Prepare the Kindling
Mike Davis wanted you to set the night on fire.
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Fired Up
We can’t wait around for a spark, Mike Davis always seemed to be saying.
by Shane Reiner-Roth
The optimism that had defined Davis’s youth does not come across in his first two books about Los Angeles, which were written decades after his earlier formative experiences. City of Quartz (1990) and Ecology of Fear (1998) both read as a People’s Guide to Los Angeles, as genuine as Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States (1980), yet boundlessly more cynical, especially when it came to the city’s anti-homeless architecture, gated communities, and other grim urban innovations. While both Quartz and Ecology grappled with L.A.’s troubled past through the author’s signature mix of urban studies and journalistic fury, they generally depicted its citizens as casualties subject to the cruel exigencies of geography, power, and violence.
Davis’s third book in the Los Angeles series, on the other hand, reanimates his fresh-faced thirst for revolution. Set the Night on Fire: L.A. in the Sixties, a self-proclaimed “movement history” coauthored with UC Irvine professor Jon Wiener, was released in April 2020, weeks before the country broke out in massive protests resembling those of six decades earlier.
Read more about Mike Davis and LA in the ’60s here.
Both/And
We’re accustomed to thinking about the US-Mexico border as an abstraction. A new book tries to find intimacy in it.
by Mimi Zeiger
Two Sides of the Border: Reimagining the Region, recently published by Yale School of Architecture and Lars Müller Publishers, asks us to envision an alternative to the hardened US-Mexico boundary and its attendant violences, human and ecological.
“For me, it is imagining a place where the border doesn’t exist. Obviously, that is too much imagination,” says co-editor Tatiana Bilbao in a transcribed interview with two of her collaborators on the anthology, photographer Iwan Baan and co-editor Nile Greenberg (Ayesha S. Ghosh is the third co-editor). Too much imagination could read as Panglossian in the face of so much scarcity. But it is a risk Bilbao deems worth taking. In her architectural practice, she and her collaborators deploy more fantastical techniques of representation, such as collage, alongside critical research and analysis in order to challenge existing paradigms.
Read about the border from both sides (now).
Fever Dream
An overlooked classic by Charles Jencks finds the serial taxonomist in top form.
by Anna Kats
The canon of writing on Los Angeles architecture has probably done as much to elevate the city’s design profile as the built work itself, proselytizing narratives of sun-and-sea residential lifestyles or property-and-privilege real estate economies to the traditional centers of architectural discourse back east. The major titles will likely be familiar to almost any architecture aficionado: Esther McCoy’s Five California Architects circa 1960, Reyner Banham’s The Architecture of Four Ecologies from 1971, and Mike Davis’s 1990 City of Quartz have variously cast Angeleno building design and urbanism as the city’s defining protagonists and antagonists. In words and in mortar, modernism was enshrined as the lingua franca of local architecture.
Charles Jencks’s Daydream Houses of Los Angeles never figures on the must-read lists that recommend all the above—a shame, really, since it has proved at least as prescient as any of these more established architectural scriptures in the 40-some years since publication in 1978.
Read more about the Daydream Houses here.
New York Review of Architecture is a team effort. Our Editor is Samuel Medina, our Deputy Editor is Marianela D’Aprile, and our Editors-at-Large are Carolyn Bailey, Phillip Denny, and Alex Klimoski. Our Publisher is Nicolas Kemper.
To pitch us an article or ask us a question, write to us at: editor@nyra.nyc. For their support, we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
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