An Acre of Art - LACMA's Resnick Pavilion Press Preview

LACMA has a new gallery and it’s a winner. The Lynda and Stewart Resnick Pavilion is a work of art that complements BCAM to the south and fleshes out Renzo Piano’s master plan. It substitutes a vibrant, layered composition of travertine, scarlet steel, and plantings for a dowdy courtyard as the museum’s core. Unjustly disparaged as the safe choice for American museums that are afraid of innovation, Piano demonstrates a mastery of space and connectivity that make him an ideal choice for LACMA. He has introduced order and excitement to an institution that stumbled badly in commissioning two mediocre sets of buildings in its early years, and then abruptly abandoned Rem Koolhaas’s iconoclastic proposal to start afresh. As an Italian, Piano has a sense of history and the way cities grow incrementally over time. He is familiar with excavations that reveal the foundations of Roman villas—a discovery that delayed construction of the Rome Auditorio by several years. “Here we struck oil—and dinosaur bones, but it didn’t stop us,” he observed.

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From Bathrooms To Michelangelo - Hennessey + Ingalls Bookstore

Hennessey + Ingalls is the best-stocked art and architecture bookstore in America, and it has grown ten-fold in its half century of operation. It's still a family-run operation and its Santa Monica store offers 80,000 titles on subjects as diverse as classic art and home improvement, Swiss graphics and Japanese photography, but architecture predominates.

Mainstream publications are a key click away and they will be shipped to your door, often at a substantial discount, so how can a specialized bookstore stay in business? Many have failed, most recently Urban Center Books in New York. There is no endangered species protection for independents, but Mark Hennessey is determined to survive the triple threat of recession, architectural meltdowns, and Amazon. In Santa Monica and  the Hollywood satellite you can find rarities, imports, and the latest El Croquis or GA, as well as a broad selection on masters and new talent. Often a customer will find that the book she came in for isn't what she needs but end up buying a couple she hadn't heard of.

I love books. I've written quite a few, and my shelves are full to overflowing. I might one day read a novel on a Kindle but I cannot imagine doing that for an architectural title, where the quality of the images, layout and physical dimensions are  crucial. Bookstores like these two are staffed with knowledgable enthusiasts, who don't draw a blank when you ask what they have on Peter Zumthor. They've made choices from the thousands that are published worldwide every year and you can compare a new title with one that first appeared before the store was launched. Expert guidance combined with serendipity is a productive experience and it carries over into Hennessey + Ingalls well-organized web site. But the stores are what counts: cherish them while they are still there. 

214 Wilshire Blvd.
Santa Monica, CA 90401 

Space 15 Twenty
1520 N. Cahuenga Blvd., Suite 8
Hollywood, CA 90028

REVIEW: American Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture

Click image to visit Hennessey + Ingalls BookstoreAmerican Glamour and the Evolution of Modern Architecture
by Alice T. Friedman
(Yale University Press, $65)

A brilliant study of post-war American architecture comes in frivolous disguise. The cover illustration is a Slim Aarons tableau of the idle rich: models impersonating trophy wives in playsuits, sipping champagne around a turquoise pool. Neutra’s Kaufmann house is relegated to the far corner. But this image, along with the sleek jet that upstages Saarinen’s TWA terminal on the back cover, illustrates Friedman’s thesis: that modernism won brief popular acceptance in the US through its association with escapism, consumerism, and image-making.

In Europe, modernism had a social conscience and put down deep roots; in the US, Philip Johnson christened it International Style, stripped it of its socialist baggage, and sugar-coated it for the masses. This is a tale of optimism and opportunism; of talented architects like Eero Saarinen, Morris Lapidus, and even Frank Lloyd Wright indulging public fantasies in the decade of the 1950s. It was an era of big corporations and splashy public projects; the rejection of austerity in a supremely confident and prosperous America. As Friedman observes, that decade now seems as remote as the Jazz Age or the Gilded 1890s, and it deserves her thoughtful re-evaluation. The images of sleek buildings and seductive advertising are reason enough to browse this book, but you should buy it for its provocative, compelling text.

REVIEW: New Architecture in Japan

Click image to visit Hennessey + Ingalls BookstoreNew Architecture in Japan
by Yuki Sumner and Naomi Pollock
Photography by Edmund Sumner
(Merrell, $49.95)

Outsiders have the sharpest appreciation of the contradictions of Japan, and this selection of a hundred recent buildings focuses on radical alternatives to a prevailing conformity. A British photographer traveled extensively with his Japanese wife, searching for exceptional work by mainstream architects and such mavericks as Atelier Bow-Wow, Shuhei Endo, and Terunobu Fujimori. Perceptive essays by Yuki Sumner and Naomi Pollock, an American architect who lives in Japan, seek to explain why innovation flourishes in a country that seems so uniform and banal to Western eyes.  Sumner traces the long history of deviance in Japan and the subtle ways that individuals can express their dreams. Pollock evokes the ephemeral urban context that is constantly renewing itself, rejecting the past in a quest for novelty. “Freed from the historical and aesthetic constraints facing their counterparts in the West, architects in Japan readily experiment with new structural systems, construction materials and geometrical solutions,” she asserts. Confronted by tough legal restrictions and deeply entrenched social conventions, the best architects “treat those limitations as catalysts for, not impediments to, good design” Many of the buildings shown here are hidden away or are located in remote areas that may take a day to reach, and that makes this colorful survey all the more valuable as a record of what lies off the radar.