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AFH:LA – February Chapter Meeting

AFH-LA_BUS_BENCH

Take the bus.

This is our second public meeting for 2012. Everyone is welcome. Architects, starchitects, designers, raconteurs, jazz bands, community activists and marketing gurus!

We will be meeting at the West Side Tavern located on the ground floor of the Westside Pavilion Shopping Center. Look for friendly people with pencils tucked behind their ears.

Westside Tavern
10850 West Pico Boulevard
Los Angeles, California 90064

Click here for a Google Map

This is meant to be more of a social event than a business meeting, but please bring your ideas for they kinds of projects and other activities you would like to see the chapter take on in 2012.

Click here to download a printable PDF flyer for this event.

Stay in touch with the organization by signing up for the AFH:LA Mailing List.

http://losangeles.architectureforhumanity.org/

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Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles

By Scott M B Gustafson

Welcome to Los Angeles.
Supercity of the Future.
Metropolis of Southern California.

Architectural critic Reyner Banham explores Los Angeles in this 1972 BBC documentary. This film is a great compliment to his book “Los Angeles : The Architecture of Four Ecologies.” From Watts to Beverly Hills, Hollywood to the Pacific Palisades, Venice, Olvera Street, Century Boulevard, the 405, Santa Monica, Pasadena and beyond, Banham covers it all. In the film it is very interesting to see Los Angeles as it existed in the years before I was born. It seems wilder, freer and perhaps more ready to accept diverse interpretations and developments than it does today.

I am re-reading Banham’s famous treatise, and I will probably revisit Kevin Lynch’s chapter on LA in “The Image of the City“. In a city with great geographic width and (seemingly) little historical depth, I appreciate the views of those writers who came to the city with fresh eyes, unburdened or biased and took a grand survey of what was really happening here. Kevin Lynch’s notion of Mental Maps for understanding the city has certainly been amplified through the advent of technologies like GPS, Yelp, and augmented reality. Los Angeles remains a great social experiment and in my opinion, the cultural capital of the United States.

Reyner Banham - Los Angeles : The Architecture of Four Ecologies

The man himself and his glorious ode to the metropolis. Image source: KCET

BANHAM_BOOK

Temple of sport.

Imagined images of the urban situation. Image source Jason Skibo.