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5 comments about Iconic LA: Stories of LA's Most Memorable Buildings.

1. When you think of cities you often think of some kind of landmark building or structure. Sydney - Opera House, Chicago - Sears Tower, New York - Empire State Building (if not the World Trade Center) and so on. Mention Los Angeles and what comes to mind is endless miles of cars on slow moving freeways.
   
   After looking at this book, I find that I do remember a significant number of what the author has selected as the best of architectural design in Los Angeles. Her selection is varied from her husband's Case Study House #22, a spectacular steel and glass structure on an otherwise unbuildable lot, to the Los Angeles International Airport Theme Building; from Frank Lloyd Wright's rather strange looking Hollyhock House to the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is almost as dramatic as the Sydney Opera House and has much better acoustics.
   
   This is a dramatic book that will make you look at Los Angeles architecture in an entirely different light.



2. KNOWING LOS ANGELES: EXCERPTS FROM CITE ARCHITECTURAL REVIEW: "Iconic LA" is not exactly the book its title and appearance might lead one to expect. It turns out to be more than just a splashy presentation of the cool, the weird and the kinky. What it is instead is a carefully focused look at 13 notable buildings spanning two centuries, well illustrated with pictures both current and historical, and topped off with succcinct text sufficient to whet the appetite of Los Anglophiles and architectural critics alike. Koenig, a former editor and writer at the University of California at Los Angeles, has selected buildings that represent different eras and architectural types. Each project is boradly described and documented, and the photographs - many of them are rare - are sublime. Some surpriese await the readers of this book; for example, how important a fixture on the LA architectural scene Lloyd Wright was, from the time he came to complete his father/s Hollyhock House in 1920, to his seminal designs for the Hollywood Bowl, and on through the 1940's. A readerr can also develop a new appreciation of how much Frank Gehry is a product of LA; it's probably for that reason that he was asked to supply the book's foreward. I have a growing bookshelf dedicated to Southern California, and "Iconic LA" has an important new place on it. It nestles comfortably next to Reyner BAnham's "Los Angeles: The Four Ecologies" and Charles Moore's "Experiencing Los Angeles". Its overview of immediately familiar structures and the insights they offer into the city's culture make "Iconic LA" a good companion to these. In the book Frank Gehry says, "LA is a city of instant recognition." He's right, and "Iconic LA" is where that recognition gets its due.



3. I just read Iconic LA as a part of my research on Los Angeles landmark, the Watts Towers of Simon Rodia State Historic Park. The book is truly a valuable addition to the field of architectural literature for all of us! I truly enjoyed reading the entire book. Sincerely, Bud Goldstone, conservation engineer co-author The Los Angeles Watts Towers 6719 W 86th Place #2 Los Angeles, CA 90045



4. From Los Angeles Magazine, January, 2001. If architecture is a stamp of a city's identity, then Gloria Koenig's "Iconic LA: Stories of LA's Most Memorable Buildings" is proof that Los Angeles is more than a mass of shopping malls. In a city sometimes thought to be lacking in landmarks, it's surprising how recognizable the 13 buildings included here are and how much they have become a part of our collective consciousness. From the art deco Union Station to the futuristic Bradbury Building, these structures suggest the growth and sensibility of the city - and, with a section on the under-construction Walt Disney Concert Hall, the city to come. The selections may be obvious, but Koenig provides the tales behind them: Aline Barnsdall's conflicts with Frank Lloyd Wright during the building of the Hollyhock House; Sid Grauman's obssession with creating an authentic Chinese Theater in Hollywood; and the struggles of Paul Williams, the African American architect of the LAX Theme Building.



5. For those with architectural leanings, Gloria Koenig's Iconic LA offers tales and black-and-white pictures pertaining to a baker's dozen of Los Angeles's most memorable buildings, the Hollywood Bowl, Grauman's Chinese Theater, and the Getty Center, among them. Part guidebook, part urban history, Iconic includes compact entries that reveal as much about the architectural details - like the fact that Pierre Koenig's glassed-in modernist masterpiece Case Study House #22 was assembled in a single day - as they do about the people behind them. Who knew that Paul Williams, the architect who designed the space-age Theme Building at LAX, was African American? The book has the breezy quality of a Hollywood bio, with the buildings as stars.

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1 comments about Vitruvius: Writing the Body of Architecture.

1. out of any reader who thinks s/he loves architecture, confusing architecture's greasy, grimy engine of manifestation as a 'built thing' with the SPECTACLE of architecture. The book deals with the ten books by V. It has a lot of Latin, with references to contemporary intellectual influences, namely Stoicism and Pythagoreanism. As much as I respect the author's labor, I must admit, she does get a little dry at times being so sincere (read pedantic) to her calling as a scholar. There is a bit more information than any thinking practitioner of architecture would really need. But then, any thinking architect will know what to cull from this rich feast/tour of the post Civil War Augustan Roman imperium.
   So as to not repeat the content of the existing review, I shall speak more of how this book is relevant now by reminding the reader that the structure of the American Imperium is not all that different from the Roman. Just as it was true of Rome, it is still true today that all 'avante-gardes,' despite their rhetoric, work to actually further the Work of Empire. In fact, their very podium on which they utter their battle cries is built into the very structure of Empire.
   The current fascination with the idea of 'body' can be, it turns out, traced back to V himself, who was among the very first to use the term 'corpus' to refer to his writing, as well as to architecture. By corpus, he meant 'whole' as opposed to fragments, and there were many commentaries at the time lying about on many a topic, but all in fragments. So V sets out to put it all together into a co-ordinated whole. According to the author, ORDINATIO is a word that crops up often in V's 10 Books but not as often as RATIO. The book makes it clear why these terms do not carry the meaning when translated into Order and Reason, respectively. This is where the author's surgical description of the Roman conception of the world comes in handy as well as fascinating.
   The author, unlike the reviewer, finds her own conclusion "unsettling": namely that architecture as V defines it for the rest of the Western world henceforth (V distinguished it from 'building') is, by fate, inextricably tied to IMPERIUM. That is, Architecture IS the shadow of IMPERIUM.
   As the archetype of Empire's Architect, V speaks for all architects who serve Empire, all Empires everywhere. While this book makes the modest claim to be looking only at the 10 Book's Roman context, the content, if read carefully, will reveal how V's "prophecy" about architecture is coming to fulfillment more today than ever before now that architecture can move so much faster and shift shape with digital ease, having long ago jettisoned the baggage of the 'perfect proportion/body.'
   V was the first to write about the central role of machines (especially machines of war (killing) and spectacle (laughter and forgetting)) in architecture. Le Corbusier was perhaps the last "classical" architect to bring the circle of fate to its point of origination with his saying that, "A house is a Machine for Living in."

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