Reading L.A.: Mike Davis, 'City of Quartz' and Southern California's 'spatial apartheid'

When it comes to "City of Quartz," where to start?

Mike Davis' 1990 attack on the rampant privatization and gated-community urbanism of Southern Calfornia -- what he calls the region's "spatial apartheid" -- is overwritten and shamelessly hyperbolic. It is prone to dark generalization and knee-jerk far-leftism (and I say that last part as somebody who grew up in Berkeley and recognizes knee-jerk far-leftism when he spies it). It is in desperate need of editing and -- as many have pointed out in the two decades since it appeared -- fact-checking. Its view of Los Angeles is bleak where it is not charred, sour where it is not curdled. Many of its sentences are so densely packed with self-regard and shadowy foreboding that they can be tough to pry open and fully understand.

Here's a (perhaps unusually turgid) sample from Chapter 2, "Power Lines": "In the genealogy that follows, I sketch a generational narrative of power elites framed within a tripartite periodization according to historically dominant modes of land development.... In this first century of Anglo rule, development remained fundamentally latifundian and ruling strata were organized as speculative land monopolies whose ultimate incarnation was the militarized power structure."

As Bryce Nelson put it in reviewing the 462-page book for the New York Times, "It's all a bit much." 

And yet for all its polemicism,"City of Quartz," the 12th title in our Reading L.A. series, is without question the most significant book on Los Angeles urbanism to appear since Reyner Banham's "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" was published in 1971. It earns its reputation as one of the three most important treatments of that subject ever written, joining "Four Ecologies" and Carey McWilliams' 1946 book "Southern California: An Island on the Land." Though Davis' "Ecology of Fear," which appeared in 1999 and explored the inseparable links between Southern California and natural disaster, was a surprisingly potent follow-up, no book about Los Angeles since "Quartz" has mattered as much.

Reading L.A.: Marc Reisner's 'Cadillac Desert'

Marc Reisner's "Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water," the 11th title in our Reading L.A. series, is not, strictly speaking, a book about Los Angeles or its urban form. It is a book -- a monumental, sharply opinionated and terrifically entertaining book -- about the role that struggles over water have played in shaping the modern American West.

And yet it is fair to say that Los Angeles -- as a city, as a region and as an idea -- haunts "Cadillac Desert" from start to finish. For Reisner, L.A. represents everything that has gone wrong in the relationship between man and nature; L.A is what happens when politicians, engineers, hydrologists, architects and urban planners operate, as he puts it, "on the pretension that natural obstacles do not exist."

Published in 1986 and turned into a four-part PBS documentary series in 1997, "Cadillac Desert" focuses in the main on the great, often disastrous efforts the United States has taken to support massive irrigation projects in the driest sections of the West. (The book has arguably been as important to debates over water policy as Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring" had been to those about pesticides a generation earlier.)

Reading L.A.: Thomas Hines on Richard Neutra

 
When the architect Richard Neutra, an Austrian émigré with a thriving practice in Los Angeles, appeared on the cover of Time magazine in the summer of 1949, an image of Neutra’s weathered face and flowing white hair was accompanied by this brief bit of text: "What will the neighbors think?"

The question -- tongue in cheek and anxiety-ridden at the same time -- suggests that even after World War II, even after Neutra had become one of the most prominent architects in the United States, the battle to convince the American public of the virtues of modern architecture had hardly been won. A flat roof could still, apparently, prompt real skittishness, a purely aesthetic version of what we now call NIMBYism.

On the other hand, how often did news magazines back then -- and how often do they now -- put architects on their covers?

That tension between doubt and triumph, struggle and acceptance -- for Neutra and, more broadly, for modern architecture -- is a major thread running through Thomas S. Hines’ 1982 book, “Richard Neutra and the Search for Modern Architecture,” the 10th title in our Reading L.A. series.

Reading L.A.: David Brodsly's 'L.A. Freeway'

 

As far as polarizing subjects in Los Angeles go, freeways have long ranked near the top, perhaps trailing only Shaq-Kobe and the question of where the Eastside really begins.

Most of us love to complain about our freeways -- about the bad air and gridlock they produce, mostly, and to a lesser extent about the way they cleave neighborhoods in two. Others -- a smaller group, admittedly -- have praised the freedom they enable and even the beauty of their form as monumental urban objects.

But rarely has a writer looked at them in as much depth, and with as much clear-eyed restraint, as David Brodsly does in "L.A. Freeway: An Appreciative Essay," his 1981 book and the ninth title in our yearlong "Reading L.A." series.

As Brodsly puts it in his prologue, which is titled, after Wallace Stevens, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Freeway," the book "is neither a diatribe nor a paean. Sometimes I hate freeways and sometimes I actually love them, but that is not the point. The point here is simply to spend some time thinking about a subject that most of us take for granted. ... My hope was to understand the freeways, not to judge them."

Reading L.A.: Richard Meltzer tracks down the ugly



After our encounter last week with Reyner Banham, consider the latest entry in Reading L.A. an antidote (to excessive optimism) and a palate cleanser at the same time. It’s “Richard Meltzer’s Guide to the Ugliest Buildings of Los Angeles.” Yes, his name is officially part of the title.

Meltzer remains known for having been a pioneering rock critic in the 1960s and '70s. But he was always interested in architecture too -- or at least in the visual extremes of the physical landscape -- and for the Los Angeles Reader, an alternative weekly, he contributed a series of columns calling out some of the city’s worst architectural offenders. Each of the columns, here collected in a 40-page, pamphlet-sized book bound by Illuminati Press the way PTAs used to bind their recipe books, is a barbed meditation on what it takes to qualify not just as a mediocre piece of architecture but as a genuine eyesore.

Reading L.A.: A Reyner Banham classic turns 40

This month Reading L.A. arrives at a major milestone: "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies," written by the British architectural historian and critic Reyner Banham and published in 1971. As it turns 40 this year, the book remains -- with Carey McWilliams' 1946 "Southern California: As Island on the Land" and Mike Davis' 1990 "City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles" -- among the few volumes to grasp the city in all its urban and architectural complexity. Davis called it "the textbook on Los Angeles."

Compared to McWilliams and Davis, however -- especially to the dystopian, myth-busting Davis -- Banham was an unalloyed admirer of Los Angeles. The documentary that the BBC produced in 1972 about the his travels around the city, now easy to track down on the Internet, is fittingly called "Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles."

Reading L.A.: Robert Fogelson examines a city 'hooked on growth'

Big but sprawling. Hungry for growth and influence yet wary of density. A horizontal behemoth.

The central contradiction that has always made Los Angeles so hard to define and govern -- that it is a huge, globally powerful city made up of dozens of smaller, largely suburban communities -- stands at the heart of Robert M. Fogelson’s “The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930,” the sixth book in our yearlong Reading L.A. series.

Begun as Fogelson’s doctoral dissertation at Harvard, where he studied with the historian Oscar Handlin, the book was published in 1967 -- on the heels of the 1965 Watts riots, which seemed to confirm some of its most pessimistic conclusions about the fissures splitting the city.

Reading L.A.: Richard G. Lillard on the growth machine and its discontents

"The orange groves ... have been uprooted, replaced by housing for those who came to see the orange groves," Richard G. Lillard writes in "Eden in Jeopardy: Man's Prodigal Meddling with His Environment: The Southern California Experience."

The fifth title in our Reading L.A. series -- and a circuitous title it is, with that pair of colons -- is full of paradoxical laments along those lines. Published by Knopf in 1966, in the middle of another of Southern California's many boom decades, the book is a sustained, detailed complaint about the various ways that developers, highway builders and other "replanners of the earth's surface" were muscling their way across the region in the postwar years.

By the early 1960s, Lillard notes, "California was taking 375 acres of open land each day to meet the urban needs of newcomers." The result in the southern part of the state is a region where "all construction is temporary."

"One wrecking company," according to Lillard, "has men make notes and drawings as buildings go up so that tearing them down in a few decades can be safe and efficient."

A remarkable 70% of Orange County residents moved at least once between 1955 and 1960, Lillard reports, "most into brand-new" houses or apartment buildings. And in a region that seems to crave mobility and novelty in equal measure, even institutions have trouble putting down roots; the main branch of the Los Angeles post office "has moved twenty times since 1849."

Reading L.A.: Esther McCoy

McCoy’s 1960 book “Five California Architects,” the fourth installment in our Reading L.A. series, is in reality a somewhat different book than its title would seem to advertise. Two of the five architects in the book are the brothers Charles and Henry Greene, which means it is really about four architectural practices, not five. On top of that, the detailed but rather workmanlike section on the Greenes is written not by McCoy but by a writer and architect named Randell L. Makinson. And the book’s first chapter is on Bernard Maybeck, who was based not in Los Angeles but in the Bay Area.

As a result, for the purposes of Reading L.A., the book -- whose central goal was to rescue the reputations of architects McCoy felt were by midcentury at risk of being forgotten -- exists essentially as complementary chapters by McCoy on a pair of pioneering L.A. modernists, Irving Gill and Rudolph Schindler. Still, two chapters by McCoy are worth a full book by most architecture writers; and the section on Schindler is filled with particular insight because McCoy knew Schindler and his work remarkably well, having worked in his office, doing drafting work, from 1944 to 1947.

Schindler, the Austrian émigré modernist who oversaw Frank Lloyd Wright’s office in Los Angeles before striking out on his own, was for McCoy as much artist -- and visionary, experimental artist at that –- as architect. “Schindler brought a particular vision to architecture,” she writes, “one in which materials  -- and even the structural systems he developed -– were always incidental.”

Reading L.A.: Carey McWilliams and Southern California's 'vast drama of maladjustment'

I kicked off the Reading L.A. project last month with a pair of little-known but sharp-minded (and frequently cutting) analyses of Los Angeles, the first by the émigré Louis Adamic and the second by Morrow Mayo. But we could easily have begun with Carey McWilliams, because so much important scholarship about Southern California flows from his example. His 1946 book “Southern California: An Island on the Land” is, if not quite our urtext, then easily the most significant volume ever published on L.A.'s civic and urban character.

What makes the book feel so definitive begins with the way it knits skepticism with consistent, if always clear-eyed, enthusiasm -- and in so doing anticipates the whole diverse spectrum of later studies of Los Angeles and its architecture, from the upbeat rhapsodies of Reyner Banham to the bleak-black critique of Mike Davis.