Moving to LA

In the 1960's and 70's Los Angeles was transforming itself again. The Hollywood version of LA that was created beginning in the 1920s with the boom of the movie business, cheap land and the Los Angeles aqueduct was still there, but a new generation of defense contractors, bankers were pouring money into the LA basin. More importantly, the music recording business and television created a media power center that began to rival New York; a new crop of West Coast artists were maturing and providing an alternative vision of what America was.

The baby boomer generation embraced the new media, and the manufacturing processes originally developed to build ships and planes were now adopted by the new generation to produce surfboards and hot rods. Suddenly Los Angeles really was a center of the new culture.

Meanwhile, in 1972 I was turning from a pre-med undergraduate to study architecture and urban planning, fields that had interested me since my childhood growing up in New York City. Around this time, I read a book written by the English architectural critic Reyner Banham entitled "Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies" that put the changing urban landscape of Los Angeles under an artistic-historical lens to reveal the incredible layers of rich architectural cake that had been built up in LA from its founding in the 1700's right up to the present time.

All of these incredible styles, from mission architecture, to ziggurat-shaped tire factories, to houses built with aircraft technology were all still there in 1973. When I found out that my mentor, architect and professor Charles Moore, was moving to the UCLA school of architecture to become its director, that did it for me. I had had a brief, appropriately car-oriented stay in LA over a spring break from college on the east coast. In those 48 hours in LA I was drinking in its air, its light, its hills, its smog and its heat. Now I had a chance to dig into all this architecture, available by car at 52 cents a gallon.

I turned the Datsun west, then south, and arrived in Los Angeles in August 1974.