BOOK FORMAT Hardcover, 11.5 x 8.5 in. / 376 pgs / 200 color / 200 bw.
PUBLISHING STATUS Pub Date 7/31/2013 Out of stock indefinitely
DISTRIBUTION D.A.P. Exclusive Catalog: SPRING 2013 p. 34
PRODUCT DETAILS ISBN 9781935202967TRADE List Price: $55.00 CAD $72.50
AVAILABILITY Not available
TERRITORY WRLD Export via T&H
an art book featuring more than 400 images that offer a vision of the city Los Angeles never became, in the form of nearly a century's worth of plans, designs and layouts - David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times book critic
By Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin. Foreword by Thom Mayne.
Never Built Los Angeles explores the “what if” Los Angeles, investigating the values and untapped potential of a city still in search of itself. A treasure trove of buildings, master plans, parks, follies and mass-transit proposals that only saw the drawing board, the book asks: why is Los Angeles a mecca for great architects, yet so lacking in urban innovation? Featured are more than 100 visionary works that could have transformed both the physical reality and the collective perception of the metropolis, from Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew’s groundbreaking 1930 Plan for the Los Angeles Region, which would have increased the amount of green space in the notoriously park-poor city fivefold; to John Lautner’s Alto Capistrano, a series of spaceship-like apartments hovering above a mixed-use development; to Jean Nouvel’s 2008 Green Blade, a condominium tower clad entirely in cascading plants. Through text and more than 400 color and black-and-white illustrations drawn from archives around the U.S., authors Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin explore the visceral (and sometimes misleading) power of architectural ideas conveyed through sketches, renderings, blueprints, models and the now waning art of hand drawing. Many of these schemes--promoting a denser, more vibrant city--are still relevant today and could inspire future designs. Never Built Los Angeles will set the stage for a renewed interest in visionary projects in this, one of the world’s great cities.
Featured image is reproduced from Never Built Los Angeles.
PRAISE AND REVIEWS
Metropolis Magazine
Edward Lifson
We see visions that were never realised-- a "bicycle freeway" from 1900, monorails, and people movers. What a different city L.A. might have been, with houses of the hills rather than on the hills, and acres upon acres of parks. Some of the projects are so grandiose you might be glad they were abandoned, but they are all provocative. Seeing them together is a reminder of the power of dreams in a city where dreams can fade so easily.
T: The New York Times Style Magazine
Brooke Hodge
Los Anegeles is known as a place where anything is possible. But "Never Built: Los Angeles", an exhibition that opens Sunday at the A+D Museum, reveals that for all the architectural gems built in the city, there were plenty of innovative projects - buildings, master plans, transportation scemes and more - that didn't make it past the drawing board.
The New York Times
Julie Lasky
Pereira & Luckman's original design for Los Angeles International Airport was a single, giant glass - domed terminal. The 1952 scheme never got off the ground. And that's a pity, said Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, the organizers of "Never Built: Los Angeles," a show of doomed visionary architecture. Given Pereira & Luckman's local influence and the symbolic value of airports, this one " could have set the tone for public architecture afterward in L.A.," said Mr. Lubell, who is the West Coast editor of The Architect's Newspaper and who has written for The New York Times.
Los Angeles Times
David L. Ulin
" Never Built Los Angeles ... a compendium of more than 100 architectural projects - master plans, skyscrapers, transportation hubs, parks and river walks - that never made it off the ground. Edited by former Los Anegeles magazine architecture critic Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, West Coast editor of the Architect's Newspaper, and accompanied by an exhibition at the Architecture and Design Museum, it's a lavish counter-history of the city as it might have been: a literal L.A. of the mind. "
Architectural Record
Sarah Amelar
A history of what didn't happen can sometimes be even more revealing and thought provoking than what did. That curious inversion of circumstance fuels Never Built: Los Angeles, a show at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum focused on more than a century of ambitiuous designs, some right on the brink of realization - that never broke ground in the city.
LATIMES.COM
Christopher Hawthorne
The Architecture and Design Museum's " Never Built Los Angeles" exhibition is filled with dream projects that have lessons for L.A. and its leaders.
KCET.org
Mike Sonksen
Mind-blowing...a majestic dream-book and fantastic roadmap to never-built Los Angeles.
STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely.
FROM THE BOOK
“We could rebuild Los Angeles a dozen times over with the visions in this book. They tell us a lot about the successes and failures of its teeming, experimental urbanism: utopian dreams, fantastic ad hoc reinvention, social innovations, technological futurism, full-frontal commercialism. But these modest proposals achieve a greater clarity because they weren't forced to go through the bother of becoming real. Lubell and Goldin have produced a fascinating history of a city that never was, but which ends up teaching us who we are, and who we might still become.” – Alan Hess, author and architecture critic, San Jose Mercury News
"I can't wait for this: an art book featuring more than 400 images that offer a vision of the city Los Angeles never became, in the form of nearly a century's worth of plans, designs and layouts, including the Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew's 'Plan for the Los Angeles Region,' a 1930 re-imagining of the city as a whole." David Ulin, Los Angeles Times
“The built environment of modernist Los Angeles has long been regarded as one of the world's greatest. This book reminds us how much greater it COULD have been had these potential treasures actually been realized. With this illuminating study, Lubell and Goldin have made an important contribution to the region's cultural and architectural history. – Thomas S. Hines, urban and architectural historian, UCLA
"Mind-blowing...a majestic dream-book and fantastic roadmap to never-built Los Angeles." – Mike Sonksen, KCET
Never Built Los Angeles, Metropolis Books' captivating new collection of visionary, unbuilt Los Angeles architectural projects, launched this weekend with a corresponding exhibition at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum. On Tuesday, July 30, the Los Angeles Public Library follows up with a (sold-out) panel discussion featuring authors Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne, landscape architect Mia Lehrer, and architectural historian and moderator, Alan Hess. Featured image, W. L. Couverly's 1959 proposal for the International Marketland mall in Orange County (currently the site of the UC Irvine Medical Center), is reproduced from Never Built Los Angeles, one of the most highly anticipated architecture titles of the year. For recent press, see Arch Daily, The New York Times and T Magazine, to name a few. continue to blog
This weekend, Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell's exhibition, Never Built Los Angeles, was featured on the front page of the Los Angeles Times. On Friday, the accompanying book was treated to a long and glowing review by the Times' esteemed book critic, David L. Ulin: "When, in the 1920s, the pioneering Southern California social critic Louis Adamic called Los Angeles 'the enormous village,' he didn't mean it as a compliment. Rather, he was referring to L.A.'s insularity, its status as what Richard Meltzer would later label 'the biggest HICK Town (per se) in all the hick land,' a city of small-town values and narrow vision that 'grew up suddenly, planlessly'.
For Adamic, Los Angeles was defined by individual, as opposed to collective, passions, starting with its architecture. His idea of the place as a 'garden city,' in which identity was less an expression of the public square than of the private home, has been echoed by nine decades of observers, from Nathanael West ('Only dynamite would be any use,' he sniffs in The Day of the Locust, against L.A.'s 'Mexican ranch houses, Samoan huts, Mediterranean villas, Egyptian and Japanese temples') to Norman Mailer, who, in Superman Comes to the Supermarket, grouses about the 'pastel monotonies' of this 'city without iron, eschewing wood, a kingdom of stucco, the playground for mass men.'
A similar sensibility underpins Never Built Los Angeles, a compendium of more than 100 architectural projects — master plans, skyscrapers, transportation hubs, parks and river walks — that never made it off the ground... It's a lavish counter-history of the city as it might have been: a literal L.A. of the mind."
FORMAT: Hbk, 11.5 x 8.5 in. / 376 pgs / 200 color / 200 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $55.00 LIST PRICE: CANADA $72.5 ISBN: 9781935202967 PUBLISHER: Metropolis Books AVAILABLE: 7/31/2013 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Out of stock indefinitely AVAILABILITY: Not available TERRITORY: WRLD Export via T&H
Published by Metropolis Books. By Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin. Foreword by Thom Mayne.
Never Built Los Angeles explores the “what if” Los Angeles, investigating the values and untapped potential of a city still in search of itself. A treasure trove of buildings, master plans, parks, follies and mass-transit proposals that only saw the drawing board, the book asks: why is Los Angeles a mecca for great architects, yet so lacking in urban innovation? Featured are more than 100 visionary works that could have transformed both the physical reality and the collective perception of the metropolis, from Olmsted Brothers and Bartholomew’s groundbreaking 1930 Plan for the Los Angeles Region, which would have increased the amount of green space in the notoriously park-poor city fivefold; to John Lautner’s Alto Capistrano, a series of spaceship-like apartments hovering above a mixed-use development; to Jean Nouvel’s 2008 Green Blade, a condominium tower clad entirely in cascading plants. Through text and more than 400 color and black-and-white illustrations drawn from archives around the U.S., authors Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin explore the visceral (and sometimes misleading) power of architectural ideas conveyed through sketches, renderings, blueprints, models and the now waning art of hand drawing. Many of these schemes--promoting a denser, more vibrant city--are still relevant today and could inspire future designs. Never Built Los Angeles will set the stage for a renewed interest in visionary projects in this, one of the world’s great cities.
