Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Dennis McDougal says: This looks at all of Southern California’s issues, including water, and weaves them into a road map for the 21st century, with lots of warning signs.
Jeremy Till says: I found City of Quartz when I went to Los Angeles for first time. In its angry and political way, it describes how cities arise out of an incredibly complex and difficult set of uncontrollable forces. When I first arrived in Los Angles, before I read the book, I was completely and utterly bamboozled by the place. I was just thinking what the hell is going on here? I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. It made sense of things; why the railways have gone and why freeways had proliferated for example.
The other books you have chosen are not specifically architectural books. Tell us about the first of these, City of Quartz.
Mike Davis is getting increasingly vociferous about development and climate change, and in a way this is one of his milder books. I found City of Quartz when I went to Los Angeles for first time. In its angry and political way, it describes how cities arise out of an incredibly complex and difficult set of uncontrollable forces. When I first arrived in Los Angles, before I read the book, I was completely and utterly bamboozled by the place. I was thinking what the hell is going on here? It wasn’t just to do with the freeways and the smog, and Hollywood – there was something very strange about it. Whilst I was there I picked up a copy of City of Quartz, which had just come out, and read it all in one session. It made sense of things; why the railways have gone and why freeways had proliferated for example (the railways in LA were brought up by a conglomerate made up of companies in the car industry, who just shut them down because they were competition, which in time meant the freeways popped up). It’s a book about understanding the relationship between the built and the un-built, the physical fabric and social fabric. I also like it because he’s left-wing!
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Current Dean of the School of the Built Environment at Westminster University since 2008 and partner at Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Jeremy Till both practises and teaches architecture. He was Britain’s representative in 2006 at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2004, 9 Stock Orchard Street, which he designed with Sarah Wigglesworth and is perhaps their most famous building, won the prestigious RIBA Sustainability Prize. In his latest book, Architecture Depends, he argues that architecture is a dependent discipline and offers a critique of the architectural establishment which he believes tries to escape this dependency.
Finally, City of Quartz focuses on the conflicts under the Klieg lights. What does MacArthur fellow Mike Davis accomplish in this book?
Davis built on the history and arguments that Carey McWilliams proffered in An Island on the Land half a century earlier. City of Quartz, which was actually a PhD dissertation that he turned into book form, looks at all of Southern California’s issues, including water, and weaves them together into a road map for the 21st century, with lots of warning signs along the way. He was wary of air pollution and what would happen with the ever-increasing number of automobiles clogging the freeway system. Sadly, a lot of his predictions have come to pass.
Davis also dove into an area that McWilliams only touched on – the overdevelopment and non-stop redevelopment of Southern California. LA is one constant rehab project, from one end of the city to the other. It makes for great conflict, great political crises and for terrific stories.
Excavating the Future in Los Angeles is the subtitle of this book. Do you agree with Davis’s projection of the city’s future? And is that part of the reason you’ve decamped from Southern California?
His dystopian view did have an influence on me, yes. So does his follow-up book about Southern California’s changing weather patterns, Ecology of Fear. I saw it happening: The sunny skies and predictably short rainy season, the Santa Ana winds that came in November and occasionally in the late spring – all of those things began to change in the late seventies. The weather is increasingly erratic with harsh results. There were frequent sightings of tornadoes in Orange County, which was astonishing. The Santa Ana winds that Raymond Chandler wrote so eloquently about seem to be kind of a year-round phenomenon. They show up for no reason, dry everything out and the city will be in flames. But the worst thing about Southern California remains the traffic. You cannot get from here to there during rush hour. And, with each passing year, it only gets worse.
Los Angeles has a reputation for being more superficial than other cities. Christopher Hitchens said the city is “full of nonsense and delusion and egomania”. Neil Simon once noted that although the city is a pleasant 72 degrees year round, only 72 interesting people live there. Is this reputation unfair?
Every so often somebody from New York or Toronto or even DC will make a trek to LA as if they are pioneers. They’ll rent a room at the Beverly Hill Hotel or at the Peninsula down in Santa Monica; they’ll spend a week, maybe two, talking to all the usual suspects, mainly on the West Side of LA. And then they’ll take their gleanings back to their computers and come up with searing revelations about the residents of La-La Land, as they like to call it.
My answer to those critics is that they should take a look at UCLA, the Getty Museum, the Frank Gehry Concert Hall, the Claremont Colleges. Los Angeles may be a latecomer when it comes to sophistication but it is far less superficial than most of its critics.
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Dennis McDougal was called “LA’s number one muckraker” by The New York Times. He spent 15 years as a staff reporter for The Los Angeles Times and has won over 50 awards for his work. A Southern California native, McDougal has written nine books about the region
