Notes from All Over

Josep Lluís Sert's Maeght Foundation in Saint-Paul de Vence, France is 50 years old, and celebrating the event with an exhibition. Another of my favorite places.

Miguel Mora
El Paraíso del Arquitecto y los Artistas
El País, April 5, 2014
Photo DC

 
Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles
My friend Jorge Sainz, Professor of History and Theory at Madrid's School of Architecture (the famous ETSAM), sent me this YouTube link to a 1972 BBC documentary on Los Angeles prepared by Reyner Banham. It includes a science-fiction proto-GPS sexy car guide as a jokey part of the commentary. Above, hanging out with Ed Ruscha and friends. A little faded, but priceless.

The Architectural Review covers a new, updated book by photographers Ian Lambot and Greg Girard documenting Kowloon's Walled City, in the former British colony of Hong Kong, which was reportedly the densest human settlement on earth before it was finally torn down in 1993. I am sorry I missed it on my stay in Kowloon in 1984:

"On a site measuring just over 220 x 110 metres were crammed some 200 individual tower blocks, rising on average to 14 storeys in height.... At the Walled City’s height in the early 1980s, it is thought that well over 40,000 people lived there, and over 33,000 were officially registered as part of the clearance in 1987."

City of Darkness: Surreal photographs of day-to-day life inside Kowloon Walled City
The Architectural Review
April 9, 2014

Greg Girard & Ian Lambot
City of Darkness Revisited
Watermark Publications, London
Upcoming, July, 2014
Preview on Kickstarter

Discovering Esther McCoy

One of the interesting things to emerge about this site is that it is read as much in Spain as in the US, Britain or elsewhere.*  To make this a bridge with two-way traffic, now and then I will single out to Spanish readers some of the most interesting things I come across from outside Spain.

The first of these is a brief profile in the Design blog of The New York Times on the Los Angeles architecture critic Esther McCoy  (1904 - 1989): Arkansan-born, Greenwich Village bred (she worked as an assistant to Theodore Dreiser) and draftswoman for RM Schindler after WW II, before she started writing on West Coast architecture. There's a show on her career organized by blog entry author Susan Morgan, at the Schindler House on North Kings Road in LA where she worked, now the MAK Center for Art and Architecture (through January 8th). 



*The View from Madrid all-time audience since May 2009:

Spain ............3094
US .................2433
Italy...............1282
UK .................1275
Germany .........813
Portugal ...........429
France ............. 410