"Sleeping giants" lack clout in planning, LA is an adolescent city and how the government has curtailed the careers of many Canberra architects, in today's news digest.
“The design architects essentially relinquish control of their projects once the construction documents are handed over to Make it Right’s team of architects and builders. Ostensibly, this is to create a certain vague uniformity among the houses, keep costs down, and strengthen the vernacular elements, thereby creating a neighborhood from disparate global visions. The end result, however, is at best a diluted version of the design, and at worst, a poorly detailed, hastily constructed eyesore.”
Life without buildings
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“That’s why we can think of them as “sleeping giants.” [The Metropolitan Planning Organizations] can propose, but not dispose. They can veto federally funded projects allocated under state plans, but not rewrite them. So they have few if any teeth. They are good for jawboning and horse-trading amongst a selected group of interested officials, but they have difficulty walking their talk. Their job is to coordinate, not operate. They lack clout, and are not given the power to enforce the plans they recommend to city or county councils or the state legislature.”
Citiwire
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“Art Deco is an older sibling of Mid-Century Modernism and is presently treated with a similar disregard in ‘development’ circles. It seems our State Government wishes only to see remnants of Art Deco in blockbuster exhibitions at The National Gallery, as if it’s a part of ancient history, rather than acknowledge its integral place in our cities here and now.”
Modern Is Australia
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"Los Angeles, probably to be fair, is probably an adolescent city. People talk about Los Angeles as a world city —I was in Tokyo and I was in Beijing, I was in London, I was in Milan — you talk about cities with long, long histories. Kings and queens and plagues and Medicis and Marco Polos and every… damn thing. And then you're looking at a city of 10 million people, and it really is an infant city."
LA Times
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“The conservatism of the Department of the Interior during the 1960s made life very difficult for architects trying to do something a bit different, or that didn’t match the narrow template laid down by government. It forced some of them out of Canberra and curtailed the careers of others.”
Canberra House
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