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Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990
From 1940 to 1990, Los Angeles rapidly evolved into one of the most populous and influential industrial, economic, and creative capitals in the world. During this era, the region was transformed into a laboratory for cutting-edge architecture. Overdrive: L. A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 examines these experiments and their impact on modern design, reframes the perceptions of Los Angeles’s dynamic built environment, and amplifies the exploration of the city’s vibrant architectural legacy.
The drawings, models, and images highlighted in the Overdrive exhibition and catalogue reveal the complex and often underappreciated facets of Los Angeles and illustrate how the metropolis became an internationally recognized destination with a unique design vocabulary, canonical landmarks, and a coveted lifestyle. This investigation builds upon the groundbreaking work of generations of historians, theorists, curators, critics, and activists who have researched and expounded upon the development of Los Angeles. In this volume, thought-provoking essays shed more light on the exhibition’s narratives, including Los Angeles’s physical landscape, the rise of modernism, the region’s influential residential architecture, its buildings for commerce and transportation, and architects’ pioneering uses of bold forms, advanced materials, and new technologies.
Los Angeles’s ability to facilitate change, experiment, recalibrate, and forge ahead is one of its greatest strengths. Future generations are destined to harness the region’s enviable resources to create new layers of architectural innovations.
The related exhibition will be held at the J. Paul Getty Museum from April 9 to July 21, 2013.
The drawings, models, and images highlighted in the Overdrive exhibition and catalogue reveal the complex and often underappreciated facets of Los Angeles and illustrate how the metropolis became an internationally recognized destination with a unique design vocabulary, canonical landmarks, and a coveted lifestyle. This investigation builds upon the groundbreaking work of generations of historians, theorists, curators, critics, and activists who have researched and expounded upon the development of Los Angeles. In this volume, thought-provoking essays shed more light on the exhibition’s narratives, including Los Angeles’s physical landscape, the rise of modernism, the region’s influential residential architecture, its buildings for commerce and transportation, and architects’ pioneering uses of bold forms, advanced materials, and new technologies.
Los Angeles’s ability to facilitate change, experiment, recalibrate, and forge ahead is one of its greatest strengths. Future generations are destined to harness the region’s enviable resources to create new layers of architectural innovations.
The related exhibition will be held at the J. Paul Getty Museum from April 9 to July 21, 2013.
- GenresArchitecture
320 pages, Hardcover
First published April 25, 2013
2 people are currently reading
30 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
March 11, 2017
This book is in my DNA. All my grandparents settled in Los Angeles around 1920. One grandmother had been raised on a farm south of Sacramento; her Ohio Quaker husband came to Los Angeles as an engineer to help extend electrical service in the southland. The other grandparents were a WWI soldier who didn’t want to go back to a hog farm in Kansas after he’d seen warm weather (he worked for the Union Pacific railroad in LA), and a girl who came from Minnesota to see Hollywood (the closest she got to the movies was dating Harold Lloyd). Quintessential Angelenos.
My parents were raised in the San Gabriel valley, east of downtown, in the twenties and thirties. I lived there as a child in the fifties, then moved away and came back from 2002 to 2011, living on the Westside near UCLA. I had relatives who lived in the San Fernando valley until 1980. So I’ve heard this history, I lived in the eastern suburbs as they were losing the last vestiges of orange grove and Mission feel, and I worked amidst postmodern LA architecture many years later.
For example, the streetcar lines that once served eastern Los Angeles county were gone by the time I was born. But I heard about them. In his essay in this volume, Eric Avila writes:
The key figure in this development was the scion of California’s railroad empire, Henry Huntington, who quickly figured out that although building a streetcar network in Los Angeles was not necessarily a profitable enterprise, fortune awaited those who could tie this venture to land development and real estate promotion. Thus Huntington built streetcar lines to vast parcels of empty land beyond the fringes of settlement, with nothing but a bandstand a barbecue lunch and big signs that read “Burbank,” “Van Nuys,” and ‘Monrovia” to greet future residents of the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. In piecemeal increments, and with lots of fanfare, urban sprawl was born.
My father used to tell us about riding to the end of the streetcar line and shooting rabbits from the cars with his .22. Where did they go? Why doesn’t LA have those rights of way to use for mass transit? Those were stories in my house as well. Avila continues:
Local boosters tied to the industries that produced automobiles recognized that downtown had to make room for the automobile, lest drivers find other places to take their business. Thus, the Los Angeles Times, the voice of downtown Los Angeles since 1881, campaigned to make downtown more car friendly. In 1920, a section of the newspaper was devoted exclusively to automobile news; it became a platform for promoting wider streets, more parking garages, and an end to public subsidies for streetcars, which the Times slandered as a socialist plot.
Avila continues in his fine piece to talk about how East Los Angeles was cut up by freeways, displacing poor ethnic residents with no cheap housing to replace the lost stock, while those in Beverly Hills successfully fought such development in their city.
The book is a collection of fifteen independent essays on various aspects of Los Angeles’s physical environment between about 1920 and today. Quality varies considerably, from worthless to excellent. I thought the best were those of Avila (“All Freeways Lead to East Los Angeles: Rethinking the LA Freeway and Its Meanings”), Sandy Isenstadt (“Los Angeles after Dark: the Incandescent City”), Vanessa R Schwartz (“LAX: Designing for the Jet Age”), and especially Stephen Phillips (“Architecture Industry: the L.A. Ten”). There are also hundreds of images from the archives of the Getty Institute and other sources.
Phillips discusses ten architects who very consciously integrated industrial elements into their work as a philosophical response to living in such a huge, sprawling city. They include people I already knew about, like Frank Gerhy and Thom Mayne, but others new to me like Eric Own Moss, who if I ever win the lottery will get a commission for my new house.
I enjoyed the book immensely.
My parents were raised in the San Gabriel valley, east of downtown, in the twenties and thirties. I lived there as a child in the fifties, then moved away and came back from 2002 to 2011, living on the Westside near UCLA. I had relatives who lived in the San Fernando valley until 1980. So I’ve heard this history, I lived in the eastern suburbs as they were losing the last vestiges of orange grove and Mission feel, and I worked amidst postmodern LA architecture many years later.
For example, the streetcar lines that once served eastern Los Angeles county were gone by the time I was born. But I heard about them. In his essay in this volume, Eric Avila writes:
The key figure in this development was the scion of California’s railroad empire, Henry Huntington, who quickly figured out that although building a streetcar network in Los Angeles was not necessarily a profitable enterprise, fortune awaited those who could tie this venture to land development and real estate promotion. Thus Huntington built streetcar lines to vast parcels of empty land beyond the fringes of settlement, with nothing but a bandstand a barbecue lunch and big signs that read “Burbank,” “Van Nuys,” and ‘Monrovia” to greet future residents of the San Fernando and San Gabriel Valleys. In piecemeal increments, and with lots of fanfare, urban sprawl was born.
My father used to tell us about riding to the end of the streetcar line and shooting rabbits from the cars with his .22. Where did they go? Why doesn’t LA have those rights of way to use for mass transit? Those were stories in my house as well. Avila continues:
Local boosters tied to the industries that produced automobiles recognized that downtown had to make room for the automobile, lest drivers find other places to take their business. Thus, the Los Angeles Times, the voice of downtown Los Angeles since 1881, campaigned to make downtown more car friendly. In 1920, a section of the newspaper was devoted exclusively to automobile news; it became a platform for promoting wider streets, more parking garages, and an end to public subsidies for streetcars, which the Times slandered as a socialist plot.
Avila continues in his fine piece to talk about how East Los Angeles was cut up by freeways, displacing poor ethnic residents with no cheap housing to replace the lost stock, while those in Beverly Hills successfully fought such development in their city.
The book is a collection of fifteen independent essays on various aspects of Los Angeles’s physical environment between about 1920 and today. Quality varies considerably, from worthless to excellent. I thought the best were those of Avila (“All Freeways Lead to East Los Angeles: Rethinking the LA Freeway and Its Meanings”), Sandy Isenstadt (“Los Angeles after Dark: the Incandescent City”), Vanessa R Schwartz (“LAX: Designing for the Jet Age”), and especially Stephen Phillips (“Architecture Industry: the L.A. Ten”). There are also hundreds of images from the archives of the Getty Institute and other sources.
Phillips discusses ten architects who very consciously integrated industrial elements into their work as a philosophical response to living in such a huge, sprawling city. They include people I already knew about, like Frank Gerhy and Thom Mayne, but others new to me like Eric Own Moss, who if I ever win the lottery will get a commission for my new house.
I enjoyed the book immensely.
May 17, 2017
"I / Who live in Los Angeles and not in London / Find, on thinking about Hell, / that it must be / Still more like Los Angeles." (quoting Brecht, viii)
"'Mr. Soriano, can we put [on] some colonial type of and entrance, porches?' Soriano responded: 'Why do you want to do that? Do you do that with your planes?'" (153)
"'The growth of Los Angeles coincided with a great deal of gadgetry. The airplane did more for this city thank for any other because it ended our isolation -- first our isolation from the rest of America, by the deserts, and then our isolation by the Pacific.'" (163)
"'Mr. Soriano, can we put [on] some colonial type of and entrance, porches?' Soriano responded: 'Why do you want to do that? Do you do that with your planes?'" (153)
"'The growth of Los Angeles coincided with a great deal of gadgetry. The airplane did more for this city thank for any other because it ended our isolation -- first our isolation from the rest of America, by the deserts, and then our isolation by the Pacific.'" (163)
December 30, 2021
Absolutely loved this beautifully constructed book with essays by scholars who both appreciate and unpack how Los Angeles is defined by the relationship between myth and dreams, on one side, and material specifics and limits, on the other. It specifically examines the middle decades of the 20th century, when Los Angeles “grew up” from being essentially a provincial boomtown to becoming a global city.
January 19, 2024
The most incredible combination of history, architecture, and throw in SFV, Eichler, and bowling references. The pictures are great.
October 20, 2013
A collection of essays and plates from the Getty Museum's 2013 exhibition of the same name, this book provides good insight into the development of Los Angeles during the second half of the 20th century.
Overall the essays were interesting, however the collection of essays felt more randomly selected than carefully crafted together. The book definitely is more of a wild buckshot at Los Angeles modern/post modern history than a detailed and comprehensive view.
Overall the essays were interesting, however the collection of essays felt more randomly selected than carefully crafted together. The book definitely is more of a wild buckshot at Los Angeles modern/post modern history than a detailed and comprehensive view.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews