Never Built Los Angeles

by Greg Goldin, Sam Lubell, Thom Mayne (Foreword)

"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.

Genres: Architecture, Urbanism, Nonfiction

376 pages, Hardcover

First published April 30, 2013

Reviews

[Karen Marie Lucas · Rating 5 out of 5]

If you ever wondered about that never-built Disney Burbank project you overheard two elder architects half-drunkenly discuss over old fashions at the Magic Castle - - then this book is for you!

This is a collection of fabulous projects inked but never realized in concrete, glass or steel grace the pages of what was dreamed but never done.

Locals still in mourning for our LA - Vegas Maglev that never was will finally be at peace reading its obituary here. Gone but not forgotten.

[Kiel Bryant · Rating 5 out of 5]

Merely magnificent. A valentine to the undying urban stimulus of a city that is an entire world.

[Brady Dale · Rating 3 out of 5]

From a roundup review I did at the end of 2013 on NextCity.


What I wrote about this book:

This is a bitter book, and also a lot of fun. Chronicling ambitious plans for L.A. that never got executed, the authors ask, “So what is about Los Angels that fosters so many imaginative, potentially transformative public-realm projects — good and bad — yet simultaneously quashes them?” Opinions abound on that score. So many, in fact, that the authors combed through the archives and came up with nearly 400 pages’ worth of fleshed-out ideas never realized in the home of Hollywood.

They include a skyscraper with its foundation in the ocean, movie theaters out of some sort of Art Deco sci-fi film, a downtown by Frank Lloyd Wright that looks fit for the Holy Roman Empire, Circa 1960, and a plan for Sunset Mountain that looks like a pen-and-ink drawing by a masterful Buddhist monk. Readers will learn of architects who saw the commuter problem clearly in 1977 and of Pierre Koenig’s austere Hollywood Mosque. These are pages filled with what might have been and the stories of why they weren’t.

Like long-lost romantic partners, what might have been is never that profitable to dwell on. Except, in this case, it does illustrate how L.A.’s political system has limited its capacity to live up to its people’s exceptional potential.

[Martin · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an indispensable resource...if you can find it. I saw it once at the LACMA gift shop and by the time I remembered to buy it, used copies were fetching over $75. I just looked on Amazon and you'd be lucky to find it for $150. I hope there's a second edition someday. The book is divided into five sections: Master Plans, Buildings, Follies & Amusements, Parks & Plazas, and Transit Plans. Each chapter then goes in chronological order. Putting it all together, though, you get a picture of many different cities that Los Angeles could have become - and though it's sometimes sad that certain things didn't happen because of an economic downturn (lots of plans abandoned due to the onset of the Depression, WWII or the Great Recession), usually I just can't picture what the city would have become had some of these been enacted. This book is very thorough. If there's anything you ever heard about in passing, like plans for a Motion Picture Museum across from the Hollywood Bowl, or a Hollywood Ritz-Carlton at the top of Argyle that was a huge scam, or Huntington Hartford II wanting to build a sports club overlooking Runyon Canyon, or the Beverly Hills freeway that would have run from Vermont to the 405 between Melrose and Santa Monica Blvd, or an offshore freeway in Santa Monica, it's all here. There's also the terrifying vision that Lloyd Wright had for Grand Ave that reimagined downtown and Bunker Hill as a kind of Meso-American pyramid transit hub. There's also a crazy Catholic church he designed that was a high rise and looked like a standing cross from any vantage point. I was sad to see unrealized movie palaces designed by S. Charles Lee after WWII. And a large circular mall designed by Victor Gruen for Boyle Heights. Or a really cool Griffith Park nature center designed by John Lautner, which would fit right in with the houses he built in the area. Also a reptile and insect house for the LA Zoo that does not seem as cuckoo as the zoo seemed to think it was, all curves and green, sort of programmatic to signal what would have been in there. Although this was published in 2013, which seems recent, the book reports some things that are thankfully no longer true. We finally have a motion picture museum (underwhelming but room to improve). We have a new stadium and we have a football team, so the Coliseum doesn't need to be expanded. We're getting mass transit into LAX for real this time. The train from LA to SF is really happening. (I think? Fingers crossed!)