L.A. [Ten]

Anfang der 1980er-Jahre tritt mit den 'L.A. Ten' eine Architektengruppe auf die Bildfläche, die die architektonische Zukunft der kalifornischen Stadt entscheidend mitbestimmen wird. In diesem Buch zeichnen Stephen Phillipps, Wim de Wit und Christopher Alexander die Entwicklung der Architekturszene der Stadt von 1970 bis 1990 nach. Den Kern der Publikation bilden Gespräche mit den L.A. Ten-Architekten Neil Denari, Frederick Fisher, Ming Fung, Craig Hodgetts, Coy Howard, Franklin Israel (posthum), Wes Jones, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss und Michael Rotond. Die Protagonisten rekapitulieren nicht nur bedeutende Momente der eigenen Vita, sondern auch Ereignisse, die die gesamte Avantgarde-Community L.A.s geprägt haben, wie Konferenzen und Ausstellungen. Darüber hinaus analysieren sie die Herausbildung eines gemeinsamen Denkansatzes sowie die gestalterischen Strategien der Gruppe. Die Publikation bietet somit einen umfassenden Überblick über die L.A. Ten-Architekten zwischen Postmodernismus und Dekonstruktion.

These interviews, a group endeavor by the Cal Poly LA Metro Program and the Getty Research Institute, constitute an oral history of a turbulent and creative era. Even Mayne, whose career has burgeoned in the past three decades, looks back on that time with wistful nostalgia. [...] And how they talk! [...] Recalling their first encounters with LA and especially with Venice, which was then a cheap, seedy backwater, beloved by impecunious artists. It is the LA that is 98 percent mundane with a few scattered sparks of brilliance and eccentricity that nurtured Reyner Banham, the Eameses, and a long succession of architects who found opportunities here they would never have enjoyed in conventional cities. The perspective of the LA Ten is invaluable-as social history and as a spur for another tide of talent to ameliorate the mediocrity.
-- Michael Webb, The Architect's Newspaper
"In the 1980s and 1990s, a small group of Los Angeles architects changed the world of design. Out of the messy vitality of Los Angeles, they developed strategies of collage, reuse, and expression that have become hallmarks for some of the best architecture around the world. Some of them became famous; others just kept doing good work. Now you can meet them all, and read what they did and how, in their own words precisely and clearly edited by Stephen Phillips."
-Aaron Betsky, critic, curator, educator, and Director of the Cincinnati Art Museum
"The architects of the L.A. School often styled themselves as 'doers' rather than 'writers,' a characterization that makes it easy to miss what kind of 'thinkers' they were and still are. This collection of interviews explodes this common oversight. It not only captures the intimate and informal conversational structure, through which architectural ideas were generated in Los Angeles, but it reveals how much the culture of L.A. during the 1980s anticipated the worldwide blog-driven form of contemporary architectural thought."
-Sylvia Lavin, Director of Critical Studies and M.A./Ph.D. Programs at UCLA Department of Architecture