California Dreaming

California has historically provided a fertile breeding ground for radical modes of architectural thinking, practice and building, which from the 1920s onwards was sparked by the presence of eminent émigré architects. It was also central to the birth of ‘cool’ mid-century Modernism – all in parallel with the intense concentration of design and experimentation in the film, aerospace and tech industries. This AD issue explores the influential formal tropes generated in the nexus between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, as well as the thriving theoretical preoccupations that have brought California's architects global attention. Between Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, this unique context has nurtured and become the platform for those who not only build buildings around the world, but have also founded and directed schools and educated emergent generations of architects.

Contributors: Frances Anderton, Jasmine Benyamin, Blaine Brownell, Courtney Coffman, Heather Flood and Aaron Gensler, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Craig Hodgetts, Max Kuo, Eva Menuhin, Nicole Meyer, Jill Stoner, and Grace Mitchell Tada.

Featured architects: Atelier Manferdini, Ball-Nogues Studio, Faulders Studio, FreelandBuck, Hood Design Studio, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Preliminary Research Office, Stereobot, and Synthesis Design + Architecture.

Introduction The Golden State: California's Architectural Soul

Chapter 2 Backlot Suburbia: A California Story

Chapter 3 Californian, The Third Way

Chapter 4 Material Imageability: The Architecture of Façades and Envelopes

Chapter 5 Printing the Picture Plane: Imaging Scales Up

Chapter 6 California Burning: Architecture's Pyrocene Future

Chapter 7 Do Dream Landscapes Have Earthquakes?

Chapter 8 Extra-disciplinary Dreams: Journeys Into the Foothills

Chapter 9 The Picture and the Frame: Understanding a Contested Landscape

Chapter 10 A Hands-on Conceptual Rigour: A Multi-scalar Approach

Chapter 11 There's Something in the Air: Authorship, the Hand and the Machine

Chapter 12 Housing the Unhoused: Los Angeles Architects Rise to the Challenge

Chapter 13 Skin and Bones: Pushing the Event Horizon

Chapter 14 In the Mood for Love: Chromophilia Unbound

Chapter 15 From Another Perspective – Morphosis Modelling: A Golden Anniversary

Contributors

About Architectural Design

Neil Spiller is editor of AD, previously he was Hawksmoor Chair of Architecture and Landscape and deputy pro vice-chancellor of the University of Greenwich, London. Prior to this, Spiller was dean of the School of Architecture, Design, and Construction and professor of architecture and digital theory, and vice-dean and graduate director of design at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College, London.

California has historically provided a fertile breeding ground for radical modes of architectural thinking, practice and building, which from the 1920s onwards was sparked by the presence of eminent émigré architects. It was also central to the birth of ‘cool’ mid-century Modernism – all in parallel with the intense concentration of design and experimentation in the film, aerospace and tech industries. This AD issue explores the influential formal tropes generated in the nexus between Los Angeles and the Bay Area, as well as the thriving theoretical preoccupations that have brought California’s architects global attention. Between Hollywood and the Silicon Valley, this unique context has nurtured and become the platform for those who not only build buildings around the world, but have also founded and directed schools and educated emergent generations of architects.

Contributors: Frances Anderton, Jasmine Benyamin, Blaine Brownell, Courtney Coffman, Heather Flood and Aaron Gensler, David Freeland and Brennan Buck, Craig Hodgetts, Max Kuo, Eva Menuhin, Nicole Meyer, Jill Stoner, and Grace Mitchell Tada.

Featured architects: Atelier Manferdini, Ball-Nogues Studio, Faulders Studio, FreelandBuck, Hood Design Studio, Oyler Wu Collaborative, Preliminary Research Office, Stereobot, and Synthesis Design + Architecture.