What do you think?
Rate this book
Looking for Los Angeles: Architecture, Film, Photography, and the Urban Landscape
Often referred to as the city of the future, Los Angeles is known for its sprawl, its constant change, and its special relationship to the film industry. The twelve contributors to Looking for Los Angeles focus on dramatic shifts in the urban landscape, important moments in the city's
architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers.
Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom searches for Los Angeles's center and finds a city that "breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces and regroups itself" and where "freedom of movement" is a basic premise of life. Historian Philip Ethington documents the city's changing character in both
text and images, urban studies professor Dana Cuff exposes the demise of once-thriving urban neighborhoods to make way for Modernist housing projects, and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips invites us on a personal journey into "the projects" to meet gang members and their families today. Artist
Robbert Flick offers a sixteen-page, full-color photo-essay that takes us on a "drive-by" along Alameda Avenue, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines traces Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on the life and career of photographer Edmund Teske, and film historian Robert L. Carringer examines Los
Angeles as a setting for Hollywood feature films.
architectural history, and the role of the image in this mecca of image makers.
Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom searches for Los Angeles's center and finds a city that "breaks itself down, builds itself up again, displaces and regroups itself" and where "freedom of movement" is a basic premise of life. Historian Philip Ethington documents the city's changing character in both
text and images, urban studies professor Dana Cuff exposes the demise of once-thriving urban neighborhoods to make way for Modernist housing projects, and anthropologist Susan A. Phillips invites us on a personal journey into "the projects" to meet gang members and their families today. Artist
Robbert Flick offers a sixteen-page, full-color photo-essay that takes us on a "drive-by" along Alameda Avenue, architectural historian Thomas S. Hines traces Frank Lloyd Wright's influence on the life and career of photographer Edmund Teske, and film historian Robert L. Carringer examines Los
Angeles as a setting for Hollywood feature films.
340 pages, Paperback
First published December 13, 2001
11 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
January 4, 2014
Like nearly all such compilations, some pieces of this book are brilliant while others do little more than take up space, wallowing in predictability. In this volume the best pieces elevate the less compelling, however, and make the overall experience of dissecting and reconstructing the concept of Los Angeles into a transformative and often surprising endeavor.
Cees Nooteboom's essay lays the groundwork for this, and his touching experience as an outsider searching for logic, meaning, and space in the vastness informs (for me at least) everything that comes after. It sets a tone for the outsider quality and detachment that is necessarily a part of trying to study and ultimately understand something so vast; the concept of looking--searching--underlies the thread contained within the entire book of falling just short of neatly classifying any experience of the whole. Los Angeles, as a space, a cultural center, a producer of words and images, is the sum of parts, but also both more and less.
Cees Nooteboom's essay lays the groundwork for this, and his touching experience as an outsider searching for logic, meaning, and space in the vastness informs (for me at least) everything that comes after. It sets a tone for the outsider quality and detachment that is necessarily a part of trying to study and ultimately understand something so vast; the concept of looking--searching--underlies the thread contained within the entire book of falling just short of neatly classifying any experience of the whole. Los Angeles, as a space, a cultural center, a producer of words and images, is the sum of parts, but also both more and less.
Displaying 1 of 1 review