A city seventy miles square but rarely seventy years deep apart from a sman downtown not yet two centuries old and a few other pockets of andentry, Los Angeles is instant architecture in an instant townscape.
Most of its buildings are the first and only structures on their particular parcels of land; they are couched in a dozen different styles, most of them imported, exploited, and ruined within living memory. Yet the city has a comprehensible, even consistent, quality to its built form, unified enough to rank as a fit subject for an historical monograph.
Historical monograph? Can such an old-world, academic, and precedent-laden concept claim to embrace so unprecedented a human phenomenon as this city of Our Lady Queen of the Angels of Porciuncula? - otherwise known as Internal Combustion City, Surfurbia, Smogville, Aerospace City, Systems Land, the Dream- factory of the Western world.
It's a poor historian who finds any human artefact alien to his professional capacities, a poorer one who cannot find new bottles for new wine. In any case, the new wine of Angeleno architecture has already been decanted into one of the older types of historical bottle with a success that I will not even try to emulate.
