As an architect, architecture critic, historian, author, educator, and preservationist, Hess has elevated the roadside and commercial architecture of post-World War II to its rightful place in the canon of architectural history. He has done so by taking seriously the hidden, forgotten, neglected, and unsung places that helped define postwar living.  Coffee shops, ranch houses, […]

Widely regarded as the father of Modern landscape architecture, Garrett Eckbo saw landscape design as a vehicle for social change...

The decade of the 1950s established Southern California’s reputation for creativity in architecture. The city’s residential architecture gained international fame, largely due to the Case Study program sponsored by Arts+Architecture magazine. Through Sunset magazine, however, California design spread even more widely and popularly. The region’s growth was also gaining attention nationally; its burgeoning population led […]

Throughout the 1980s, much of the Los Angeles basin and San Fernando Valley were being built out. Open agricultural land and undeveloped hillsides had once offered a blank slate for development; in the 1980s the emphasis of development shifted to the challenge of infill projects, additions, redevelopment for denser uses, and preservation. Yet even the […]