UEP 308 The Third Los Angeles Project

How do we decide what pieces of architecture in a city are the most significant? How do we guide people through the 21st-century city? Is the traditional idea of an architecture guidebook -- as a collection of maps as a steady voice of authority as a way to determine and fix the architectural canon -- obsolete? Are the familiar definitions of Los Angeles' urbanism and architectural innovation obsolete too? This course will allow students to explore those questions as they work alongside Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne in helping research and write a new architectural guidebook for Southern California. A new approach to compiling a guidebook will offer the chance to move beyond a limited list of pedigreed architectural landmarks and think about L.A.'s vernacular architecture as well as the way that new investments in transit and public space and waves of immigration have changed the city's built form over the last several decades.