Glitter Stucco PA

by Chase,John

• ISBN13: 9781859841389
• ISBN10: 1859841384
• Edition: 00
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2004-07-17
• Publisher: VERSO

Summary

Commended in the PEN/Architectural Digest Award for Literary Writing on the Visual Arts (2001).In this free-wheeling guided tour to the cityscape of Southern California, from movie-star mansions to the alleys of the homeless, urban planner John Chase combines gossip, anecdote, archival research and tabloid-worthy self-revelation, grounding architecture as a multidisciplinary art.Speeding across the California landscape, Chase pauses frequently to see what's really there: not just what the movies have taught us to expect, but the range and variation of the built environment that occupies what he calls "everyday space." An urban designer as well as an important architectural critic, Chase explores a myriad of locales and examines their architectural features from the gay community space of West Hollywood, to the stucco box apartment complexes of the 1950s, to the truly weird mix of domestic arrangements in Venice Beach, to gated communities, to some of the historic houses of Hollywood and Beverly Hills and to the most recent transformations of the casino architecture in Las Vegas. At once learned, witty and ironic, Chase makes the mundane world of Southern California vistas come alive on the page.

Author Biography

John Chase has worked as a journalist, architectural designer, critic and Disney Imagineer. He is currently the urban designer for the City of West Hollywood. His previous books include Everyday Urbanism, Las Vegas: The Success of Excess and Exterior Decoration.

Table of Contents

preface	ix
acknowledgments	xiii
PART ONE THE SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA HOME AS COMMODITY
the stucco box (with John Beach)	3	(36)
build your castle upon the trash
the making of mountaingate	39	(12)
PART TWO ILLUSION AND DELUSION IN LOS ANGELES
finding los angeles in the movies, finding the movies in los angeles	51	(24)
how can i miss you when you won't go away?
convention versus invention and the survival of period revival in southern california	75	(28)
knocking off the knock-offs	103	(14)
PART THREE LAS VEGAS
pirates! volcanoes! neon!
welcome to the capitol of non-glamour!
(with Frances Anderton)	117
PART FOUR PERSONAL SPACE
a curmudgeon's guide to urban living
paranoia, pagoda and pirate cave	143	(30)
trashy space, trashy behavior and trashy people	173	(18)
PART FIVE CLASSIFYING AND EVALUATING BUILDING PRODUCTION
the typology of building production	191	(10)
duty and the beast
the representative and the lovable
in the preservation of the recent past	201	(10)
you are what you buy
the consumerist imperative
in american building production	211	(22)
bibliography	233