Some of you may remember when Memphis furniture and Charles Moore’s Piazza d’Italia (above) bounced into the world, reminding designers steeped in Braun-era minimalism and high-minded Modernist architecture that design could be FUN.
Then the visual jokes were coopted by Philip Johnson in the Chippendale top of the AT&T Building (now Sony Tower, below right, completed 1984) and Postmodernism became the new corporate style. This became loathed by designers who counter-rebelled …

On this week’s show, DJ (design journalist) Maura Lucking interviews fashion designer Bryan Sanderson.

Walking down the sunny, tree-lined stretch of Vermont Avenue in Los Feliz near Barnsdall Park, you could almost miss the narrow glass façade of Weltenbuerger, one of the city’s most unique and genre-defying storefronts.  With its sculptural plywood forms, surrealist mannequins, and textiles and weavings draping the front window, it’s not …

It has been a monumental, and monumentalizing, year for SCI-Arc, Los Angeles’ famed experimental architecture school. The Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) celebrates its fortieth anniversary this year, with special programming, building initiatives and a new digital archive of decades of guest lecture videos. The school was also the focus of an exhibition at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture.
The anniversary coincides with a …