September 2013 Notable Review Never Built Los Angeles

Greg Goldin

Sam Lubell

Never Built Los Angeles

By Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell; Foreword by Thom Mayne
Metropolis Books (July 2013)
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Reviewer: Book Board member Alissa Walker (Los Angeles)

Never Built Los Angeles by Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell, 2013 (Metropolis Books)

Los Angeles’s civic center might have been a Lloyd Wright masterpiece of terraced gardens. There should be a lush housing development by Richard Neutra where Dodger Stadium stands today. LAX could have been encased under a massive glass dome. These otherworldly proposals for L.A. were unearthed by architecture writers Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell during three years of intensive research, who turned their findings into an exhibition, app, and this book of over 100 projects that might have changed L.A. for the better. (Of course not all the dashed ideas were good: A freeway was supposed to connect Santa Monica to Malibu—directly through the Santa Monica Bay.) Armed with hundreds of models, sketches and drawings, Goldin and Lubell worked with the designers at Volume, Inc. to capture the "on the boards" nature of the projects without succumbing to the bleary-eyed nostalgia of most retro-fabulous compendiums. While the book makes the case that L.A. is "always the exception," it also admits that there's something exceptional in the way we built up, tear down, dream big and fail disastrously. We probably always will. In that way, Never Built Los Angeles is about a city that never was, but it's also about the kind of city L.A. still wants to be.

Lloyd Wright Civic Center Plan, 1925, from Never Built Los Angeles. Photo: Courtesy Eric Lloyd Wright

Proposed Santa Monica Causeway, 1965, from Never Built Los Angeles. Photo: courtesy of the City of Santa Monica

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