Excerpt from "The Expediter"

CUT TO:

Interior, Building Department, Day.  Jason and Farid place the model against the wall.  Cary grabs a number.  He gets 644.  He looks up at the television screen.  They’re at 573.  He sighs.

Interior, Building Department, Later.  The number on the screen is 642.  Cary’s knee bounces nervously, his eyes glued to the screen.  Jason and Farid check out the women walking the floor.

FARID:  Hi.  My name is Farid.  Have you met my pet hamster?

JASON:  I want to schmeckel you.

Cary checks the screen: 4:25 p.m.  A customer leaves the counter.  Plan checker, 
ERNESTO, 45, calls out.

ERNESTO:  643.  643? Last call, 643.

Cary looks around.  No one is answering.  He starts to get up.  Suddenly a striking bleached-blonde, PETRA CRUZ, mid-30s, swoops in, a milk crate filled with drawings trailing behind her.

PETRA:  Ernie, hi.  (slipping into the chair)  I know it’s not my turn, I just have a quick little thing.

ERNESTO:  Petra, it’s always your turn.

CARY:  (turning to his colleagues) Did you just see that?

JASON:  A vanilla milkshake.

FARID:  Blonde, smooth, and delicious.

CARY:  Hey. (approaching the counter, livid)  It was my turn.

ERNESTO:  Are you 643?

CARY:  644, but she doesn’t even have a number.

ERNESTO:  Doesn’t matter.  It’s not your turn.

CARY:  (frustrated, huffing before sitting back down)  Who does she think she is?

JASON:  A sweet honey muffin, that’s who.

FARID:  A nibble is all I ask.

Petra stands up, leaves, glancing at Cary, smiling.

PETRA:  You’re up. (she looks back to the counter)  Thanks Ernesto.

ERNESTO:  Always a pleasure.

Cary drags his drawings as Jason and Farid set the model on the counter.

ERNESTO:  Did I call your number?

CARY:  No, but we’re next.

ERNESTO:  We’re closed.

CARY:  But it’s 4:29.  We still have one minute.

ERNESTO:  Not according to my watch.

CARY:  But the screen...

ERNESTO:  (shrugging)  Sorry.  (he stands)

CARY:  Oh no.  No way.  We have to submit this project today or we’re totally fucked.

ERNESTO:  What can I say?  You should have made an appointment or come in earlier.

CARY:  I came in two hours ago.  Maybe if you guys worked a little harder…

            Ernesto smiles at the insult, walks toward his office behind the counter.

CARY:  Who’s your supervisor? (almost vibrating with frustration)  Look.  I know the damned Mayor!  Maybe I’ll just give him a call.

ERNESTO:  (amused, turns back to Cary)  That’s a great idea.  Hey, maybe you can even submit your project to him.  (snickering as he disappears into his office)  Cary stands open mouthed as his door CLICKS shut.  Petra Cruz suddenly appears as Cary’s side.

PETRA:  It’s not who you know, it’s who you get.

CARY:  What’s that supposed to mean?

PETRA:  Watch and learn.  (She passes behind the counter and goes to Ernesto’s office, tapping gently)  Ernesto?

            The door opens and Ernesto’s head appears.

ERNESTO:  What is it, my dear?

PETRA:  There is just one more thing...

            The door swings open.  Petra casts a knowing smile to Cary before disappearing inside.

            CUT TO:

            Exterior, The Edison, Sunset.  A retro bar at the base of a downtown LA office building.

Interior, The Edison, Continuous.  Camera pans along the bar stopping at Jason and Farid, who talk up Candace, a twenty-something hipster.

FARID:  Have you ever slept with a guy who giggles during sex?

CANDACE:  (furrowing her brow) Can’t say that I have.

JASON:  Would you like to?

Candace smirks, then turns away.  Jason and Farid share a shrug, then look around. Cary and Petra are sitting at a booth.

CARY:  I think there should be a law that developers who want to demolish a building have to prove to a jury of their peers that what they’re putting up is better than what they’re tearing down.

PETRA:  Yeah. (sipping her Negroni)  Good luck with that one.

CARY:  Yeah, maybe not.  (he drops his eyes sheepishly, then looks up)  Seriously though.  How’d you do it?

PETRA: Do what?

CARY:  At the building department.

PETRA:  I’m an expediter.  It’s what I do.

CARY:  I’ve always wondered.

PETRA:  What was that you submitted? 

CARY:  Just this project.  For a competition.  They want to fix up the area around the old plaza next to Olvera street. (in his best Spanish accent) La Placita.

PETRA:  That explains the huge model.  Think you have a chance?

CARY:  Doubtful.  Our submission is pretty out there.

PETRA:  This is LA.  Everything is out there.

CARY:  It’s based on this idea.  Urban succession.  You know, that a city evolves kind of like a forest, with particular building species dominating during economic expansions.  (off her glazed look)  You know, so in time a city becomes an archive of successive economies? (off her silence)  Never mind.

PETRA:  Building species.  I like that.

CARY:   I know.  Pretty crazy. But it kind of makes the city more legible.

            Petra, nodding, returns to her drink, taking a long, slow sip.  She smiles flatly.

CARY:  What?

PETRA:  (pausing) Nothing.

CARY:  No, really.  What?

PETRA:  It’s just…  It’s a cute theory.

CARY:  Cute?  Cute?

PETRA:  Cute isn’t the right word.  Underdeveloped, maybe?  I mean, the city as an archive of successive economies?  It just doesn’t work for every city.  Paris, for instance. 

CARY:  Paris is a great example of urban successionism.

PETRA:  Really? Didn’t they outlaw wooden structures within the city at some point?  I mean, how many building species were lost when that happened?

CARY:  (sighing)  Whatever.  It works for LA, that’s all I know. (as he takes a long drink of his beer, Petra watches him, thinking)

PETRA: I don’t know.  Maybe it just needs some elaboration.  For instance, is there a specific mechanism that induces speciation?

            Cary perks up, leaning forward.

THE MASSIVE MEDIA, PART 2

Architecture is a massive medium, it communicates what we value most – our hopes and desires, our aspirations.  In the same way, infrastructure conveys what is important to particular society: what we build, where we build, and how we build it speaks volumes about what we hold dear; and as our values change, the massive media of architecture and infrastructure change with us. The evolution of cities thus proceeds as we adapt our physical environment to changing political, social, cultural, and economic needs.  But how does that adaptation occur?  What is the mechanism of change?

In fact, a city evolves one project at a time; each project is an attempt to exploit an opportunity opened up by a change in political, social, cultural, or economic conditions; each project is the product of a specific interaction between particular individuals, one in which their often conflicting desires are locked in an ongoing struggle, a sort of metabolic process whose end-product is a completed project; and that it is in the aggregation of these projects -- these particular adaptations to specific urban conditions -- that the shape of the city emerges.

Underneath this process is a pattern that seems to underlie adaptation across the spectrum: ecosystems at every scale seem to be directed by a microcosm at a scale small enough relative to the ecosystem that it seems invisible; when a change in conditions knocks an ecosystem out of equilibrium, it is the effort of the microcosm that does the hard work of restoring order.  Often, despite the overt desire of the ecosystem to return to a previous equilibrium, the microcosm works at the smaller scale adapt it to the reality of the new conditions.   

How does it do this?  The microcosm works chiefly through signaling and other more complex forms of communication.   In forests, for example, a change in conditions propels the microcosm to adapt.  Microbial organisms such as bacteria, algae, and fungi engage in metabolic activity that reconfigures the environment to cultivate a new habitat, one more in line with the altered ecological conditions.  The forest changes its makeup, autopoietically, rearranging its biota through a succession of species, continually seeking equilibrium.

Cities evolve in a similar way; however, instead of an unseen microcosm instigating change, it is what I call the metrocosm that does the work.   The metrocosm consists of an ecosystem of citizens engaged in a riot of activity that includes all manner of interaction – fighting and playing; buying and selling; politics, sports and entertainment; crime and punishment; eating, praying, loving, etc. – that, when taken together, is the city, autopoietically remaking itself, interaction by interaction. 

When this activity occurs in the realm of architecture and infrastructure, the life of the city can be read in its physical form; thus the city itself becomes a massive medium broadcasting to the world the collective message of the metrocosm.  This is how a city like New York is always New York even though both the medium and the message are constantly changing.

SUCCESSIONISM ISN'T JUST FOR CITIES ANYMORE

Urban Successionism posits that a city evolves one building at a time, that each building is the specific result of the interaction between particular people at a particular time, and that cities are archives of successive economies.  Because of this, one can read a city, understand its metrocosmic ecosystem, and propose ways to evolve it further.

But successionism is not limited to urban evolution; it occurs in all manner of human endeavor: sports, the arts, politics, religion all evolve through a succession of movements, styles, economies, each of which mutates, project by project, a result of one human interaction after another and identifiable as a moment in that evolution only upon aggregation or the passage of time.

MACROCOSMOS:

THE ROLE OF TECHNOLOGY IN THE EVOLUTION OF CITIES

Internet technology has impacted how we live in many ways, changing patterns of human interaction, transforming everything from commerce to politics, from entertainment to journalism to interpersonal relations; in short it has become the de-facto public realm, substituting much of what we do in the actual world with a simpler more efficient way to do it virtually.  The Occupy movement seemed at first to invert this trend: it used the Internet to activate civic centers across the US.  But was its ultimate effect the opposite?  Did it instead confirm our fears that the very places that once formed the core of our urban experience have become irrelevant to most of us?  Has the internet succeeded in rendering the city as we know it meaningless?

TECHNOLOGY

Technology has played a significant part in the development of cities from the very beginning.  One of the first cities was Jericho, settled as the earth began to warm after the last ice age and agriculture was discovered. The springs around the city created a fertile plain, but one that flooded easily.  A wall was constructed to keep the city dry; but it also proved valuable as a defense against marauding outsiders. The walls of Jericho became more and more elaborate as techniques of warfare became more sophisticated.

Eventually the walled city spread to Asia Minor and Europe, evolving a variety of species that incorporated such innovations as battered walls, crenellation, and moats.  Byzantine cities such as Venice and Genoa secured themselves using different methods: in Genoa, the city was surrounded by a double wall forcing access to the city through a relatively small passage in the harbor, which gave the city a strategic advantage; Venice went a step further and forced all access to the city to occur over water, which, together with its location at the head of the Adriatic, enabled it to become the dominant political and economic connection between Europe and the Muslim world.  It thrived for centuries, until warfare technology evolved to the point that Napoleon could conquer it in 1787.

Cities like Florence and Paris kept building new walls further out as their thriving economies pushed them into the surrounding lands.  Eventually, as the political and economic status gained equal footing with military, the walls were no longer needed.  In fact in the 18^th and 19^th centuries, the enemy was not as often invaders from the outside, but insurrectionists from within.  Napoleon III used the rationale of improving the health of the city to engage Baron Haussmann to create the present urban structure of Paris, the grand boulevards connected by “etoiles,” which accomplished three tasks simultaneously: they discouraged the insurrectionists certainly (the Paris Commune of 1871 notwithstanding); but they also introduced an efficient new sewer system, and ultimately created an underlying structure for the city that facilitated the spread of the Metro, all of which created the Paris that we know today.

In New York, it was also the urban structure – the grid – that facilitated the construction of its subway at the turn of last century.  But it was the arrival of the telephone as well as the elevator that transformed New York into a vertical city.  In Los Angeles, which had been a series of villages connected by the largest urban-rail system in America before the arrival of the automobile – an event that, while enabling LA’s horizontally expansion to be as quick and thorough as its economy would allow, also transfigured it beyond recognition.

And what might a city of the internet look like?  So far every city has had to adapt to it in small ways: the loss of book stores, record stores, libraries and post offices; but what new urban artifacts will emerge?  Will any city be transformed by the technology?  Or be born of it? One can imagine a world in which the wealthier 1% live in “lifestyle” cities – those devoted to shopping, playing, or cultural activities –  while the poorer 99% live in “drone” cities – those devoted to the support and maintenance of the 1%. 

But another reality may already be already unfolding before us.  In Megatrends, John Naisbitt predicted a correlation between “high tech” and “high touch.”  In cities across America this is happening; a trend is emerging toward embracing authenticity.  Perhaps propelled by the Internet’s ubiquity, there is a new appreciation of the hand-crafted object, the fresh produce of farmer’s markets, a vibrant street culture.  Could it be that the flattening effect of the internet has inspired a desire for the dimensional?  That the global reach of the world-wide-web has compelled us to become more intensely local? 

The ubiquity of the internet reminds us that technology alone does not create these cities; there are always other places that have many of the same elements in place – London and Paris during the emergence of underground rail; Chicago and New York at the birth of the skyscraper; Detroit and Los Angeles during the rise of car culture – but why does one city expand beyond expectations – or reason – while the other remains relatively intact or even withers? 

EVOLUTION

Technology-driven urban transformations are clearly the exception.  In the evolution of cities, most change occurs in small ways, almost invisibly.  Cities are constantly remaking themselves through millions of tiny gestures performed by individual citizens on a daily basis.  In this way, a city lives.  It is what evolutionary biologists Lynn Margulis and Dorion Sagan call autopoietic in that cities are constantly adjusting themselves to adapt to changing conditions.  In Microcosmos, they write, “this modulating ‘holisitic’ phenomenon of autopoiesis, of active self-maintenance, is the basis of all known life.”

Margulis and Sagan argue that although we live in the Macrocosm, which makes up the visible world, all our basic life functions – including evolution – occur at the level of the Microcosm – the ecosystem of micro-organic cells that, in the human body alone, constitute more that ten-times the number of human cells.  These cells, mostly bacteria of some sort, are of unknown origin with a mysterious function because they are unable to survive outside their human ecosystem.  What is clear is that these microbes undergo a complex series of interactions – signaling, communication, reproduction, transpiration, even fermentation – that result in byproducts necessary to sustain the human body.

This is also true for macrobes in nature.  A forest is an ecosystem of macrobes – trees, shrubs, grasses, etc. – and each of these macrobes is itself an ecosystem much like the human body.  The question is, if we understand that ecosystems occur at all scales, can we begin to see the city as a sort of ecosystem, one created through the interaction of human macrobes?  Certainly the physical byproducts of such interactions – architecture and infrastructure – are not themselves living organisms; but does that mean that the city as a system – as an ecosystem – cannot act in an autopoietic manner?

Consider then the Metrocosm, an ecosystem at the urban scale made up of human macrobes in constant interaction whose residue is the city itself.  The metrocosm evolves to survive, just as any ecosystem does.  It is constantly changing in order to remain the same.  And it does so through two related mechanisms: adaptation and mutation.

The metrocosm adapts in much the same way a forest does: through successionism. But while a forest adjusts its ecosystem plant by plant, reacting to changing environmental conditions, the city does so building by building.  In fact, every building can be seen as the result of a specific interaction between particular individuals – the developer, the city, the contractor, the architect – and it takes on an appearance that reflects this unique interaction.  Thus in any building it is possible to read the intent of the city planners, the economic strategy of the developer, the current construction conventions, as well as whatever style the architect chooses to employ.  The city is legible in its architecture.  And because development tends to occur during times of economic expansion, the city becomes an archive of successive economies.

The metrocosm can also mutate.  Mutation is an extreme form of adaptation and is facilitated through technology.  It is what occurs when a political/economic environment calls for extraordinary change at exactly the moment that the technology is there to make it happen.  Think of the sewers, boulevards and Metro system in Paris; the street grid, subway system, and elevators in New York; the car in Los Angeles: each metrocosm was able to transform itself toward its desired future precisely when the technology to do so became available.

CITIES

This is why the metrocosm looks the way it does: its buildings reflect the styles in vogue during successive economies, while its urban form and infrastructure reflect the ascendant technology at the time of its greatest economic expansion -- which is not always good news.

Take Los Angeles, a place simultaneously beautiful and horrific; both reimagined and ruined by the automobile, LA defies easy categorization.  In his recent book, “No More Play,” architect Michael Maltzan interviews a number of people across the city to get their assessment of the place, but few are able to give a definitive answer.  Qingyun Ma, dean of the USC School of Architecture considers LA not to be a city, yet to be somehow urban; pressed to name this brand of urbanism, he called it “intermediate utopia.”

Perhaps Los Angeles is not a city in the conventional sense; but it is a metrocosm.  If we embrace the metrocosm as an ever evolving, self-maintaining, and self-preserving system, then the notion of whether it is a city or not becomes irrelevant.  The important thing to recognize is that, as a metrocosm, it has the best chance of survival the more adaptable it is. 

This is the problem with places like the city of Irvine, California.  Designed for the car, virtually every decision was guided by the intent to make life as convenient for the driver as possible, from the size and shape of the roads and freeways, to the location and layout of shopping centers, to the layers of exclusivity within gated residential communities.  It may seem to work, for now; but what happens when as-yet-unimagined technologies arrive?  Not only is the structure of the master-planned community fixed, but in Irvine the CC&Rs restrict the ability to adapt. Irvine could forever be stuck in a late 20th century, car-centered mentality.  Adapt or die: its only hope for survival may be to be swallowed up in the ever-expanding Southern California metrocosm extending from the Ventura County line, all the way down to Camp Pendleton at the southern border of Orange County.

I am convinced that the future of the metrocosm lies in the complete opposite direction of Irvine – the ability to adapt freely.  Nowhere is this more evident than in the Netherlands.  Because of its relentlessly artificial topography, The Dutch metrocosm known as the Randstad, which includes cities such as Amsterdam, Rotterdam, and the Hague, was forced to adapt to survive – which has made it naturally more open to change, more inclined to welcome new technologies, and why the entire country is such an exciting place to watch as world culture transitions from one technology to the next.

WHAT SHE SAID

The way it works, she said, is a matter of science.  She had been trained as a microbiologist but felt too removed from microbial interactions to actually care about their result.  It was simply a matter of scale.  Which is how she began to see humans as macrobes, which, like microbes, were constantly embroiled in complex interactions but that produced more significant by-products, things like music and art and babies and war.

She said, “Culture is an infection spread through macrobial interaction.”

By adulthood, macrobes are infected with multiple cultures which have a varied and unpredictable affect on one other.  Let’s take an individual macrobe, she said, to illustrate this point.  A boy, brought up, say, in the Catholic church, embodies that culture, as well as the culture of his parents and siblings; as he grows up he is infected with the culture of his peers, of his coaches, and teachers; let’s imagine he goes to architecture school, where he is exposed to a variety of cultures, some of which he immune to, but some which infect him nonetheless, a pair of teachers, say, stricken with deconstructivism, pass that onto him, which is made stronger by later work experiences, so that by the time he is out on his own, the architect is product of a succession of cultures and carries remnants of all of them in a complex egosystem in which one or more of these cultures is dominant.

This is important for cities, she said, because building of a structure is a sort of fermentation or metabolism, an interaction between several macrobe cultures that must be present for the process to take place.  The first culture that must be there is the will of the larger community, represented in the planning and/or building department, the entity that lays the ground rules for what is acceptable within a particular jurisdiction.  The second culture that must be present is the developer, who seeks to build the structure in order to gain more nutrients (money) for himself; but it is also he who provides nutrients for the fermentations.  The third culture that is required is the contractor, who takes the nutrients provided by the developer and works within the conditions imposed by the city to construct the building.  The culture that is not absolutely required, but which often adds complexity – if that’s what the developer wants for his building – is the architect.

She likens the making of a building to the making of wine: is a succession of biological onslaughts, macrobial instead of microbial, starting with the fermentation of the developer culture with the architect culture, the primary fermentation producing a design, which can then be processed by the city through the metabolism of permitting.  The secondary fermentation – the interaction between several cultures, primarily the developer and the contractor – occurs once the building permit has been granted and the construction begins.   Sometimes these fermentations occur simultaneously, but usually they are serial in nature, each one providing nutrients specific to the subsequent fermentations.  If deeper complexity is the goal then the presence of other macrobes is encouraged; however, due to the often-negative effects of unsolicited macrobial opinions, most projects attempt to proceed without such input.  She said that the influence of unwanted macrobes leads to unpredictable results, often inviting unsavory characters to the project.

The by-product of an architectural fermentation is a building, the species of which is a result of that specific fermentation.  A new building species is formed when the fermentation changes, usually occurring when one or more of the fermenting agents is altered.  For instance, if the planning department changes the zoning, or a developer who sees a new opportunity brought about by a changing economy, or an architect who wants to test a new design concept, the fermentation takes a different course, which could result in a new building species. 

Thus succession of interactions, she said, is the mechanism that produces the succession of building species through which a city evolves, one building at a time.  She said the process can be controlled, if you know what you’re doing.  Which is why she became an expediter.

ADAPTATION, MUTATION, AND SPECIATION IN CHICAGO

The evolution of cities occurs at all scales, from the tiniest urban gesture to the grandest of plans.   Nowhere is this more apparent than in Chicago.

After the Chicago Fire of 1871, when the first-growth city was destroyed, the city reacted to the trauma with a burst of creativity that virtually invented modern America.  New building species emerged, most notably the skyscraper, which was pioneered there during a building boom that coincided with the arrival of steel construction and the invention of the elevator and the telephone.  While the skyscraper genus quickly spread to New York, it underwent an intriguing evolution in Chicago with architects attempting to render it the various styles of the day.  Thus from the Tacoma Building to the Reliance Building to the Guarantee to Carson Pirie Scott, and to the Chicago Board of Trade, the skyscraper tried on a succession of eclectic styles, from Richardsonian Romanesque, to Gothic, to Beaux Arts classical, to the iconoclasm of Louis Sullivan, settling comfortably on Art Deco as what, for me, is its defining style.  That is, until Mies came along and reinvented it once again, initiating a wave of skyscraper cultivars that continues to this day.

But Chicago is also known for the efforts to plan the city.  Since the Great Fire, Chicago has never stopped reimagining itself with a series of grand schemes, the most famous, of course, from Burnham and Bennett, whose plan for the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition was the one plan of so many proposed following the Chicago Fire to be realized.  The more recent Millennium Park comes out of this tradition.  A public/private partnership, it took longer and cost far more than had been anticipated, yet it has drawn an unprecedented amount of tourists and, with art and architecture by Anish Kapoor, Renzo Piano, and Frank Gehry, has cemented Chicago’s already solid reputation as a cultural capital.  

Of course, it was Daniel Burnham, whose handiwork can bee seen everywhere in Chicago, who famously declared, “make no small plans.”  But it is precisely in these smaller plans that Chicago is readying for the future.  “Cities adapt or they go away,” is what Aaron Durnbaugh, deputy commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment said in a recent New York Times article describing plans for the city to adjust to the inevitable climate change on the horizon.  The city is taking steps to prepare for hotter, wetter weather.  That means devising ways to deal with stormwater with permeable paving and changing the urban plant palette toward more heat tolerant varieties.  This also means taking the city in a more sustainable direction, working on an electric car infrastructure, a network of bike paths, reduction of paved areas to reduce the heat-island effect, and moving the city to zero waste through aggressive recycling.  Such measures are part of a strategy of urban adaptation that Suzanne Malec-McKenna, commissioner of Chicago’s Department of Environment describes in the same New York Times article as “a constant ongoing process to make sure we are as resilient as we can be in facing the future.”

New York Times article

This is how the evolution of cities proceeds: not through the simple mechanics of Darwinian capitalism naturally selecting certain forms, nor merely the result of good planning, but an interaction of these and other less-obvious forces.  Cities like Chicago constantly reshape themselves – from a treasured landmark adapting to a new use, to the mutation of known building species in reaction to altered conditions; from the birth of a totally new building genus that forever transforms the city, to a simple change in paving.  Urban Successionism is the endless struggle to remain vital in an increasingly competitive global economy.

BEYOND URBAN SUCCESSIONISM

Classification of building species proceeds much in the same way as it does for plants or animals.  Differentiation between the species must be definite, yet must be open enough to allow for a degree of variation within the species.  If all dogs are the same species, for example, how are the different breeds distinguished from one another.  The use of a simple differentia following the genus and species name could solve this:

A Proposed Taxonomy for Building Species:

KINGDOM
        Plants
        Animals
        Matter           

PHYLUM                                                           

        Gas

        Liquid

        Solid

CLASS
        Natural

        Manmade

ORDER
        Infrastructure
        Architecture
        Objects

FAMILY
        Residential

        Retail

        Office

        Institutional

        Civic

        Cultural

        Educational

        Recreational

        Health Care

GENUS

        Domus

SPECIES
        casestudiana

DIFFERENTIA

        “Craig Ellwood”

                                                                                      

Thus the house pictured above, Case Study House #16 by Craig Ellwood, could be called:

Domus casestudiana "Craig Ellwood"

The task of identifying and naming the various native and non-native building species in a  city like Los Angeles is fairly daunting.   Yet when approached from the perspective of Urban Successionism as outlined in my previous post, such an effort could result in a history of the city told in its buildings, making it visceral, alive, relevant.

Coming Soon:

A FIELD GUIDE TO THE ARCHITECTURE OF LOS ANGELES (www.afgala.org)