Greg Goldin

The Two-Minute Interview

Distribution manager 1978-1981Contributing writer 1978-present The phone call came a few days before Thanksgiving. The man on the other end of the line identif...
Kenaston House

A. Quincy Jones: High and Low

Archibald Quincy Jones might have been the quintessential modernist architect. Like his contemporaries in the generation that followed Rudolf Schindler and Richard Neutra, Jones worked with steel and glass and concrete and plywood. He designed to create an interplay between house and garden. He built modest homes, on a modest......

Jean Nouvel Unveils Century City Condo Plan

Jean Nouvel, the French architect who five years ago lost out to Rem Koolhaas for the then-contemplated museum makeover at LACMA, stopped by the Four Seasons Hotel last week to unveil a 45-story condo he has designed for Century City. The ritzy $400 million tower, set to rise above the......
Robert Crais (Photo by Julie Dennis Brothers)

Pike's Peak

{mosimage} Meet Joe Pike. For 20 years, he’s been the taciturn, downbeat partner of Elvis Cole, the randy, flippant hero of Robert Crais’ detective fiction. Now, Pike is forced out of the shadows when he gets an assignment he may not refuse. He owes a man a return favor that......
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Pike’s Peak

Meet Joe Pike. For 20 years, he’s been the taciturn, downbeat partner of Elvis Cole, the randy, flippant hero of Robert Crais’ detective fiction. Now, Pike is forced out of the shadows when he gets an assignment he may not refuse. He owes a man a return favor that turns......

A Vote for the Future

“I wish I could live another hundred years,” said Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa after seeing what Los Angeles would look like a century from now — at least in the minds of eight architectural teams in a competition sponsored by the History Channel, “City of the Future.” All were gathered at......
Illustration by Mitch Handsone

Towering Inferno

On the last page of The Fellowship: The Untold Story of Frank Lloyd Wright & the Taliesin Fellowship, we are told that without the Greco-Armenian mystic Georgi Gurdjieff, there “very likely” would have been no Fallingwater, no Johnson Wax building, no Guggenheim Museum. This claim is bold, and something new......
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Alvaro Siza

Only five works by Pritzker Prize–winning architect Alvaro Siza are on display at the Santa Monica Museum of Art, but they feel like a lot more. The exhibit is spacious and understated yet is brimming with the architect’s playful and sometimes subversive ideas, presented in models, photographs, sketches and blueprints......

Rough in the Diamond

If you are a regular at Diamond Bakery on Fairfax, counterwoman Gloria Kalili will greet you with a quick appraisal of your needs, not wants. “Mameleh,” she’ll say, “you’ll have a corn rye.” Should you stutter, “I’m thinking,” Gloria will repeat herself, pronouncing her words with the sharp accent and......
Ettore Sottsass (Photo by Adam Beinash)

In the Realm of the Senses

Ettore Sottsass is a lucky man. Despite feeling “really a bit lousy” on this blustery, cold, cloudy day, the 88-year-old lion of Italian design — in town for the opening of a LACMA retrospective of his work — is sitting in the warm, paneled library of museum patron Max Palevsky’s......