ROCKET SCIENCE THIS DEFINITELY IS NOT

NECESSITY NOT LUXURY One of five sites in Huntington Beach that were a focus of the city-wide master plan, the Main Street Branch was the first to be built in the city.  To better serve the historic downtown neighborhood it now requires complete renewal and expansion.

We recently completed a yearlong effort whose purpose was to craft a master plan for an enhanced and expanded library system for a city of 200,000 here in southern California.  The effort entailed numerous encounters with the community, stakeholders, city leadership and staff.  It was stopped in committee before going to city council with the criticism that both the effort and we were and are out of touch with the unique character and values of the city.  It was easy not to take it personally as the harsh words were mostly cover for what was more likely an ideological and political agenda not dissimilar to what is going on across the country.

LOST FOR GOOD The Santa Clara Valley, now Silicon Valley, in northern California was in the early part of the 20th century one of the largest agricultural producers in the world.

IMAGE: Santa Clara Valley, CA, Pre WWII Postcard - Stanley A. Piltz

The experience, while extreme (and extremely disappointing), is not unfamiliar to us.  When faced with investing in the public interest, when seemingly large amounts of taxpayer money are involved, people struggle to agree on how best to invest, or whether to at all. (Although, the dollar amounts are relatively minor compared to what Americans spend on themselves.) As architects, numbers, facts and data are crucial in our line of work, but ever more so are personalities, values and emotions.  We’ve come to accept that not everyone can be pleased but we are most times nevertheless able to get through projects with all their challenges and come out on the other side with most people pleased.  

 AUSPICIOUS BEGINNINGS During WWII NASA established its Ames Research Center at Moffett Field in the Santa Clara Valley principally to improve the quality of the military’s aircraft.

PRIVATE INITIATIVES In the 1950s attracted by geography, climate, the presence of NASA and two world-class research universities (Stanford and UC Berkeley) engineering companies such Fairchild Semiconductor and Hewlett Packard began to establish businesses putting the valley at the cutting edge of computer science research and development.

TOP: NASA Ames Research Center, MIDDLE: NACA / NASA Ames Research Center, BOTTOM: NASA Ames Research Center.

Where I went to high school and college in the 1970s, the Santa Clara Valley in northern California, prior to 1960, was the single largest agricultural producer in the world—and one of the most beautiful places in the world.  It was carpeted almost end-to-end in fruit orchards and vineyards and framed by rolling hills that are emerald in winter and gold in summer.

NATIONAL STAGE When in 1962 President Kennedy committed the nation to the moonshot mission the federally run Ames Research Center and privately run companies like Fairchild Semiconductor played a central role.

TOP: John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, President Kennedy at Rice University, September 12, 1962; MIDDLE: NASA, Apollo 11 Lunar Surface, July 20, 1969; BOTTOM: NASA, Apollo 11 Saturn V Launch, Kennedy Space Center, July 16, 1969.

MOONSHOT MODEL The success of the Apollo mission has served as a metaphor and model for governmental and philanthropic initiatives that are concretely scoped “missions” with clear (and quantifiable) criteria of success.

TOP: NPR / Associated Press — Photo by Evan Vucci, President Biden’s Cancer Moonshot speech at the John F. Kennedy Library and Museum, Boston, September 12, 2022; MIDDLE: The White House, CHIPS and Science Act signing, August 9, 2022; BOTTOM: The Earthshot Prize / Getty Images, Prince William and Catherine, Princess of Wales, Earthshot Prize 2022, Boston, December 2, 2022.

It is now Silicon Valley where, with the help of the United States government and Stanford University, companies such as Hewlett Packard and Fairchild Semiconductor were first founded then later Intel, Apple, Google and you know the rest.  It is now one of the ugliest places in the world (geography and climate aside).

ADOLESCENT OBSESSIONS Some American teenagers inspired by childhood memories of the moonshot and their obsessions with science fiction fantasy stories come to believe that going to space is the coolest thing anybody could ever do.

IMAGE: Miami Palmetto Senior High School Yearbook, Jeff Bezos, Class of 1982; BOTTOM: Miami Herald, Jeff Bezos interview following his graduation as valedictorian, June 1982.

ACTING OUT Many of those same teenagers become billionaires and then get to indulge in their teenage fantasies in the real world.

TOP: The Economic Times, SpaceX IPO / Elon Musk graphic; SECOND: “Teens in Space” by Jonathan Gilmour & Doug Levandowski, Snowbright Studio; THIRD: Tesla, “Tesla Flying Car / SkyCab” concept image; BOTTOM: Warner Bros. / Getty Images, The Jetsons.

Fairchild Semiconductor was the first company to produce at scale the silicon integrated circuit (IC or chip) which enabled what we know as the computer revolution.  It was a major early supplier of ICs used in the Apollo guidance Computer (AGC) that was essential to the Apollo space program’s success.  Fairchild Semiconductor was one of hundreds of private sector companies that partnered with the federal government to put men on the moon.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS Investing billions into the fantasy of “terraforming” Mars in lieu of fixing what ails this planet are enormous and a tragedy of our time.

TOP: SpaceX, Falcon 9 launch from Kennedy Space Center; SECOND: Silent Studio, Martian Colony Base concept rendering, 2020; THIRD: SpaceX, Mars settlement concept showing Starship and a future Martian base; BOTTOM: SpaceX, Mars City concept rendering.

FACT NOT FICTION The science behind the Mars fantasy among other tech bro obsessions is clearly laid out in Mr. Becker’s thoroughly researched expose.

TOP: Thomas Burden, illustration for “Choose Your Overlord: Musk or Bezos?,” The Atlantic, November 2026; MIDDLE: Basic Books, More Everything Forever by Adam Becker, 2025; BOTTOM QUOTE: Adam Becker, More Everything Forever, 2025.

The Apollo program, popularly known as “the moonshot” is widely considered a success story of public/private collaboration in which the state played a major part in crafting a mission then commissioned private sector players to help fulfill it.  The state was neither purely regulatory nor passive but mission oriented and agentic.  Its role was to both stimulate and guide the market enabling capitalism to do what it does best (compete, innovate and produce) but to do so in the context of a goal larger than itself.

DUMB, DUMBER AND DUMBEST The resources wasted on developing stupid toys reveal this culture’s inability to focus on what matters most --how we live here on earth and the conditions of our cities.

ABOVE IMAGES: Shutterstock.

Academics and policy advisors have lately extrapolated upon that experience as a model for how to solve some of our most pressing challenges.  Those often cited include climate change, clean oceans, transportation, inequality, education and health.  Proposals are always accompanied with supposedly quantifiable criteria with which to measure their success—reduction of carbon (tons eliminated) and ocean trash (tons collected), increase of mobility (times traveled), prosperity (dollars earned), learning (tests passed) and longevity (years lived).

GRAND DELUSIONS  That Elon Musk believes he and his technology can solve everything, that real world friction doesn’t exist or only does for stupid people is belied by the big promises of his technological adventures that have gone mostly unfulfilled.

TOP: The Boring Company / Steve Jurvetson (Wikimedia Commons); MIDDLE: Hyperloop Transportation Technologies; BOTTOM: The Boring Company / Las Vegas Convention Center Loop.

BULLET TRAIN BLUES That we are a society, and a culture incapable of building things has less to do with technology or construction and more to do with inept politicians, adversarial lawyers, childish property owners and an out-of-control consultancy class.

TOP 2 IMAGES: California High-Speed Rail Authority, BOTTOM 2 IMAGES: Shutterstock.

But what all these challenges have in common and what goes consistently unacknowledged is that beyond quantitative analysis they require introspection -- that is, some thoughts on what we value, how and where we live.  Most of us live within jurisdictional boundaries we call cities, most of them gigantic, too spread out, too dense and inhumane territories that are unsympathetic to the climate, oceans, getting around and our own flourishing.

MAN MADE TRAGEDY The transformation of the Santa Clara Valley into Silicon Valley over the latter half of the 20th century was one of the great and unnecessary environmental transgressions of our time.

TOP: San José Public Library, California Room; BOTTOM: Silicon Valley Map / Silicon Maps.

No one talks about a town-planning or urban-design moonshot because no one sees the inhumanity and ugliness of where we live as an urgent problem to be solved, or rather, we do but we cannot agree on a solution. And this is because this problem is what sociologists and economists call “wicked”, that is, not easily quantifiable and instead ineffable—if, nevertheless, still very real.

TOP: San José Public Library, California Room; BOTTOM: Silicon Maps, Inc.

BLAND AND BANAL. That exceedingly wealthy corporations are incapable of building buildings that are more than just spaceships in the landscape with virtually no value to society or our culture is one of the great lost opportunities of our time.

ABOVE IMAGES: Shutterstock.

UGLY AND UGLIER Bland and banal would be an improvement on what these wealthy corporations have contributed to the culture.

ABOVE IMAGES: Shutterstock.

But were we to solve the problems of our cities, to learn how to live more compactly and humanely all those other problems would resolve themselves. We would need less and want less. And yet to address how we live, to know how to invest in ourselves requires coming together in a context of shared values and common goals.

ANTI TOWN With your head in the clouds (or the cloud, or Mars, or wherever) why would you ever see what’s right in front of you much less invest in it.

ABOVE 2 IMAGES: Shutterstock. BOTTOM IMAGE: Main Street Cupertino / Sand Hill Property Company.

Beating the Soviets could be seen as a shared value and a common goal but unlike the Apollo mission, a mission to fix our cities would be more than technological and instead require the interplay of values so complex they could only ever be resolved through an artistic mindset.  For an artistic mindset values are what matters most, beauty is the goal and artistry the outcome.  We’re more used to the technological mind set for which numbers and facts are what matter most, efficiency is the goal and mechanization the outcome.   Our cities could use more of the former and less of the latter.

MOONSHOT FALLACY While well intentioned the focus on problems that can be quantified excludes distracts our attention from those more pressing ones, such as the condition of our cities, that cannot be quantified.

TOP: Mariana Mazzucato / UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose; MIDDLE: Allen Lane / Penguin Books; BOTTOM: Mariana Mazzucato, “Mission Economy: A Moonshot Guide to Changing Capitalism,” 2021.

But as the Santa Clara Valley has demonstrated over the last half century and as we architects know we are as a nation and a culture not ready for it, nor when the time comes will it be easy, because rocket science this definitely is not.

 EASY MADE HARD Building something as simple as a library system that properly serves a community turns out to be controversial, beyond our imagination and therefore beyond our capacity to realize.

ATROPHIED ASPIRATIONS Fifty years ago this same city built a monument to its future in the form of a new central library designed by a world class architect (Richard and Dion Neutra, 1974).

IT'S NOT THE HOUSING, STUPID

WHAT REAL PLANNING LOOKS LIKE What makes a center a center is its central role in the daily life of people, not just that it centralizes a bunch of services—governmental, commercial or otherwise. (Torrance Civic Center Redevelopment, Preliminary Study, Johnson Favaro, 2023)

Not long ago an associate in our office, a parent of two young children, felt he had no option but to secure a house with a yard within reasonable distance of our office so his children could safely run around outside of the house -- that is, in a yard.  He has managed to find a place, but its cost is burdensome.  Meanwhile, younger associates are having to live with extended families or gang up with two or three friends in apartments.

PLANNING WITH WORDS The State of California has passed several laws that will override local objections to more housing on less land within existing neighborhoods without any consideration for what kinds of environments such projects will in their accumulation leave behind.

TOP & MIDDLE Images: Los Angeles Department of City Planning. (2026). SB 79 Development Standards and Transit-Oriented Development Map. BOTTOM Text: Adapted from Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Senate Bill 79: Abundant and Affordable Homes Near Transit Act (May 26, 2026).

PLANNING IN BITS AND PIECES Despite recent measures to increase so-called “missing middle” homes (neither houses nor apartments) within existing neighborhoods the results have been modest at best for reasons that are obvious.

TOP Image: Los Angeles Department of City Planning. (2026). Low-Rise Program Typology Outcomes. BOTTOM Text: Adapted from Los Angeles Department of City Planning, Low-Rise Ordinance (CF 25-1083-S3) (May 26, 2026). 

It has been a generation or two that Los Angeles has become an expensive place to establish a home.  There are now not enough places to live in a dynamic city that is still attracting newcomers from around the world.  That we have a “housing affordability problem” has become our elected officials’ cause-celebre.

NO PLANNING AT ALL The aftermath of the Pacific Palisades and Altadena fires rendered sadly transparent our political and community leaders’ stunning lack of imagination and whose best thoughts seem to be “let’s replicate what was there” – seemingly with little awareness that what was there is why it is no longer there.

TOP & BOTTOM Images: The Foothill Catalog Foundation. Foothill Catalog Website.

PERPETUAL HOUSES ON THE PRAIRIE That we in the 21st century insist on perpetuating the bad habits of the 20th century is by now unforgivable.

TOP Image: Los Angeles Times. (July 1, 2026). “Prefab housing builders seek to show their stuff in L.A. fire recovery.” MIDDLE Image: The Foothill Catalog Foundation. (2026). “Journal Entry #21 – The First Welcome Home.” Foothill Catalog website. BOTTOM Image: The Foothill Catalog Foundation. (2026). “The Whitfield.” Foothill Catalog website.

The underlying reasons for the scarcity of housing are much discussed and two-fold: too much regulation (design and environmental review, NIMBYism, etc.) and too much money (land, carrying and construction costs).

MANUFACTURING THE MYTH The “industrialization” of housing has amounted to little more than the reliance on costly and inefficient craft-based construction off-site that then must be inefficiently and at a high cost transported on site.

ALL Images: Shutterstock.

Government can, with its limited tools and blunt instruments, address regulations and environmental review on the theory that by easing restrictions on land-use more housing will naturally follow.  Several laws have recently passed in California with the intention of providing for more housing on private properties within existing neighborhoods (overriding local NIMBYism).

Land, carrying and construction costs are, however, at the mercy of both global and local financial and labor markets.  Land is a limited resource even in Los Angeles and that lots of people want to live on it necessarily drives up its cost.  Meanwhile, federal interest rates (carrying costs) are shackled to our vagarious larger economy with little that any of us can do about it.

REFASHIONING THE MYTH By re-styling a retrogressive industry we somehow think we are modernizing it.

ALL Images: Shutterstock.

With land and carrying costs out of our control, we instead focus on construction costs, specifically labor costs, specifically by reducing not the cost of labor but the labor itself.  For over a century we have indulged in fantasies of manufactured (or “prefabricated”) modular housing on the theory that we could make a house the way we make a car (Henry Ford tried).  More recently we have pivoted to large-scale 3-D printing on the promise that it will finally revolutionize the economy of housing production.

None of this has or will work.

20TH CENTURY DELUSION For over a century catalogued templates and prefabricated products have lulled us into thinking that we need not ever build cities, just homes.

TOP Image: Sears, Roebuck and Co. Honor Bilt Modern Homes catalog. Early 20th century. BOTTOM Text: Brian Potter. Construction Physics. “The History of Prefabricated Construction.” March 12, 2026.

21ST CENTURY DELUSION Not unlike those made a century ago wild claims are now made that new more efficient and heretofore unheard-of technologies will somehow solve the housing affordability issue.

TOP Image & Text: ICON. “Moonshot to Affordable Housing.” ICON website. MIDDLE Text: ICON. “World-class design, realized through robotic construction.” ICON website. BOTTOM Image: ICON. 3D-printed housing project. ICON website.

When landowners realize more can be built on what they own the more valuable they will conclude their land is worth.  Land scarcity to them is the source of their wealth (NIMBY ism is about more than racism).  Meanwhile, over the last century the cost of construction has risen at almost twice the rate of the larger economy, not because it has gone up relative to everything else, but because the cost of everything else has gone down relative to it.

THE SUSTAINABILITY OF BULLSHIT Words such as “sustainability” and “innovative” must now count for nothing having lost all meaning in the context of bad land use behaviors we’ve witnessed for over a century. 

TOP Text: ICON. Projects – Residential. ICON website. BOTTOM Image: ICON. Residential 3D-printed home. ICON website.

This is a case of what economists call the “Baumol effect:” While televisions and shoes are manufactured with increasing standardization and efficiency, and now mostly overseas (where labor is cheap) we cannot (or should not) standardize or manufacture an opera, or a string quartet or a Broadway play—neither here nor overseas.  Consequently, the cost of dinner out in Los Angeles is equivalent to a new suit because our suit can be made in Vietnam, while our dinner out cannot.

AUTOMATION MISAPPROPRIATION A technology that seeks to extract the craft out of building is doomed to failure for reasons that are endemic to building-- a human act that, like poetry and painting, is uniquely resistant to standardization and industrialization.

TOP Image & Text: ICON. “What We Do.” ICON website. BOTTOM Image: ICON. 3D-printing construction technology. ICON website.

We are deluded when we complain about costs that weigh on the real estate market, because we never question the underlying assumptions of the real estate market.  Building buildings has always been expensive and buildings (including those in which our homes reside) are not consumer products.  We cannot carry around or wear homes, and we should stop thinking about them as if we can.  And we should stop trying to force construction into a manufacturing model by building houses, apartment blocks and towers as if they are.

CAMPGROUND OR CITY?  Whether prefabricated or printed, a bunch of houses does not a home make.

TOP Image: Manufactured single-family suburban neighborhood. Shutterstock. BOTTOM Image: ICON. 3D-printed single-family residential community. ICON website.

The accumulation of buildings designed and built as if they were standardized, manufactured consumer products with little to no concern for how they are accumulating blinds us to what we are (or rather should be) building—which is (or should be) not homes but a home.

WHY SOME THINGS COST LESS Those things, mainly consumer products, that we have managed to industrialize we also manage to make with ever greater efficiency thus reducing their costs.

TOP Image & BOTTOM Text: Brian Potter, Construction Physics, “The History of Prefabricated Construction” (March 12, 2026).

WHY SOME THINGS COST MORE Those things, mainly the products of art and craft, that we have not been able to industrialize seem to greatly increase in cost when they do so only comparatively.

TOP CHART: HowMuch.net, “20 Years of Price Changes in the United States” (1998–2018). MIDDLE CHART: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), U.S. Employment, Goods-Producing vs. Service-Providing Industries. BOTTOM QUOTE: William J. Baumol, Macroeconomics of Unbalanced Growth: The Anatomy of Urban Crisis (1967).

A city that is a home is more than a bunch of homes.  It includes squares, courts,  parks, gardens, streets (without cars), mews and alleyways within walking distance of a variety of kinds of places in which to live (large, small and everything in between) that accommodate a variety of kinds of people in proximity with one another.  It provides for an array of opportunities for being outside of the home as much as inside—available to everyone, safe and teeming—and in so doing allows each of us to need and want less (such as, for example, a house with a yard).

KIDS IN STREETS

ALL Images: Shutterstock.

KIDS ON BIKES

ALL Images: Shutterstock.

Too much of our land, both private and public, is single-purposed or underutilized or both. Re-zoning privately held land to accommodate more of what we do not have enough will not work unless we change our attitude toward the development of not only privately held but also publicly held land, too much of which is, stupidly, covered in roads and parking lots.

KIDS IN SQUARES

ALL Images: Shutterstock.

KIDS IN PARKS

ALL Images: Shutterstock.

Our is not a housing problem, it is a design problem, and that what we cannot see this is a failure of imagination (political and otherwise).  What young people and young families in our office and in Los Angeles need is not a house and instead—as most young people in most mature cities across the world have—options.  That is a bunch of different kinds of homes and places to hang out in a city that is less of a territory and more of a city where outside of our homes we feel at home.

LAND BOUNTY That we claim to have “run out of land” in Los Angeles County is ridiculous at best and criminal at worst (Torrance Civic Center Redevelopment, Preliminary Study, Johnson Favaro, 2023).

TOP IMAGE: Google Maps / Google Earth — Aerial imagery of Torrance Civic Center.

LAND BETTER USED Parks, piazzas, courtyards and streets are what makes a home a home. (Torrance Civic Center Redevelopment, Preliminary Study, Johnson Favaro, 2023).

CITY OF CITADELS (AND ABOUT THAT FENCE)

OPEN TO ITS SURROUNDINGS The Ladera Linda Community Center in Rancho Palos Verdes is an almost completely transparent building to maximize the relationship of its interiors with the surrounding site which sits at the base of the Palos Verdes Nature Preserve overlooking the Pacific Ocean (Johnson Favaro, Ladera Linda Park and Community Center, 2024)

The new David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles Museum of Art (LACMA) recently opened. Designed by an architect from Switzerland the building aspires to channel the (supposedly) free spirit of life in Los Angeles: informal in shape, horizontal in emphasis, transparent to its surroundings, levitated in its relationship with Hancock Park and the Miracle Mile neighborhood of west L.A. where it resides.  Meandering floor-to-ceiling glass walls wrap the building’s perimeter affording views in and out of it from all sides. Seemingly endless, or at least open-ended, from nowhere is the building visible from end to end.

CRAZY FOR SECURITY One RPV city council member insisted that the building be able to be shuttered completely (via built-in roll down security screens) after hours to prevent vandalism and theft. (Johnson Favaro, Ladera Linda Park and Community Center, 2024)

DRIVEN BY FEAR The park and the community center reside in a remote location surrounded on one side by the nature preserve and three sides by upper middle class single-family neighborhoods.  Rancho Palos Verdes has been rated the 4th safest city in California (for its low crime rate) rendering perplexing the need to fortify this building.

TOP Image: Johnson Favaro. (2024). Ladera Linda Park and Community Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, California. Project photograph. MIDDLE Image: Google Earth. Aerial imagery of Ladera Linda Park and Community Center, Rancho Palos Verdes, California. © Google. BOTTOM Image: City of Rancho Palos Verdes. (2021). Rancho Palos Verdes Named 4th Safest City in California.

The museum fulfills a curatorial aspiration that most traditional museums find challenging. That is, to show the free exchange of ideas and techniques in art that has transpired for over 5,000 years across every corner of the globe.  Objects are arranged not by locale or period, but by what they have in common with objects from other places and eras emphasizing not hierarchy or originality but instead cross-fertilization and universality.  The exhibits reside on one floor in a show of cultural solidarity across geography and chronology.

ELECTIVE PHOTOGRAPHY Elegant photos of the new David Geffen Galleries at LACMA show cropped fragments of the building’s interiors and exteriors with as little context as possible to accentuate the building’s artistry devoid of contamination by its surroundings. (Michael Govan, LACMA Director; Peter Zumthor, Architect).

TOP Image: David Geffen Galleries at LACMA. Photograph by Iwan Baan. © Iwan Baan. BOTTOM Image: David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, Los Angeles, California. Photograph by Iwan Baan. © Iwan Baan. Tony Smith’s Smoke (1967) © Tony Smith Estate / Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

This building, in other words, intends to telegraph that this museum is an open-minded cultural institution serving a (supposedly) open-minded, wide-open city.

OLD SCHOOL MODERNISM The meandering composition of the new building is meant to convey the museum’s   open-ended mindset suitable for an open-minded city without walls. (Michael Govan, LACMA Director; Peter Zumthor, Architect).

TOP Image: David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, Los Angeles, California. Aerial view. © Iwan Baan. BOTTOM Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Site plan showing the David Geffen Galleries and surrounding Hancock Park campus. LACMA. Project: Zumthor, P. (2025). David Geffen Galleries at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Los Angeles, California.

Cities for most of human history were rarely wide open and mostly walled in. And even then, there were often cities within cities, what we call “citadels” within which in the event of an attack or some other crisis citizens took refuge surrounded by high walls and outfitted for a survivable if not comfortable daily existence for as long as it took. The descendant of the citadel we Americans know as a “fort”, built mostly in the 18th and 19th centuries, but within territories not cities. By the 20th century the mechanization of our societies (and warfare) rendered citadels obsolete.

CITADEL At the center of the city of Aleppo in Syria lies one of the oldest citadels in the world dating to at least 3,000 BCE. It functioned as both as an acropolis and military stronghold—a refuge into which citizens would escape siege.

TOP Image: Citadel of Aleppo, Aleppo, Syria. Aerial photograph by Frederic Soltan / Sygma / Corbis (1993). MIDDLE Image: Citadel of Aleppo Visitor Site Plan and Facilities. Directorate General of Antiquities and Museums (DGAM), Syria. BOTTOM Image: Aleppo (Haleb), Syria. Historical city map, c. late 19th–early 20th century. Public domain.

CASTLE The citadel has assumed many forms since Aleppo, perhaps most notably in Europe where castles emerged in the Middle Ages sometimes remotely, sometimes at the edge or center of a city.  A prominent example is the Castello Sforzesco in Milan, Italy dating from the 15th century CE.

TOP Image: Castello Sforzesco, Milan, Italy. Aerial photograph. Shutterstock. MIDDLE Image: Castello Sforzesco in the 16th century. Historical reconstruction drawing. Public domain. BOTTOM Image: Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. (1833). Milan. Historical city plan. Public domain.

FORT In north America European settlers-built forts, usually on the frontier and usually to establish a foothold in territories and then protect them.  They were often fully functioning microcosms of cities. (Bent’s Old Fort, Otero County, Colorado, USA).

TOP Image: Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, Otero County, Colorado. Exterior view. National Park Service (NPS), Shutterstock. MIDDLE Image: Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, Otero County, Colorado. Interior courtyard. National Park Service (NPS) , Shutterstock. BOTTOM Image: Google Earth. Aerial imagery of Bent’s Old Fort National Historic Site, Otero County, Colorado. © Google.

But recently the citadel has re-emerged, albeit in different form although not for entirely different reasons. One was just built not far from our office. Its developers call it the “Cumulus District”. It is a 14-acre development that consists of two main parts, distinguished in the marketing language as “Vox” a six-story residential complex and “Arq” a thirty-story residential tower. Except for a corner grocery store, a few vacant storefronts, a service entrance and one vehicular entrance, it is impenetrable from surrounding streets.

CITADEL CITY Despite the marketing language the Cumulus District is conceived as a self-sustaining citadel sealed off from its neighbors and therefore represents a multi-billion investment in real estate that accomplishes nothing for the vitality of the city within which it sits and upon which it depends.

TOP Image: VOX at Cumulus District, Los Angeles, California. VOX / Cumulus District. MIDDLE Image: Cumulus District at La Cienega and Jefferson Boulevards, Los Angeles, California. Google Street View. © Google. BOTTOM1 Image: Google Earth. Aerial imagery of Cumulus District and surrounding neighborhoods, Los Angeles, California. © Google. BOTTOM2 Text: Quoted from VOX at Cumulus District website.

The Cumulus, like a citadel, contains within it all that is necessary to sustain daily life.  You could conceivably never leave.  At the center lies what the marketing language calls the “Zocalo.”  “Zocalo” means public square, and while according to the marketing language it is open to everyone, in practice it’s neither public nor a square.  It is disconnected and barely visible from surrounding city streets and programmed to serve the development’s residents. Calling this a zocalo is like calling a shopping center a “mall” or a “plaza” or an apartment building a “terrace” or a “villa.”

DISENGAGED URBANISM A real estate investment fund that is financed by third party investors with no relationship with or personal investment in what the investments fund has no place in the planning or building anything in our cities.

TOP Image: Kalinowski, G. (2023, April 12). “Carmel Partners Closes $1.6B Fund.” Multi-Housing News. MIDDLE Image: Carmel Partners. Vertically Integrated Platform. Carmel Partners official website. BOTTOM Text: Quoted from Kalinowski, G. (2023, April 12). “Carmel Partners Closes $1.6B Fund.” Multi-Housing News.

Its developer probably had to make the case to the city that public amenities were being delivered as part of the project when, despite the marketing language, they had no intention of doing so. The many reasons for not wanting to include exerting control over the outdoor environment (like a resort), avoiding the accommodation of the homeless or other undesirables (that public libraries must) and maximizing the floor area on the site (like an Amazon distribution center).  The result is a city within a city-- a citadel—one that hardly contributes to the life of the city around it and instead undermines it.

FAKE URBANISM The bullshit marketing language telegraphs either ignorance or cynicism or more likely both.

TOP Image: VOX at Cumulus District. “An Acre of Green in the City: Zócalo.” VOX / Cumulus District. MIDDLE Image: Google Earth. Aerial imagery of the Cumulus District and Zócalo at La Cienega and Jefferson Boulevards, Los Angeles, California. © Google. BOTTOM Text: Quoted from VOX at Cumulus District website.

REAL URBANISM A real zocalo (or town square or place or plaza or piazza) is an outdoor room that is both well-defined and porous to its surroundings, both a crossroads and a destination.

TOP Image: Zócalo de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico. Photograph. Wikimedia Commons. MIDDLE Image: Zócalo de Puebla, Puebla, Mexico. Google Street View. © Google. BOTTOM Image: Google Earth. Aerial imagery of the Zócalo and Historic Center of Puebla, Mexico. © Google.

This kind of isolation is self-fulfilling on the part of the developer and self-defeating on the part of the city.  The privatization of huge swaths of land in the form of single-family tracts leaving behind public land devoted almost entirely to streets to serve those tracts has created an environment so empty of people with so little opportunity for real public space (like a zocalo) that we fake it. We pretend that we can create cities within cities but then wall them off to create a sense of safety within an otherwise abandoned and alienating environment.  

CITADEL LITE That the site over which the new LACMA building hovers needed to be secured was clearly not known or considered in the design of the building with the result that its philosophical/ compositional/aesthetic approach is severely compromised.

TOP Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Wilshire Boulevard frontage at Ogden Drive, Los Angeles, California. Photograph by Jim Favaro, 2026. MIDDLE Image: David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, Wilshire Boulevard frontage, Los Angeles, California. Photograph by Jim Favaro, 2026. BOTTOM Image: David Geffen Galleries at LACMA, Wilshire Boulevard frontage looking east, Los Angeles, California. Photograph by Jim Favaro, 2026.

NO MAN’S LAND Because Los Angeles is a populated territory, neither city nor country, it is vulnerable to the dangers of urbanity (crime, homelessness that precipitate the need for fences)  and enjoys none of its benefits (populated, active and therefore safe streets).

Image: Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), Wilshire Boulevard frontage looking west, Los Angeles, California. Photograph by Jim Favaro, 2026.

This is the reality of Los Angeles, a place that is more a territory than a city, and that that architect from Switzerland did not understand.  The park over which the new Geffen Galleries hover is entirely fenced off from surrounding streets, like a citadel. (Los Angeles County who owns the park controls who enters and when.)  And because the fence is so prominent on the street, because upon approach to the building it dominates your view of the building and because it sits just in front of the building’s entrance it is an unavoidable—and unwanted-- presence in the experience of the building.

THE PROMISE The mid-century era in Los Angeles was fueled by the   optimistic belief that cities need not exist anymore, that your house was your castle and everything around it was free range. (LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA).

TOP Image: LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, California. Historical photograph. MIDDLE Image: Aerial view of LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, California. Google Earth. BOTTOM Image: Aerial view of LAUSD James Madison Middle School and surrounding neighborhood, North Hollywood, California. Google Earth.

THE REALITY The 1970s put an end to suburban illusions and yet still fifty years later held back by a combination of lack of resources and ignorance we still struggle to find an architecture that acknowledges the reality of the gradation and hierarchical nesting of outdoor spaces from private to public and everything in between. (LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA).

ALL Images: James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA. Photos by Jim Favaro.

The curatorial idea of the building was supposed to be reflected in its architecture which might have worked on a rural site or even an urban site in, say, Switzerland. There are design approaches that could have comfortably resolved the aspiration of the building and the reality of this place (which is neither rural nor urban), that could have amicably combined both an open-ended and enclosed composition. But instead while this building  is intentionally open-ended in its composition its site has been enclosed as an after-thought and therefore the building remains unresolved in its relationship with its surroundings, its noble ambitions sadly undone by a fence.

SHAPING ENCLOSURE WITH WALLS: Our strategy for the addition of a new building on this campus originates with how to make better security enclosure of the main campus while providing for gracious relationship with the rest of campus and the neighborhood. (Additions and Renovations at LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA; Johnson Favaro 2026).

SHAPING ENCLOSURE WITH BUILDINGS The new building divides into two and distributes about the center of the composition (the gymnasium) linked by a new garden wall that forms the security enclosure between main and south campus. .(Additions and Renovations at LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA; Johnson Favaro 2026).

AFFIRMATIVE ENCLOSURE The new garden wall inside and out.(Additions and Renovations at LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA; Johnson Favaro 2026).

The new east wing forms campus enclosure along the street. (Additions and Renovations at LAUSD James Madison Middle School, North Hollywood, CA; Johnson Favaro 2026).