Archives by Category · architecture

1. Nothing is real, everything is possible.

The houses and the automobiles are equal figments of a great dream, the dream of the urban homestead, the dream of a good life outside the squalors of the European type of city, and thus a dream that runs back not only into the Victorian railway suburbs of earlier cities, but also to the country-house culture of the fathers of the US Constitution, or the whig squirearchs whose spiritual heirs they sometimes were, and beyond them to the villegiatura of Palladio’s patrons, or the Medicis’ Poggio a Caiano. Los Angeles cradles and embodies the most potent current version of the great bourgeois vision of the good life in a tamed countryside, and that, more than anything else I can perceive, is why the bourgeois apartment houses of Damascus and the villas of Beirut begin to look the way they do.