An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles

Rating:
Summary: An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles
Review: The long-awaited fifth edition of an LA guide that's often called "the bible" is a major disappointment. Robert Winter is a perceptive scholar of Victoriana and arts and crafts, but he sensibly left modernism to his collaborator, the late David Gebhard. Now he has attempted to do it all, by providing entries on key buildings of the 1990s that he neither likes nor understands, and the result is embarrassing. Gehry, Maltzan, Mayne, Moss, Pei, and Yazdani will be surprised to find themselves bundled together under the label "Neo-Expressionism (Postmodernism)." Disney Hall, which is pictured on the cover, is described in terms of what happened ten years ago (plus cloddish public reactions to the first pictures of the model); there's not a sentence on the completed building. Other adventurous work is dismissed as "very strange." A long-winded entry on the Getty reads like a chatty letter to a friend; most are absurdly brief. The revisions add almost nothing, and are woefully incomplete; the publisher is guilty of gross negligence for not wielding an editorial pencil. Earlier selections have been edited, but the William Cameron Menzies house in Beverly Hills is still there, even though it was demolished three editions ago, along with Gehry's Venice restaurant, Rebecca's. The original 97 percent of the guide remains invaluable and engaging. (Michael Webb is the book reviewer for LA Architect magazine.)