The city’s chief design officer explains why Los Angeles is America’s creative capital and what the mayor is doing to make housing more affordable.
Christopher Hawthorne made a surprising career change. Last year, after nearly 14 years as the architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times, he took a job under Mayor Eric Garcetti as the city’s first chief design officer. Hawthorne had been one of the few architecture critics left at a major U.S. daily and gave a civic-minded rationale for his departure.
"There’s a national conversation going on about the history of single-family neighborhoods
and their connection to wealth gaps and gaps between white homeowners and communities of color," says Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer, City of Los Angeles.
Illustration by Sam Kerr
"I stubbornly continue to believe in the public realm," he wrote in the Times. "A career spent writing about architecture and urbanism, while it’s certainly made me cynical in some ways, has yet to rob me of my faith in the power of the collective spaces of the contemporary city."
Row DTLA—a repurposed produce distribution terminal that now houses studios, offices, shops, restaurants, and other creative-leaning businesses—is one example of the revitalization of downtown Los Angeles. Architecture critic-turned-public official Christopher Hawthorne
cites downtown’s comeback as an example of the transformative effect of smart urban policy.
Photo by Iwan Baan
So what does the chief design officer do? Hawthorne says he spends about 40 percent of his time overseeing the design quality of city projects already in the works and 40 percent on competitions and proposals to create new ones. The other 20 percent, he says, is spent talking with the public about the importance of design in the urban landscape.
He recently spoke with Dwell about the city becoming an architecture patron, the redesign of thousands of street lights, and the future of housing in a town synonymous with 20th-century planning and single-family homes.
Dwell is based in San Francisco and New York, so it’s painful for us to ask, but is Los Angeles the coolest city in the country right now?
Christopher Hawthorne: L.A. is the most dynamic city in the country now in terms of culture and cultural production, and I think by a significant margin. This continues to be a really fantastic place to move if you’re a young chef, or a young artist, or a young writer, or a young musician. There’s just more room to operate here than in other cities.
But it’s difficult for younger architects to gain a foothold, just because the city has gotten bigger, more expensive in terms of its land. And so the opportunities that were available to young architects in the ’70s and ’80s, and really the whole modern history of Los Angeles, are trickier to find. And so I’ve been thinking about that a lot.
The new Sixth Street Viaduct, designed by Michael Maltzan Architecture and slated for completion in 2022, will have dedicated space for pedestrians and cyclists as well as for cars.
Photo by Iwan Baan
See the full story on Dwell.com: A Conversation With L.A.’s Chief Design Officer Christopher Hawthorne
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