Free!
Thursday, September 29th 2022 @ 7pm
Join on Zoom
Architecture and Beyond
Los Angeles Public Library
For more information or to request the Zoom link, email: lfeliz@lapl.org with “A&B - GP” in the subject line.
This free event is part of the Architecture & Beyond lecture series presented by the Los Feliz Branch Library with support from the Friends of the Los Feliz Library and Skylight Books.
To purchase the book featured in tonight's Architecture and Beyond program, please click the Add to Cart button below.
The Speculative City: Art, Real Estate, and the Making of Global Los Angeles by Susanna Phillips Newbury
Underlying every great city is a rich and vibrant culture that shapes the texture of life within. In The Speculative City, Susanna Phillips Newbury teases out how art and Los Angeles shaped one another’s evolution. She compellingly articulates how together they transformed the Southland, establishing the foundation for its contemporary art infrastructure, and explains how artists came to influence Los Angeles’s burgeoning definition as the global city of the twenty-first century.
Pairing particular works of art with specific innovations in real estate development, The Speculative City reveals the connections between real estate and contemporary art as they constructed Los Angeles’s present-day cityscape. From banal parking lots to Frank Gehry’s designs for artists’ studios and museums, Newbury examines pivotal interventions by artists and architects, city officials and cultural philanthropists, concluding with an examination of how, in the wake of the 2008 global credit crisis, contemporary art emerged as a financial asset to fuel private wealth and urban gentrification.
Both a history of the transformation of the Southland and a forensic examination of works of art, The Speculative City is a rich complement to the California chronicles by such writers as Rebecca Solnit and Mike Davis.
Susanna Phillips Newbury is associate professor of art history at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
