Frances Anderton covers Los Angeles design and architecture for print and radio.
She is currently writing a book, Common Ground: Multifamily Housing in Los Angeles, for Angel City Press.
She recently completed the production of Wasted: Neat Solutions to the Dirty Problems of Waste, to air on the daily show Greater LA, on KCRW public radio station. For many years she hosted KCRW’s DnA: Design and Architecture radio show; prior to that she produced To The Point and Which Way, LA?, hosted by Warren Olney, also for KCRW.
Past series for DnA include Bridges and Walls, a series about the barriers and connections–both metaphorical and physical–shaping life in California today, and This is Home in LA: From the Tent to the Gigamansion (and Everything In Between).
Anderton also works with Helms Bakery District on programming talks and events for its design center. She has curated exhibitions, including Sink Or Swim: Designing For a Sea Change, a critically received exhibition about resilient architecture, shown in 2015 at the Annenberg Space for Photography.
She has served as correspondent for the New York Times and Dwell magazine. Her books include Grand Illusion: A Story of Ambition, and its Limits, on LA’s Bunker Hill, based on a studio she co- taught with Frank Gehry and partners at USC School of Architecture.
Honors include the Esther McCoy 2010 Award for her work in educating the public about architecture and urbanism from USC School of Architecture’s Architectural Guild; she was SCI-Arc’s “Honored Guest” at its 2018 Main Event and received the 2020 ICON Award from the Los Angeles Design Festival.
Maristella Casciato (architect and architectural historian) is Senior Curator Architecture at the Getty Research Institute (2016-to present). She was Mellon Senior Fellow at the Canadian Center for Architecture, Montreal (2010) prior to being appointed Associate Director of Research at the same institute (2012-2015). She has taught history of architecture in Italy and in the United States. Since the late 1990s she has been engaged in a research project on Pierre Jeanneret and the planning of Chandigarh in post-colonial India. On this topic she has curated a few exhibitions and contributed to the publication of catalogues and essays. More recently, she co-curated the exhibition Gio Ponti Amare l’architettura at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and co-edited the eponymous volume.
Alissa Walker is the Urbanism Editor at Curbed LA. She connects people
with where they live through writing, speaking, and walking. As the urbanism
editor at Curbed, she authors the column Word on the Street, highlighting the
pioneering transit, clever civic design, and game-changing policy affecting our
cities.
For her writing on design and urbanism,
Alissa has been named a USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellow and
Journalist of the Year by Streetsblog Los Angeles. In 2012 her project Good Ideas for Cities was selected for
inclusion in the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. In 2015 she
received the Design Advocate award from the LA chapter of the American
Institute of Architects. She is also the co-founder of design east of La Brea,
a nonprofit that has received two National Endowment for the Arts grants
supporting its LA design events.
Alissa lives in Los Angeles, where she
is a co-host of LA Podcast, a contributor to the KCRW show Greater LA, and a
mom to the city’s two most enthusiastic public transit riders.
Architect and historian Alan Hess is author of twenty books on Modern architecture and urbanism in the twentieth century; his subjects include John Lautner, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, the Ranch House, Googie architecture, Las Vegas, and Palm Springs. He is a Commissioner on the California State Historical Resources Commission, and serves on the boards of Preserve Orange County and Palm Springs Modernism Week. He has been the architecture critic of the San Jose Mercury News, a contributor to The Architects Newspaper, grant recipient from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts and the Clarence Stein Foundation, and a National Arts Journalism Fellow. Buildings from the Modern era which he has helped to conserve or landmark include CBS Television City (Pereira & Luckman, architect), Bullock’s Pasadena (Wurdeman & Becket, architect), and the oldest remaining McDonalds stand (Stanley Meston, architect.) Awards for his work conserving Modern architecture include the Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Docomomo/US’sAward of Excellence, and the President’s Award from the Los Angeles Conservancy. His newest book, “Hollywood Modern: Houses of the Stars,” was published by Rizzoli International last October. He is currently writing a history of Modern Architecture in California.
Ann Scheid heads the Greene & Greene Archives at the Huntington Library. The archives is administered by the Gamble House, University of Southern California. She is an author and historian who has published books on Pasadena history as well as articles and essays on the history of architecture, planning, and landscape in Southern California. She is a graduate of Vassar College, the University of Chicago, and Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. She contributed a chapter on the women clients of Greene & Greene to the publication “A ‘New and Native’ Beauty: the Art and Craft of Greene & Greene.
