Review: A city’s unrealized ambitions in ‘Never Built Los Angeles’
By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic
Los Angeles has never been big on regret.
For most of the city’s history we’ve been so busy charging forward, inventing and reinventing the future, that we’ve rarely paused to wonder what might have been.
In architecture, when we do look back, we usually focus more on mistakes of action than inaction. We mourn the landmarks we’ve knocked down rather than the ones we failed to build in the first place.
But how do you catalog a history of mistimed, misguided or ill-fated ambition? What about a preservation movement for the ideas and designs that almost made it?
“Never Built Los Angeles,” a revelatory new exhibition at the Architecture and Design Museum on Wilshire Boulevard, is a first step in that direction, an attempt to corral the city’s most beautiful architectural ghosts and put them on public view.