Thresholds

I lived part of my teen years in Brasília, the capital built from scratch whose architecture and urban planning have drawn equal parts fascination and disdain. Over the years I’ve grown accustomed to comments about how “wild” the spaceship-like buildings designed by Oscar Niemeyer must have looked, how “alienating” the car-centric city must have been. But when I first heard these kinds of comments, I was admittedly surprised, because my memories of living in the city were much more mundane — eating hot dogs on the dusty sidewalks, hanging with friends at the base of our apartment building, movie-hopping at the mall. In other words, I was just living my life.

Now that I live in L.A., I sometimes hear echoes of what I used to hear about Brasília. They are both places with a mythic allure that nonetheless draw the same kinds of criticisms. How do you live in such a sprawling city where you have to drive everywhere? Isn’t it isolating? But as with Brasília, I’ve found that the way L.A. is perceived is much different than how it is lived.

Our April issue is about the lived experience of the city and its architecture. A postmodernist house in Baldwin Hills becomes a place for a family to dream. A billboard on the drive home becomes a personal landmark. A therapist’s room becomes a container for everything. A museum is held up as much by its walls as the people who work within them. We are part of our built environments, and nothing encompasses this more than our cover story on Lauren Halsey and her much-anticipated sculpture park, “sister dreamer lauren halsey’s architectural ode to tha surge n splurge of south central los angeles,” which is literally etched with the faces and stories of people from South-Central, where the artist grew up and still lives. On the cover photo, the artist stands in the back, in the shadows, allowing the people who shaped her project to take center stage.

Architects, I’m told, are obsessed with the idea of thresholds — corners, crossings, the in-between. This makes sense to me when I look at this cover, the group standing between four walls that don’t quite meet, the sky above and around them, inside and outside at the same time. It is a moving illustration of how a space can hold and contain — feel safe — while also holding an open sense of possibility.

Elisa Wouk Almino
Editor in Chief

Image logo by Anna Mills for The Times