Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism, 1900-1970

Thomas S. Hines, a professor emeritus at UCLA, is the dean of architectural historians in Los Angeles, the author of major studies of the pioneering modernists Richard Neutra and Irving Gill. In "Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970," he has produced a doorstop-sized magnum opus: a massive but terrifically detailed distillation of his thinking on the city where he has lived and taught, with only minor interruptions, since 1968.

Unlike such younger historians as Sylvia Lavin, Hines' colleague at UCLA and the author of a 2005 book called "Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture," Hines is not interested in putting architecture on the couch or for that matter in charting the political or economic forces that inevitably shape the cityscape from the outside in, as Mike Davis and others have done. His goal is to flesh out the giants of L.A architecture through a patient, smart and sometimes microscopic look at their most important buildings. He is a generalist and — especially when it comes to his admiration for modernism at the expense of other kinds of architecture — something of a purist.

To read more of this content at The LA Times, click here.