“To describe the topography of Los Angeles is to describe its media.” 

- Kim Gordon

The space in which you stand right now, dear reader, is part of the historic Granada Buildings aka the Granada Shoppes and Studios. On October 2, 1927, the Los Angeles Sunday Times reported: 

“The initial announcement was made yesterday by Franklin Harper of a combined shop, studio and apartment structure under way at Lafayette Park Place between Wilshire Boulevard and West Seventh Street, which will cost approximately $1,000,000. The building, which is being designed and built by Mr. Harper, is declared to be something entirely new in Los Angeles, although the idea of incorporating apartments with shops and studios is said to be similar to the design of specialty shops in Europe.”

Franklin Harper was a journalist from Kentucky. The Granada Buildings was his first venture with architecture and development. 

Later announcements and leasing advertisements described, “The Granada, presenting a handsome facade, in the atmosphere of old Spain, has a commodious patio upon which all shops and studios open. In addition there is a second-story arranged in suites as living-quarters, so that those occupying shops or studios below may at all times be accessible to business – an Old World plan not usual in this country.”

In 1974, LA Times architecture critic John Pastier lamented new zoning laws restricting the mixture of commerce and housing. Pastier described a number of buildings across Los Angeles whose visionary concept and potential within the city’s unique urban fabric would suffer as unfortunate casualties under these new mandates. 

“They had stores on the first floor, and perhaps small offices as well. Upstairs, there were studio apartments for self-employed professional people, prosperous artistic dilettantes and sundry strange folk.”

The automobile industry had effectively redesigned an entire city and the next gold-rush was real-estate.

Kim Gordon’s conflation-cum-revelation of the topography and media of Los Angeles provides a wonderful map with which to approach John Knight’s untitled slide work from 1974. 50 years later, this work is now presented for the first time in Los Angeles - the city from which it was ‘situationally derived’.

In 1973, Knight turned to the LA Times Real Estate Supplement - collecting the slogans announcing new housing developments. Each of the 47 slides in the work presents a single slogan, from advertising campaigns selling real estate as a vision of lifestyle. Taken out of context from any visual referents, the lifted texts and their carefully recreated typography is left to speak for itself. 

It is not difficult to imagine the ad-men with scotch and cigars conjuring these taglines and knocking off early. Even out of context, these slogans maintain their carriage of aspiration and we are left to contemplate what these phrases are advertising and what visions they could be promising. Referential Elegance.

-SCW