• Brad Pitt, bungalow aficionado & rebuilder of New Orleans

    Blackerhousebookcover
    Many of you probably know Thomas Heinz, Randell Mackinson & Brad Pitt’s book on the Blacker House and its restoration. It’s an interesting read, and the photographs are surprisingly good. Certainly, Pitt’s been one of the more visible old-house aficionados in California, buying up old LA-area Craftsman homes and restoring them when he has the time.

    The Los Angeles Times has an article on Pitt’s continued interest in architecture – both traditional and contemporary – and his founding of the Make It Right foundation, which aims to completely rebuild New Orleans’ extensively damaged Lower Ninth Ward, keeping the neighborhood’s character intact and rebuilding homes specifically for their residents. He’s said that this effort is different from other proposals specifically because it doesn’t exist to make developers rich and homogenize an entire area, but rather rebuild for the benefit of those who live there. Let’s hope it works out. Tina Daunt has the full story in her Cause Celebre column of December 5 – read the whole thing there.

    NEW ORLEANS – IN Hollywood, causes tend to divide into the popular and
    the deeply personal. You usually can recognize the difference because
    the former come from the pages of next month’s glossy magazines and the
    latter right from the heart. …

    Over the years, Pitt has bought old California Craftsman houses
    and restored them, gathering every bit of literature he could find on
    the Arts and Crafts movement and its most famous local architects, Charles and Henry Greene. The actor became so interested in their iconic homes that he teamed up with scholar and restoration expert Randell L. Makinson
    to produce the most extensive book to date on the restoration of Greene
    & Greene’s Blacker House, which had been stripped and abandoned.
    (Pitt provided black and white photos as a visual essay on the Pasadena
    home’s rebirth.)

    Pitt has spent time with Frank Gehry at his studio, tinkering with diagrams and models. And last winter, for his birthday, girlfriend  Angelina Jolie gave him a special gift: a private tour of Fallingwater, Frank Lloyd Wright’s architectural masterpiece that spans  Bear Run, a creek that flows through woods about 50 miles southeast of Pittsburgh.

    So it’s only fitting that Pitt’s deep regard for the built environment
    and his concern for housing as a social cause have come together in his
    most ambitious project to date – "Make It Right" which aspires to
    nothing less than the reconstruction of New Orleans’ storm-ravaged
    Lower 9th Ward.

    Pitt, along with residents of the area, Democratic fundraiser and movie producer Steve Bing, and
    a team of world-renowned architects launched a national fundraising
    campaign this week to help the city recover from the devastation caused
    by Hurricane Katrina. Pitt and Bing have already pledged to kick in $5
    million each toward project development and construction. (Another
    difference between popular and heartfelt causes is their shelf life.
    Ruined New Orleans may not be an issue in the current presidential
    campaign, but neither Pitt — who has a residence in New Orleans’
    French Quarter – nor Bing has been able to forget that so much of a
    major American city still lays in ruins.)

    "The plan is to start with 150 homes," Pitt told a gathering of
    reporters and residents on Monday. "But there’s no reason why we can’t
    do a thousand homes, or 10,000 …We can make this happen, but we
    all need to join together to do this."

  • Payson Denny Architects in Santa Monica, CA

    Paysondennywide

    Ken Payson is an architect in the Santa Monica area (his firm, Payson Denny, also has an office in Santa Fe NM) who mainly works on residential projects. While Payson Denny do build many modern / modernist homes, they have sometimes produced very attractive and historically-accurate Craftsman structures; they’ve also been responsible for some really stunning restorations and remodels of historic structures throughout the Los Angeles area.

    We’ve created a small Flickr set with a few high-res images of these recent projects.

  • Los Angeles’ Arts & Crafts jewels are in … Garvanza?

    LAist‘s "Neighborhood Project" feature included a report this past week on a part of Northeast LA that I’m not at all familiar with – I always assumed that was Highland Park – and found extremely interesting:

    Once the heart of the Arts and Crafts movement in Los Angeles and a
    bohemian artists’ colony, Garvanza is today one of Northeast LA’s
    hidden treasures seeking to retain its turn of the century identity
    while creating a liveable neighborhood for the twenty-first century.
    Although many consider Garvanza to be just a part of Highland Park,
    this small and hilly area brimming with historic buildings has more
    than enough charm and character needed to stand out on its own. Named
    for the wild sweet peas (garbanzo beans) that used to grow on the
    hillsides, Garvanza itself is much like a hearty wildflower, blooming
    stubbornly amidst the dominant concreted landscape, unabashedly
    colorful and pleasantly surprising to discover.

    Check out the whole story for plenty of photographs and maps and a reasonably complete history of the region.