Ahh, the holidays, a great time to catch up on our reading. Little did I know that a story I casually picked up one evening would ruin the rest of my vacation. As I read “Between the Lines,” a story by Dave Gardetta in Los Angeles Magazine on the state of LA parking, I had to keep putting my phone down to quell the panic attacks originating in my chest. We have HOW many parking spaces in downtown? And they’re vacant HOW much of the time?. Just to finish the piece I had to drink a half a bottle of wine.

For all Gardetta’s awesomeness in writing this piece—you can read a disheartening breakdown of all the numbers over at Curbed LA—I actually wish it was longer. He explains plenty about the economics of parking via the philosophy of the great Donald Shoup—basically, we need to charge more for parking at peak times, which is actually being done downtown through a program called ExpressPark—but he doesn’t talk much about the infrastructural elements of parking. I agree that we don’t need more parking. But how do we improve the way that parking looks and acts in our communities—the lots, the spots, the garages?

Which has had me thinking ever since: What is good parking? Is there any such thing?

Gardetta mentions the country’s first LEED-certified parking garage (above), which is in Santa Monica and was designed by Moore Ruble Yudell. My friend Marissa included it in her story about the five best-looking parking garages in LA. While it certainly adds some flavor to the visual language of the street, and has non-car amenities like bike parking, and is way prettier than a blistered expanse of asphalt, would this really count as good parking? I mean, they still had to build a separate five-story building, right?

On DnA a few months back we covered automated parking garages, which use robotic arms to stack cars into underground lots. The argument for these is that they take up less space and can park cars more efficiently, far underground where you never have to see them. But I shudder when I think about the energy expended by these machines just so these robot valets can shuffle cars around like toys. And in essence, it’s enabling more cars to be parked per building, which is kind of the opposite of what we want. I guess it’s nicer to have our cars tucked out of the way, into cute little robot stalls or LEED-certified corners bathed in natural light. But can this really be better parking?

So that leaves us to the other option, the traditional concrete lot, which I suppose is “low-impact” in the sense that you’re hopefully using underdeveloped land, and you don’t have to build a garage or program a subterranean robot brain. But come on, they’re just awful. Of course we’ve seen lots of lots that try a little harder on the greenscape side of things, with permeable materials that allow water to filter through and some scrawny trees for shade. We’ve seen change on a very micro scale, like how places like San Francisco have converted parking spaces in to actual parks. But your average parking lot is still a parking lot. All the time.

The real place to make a difference, I would say, is in the way we use parking lots. So much of LA’s downtown, where awesome, high-density stuff could be/once was is now dominated by parking lots. (Ugh! Chest pains just thinking about the number. Need wine.) But they’re not even parking cars all the time, it’s more about the idea of parking cars. The best example of this are the acres and acres of parking lots that have flattened the land around Staples Center and the Convention Center in anticipation of games and other events. They sit empty a majority of the time. And a big sticking point about building the new football stadium down there is that they’d have to add even more parking (in part, so people could tailgate).

All week I was disheartened by this prospect until I was reminded of an example of maybe-a-little-bit-better parking—by last weekend’s Rose Bowl. If you’ve ever been to a game at the Rose Bowl, you probably tailgated in one of the most beautiful parking lots in the country. That’s because it’s not really a parking lot: You’re browning your wieners and chugging your Bud Lights on the fairways of the Brookside Golf Club.

(Since there’s no way I’m showing another school’s tailgate, I’m using this similar example of a tailgate at my school, the University of Colorado at Boulder. And yes, that is my friend’s ambulance transformed into an emergency tailgating vehicle.)

Why can’t there be a golf course downtown that doubles as an as-needed parking lot? Okay, it doesn’t have to be a golf course—it could be picnic areas and playing fields for downtown’s park-starved residents. When there are big events happening in downtown, the fields will fill with cars—but those big events like basketball games and concerts usually happen at night. The rest of the time it would be public space, maintained by the same companies who charge people (a lot) to park there. When the new football stadium comes in, there will be plenty of space to tailgate, turning downtown into one big park where people can still run, play, relax.

Is this a better solution? I have no idea. Maintaining acres of grass in drought-friendly LA may not be the smartest use of our limited resources. And maybe with too many cars driving over them, my “parking fields” might not hold up as well as I think. But as I walked through downtown the other day, I imagined how awesome it would be to look out across the wide expanses of cement and see just one continuous square of cool, inviting green. I don’t even think a car parked on it, some of the time, would ruin that view.

Update: This week, Michael Kimmelman’s column is entitled “Taking Parking Lots Seriously, As Public Space,” and has some great examples in the slideshow of a-little-better parking lots. I liked this line: “But cars aren’t going away anytime soon, certainly not in the suburbs or in cities like Los Angeles, and we can’t just wish away lots in which to park them. John Brinckerhoff Jackson, the landscape writer who died in 1996, years ago pleaded that the parking lot be treated like the city common, with its own community values.”

I could tell this morning by the way it smelled outside. The air is crisp, the fires are (almost) out, and summer is over. Which led me to reflect on one of my favorite activities of the past summer: Silverlake Wine‘s Friday night tastings at Barnsdall Art Park.

On a grassy plateau in East Hollywood named Olive Hill—a place that many people who lived a few blocks away did not know existed—there is a large park with beautiful, 360-degree views of the city. (And for the first few weeks, a bit of June Gloom.)

But there’s also this house! The ridiculously gorgeous Hollyhock House, designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for art patron Aline Barnsdall in 1921. And they had tours of this house (sorry, no wine inside). Here’s a shot from the first week (note how hardly anyone is there).

And if you’re looking for hollyhocks, by the way, this is the place to go.

Sipping a frosty Grüner Veltliner in the shadow of this temple-like structure was like being transported to a magical end-of-the-workweek world. Only 1.6 miles from my house.

After a few hours—aided by a few Spanish reds—the ridiculously gorgeous house would suddenly start to glow.

As the weeks went on, the word got out, and the crowds grew in accordance with the temperature. There was suddenly a DJ, and people brought picnics, and—to the chagrin of some people, according to this article by my friend Jess—their kids.

I held meetings, met neighbors, collected business cards. Each week, another random sampling of friends converged on my blanket.

My friend Parker was a regular. Obviously as you can see from her behavior here, she always had one too many.

Each sunset was spectacular. I remember this one, clouds feathered across the sky, which only got better as I walked home.

Or this day, after we’d gotten a freak June rainstorm, and the sun didn’t really set as much as the sky just got darker and darker blue.

By the end of the summer, it had become the place to kick off the weekend. And, since a portion of the tasting fees went towards the Hollyhock House renovation, I think the hundreds of people converging before this landmark did manage to do some significant preservation work. I think I might have funded an entire wing by myself.

As the sun set on the last night—much earlier than it had a few months ago, we lamented—I realized there was no reason this easily-transportable instant party (especially with the mobile eateries who tagged along every week) couldn’t set up on any public space in LA. In fact, there’s no reason why it shouldn’t. To prove it, they’re trying out movie nights with beer tastings that will happen once a month.

Luckily, they plan to be back pouring rosés up on Olive Hill next year. It wouldn’t be summer without it.

Why, oh, why do I get so excited when design and food collide? Redesign Your Farmers Market is a new contest co-sponsored by lots of my favorite places, including GOOD, The Architect’s Newspaper, The Urban & Environmental Policy Institute, and The Los Angeles Good Food Network. To show how design is already helping the flow of local food find its way into our cities, I wrote a short piece for GOOD about how design can help farmers’ markets. We’re looking for ideas from all ends of the food chain—from chefs and farmers, to designers and engineers, to people who just love to eat. Deadline is September 1, let me know if you have any questions.

Winners will be announced September 3 at a very cool event in LA, Farmers’ Markets: 30 Years and Growing, which will take place at an enlarged version of the already pretty awesome farmers’ market that’s every Thursday on the lawn of City Hall. And just in case you did, indeed, recognize that building in the bounty above (Celery Hall?), this beautiful image is by Michelle Park and Manny Garcia who are part of the team from Rethink Your Green, finalists in the Aspen Design Challenge that I wrote about over at Fast Company, who are headed to Copenhagen later this month. Look for more delightful work from them and others in the upcoming weeks.

The Stanley Mosk Courthouse is not the worst public building in downtown Los Angeles by any means—one of the architects that worked on it was Paul Williams, who designed plenty of my other faves around town—but it’s not the kind of place you can see yourself being trapped for eight hours a day, debating right vs. wrong. It’s sterile and cold and impersonal. But maybe that’s how justice should be served.

After locating my juror room, they made an announcement that anyone not able to stay the full duration of the day needed to go elsewhere to reschedule their service. I had a conflict, so I picked up a pink piece of paper with instructions that directed me to another building around the corner where I’d spend the rest of the morning.

The Hall of Records—besides having a much cooler, law-superhero kind of name—was definitely a far more attractive and interesting building.

Yes, your honor, I’d much rather perform my civic duties in a Neutra building! This 1962 building designed by the famous modernist was actually built as a warm, more natural response to the frigid corporate towers of the time. It even has some sweet energy-efficient features, like those vertical aluminum fins that run the length of the windows, reflecting glare and creating shade. But it turned out that the guarantee of a fair trial does not include the right to good architecture. My service was rescheduled for another day. And when I returned, I’d report once again to the sugar cube down the street.

But not before I’d return to this very same corner roughly eight hours later. In a bizarre coincidence (that’s not too odd when you realize that I pretty much always travel along the same public transit routes) I ended up right back here after going to West Hollywood and then coming back downtown to go to another event. I spent a few minutes recalling the fond moments I’d spent within the Hall of Records.

Later, taking the long way home through Chinatown, I paused to document another significant architectural landmark, ABC Seafood. It’s not so much notable for its design as it is for its location.

Which is right around the corner from an aptly-named competing seafood network.

Right around Memorial Day, LA emits this otherworldly purple glow. The jacarandas bloom and give way to June Gloom, I thought as I was walking home yesterday, spotting sprays of lavender splotched randomly like graffiti tagging the hillsides. It’s LA’s purple rain, I laughed (yes, this is how I entertain myself while walking around town). But wait, I thought, I wrote all this about jacarandas already, didn’t I?

Didn’t I? I searched my blog a year ago. No. I searched one of the other blogs I had written for in May for the past few years, in the off-chance I had been able to tie a post about purple trees to some pithy statement about effective landscape design (hey, they’re drought-tolerant; it might have worked). Nope. I conducted a full-scale Spotlight search on my computer: JACARANDA. Nothing came up.

It wasn’t until I was searching for an old email today that I remembered: I had created a series of captioned photos and published it to a .Mac page. In 2005. A .Mac page! How quaint!

But because I was so thrilled to rediscover it, I’ve reproduced the entire page’s content below. Remember, it was written in 2005, when I was barely a writer. However, it certainly conveys the way I feel about those jacarandas. Even today.

Jacarandas are desert-dwelling trees with delicate fern-like foliage.

For about three weeks in spring, they explode in hot lilac trumpets.

Providing summer shade and lovely texture, they’re perfect for yards.

But in LA, you’re more likely to find them lining the streets.

Jacarandas are huge.

You’ll never notice them the rest of the year.

But right about now, they seem to be everywhere you look.

The slightest bit of wind triggers a shower of blossoms.

If one falls on your head, it is said to be good luck.

They cover the sidewalks.

They cover steps.

They cover streets.

And cars.

They make entire blocks feel like walking on rubber.

And yards look like they never cleaned up after a surprise party.

But in LA’s super-steady climate, it’s one of our only signs of summer.

And it’s the closest most of us will ever get to snowfall.

From the way some—okay, all—publications are covering LA’s mobile dining scene lately, you probably think we’re spending three hours per night waiting in line for tacos served with kimchi and an oDD prediLection for speLLing woRds with randoM capitaLiZed LetteRs. Not so, my fine foodie friends. Way before Kogi had a Twitter account, there was a groundbreaking mobile eatery providing not only sustenance, but education, as a type of organic intervention center-on-wheels. After spotting it all over town, I finally caught up with the frying oil-powered Green Truck for ReadyMade.

On a sunny weekday in Culver City I located Green Truck founders Mitchell Collier and Kam Miceli, just a few blocks from their solar-powered headquarters. I thought my timing was so good because I was straddling the transition between breakfast burrito and lunchtime burger (yes, I had both), but I also lucked out because they just happened to be doing the photoshoot for the article with David Hennessy. Who knew how many actual burgers it took to get that one perfect burger shot? Three. Regardless of how they looked they all tasted perfect to me.

Mitchell and Kam call themselves “all-food-itarians” and they love a good Niman Ranch burger just as much as their tofu burrito, a perspective I found overwhelmingly refreshing. Truck service covers a range of sandwiches, tacos and wraps but they can make just about anything you’d like if you hire them to cater your next event, which they’ve been doing a lot for photoshoots and festivals. Mitchell also introduced me to my first kombucha, which was a pretty excellent refreshment as I snacked on the “reject” fries (a russet and sweet potato combo).

While Mitchell and I chatted farmers markets—he was raised on an organic farm that raised pine trees, cattle, peanuts and watermelon—Kam cranked out the veggie burgers using their recipe. I’ve never made them from scratch and it seems pretty foolproof, but if you’re feeling hesitant, you can buy their frozen patties—and homemade Trucker sauce, which is like organic In-N-Out spread—on their website. You can read the article (and get the recipe) here: “Green Machine.” [PDF]

Green Truck co-founder Kam (with the apron on, above) will be speaking at Dwell on Design at the end of June, alongside the folks from gourmet wienermobile Let’s Be Frank (which is parked weekly at Silverlake Wine). On the other side of the thermometer, I hear Locali will be peddling organic snowcones on their Icycle, but this summer I plan to be chasing Coolhaus, an ice cream sandwich truck dispensing design and dessert with flavors like Richard Meyer Lemon and Mintimalism.

More great news that will have to tide me over until then:  Remember a few months ago I was anxious about big changes at ReadyMade which I thought might signal the end of one of my favorite mags? Well. I recently got word that Andrew Wagner—former editor at Dwell and for the past two years editor at the revamped American Craft (which I reviewed in last year’s Print)—is now the new editor-in-chief at ReadyMade. Their blog recently relaunched and you can take a tour of their new digs in Des Moines as well as meet all the staffers who are making it happen. Now I can’t wait to see the changes in store for the re-made ReadyMade.

I had it in my head that the Watts Towers were gridlocked in some kind of shot-up, paved-over no-man’s land. But I got off the train in a grove of mature pines, with what looked like an early 1900′s train depot (Watts Station, I later found out, a building built for the Red Car in 1904, and the only building on 103rd Street that didn’t burn in the 1965 riots). As I walked the handful of blocks from the station to the towers, the horns from the train blaring softly in the background, I felt like I was strolling through a town in rural Alabama.

The houses, almost all original single-story homes, thankfully never saw enough money to be razed in favor of a stucco box or even trade their era-perfect woodwork for crappy plastic details. Some yards were meticulously manicured, but even if they weren’t, they had this wild, old-growth lushness to them; draped in bougainvillea, their walks studded with unruly succulents. As I walked by one yard, a rooster crowed.

Then I turned a corner and there were the towers, gray concrete crocheted against the sky. And in an electric green lawn facing them, all of Edgar’s team posing for their portrait, as well as some of the homeowners, who, in cooperation with artists, architects, volunteers and other neighbors, have begun to transform their houses into works of art (and you can help, too). I realized that in his quest to get this project rolling, Edgar, who is also one of my fellow GOOD community leaders, saw the same thing I saw in my walk from the train. A neighborhood with good bones and good people, plagued by perceptions of people like me, who just assumed it was a crappy place to live. Like any neighborhood, it only needs a little attention to make it great.

I had the best time hanging out with Rosa Guttierez and her two (of ten) kids Cruz and Ellani, who proudly showed me the improvements in their yard and home. These included painting the house blue and violet and adding a floral mural to the outside. Another of Rosa’s kids painted the hummingbird over her door. And Rosa herself designed a public bench that will go just outside their fence, for tourists to admire the towers from across the street.

But of course I fell in love with the gardens, all drought-tolerant plants in full-bloom. Rosa had planted all the flowers in these little sculptural mounds and as she watered them, we talked gardening while butterflies and hummingbirds and this creepy gigantor grasshopper picked through the blooms. But the most wonderful touch, which I didn’t realize until I got home and looked at the pictures: Poking out from the centers of each are the fluorescent orange pencil cactus you see above, mimicking the impossibly elongated spires of the towers right across the street. You can read more in my piece, “Urban Redeveloper,” and maybe I’ll see you back in Watts at one of the volunteer days.

When I went to Watts I also finally met Kevin Scanlon, the photographer who has taken all the portraits of the people I’ve written about for the past two years, plus about a zillion more (including the one you see above). An exhibition of his People portraits will be opening on Friday night from 7-11 pm at the Montalban Theater in Hollywood as part of LA Weekly’s LA Weekend, accompanied by the sounds (and hopefully the hilarious commentary) of KCRW’s newest DJ, Henry Rollins. On Saturday, the highlight is a meat lover’s panel at high noon, moderated by Jonathan Gold with carnivore commentary by Mark Peel, Octavio Becerra and Susan Feniger, chef at my latest favorite restaurant, Street.

The show is really just two interviews. One is with Cameron Sinclair, a TED Prize-winning architect whose work I’m sure you’re familiar with—over 40,000 architects and designers worldwide are working with the decade-old Architecture for Humanity or contributing to the Open Architecture Network, an open-source network for distributing good design concepts. And one is with Frank Gehry, a Pritzker Prize-winning architect who is so famous he starred on The Simpsons. I don’t know about you, but I believe that is the standard against which all fame must be measured.

I encourage you to listen to the show in its entirety but there’s way more swirling around this story than just the interviews. Sinclair and Gehry make great points about each of their perspectives but they don’t get to answer some of the bigger issues in this argument (that’s also because they didn’t get to talk to each other directly since Sinclair’s busy jetting to every public speaking venue imaginable on earth and Gehry’s out on his yacht. I mean, he’s on a boat).

So I decided to collect a bunch of the major articles written on the topic—and there have been many since the beginning of the year—into a longer post on Fast Company so I could hear your thoughts. In all these arguments, it’s the words like ethical, moral, relevant, and modest that have become really interesting to me…before I thought that architects were pretty much only ethically obligated to make sure their buildings don’t fall down. But looking at some of the stories I’ve covered lately—Designers Accord, Objectified, Project H—I have started to wonder if this really does signify the beginning of an age where we judge designers based on their austerity. Are we promoting a generation of work that’s more Rural Studio than Burj Dubai? In Milan, at least, it already seems like the furniture world has gotten the hint: “The dominant style of this year’s Milan Furniture Fair seems to be utilitarianism, with many designers showing spartan, minimalist objects.”

So read on over at Fast Company. There’s plenty of great commentary in there by people I adore and admire—Michael Cannell, Murray Moss, Allison Arieff, Sinclair, Gehry and even Frances herself entering the argument in a saucy HuffPo post. Let me know what you think, or be sure to sound off in the comments if you’ve got something to say.

Last summer, mojito made with freshly-plucked-and-muddled mint in hand, I took this photo from the steps of the courtyard of PS.1, the Queens outpost of MoMA. Each summer as part of the Young Architects Program, a firm transforms the gravel courtyard into a party pavilion, and this year’s piece, Public Farm 1 by Work AC, was not only the coolest installation I’d ever seen in the space, but, to me, also the most exciting. With my two editors from ID next to me, we swirled our mojitos and started talking about the prevalence of gardening in design culture, and they mentioned they’d need an article on that very topic for their upcoming nature issue. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! When I got home to LA I started avidly researching one of my most favorite stories I’ve written in a long time, which was recently published in the March/April issue.

To my delight, some of the most interesting urban agriculture projects are happening right here in LA. I got to spend a day at Farmlab, the incredible project founded by artist Lauren Bon near Chinatown. After our tour of their radical urban agriculture structures, gardener Jaime Lopez Wolters took me on a bike ride tour through the former Not a Cornfield, now LA’s newest state park. If you go there now, you can see the wildflowers blooming.

I also visited Farmlab’s seed library, which is probably the single coolest room I’ve ever been in. Every single plant they grow is hung upside down here until it dries so they can properly capture the seeds. They also have an annual seed giveaway, which was happening in December. If you haven’t been to Farmlab yet, I encourage you: Go.

Another highlight on my garden tour was SYNTHe, a rooftop garden built by SCI-Arc students atop the Flat Building in downtown LA. I was so enthralled with the setting I was determined to do an event there so this is where we recently held this month’s de LaB as part of LA Art Weekend. We started with a tour of the garden by architect Alexis Rochas (more on him in another article that was recently published!) and as he talked about the kinds of produce they were growing six stories above LA, to our delight we saw the chef traipsing around the rooftop garden with a bucket, gathering goods for the meal that followed. Then we headed downstairs to Blue Velvet for a fantastic brunch of short ribs, pistachio falafel and lavender panna cotta, where we all attempted to identify which herbs and vegetables came from the roof.

So there you have it! From cocktails grown in a Queens courtyard, to dessert with origins on an LA rooftop, with plenty about Fritz Haeg, Mike Meire, Studio Job, Urban Farming, and Vertical Farms sprinkled in along the way, I present to you the fruits of my labor: “Bloom Towns” [PDF].

A brief side note: A few months ago I reported here that my wonderful editor-in-chief Julie Lasky was leaving ID to launch Change Observer with her lovely husband Ernest Beck. Just today I got the news that my equally-wonderful editors—as well as my mojito-drinking, jamon-tasting New York compatriots last summer who where there when this story all began—Jill Singer and Monica Khemsurov are also leaving the magazine. I’ll miss their awesome edits of my stories, but wish all of them the very best in whatever they’re up to!

I totally should have posted this earlier today, but I was too busy plundering the Ferry Building to put together non-food thoughts. All day tomorrow I’ll be liveblogging Compostmodern on Core77 which means you can play along at home with your usual drinking game. Take a sip of beer every time I type the word “sustainable.”

Lots to report about the Designing Obama event on Thursday night, too, which was probably the most fun event I’ve ever been a part of. But I’m sleepy and my fingers need to rest up for tomorow. See you then!

Update: Here’s my wrap-up and all the liveblogged sessions in one convenient post.