I recently wrote about a wall in Silver Lake. But from the comments that have been posted to the article, you might have thought this wall was in Berlin. Read the story over at the LA Weekly and let me know what you think. Or better yet, add your thoughts to what’s becoming an increasingly vicious (yet extremely entertaining) thread.

I had always been fascinated with the story of the apartments: they were designed by great midcentury architect Rudolph Schindler for a family in the 1930s, so they could rent out the remaining units and have financial security. But it wasn’t until a few years ago that I knew the identities of the family who currently resided within those walls. And as I discovered as I spent the day with filmmaker Joe DeMarie and his wife Madeleine Brand (who you may know from the public radio show that bears her name), they bought and lovingly restored the property for the very same reasons: to give their children a great place to grow up, and also ensure their future.

But it’s what happened between those two families, in a story that spans over 60 years, that’s absolutely amazing. Head over to Dwell to read my story “Self Preservation.” And thanks to Joe and Madeleine for their passion and dedication to keeping this little corner of Silver Lake history alive.

Top photo by Jessica Haye and Clark Hsiao

If you remember a few months back, I posted about a very exciting new grant I received from a new creative placemaking foundation called ArtPlace. Getting a grant is at once an exhilarating and terrifying thing, as you are basically handed a very large check up front then you have to actually do things! In this case, we been charged with coordinating five big events featuring five creative teams solving five urban challenges proposed by five civic leaders in five different cities in the first six months of 2012 (yes, it’s like I’m planning SIX weddings this year). But the whole process has been exceptionally smooth, thanks to our great partners like CEOs for Cities and all the amazing people who have been helping us on the ground in our first two cities.

And speaking of those cities! We’re excited to announce that GOOD Ideas for Cities will be in Portland on February 16 and St. Louis (my hometown!) on March 8. Details for the Portland event have been posted, and I’m really looking forward to what I know will be a very entertaining evening talking about the city’s future. I’m also excited because we’re launching a student program that night in partnership with Portland State University’s Department of Graphic Design, thanks to professor Nicole Lavelle. The student will be working on their own solutions to Portland’s problems and presenting them at a separate event in March. We’ll have an event page for the St. Louis event soon, but that will be held at the Contemporary Art Museum and we’ve got some pretty awesome surprises planned for the evening.

We’re about to announce the next two cities and we’re very excited about those as well. You can stay up to date by following @IdeasforCities for updates. Here’s more about GOOD Ideas for Cities, and we’re always looking for new opportunities—let me know if you have an idea for where we should bring the program next!

It’s no secret around these parts that I’m a big Chris Burden fan. So of course I’ve been breathlessly awaiting the unveiling of his newest sculpture, Metropolis II at LACMA. It opens this Saturday but I got a sneak preview at the press conference, which I wrote about in my review for the LA Weekly. Still photos don’t do it justice, but hopefully my images and words can entice you to go see it in person. Which you must!

It’s gigantic: It takes up an entire room at LACMA. And it’s loud.

1,100 customized Hot Wheels cars move up a conveyor belt and then are released down 18 plastic tracks.

It’s like the 405 + the 101 + the 5 + the 10.

25 skyscrapers are made from everything from Legos to slotted stacking cards like the Eames Office designed.

An operator has to stand at the center to make sure no cars get flipped over or fly off the tracks. That’s also why it can only run for 90 minutes at a time, a few days a week.

Here’s LACMA’s Michael Govan talking to Chris Burden.

And Chris Burden pointing out some of the structural features.

Some parts don’t really look that different from downtown LA.

I fell in love with this little village bookended by two churches.

I was also wondering if these green panels were supposed to be parks.

Among the cars are a dozen electric trains that chug from one end to another. But they go very slow.

There are two Erector Set towers that nod to Burden’s work What My Father Gave Me, which I photographed in New York City.

And these travertine-like walls reminded me of the Getty.

The Eiffel Tower de Los Angeles!

Lincoln Logs give a nice faux-rustic look to what appears to be a very nice condo building.

Some of those Eames stacking cards. I want a real building in LA that looks like this.

Run, don’t walk to see this when it opens. Well, I suppose it would be appropriate to drive to this exhibition. As long as you don’t get stuck in traffic. Hours of operation here.

Read my review in the LA Weekly (there’s also a video there).

More Metropolis II photos.

“For all its considerable delights, Southern California always seems faintly on the cusp of an apocalypse. There are palm trees, year-round gardens and splendid weather — it was 81 degrees and sunny on Sunday — but there are also mudslides, gang shootings, wildfires and earthquakes.”

If I turned in this kind of writing to any of the publications I write for, they’d slap it back to me for a rewrite faster than you can say “year-round gardens.” (What exactly is a year-round garden? Do some gardens cease to exist during part of the year?) But in The New York Times, this writing can pass as the first paragraph of a front-page story. On what, you might ask? You’d think you’d be able to tell from the first two sentences. But does it really matter? Just be sure to read the part where it says LA’s on the cusp of the apocalypse. Is that near the 405?

I hope for writer Adam Nagourney’s sake that these consistent anti-LA musings under his byline are actually the work of a crabby editor stuck behind a desk in New York—a place we know is completely free of gang violence, fires and earthquakes. These ridiculous LA clichés are so tired they’re about to take some Ambien, go sleepwalking in the middle of the night and accidentally cancel my New York Times subscription.

That said, yesterday’s weather was pretty freaking splendid.

Last year on this day I posted my own version of a year-in-review with my 13 favorite stories of the year. (Why 13, everyone wanted to know? Was I superstitious? Unlucky? Honestly, it just worked out that way.) This year, I couldn’t help but do it again, but with a twist: I picked my favorites, but I’m also handing out specific awards in different categories (yes, giving prizes to myself—all in all, it was a pretty boring awards ceremony). So while you’re out this weekend drunk walking or choosing a parking spot or curing a hangover with a prairie oyster, please enjoy some of the best, worst, funniest, weirdest, most popular and least popular stories I wrote in 2011. Happy new year!

Most Fun to Research
Nike’s 23-Year Journey To Make McFly’s Shoes Real, Co.Design
When I got the assignment to cover the release party for Nike’s Air MAG shoes, inspired by the ones from Back to the Future, I think I traveled all the way to the Montalban Theater in a montage set to “Power of Love.” Here’s a franchise that was so beloved to me growing up—I even did a dance to the “Back in Time” song at the neighborhood talent show one year—and I got to attend this detail-perfect themed event to celebrate the films. But talking to Nike’s Tinker Hatfield unfolded another incredible story almost as unbelievable as time travel in a De Lorean, as Nike worked on the concepts for the original film and then spent the next two decades making the shoes a reality. AND—this was the kicker—all to benefit Michael J. Fox’s foundation to battle Parkinson’s disease. Now that’s the power of love. Here are some more photos from the party.

Least Fun to Research
How My iPhone Was Stolen on the Train, Gelatobaby
Um, yeah. But on the bright side, I imagine that I saved dozens of phones from similar “apple picking” incidents this holiday season. You’re welcome.

Best Anniversary Party
My LAX series of 10 stories celebrating 10 years in LA, Gelatobaby
If I had one piece of advice to writers—or any creatives for that fact—it’s to celebrate specific milestones in your own life. When I was on my vacation this summer (ah, my sweet, sweet vacation) I came up with the idea to somehow commemorate my ten years in LA, and by the time I was back home I had started writing the pieces. It was an assignment no one would have given me, and it gave me a fantastic reason to examine the place I lived and how it affected my work. I covered everything from weather to secret staircases but my very favorite piece is on how I gave up my car.

Favorite LA Thing to Write About
It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year: Why We’re Pro-Carmageddon, GOOD
Besides the fact that I finally learned to spell “armageddon,” I had the absolute best time writing about the apocalyptic closing of the 405 freeway as a positive event for car-bound Angelenos. After I wrote this story I was asked to appear on the WYNC show The Takeaway, and—when people did, indeed stay off the streets for the weekend—I followed up with six more “-ageddons” I’d like to see.

Best Continuing Education
The Insider’s Guide to Art in Los Angeles, Details
The best kinds of stories are when you have to actually learn a whole bunch of stuff that you’ve always wanted to know, just to write the story. When I was assigned one of my first stories for Details on Pacific Standard Time, I was thrilled to jump in and try to make sense of this sprawling art-stravaganza about to descend upon LA. In the process, I got a seriously intense Los Angeles contemporary art education, thanks to some awesome interviews with the Getty’s Andrew Perchuk. This week I was on the KUSC show “Arts Alive” talking about my story and how PST has affected LA.

Best Per-Word Rate
GOOD Design is Growing: Announcing GOOD Ideas for Cities, GOOD
Not for the article itself, of course, but because I was writing about receiving an incredible $85,000 grant from ArtPlace for the GOOD Ideas for Cities program I co-founded three years ago. I can’t wait to take the event series to five cities, including my hometown of St. Louis, in 2012.

Best Stumbled-Upon Story
A Hidden Oasis Grows on Hollywood’s Walk of Fame, GOOD
A perfect example of keeping your eyes open and your camera on, even when you’re out for a walk. I discovered this community garden on Hollywood Boulevard several years ago but it was only during a late-night, post-club visit that I realized it was a story just begging to be told. More on how I found it here, including photos I’ve taken of the garden throughout the years (before I even knew what it was). Street Journalism in action!

Best Stumbling
Enduring Spirit, Gelatobaby
Yes, I ran a marathon this year. Yes, I tweeted photos at every mile. Did I mention it rained the ENTIRE TIME? Did I mention that for the most part, I didn’t train AT ALL? Well, I hope you enjoy the story as I RISKED MY LIFE FOR IT.

Most Uplifting Subjects (I Believe the Children Are Our Future Award)
Middle School Students Tell LAUSD: No More Styrofoam!, GOOD
If you are ever feeling sorry for the state of the world, go visit the sixth graders at Thomas Starr King Middle School who not only got their school to stop using styrofoam trays at lunch, they raised money to buy reusable trays for every student who wanted one. After my story, the kids were featured on the local news, made dozens of videos, and worked with 826 LA to write about their experiences. Absolutely amazing.

Most Overwhelming Response
The Top 5 Things That Bother Me About This Headline, GOOD
When I pitched this little essay to GOOD for their Data Issue, it was mostly to vent about my own frustrations when writing “for the internet” compared to writing for print. But in the hands of guest editor Starlee Kine, it became a highly personal examination of my own transformation as a writer in the age of data—someone who, I realized, is almost addicted to page views and retweets. Ironically, the story was a traffic smash, and I’m still getting weekly emails and seeing it pop upon Twitter about it over six months later. Mostly, people thanking me for being honest about how hard it is to do what writers do.

Most Underwhelming Response
How Weeds Became a Marketing High For MIT’s Bike Wheel, Co.Design
After I noticed the Copenhagen Wheel in a recurring cameo role on Weeds, I jumped on this story, interviewing both the Wheel’s design team and the Weeds showrunner. I thought the incredible, slightly racy tale of how Weeds chose to include and work with the creators of this environmentally progressive bike concept would be a sure hit for cyclists and potheads everywhere. The story didn’t do that well, which I guess illustrates that data doesn’t always win. Or that potheads are an unreliable audience.

Most Beautiful Thing I Wrote About
An Almost Life-Sized Version of L.A. Made Entirely from Cardboard, Co.Design
Gosh, maybe one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen, period.

Most Delicious Thing I Wrote About
Don’t Call it a Pop-Up: Felix Barron’s KTCHN 105, KCET Food
Best brunch in Los Angeles, with a unique experience that matches the food.

Best Service Journalism
The Best Way to See the Hollywood Sign, Gelatobaby
After a group of Beachwood Canyon residents decided they didn’t want tourists prowling their streets in search of the elusive Hollywood Sign, I wrote this story outlining several alternate routes that actually produce better views than if you’d parked in some snobby asshole’s driveway. A big part of what I hope to do with my writing is to help people navigate and understand LA better, and if I can do that at the expense of wealthy, closed-minded Angelenos, even better.

Proof that You Can Make Money Riding Buses
“Mass Transit”: A Dance Performance Inspired by Riding L.A.’s Buses, GOOD
What Happens When You Put a Coffee Table at a Bus Stop?, GOOD
Is LA’s Public Transit a Joke? This Comedian Sure Hopes So, GOOD
Take that, cars!

Most Hate Mail
Do You Double Space After Periods?, GOOD
I had no idea that taking a stand (along with many other writers) against double spacing after periods would net me the most emails I’ve ever received for a single story. The emails that I received also happened to contain the poorest grammar and spelling I’ve ever seen. And every email was dutifully double spaced, of course.

Happy new year!

It’s December, and for journalists that means roundup season, as we all scramble to compile definitive lists of the BEST and WORST things to happen to all of us in the past year. I was tapped by my editors at GOOD to create a list of design highlights for 2011 but with a twist: We decided that I could only pick things that looked good and worked well. It’s tougher than you might think. Design seems to be fracturing into two camps: Stuff that works but doesn’t look especially aesthetically pleasing, and stuff that’s all surface with absolutely no substance. I argue that the best design out there can solve massive issues around depleting materials and changing technology, but still be something you want to bring into your home.

One of my favorite examples of design that’s addressing problems but is still enticing enough for consumers to embrace is Prettymaps, above, by the San Francisco-based firm Stamen (who I’ve written about many times this year). Using crowdsourced data like Flickr and OpenStreetMap, they’re able to create these incredible highly-detailed maps of pretty much anywhere. This data can be used by designers and developers, who can enlist Prettymaps as an open source mapping tool, but the technology is so visually engrossing that the maps themselves are being sold as art. You can buy Prettymaps of most major cities at 20×200 and, in a related experiment also powered by Stamen, you can buy beautiful custom textiles of any address over at SoftCities.

Prettymaps is one of 11 products I selected (for 2011, of course) and I’d venture to say they’d all make nice last-minute gifts for the holiday. Check out my story over at GOOD.

It’s not often you’re delivered two life-changing experiences in the course of a year. In 2010 I was selected for the USC Annenberg/Getty Arts Journalism Fellowship, an honor that irrevocably changed the course of my writing career. And less than 12 months later, I was thrilled to be selected for Engine29.org, where 28 fellows from the past decade were invited back to work on projects related to arts journalism. We gathered together in early November for our immersion period. And I’m excited to announce that our final projects have been officially launched.

My project, Moving Experience, with team members Joshua Samuel Brown and Michele Siegel, started with a premise: We would not use cars during the immersion period. We wanted to examine if, indeed, the way you arrived at a story changed the way that you reported it. Or, perhaps, if getting there was the story.

We rented bikes, we bought Metro passes. We took video from our helmets and lugged radio equipment on the bus. We tweeted constantly and we never put away our cameras. What I’m most proud of is a massive Google map that we created documenting the distance that each of us traveled that week and the method of transportation we took. We also embedded some of our tweets onto the map, which served as a compendium of our in-the-field realizations.

Each morning, I took long short walks through downtown. What do I mean by that? I’d walk for a long time, but I didn’t cover a lot of ground, walking only a few blocks in the course of an hour. I was practicing my noticing. I looked at anything that grabbed my attention. I took a lot of photos. I was trying to slow down as much as possible, to read the sidewalks, to talk to people, to find stories underfoot.

My team members also documented their processes. Michele, a producer on the great public radio show Studio 360, produced these beautiful audio slideshows featuring people we interviewed. Joshua, an incredible travel writer, wrote these epic travelogues interspersed with short films (and in a quite ironic twist, even managed to get a jaywalking ticket).

We quickly realized a series of five truths when it came to covering culture, especially in Los Angeles. Big stories were getting overlooked. Transportation was a huge issue. The word “art” meant different things in different neighborhoods. All of the truths pointed to one reality: Instead of reporting faster, we needed to report slower:

Could we take a page from the Slow Food movement and propose a type of “Slow Journalism” that would be embraced worldwide: an experiential, contextual approach to covering art? A return to the idea of covering a beat—by walking, riding or busing—in order to unearth the cultural stories that are more relevant and valuable to our audiences.

And so our team’s final project calls for a different methodology for reporting—a new way of working. A movement, if you will. We call it Street Journalism. And here is our manifesto:

We will cover a beat—a physical neighborhood, a cultural community, a single city block.

We will walk, bike or take public transit as we report. We will limit our trips in cars.

We will keep our eyes open, our cameras focused, and our Twitter streams active.

We will be flexible. We realize that getting there is half the story.

We will meet the locals. We will ask them what we should be covering in their neighborhoods.

We will remember that the best story leads come from people, not computers.

We will report stories which acknowledge that art is about place, and culture is about context.

If you’re a journalist, we’re hoping you can join the movement. You can read more about the Moving Experience project to get even more insight into our process. Then I hope you’ll get out there and try it yourself. Use the hashtag #streetjourno to tag your stories, your quotes, or just your realizations. Show us what you learn when you hit the streets, slow down and pay attention. Even though I thought I was writing this way, I see now that I was still moving too fast to discover the stories all around me. I know I’ll never think of my work the same way again.

A huge thanks to everyone who met with us to talk about our project. All their names and organizations are listed on the right hand side of the Moving Experience page.

All my photos from this year’s fellowship.

Should you stay at the Royalton Hotel in New York City, you will find my architectural walking guide, City Walks Architecture New York, right where it belongs. The Royalton must have read my blog in order to organize such visionary and apt product placement. How did they know that I wrote the book fueled almost entirely by tequila, vodka and whiskey?

Thanks to Stefan Bucher for snapping the photo, and for the signature wit that accompanied it. It gave me a great idea for a new kind of walking tour… more of  a stumbling tour, if you will.

Did I mention City Walks Architecture New York makes a GREAT stocking stuffer? With or without the Johnnie Walker chaser. Buy it here!

I’ve read more books this year than I may have read in any other year of my life. It’s because I started reading books on my iPhone, which not only helped me to find, try out, and buy books more quickly, it made reading more accessible—suddenly I could read no matter where I was, or what I was doing. (DISCLAIMER:  If you haven’t yet read my story about getting my iPhone stolen out of my hand on the train while I was reading a book, please do so. Not to be a downer or anything.)

Don’t get me wrong, I still love book-books. But what I’ve come to understand this year is that each book I read had an appropriate medium like screen or paper, and also an appropriate time and place for reading. So when asked to contribute six notable books of 2011 to Designers & Books, I included a wide range of books and also my recommended way to read them. I hope this will inspire people to broaden their reading experiences, realizing that there’s more than one way to devour words and pictures.

I’m also excited to announce that I’m going to be a regular contributor to Designers & Books, one of my favorite sites to discover design-related reading. So be sure to head over there for more page-turning inspiration.

Read about my six notable books of 2011.