ESSAY: "Frame the Future!" at the Los Angeles Central Library is a Mix of Visions
During my last few years of living in Los Angeles, I have begun to wonder more and more why Los Angeles, well, looks like Los Angeles. Los Angeles’ strange, surreal nature comes into focus upon its absence; to live in vibrant cities outside of Los Angeles and then to return to Los Angeles is to see every one-story strip mall collared with a parking lot as a failure of imagination, to see every vacant lot overgrown with weeds as a broken promise. To ride public transit daily in Los Angeles is to seemingly experience the sum total of every bad land use choice Los Angeles has made for the last seven decades.
So it was encouraging to learn about the project Frame the Future! LA’s Housing Manifesto + Poster Showdown, a collaboration among Friends of Residential Treasures Los Angeles (FORT LA), Abundant Housing Los Angeles, the Neutra Institute, and other urbanism- and architecture-focused organizations that encouraged the public to submit their vision of the future of Los Angeles. (Disclaimer: at the time of writing, I am currently serving in a volunteer capacity on the FORT LA annual fundraising committee.)
Currently on view until August 31 at the Los Angeles Central Library in Downtown Los Angeles—a worthwhile architectural visit in its own right—Frame the Future! displays all sixty entries for the competition in poster format, each with an accompanying "manifesto" accessible by QR code. Entries range from architectural designs for specific types of housing, to holistic reimaginings of the city and its networks, to ones that lead with the manifesto and are clearly more aimed at sparking dialogue than envisioning material reality. Some entries look to the past—to the bungalow courts and smaller-scale multifamily dwellings once common in the city—while others take inspiration from mid-century conceptions of Los Angeles as the city of the future.
Far and away, the most intriguing proposal is Doable Doubles: You Can Two It, submitted by Lisa Ramsburg and Anna Kerr (both holders of M.Arch degrees from Princeton). Rather than being architecturally prescriptive, Doable Doubles actually leans into the possibilities of adapting existing local sites and building upon a neighborhood’s unique vernacular architecture with the curious and creative brief: simply take the existing single-family home and turn it into a duplex by mirroring/angling, copying, and attaching the original dwelling. The idea is unironically delightful (if perhaps a little or a lot fanciful), which makes it perfect for this kind of creative visioning project.
Many complaints about contemporary multifamily building revolve around aesthetic concerns—i.e. the typical unappealing gray 5 over 1—which would be charmingly ameliorated by simply duplicating the original building’s architecture. Doable Doubles makes the case that district architectural styles can be maintained and kept as needs of families, neighborhoods, and cities change, mitigating the concern that adding useful urban density necessarily requires the homogenization of urban architecture.
Other strong contenders (as this exhibition is ultimately a competition!) included From One to Many: Rebuilding Altadena After the January 2025 Wildfires by Olesya Indeikina (an architecture student at California Polytechnic State University) and earthen ribbon: homes as resilient infrastructure by Lucy Lloyd, Adam Ballard, Michelle McCann, and K. Ben Loescher (of the architecture and design firm Terrain). Both projects succeed by designing for the specific and for the future of Los Angeles: one that will be (and already has been) irretrievably impacted by climate change. From One to Many imagines rebuilding in the foothills of Altadena with environmentally smart materials while building community across courtyards and landscapes of native plants. earthen ribbon calls for sustainable, place-based design and materials in Northeast Los Angeles, a “wildland-urban interface” area where simply plopping down tract homes with turf grass yards isn’t exactly in harmony with the landscape.
Lest the reader walk away thinking only experts in the architectural field contributed creatively and substantively to Frame the Future!, other bright spots included My Adulthood in Los Angeles, hand-drawn by ten-year-old artist Joe Yamamura (I would have loved to see more entries by children, frankly) and We’ve Got the Solutions. Let’s Build Them by creative director and unhoused advocate John Susoeff, which combines a clear, commonsense manifesto with a dynamic poster design. As someone who grew up in Los Angeles and recalls the sense of wonder I felt when we drove up to Dodger Stadium via the 110, feeling surrounded by downtown's skyscrapers and two members of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, for some reason, I particularly enjoyed the hustle and bustle Yamamura depicts, as well as his wild imagining of a city of flying cars and tall buildings and also at least one walking riceball.
The less said about the third or so of entries that were clearly AI generated, the better.
Space was likely limited for the organizers of the exhibition, which has the effect of overwhelming the viewer with the sheer number of creative ideas mounted on one wall. However, I would have liked to see a stronger sense of curation in terms of how the posters were arranged. Clusters of works addressing different themes (physical buildings versus holistic reimaginings of housing as a commodity, for example) might have conveyed the diversity of ideas more effectively.
Given the touted input of public figures in the architectural/urbanist/political realms on the selection of the posters, I also would have liked to see which person liked which proposal and why. Once again, I understand there was only so much wall space. I can envision a future spin-off exhibition of the entries with the highest public support that would involve more detailed renderings or models, as well as commentary from the show’s curators and/or judges.
The overarching (ha) issue, perhaps, is that the question being asked has already been answered in many cases, which We’ve Got the Solutions points out. Prior to the downzoning of the 1970s and 1980s, Los Angeles was building densely for an expected population of 10 million. Following efforts like Proposition U in 1986 to slow growth with an aim towards a population of 4 million, development of multifamily housing was heavily restricted and curtailed. Tenement overcrowding is obviously not the solution, but it is quite possible to build plentiful and pleasant multifamily housing of different shapes and sizes. What is required is the political will to challenge the single family home ethos of the city. (Ironically, many of the more explicitly political entries in Frame the Future do not take this tack, instead proposing redistributionist policies). In some ways, the answer to how best to “Frame the Future” might be to take inspiration from the past.
…and initially, that was how I ended this review.
And yet I stepped outside the library and my hair immediately curled from the humidity. Los Angeles’ dry heat has been on pause this whole summer thanks to El Niño, but who knows if needing to carry a hand fan around on the west side will simply be the new normal?
Amidst my lingering enjoyment of Doable Doubles, I kept thinking about proposals like earthen ribbon, which addresses the ways in which the past models of building housing and communities and infrastructure are no longer sufficient. The bungalow courts of the future won’t look like the adorable ones dotting Pasadena, because that world no longer exists. The one-story strip mall doesn’t cast enough shadow on hot days to cool down pedestrians on the sidewalk. If we want a future to frame in the city of dreams, the strategy needs to combine the best of the past with an eye towards what’s coming, and what has already arrived.
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