The LA Forum Reader brings together three decades of discursive writings and publications on architecture, urbanism, and Los Angeles culled from the archives of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. Published under thematic sections: Experiments, Detours, Hunches, and Santa Anas, with interludes dedicated to Art and Architecture, Downtown, and the long-running LA Forum Newsletter, the collected essays and interviews track an uneven and lesser-known history of experimental architecture, postmodern geographies, and alternative urbanism in LA as told by the city’s key designers and thinkers. The publication includes constributions from Robert Adams, Rachel Allen, Rob Berry, Aaron Betsky, Central Office of Architecture, Marco Cenzatti, John Chase, Margaret Crawford, Chava Danielson, Joe Day, Steven Flusty, Russell Fortmeyer, Todd Gannon, Alan Hess, Craig Hodgetts, Victor Jones, Ted Kane, Sylvia Lavin, Douglas MacLeod, Tom Marble, Michael Sweeney, Christopher Tandon, Kazys Varnelis, Mimi Zeiger, and Peter Zellner.

Rob Berry is principal of Berry and Linné and lecturer at the University of Southern California School of Architecture.

Victor Jones is principal of Los Angeles-based design firm Fièvre + Jones, and a writer. The relationships between architecture, infrastructure, and the urban experience play a crucial role in both his creative and intellectual pursuits. Jones is the author of Un pont apart / A Distant Bridge (Métispresses, 2016).

Michael Sweeney is a practicing architect in Los Angeles with Assembledge+.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. She has covered art, architecture, urbanism, and design for a number of publications including the New York Times, Domus, and Architectural Review. She is a contributing editor of Architect and a regular opinion columnist for Dezeen. Zeiger teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design.

Chava Danielson is a principal of DSH // architecture in Los Angeles and adjunct professor in the Architecture/Landscape/Interiors Department at Otis College of Art and Design, where she teaches design studio and courses in urban history and theory.

Joe Day designs and writes in LA, where he leads deegan-day design and teaches at SCI-Arc. He is the author of Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2013). Day contributed a foreword to the new edition of Reyner Banham's Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (University of California, 2009).

Thurman Grant is an architect and educator. He is an adjunct faculty member of the Interior Architecture Department at the Woodbury University School of Architecture. He is an editor of Dingbat 2.0: The Iconic Los Angeles Apartment as Projection of a Metropolis (DoppelHouse Press, 2016).

Duane McLemore is a designer and educator based in Los Angeles. He is a founder of the design studio X Over Zero and teaches in the architecture program at Woodbury University.

Founded in 1987 and incorporated the following year, the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is an independent nonprofit organization that instigates dialogues on design and the built environment through public programming, exhibitions, and publications. LA is a catalytic place for architecture and design, offering lessons that extend globally. Our curatorial stance frames and challenges what architecture means in an evolving city.