Architectural Record – August 2019

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perspectivebooks

Swimming to Suburbia and Other Essays, by Craig
Hodgetts; edited by Todd Gannon. Oro Editions, 220
pages, $24.95.

Reviewed by Deane Madsen

If you meet Craig Hodgetts, it’s hard not to be
swept up by his general enthusiasm—not just
about architecture, but about people, cars,
cities, and surfing. That gusto permeates his
writings, which span nearly half a century,
condensed and collected into this volume.
Divided into four categories—polemics, proj­
ects, people, and performances—the book
unveils the ideas and possibilities that have
influenced Hodgetts’s architectural work.
As the practice of Hodgetts and Hsinming
Fung, partner (and wife), has grown—from its
founding as H+F in 1984 to its current merger
with Mithun—so have the texts that begin
with his early­career efforts with Los Angeles
architect Robert Mangurian. One essay is a
testament to the negotiating skills of both
Hodgetts and Fung: though Hodgetts, as the
outgoing associate dean, thoroughly lambasted
the architec ture at the California Institute of

the Arts campus in Valencia in a

1973 Art Forum article, the couple

still ended up with the school as

the client for their Wild Beast

Pavilion for music some 30 years

later.

As an architecture student on

the East Coast in the mid­1960s,

Hodgetts studied with James

Stirling at Yale University, and he

includes three essays about his

British mentor. A profile pub­

lished in 1976 in Design Quarterly

shows that Hodgetts had embed­

ded himself with Stirling at his

home and office in London, observing the

idiosyncrasies of the character who loomed

large in his life. The other pieces provide a

measured retrospective look: one, a critique of

the Ayala Science Library at the University of

California, Irvine, completed in 1994, two

years after Stirling’s death, alternates between

Hodgetts praising the solidity of the design

and reluctantly recognizing that it was not one

of Stirling’s best works.

Other writings include as­

sessments of the Los Angeles

residential architecture of John

Lautner, the Santa Monica house

that Frank Gehry designed for

himself and family in 1977, and

even ruminations on a car Le

Corbusier designed in 1936. Yet

an urban thrust underlies

Hodgetts’s contributions. In the

essay from which the book

draws its title, the author crafts

a love letter to Los Angeles, the

city he has inhabited for the

better part of four decades (he

was born in Cincinnati). Hodgetts finds that

the city’s streets and freeways have a logic,

while knowing that the beach is its soul. All

considered, the collection, including fiction,

collages, and designs for film sets, proves that

whatever the medium, his all­encompassing

energy translates into impressive production. n

Deane Madsen is a Washington, D.C.–based writer

and photographer specializing in architecture.

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