For some reason, 30 weeks had always loomed like some kind of important milestone in my pregnancy. I have no idea why, maybe it’s just that 30 weeks seemed so. far. away. when I was in the single-digit weeks. Maybe because the weeks going forward become a kind of a countdown: 10… 9… 8… But it turns out that my 30th was one of the best weeks, as I spent it with family and friends in the golden autumn glow of Colorado. Maybe way back then, I knew this would be my very last wonderful trip on my own before the biggest adventure of my life.

For almost seven years (!) I’ve been taking fellow design lovers along on walking tours, bike rides, and light-rail field trips to visit historical landmarks, unfinished buildings, new restaurants and bars, freshly planted parks, abandoned subway stations and many, many more places all throughout Los Angeles (but mostly on the east side of town). It’s all been part of the nonprofit I founded called design east of La Brea, or de LaB, where we highlight the work of designers living and working east of La Brea.

After hosting more than 100 events, we’ve got something really exciting coming up this fall. Last year we were awarded a $20,000 NEA grant for a new programming track called Making LA, where we toured 10 projects by architects, artists, and designers that are improving communities throughout the east side of Los Angeles. After hosting 10 incredible programs, the series will culminate in the Making LA conference, a one-day event on Friday, November 7 where we’re bringing together designers and city leaders to talk about the future of the city in four critical areas: Density, Transportation, Community, and Water.

I’m pulling together the Transportation track (as you might expect) and we have some pretty amazing speakers, including a keynote from new LADOT head Seleta Reynolds, car-free comedian Kristina Wong, South LA transportation advocate Tafarai Bayne, an incredible story about how hard it really is to improve bus shelters in LA, and my dream panel on the future of LA streets including representatives from the Mayor’s Great Streets Initiative, Los Angeles Walks, People St, and streetscape projects on Broadway and Figueroa.

To sweeten the deal, I have a super secret discount code just for my friends which includes free admission to the VIP party on the evening before the conference. If you’d like to take advantage of it, drop me a line. And if you’d like to spread the word, here’s a handy graphic for you to post or share with friends. I hope to see you at Making LA!

As part of a new mission the excellent SF-based publication The Bold Italic proposed a rather bold experiment earlier this year to also publish stories about Los Angeles. I could not be more excited about this proposal, as it allows what’s happening down here to be covered by the another great editorial voice.

But after a great piece by my friend Gregory Han on last week’s CityLab event, which focused on the future of LA, I’m not sure the Bold Italic readers (who, I would guess from these comments are mostly not from LA) are as excited as I am. Here are some of the most, um, passionate comments, from the Facebook post of the article:

I’ve written many many times about my love for Sister Corita Kent, the designer, activist and nun whose work was inspired by the place she called “marvelously unfinished Los Angeles.” Next summer, the Pasadena Museum of California Art will be mounting a comprehensive exhibition of her work, and to get pumped up for the show, they’re hosting a series of events starting this fall. On Saturday, October 11 at 3pm, I’m thrilled to announce that I’ll be moderating a panel with three wonderful women—Juliette Bellocq, Louise Sandhaus and Jan Steward—who have been influenced by Kent’s work. We’ll talk about her life and her legacy, but I’m most excited to hear from these ladies on how they’ve been able to keep Corita’s spirit alive through their own art. All details here. See you then!

Over a year ago I told you about a Kickstarter I was participating in to raise money for LA’s first-ever pedestrian campaign through Los Angeles Walks, where I’ve been a steering committee member for several years. As part of that campaign we promised to create an annual “state of walking” report for the city to help keep tabs on how LA is improving for walkers. I’m excited to announce Footnotes, a new publication edited by me and designed by the lovely Colleen Corcoran.

Among the many awesome pieces I edited, I wanted to point out two features that I particularly enjoyed working on. One is an interview with Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne about his work to promote walking in LA, including his recent Boulevards series, and the many other ways he’s seeing LA change for the better when it comes to building new pedestrian infrastructure. The second feature, which was really a treat for me, was editing a timeline of LA pedestrian milestones with the awesome folks behind @LAHistory. This timeline, which goes all the way back to the founding of the city with the nine-mile walk of the Pobladores, includes several residents who became famous for walking as well as an entire sport popular here named “pedestrianism.” Who knew we had so many great walkers and walking events as part of LA’s history?

The publication is rounded out with stories, essays, drawings, infographics, and much more walking content from Rudy Espinoza, Randal Henry and Manal Aboelata-Henry, Andy Janicki, Daveed Kapoor, Yuval Bar-Zemer, Dylan Lathrop, Andy Martinez, Outpost, Mark Vallianatos, DJ Waldie, Valerie Watson, Brian Rea, and Rosten Woo.

We’ll slowly be publishing the content online (and translating many of the stories to Spanish as well), but you can get a copy by donating to Los Angeles Walks today!

To tell the truth, I hadn’t planned to announce my pregnancy to the entire internet at once.  But as I started to write the story, I realized that I had an awful lot more to tell that didn’t neatly fit in a Facebook status update.

Our journey to get here was not quite easy: Last year I had a miscarriage. I wanted to tell my story not only to talk openly about this still-quite-taboo subject, but also to share how technology, specifically, an app that I downloaded on a whim, had helped me get through this difficult time, learn more about my body, and, after many long and trying months, finally get pregnant again.

My goal in writing my story was that women like me who were searching the internet in vain trying to find some truth about what happens after a loss would somehow find my words, and with them, a little bit of solace. A few days after publishing this piece, I’ve been completely floored by the comments, emails, texts, and Tweets, and the sheer number of women who have used my essay as a cue to share their own stories. So that alone has been truly amazing.

You can head over to Gizmodo and check out the whole thing: “How An App Helped Me (And 20,000 Other Women) Get Pregnant.” Thanks so much for reading and sharing this important story.

Now on to some other important tasks: Like finding a baby stroller that can make it up the steep hills of my neighborhood!

The legendary designer, fashion icon, lover of LA, and my hero Deborah Sussman has passed away at age 83. I’d known Deborah for over 10 years had written about her inspiring work many, many, many times over the years.

She was a gracious and generous person as well, which is why I came to have one of her designs hanging over my bed. It’s a concession stand sign from the 1984 Olympics. And it’s one of my most prized possessions.

The last story I wrote about Deborah was an as-told-to about the 84 Olympics published in Los Angeles Magazine’s 80s issue this summer. As soon as I heard we had lost Deborah, I decided to publish the entire interview here, not only because she tells some fabulous stories about the Olympics, but also because the whole conversation reveals so much about Deborah herself. Just as I was typing it all in here, I could feel her personality leaping off the screen.

I spent several hours at Deborah’s home, which is filled with colorful trinkets gathered from around the world (and Eames loungers, of course). She insisted on pouring us tall flutes of cava at 4 in the afternoon. “It’s much better than champagne,” she said as she set the bottle on the counter, definitively. I took a sip and held up the flute to the light. She was right. The bubbles were tinier and sparklier than any effervescent drink I’d ever had. How had I never noticed this? Of course Deborah had.

For those of us who were lucky enough to know her work—and her blue fur boas and her Rudi Gernreich dresses—you can see that it is that same attention to detail which drove all her creative decisions, from her adamant insistence to use native LA flowers for the athletes’ bouquets during the Olympics, to always selecting the perfect shade of hot pink.

When I wrote a story for New York Times about the opening of her retrospective, one thing she said still resonates with me:

“Isn’t this something?” Sussman remarked, her turquoise-lined eyes glittering behind purple-framed eyeglasses. “All my life, I was a hard worker, and I would add that much of the time, I loved what I was working on.”

I hope one day I can stand in a room looking back at my life like that and think the very same thing. I think she would really enjoy me sharing with you some of these never-before-heard tales about one of the things she loved working on the most.

Both photos of Deborah by the awesome and amazing Laure Joliet, who photographed the New York Times article I wrote about Deborah and our de LaB event at her show. 

***

Interview with Deborah Sussman about the 1984 Olympics recorded at her home in West LA, May 2014

After she pours the cava, we begin by talking about the de LaB event I organized as part of her show at the WUHO Gallery…

AW: I did record a little bit of when we did the event at the gallery, so I do have a few things that you were saying that night, which was fun.

DS: You know, all of us who were part of putting it together, we were all drunk. I think it was mainly because Barbara [Bestor] invited us to Musso’s and we were all having martinis, and there were some people there that didn’t really drink who were at our table. The rest of us got smashed.

AW: That’s how it should be. You were celebrating!

So, I’m going to take you back to like five different moments we can use to tell this story, and the first one is when you received the call, when you found out that you were being tapped to work on this project.

DS: Well, it started not with a bang but a whimper, because we had thought that we were appropriate to work on the Olympics. However, before that all happened they had told us—I don’t know how much detail to go into—that it was all given to John Follis and Robert Miles Runyan. Robert Miles Runyan did the “Stars in Motion,” and then they were going to give all of the environmental graphics to John Follis, who was older than me and he’d been a mentor mainly in terms of how you do environmental graphics, and what are the steps, and what’s the fee and constraints. He was a mentor that way, and he had a name as a designer, and he was part of the then-old boys club, of which I was not.

AW: And how old were you at the time?

DS: Well, I was born in ‘31 and we’re talking about ‘82, ‘83, so I was 51-ish. And then along came Jon Jerde. Jon was a great strategist, and we started with the best client in the world, Harry Usher. He was an entertainment lawyer; he was charismatic, handsome, intuitive risk taking, charming, and Jon had met Harry Usher and talked about the impossibility of building anything and the absurdity of trying to build a stadium or anything with just a couple of years and no money.

And Harry went along with Jon’s concept. That was to take existing facilities and adapt them for the needs of the Olympics, so where you wanted big structures, the idea was use ordinary building scaffolding, and where there were intimate transactions with cashiers and tickets and so forth, that could be done in tents rather than in solid buildings.  And so it was making use of the constraints in a very brilliant way.

And so Jon’s office was working on ideas like for—I think in the beginning it might have been, well, I’ll have to remember the sequence, but anyway the idea of using bar mitzvah tents and tweaking them, and the building scaffolding, and chain link fences, fencing, because everybody was all freaked about safety.

So there were all these more or less disregarded materials used for other purposes that were temporary, and the Olympics is a temporary event. So Jon came up with the strategy—it wasn’t even adaptive reuse; it was using materials that were meant for one purpose for another purpose, so Harry loved the idea.

While that was happening I had been told, of course we probably called this guy, Dan Stuart, and he said well, thanks for your call but we’ve given everything to John Follis and Robert Miles Runyan. Well, that combo didn’t sit well with Harry Usher. Jon was looking at it in a more or less logical somewhat conventional way.  Jon had met us, and me, and he’d already started to talk to us about—or maybe we were already working on Horton Plaza—so we finally got an assignment and the first assignment was only to do the signing plan for the UCLA Village on the field, so the athletes shouldn’t get lost. And Jon said to me, don’t even think about that. You dream, dream, see the big picture, and I did.

Somehow I saw in my head this sky and the ground sprinkled like confetti, sprinkled with all magical stuff that shimmered and that expressed joy, excitement, you know, expressed the goals of the Olympics. I have this thing in my head, and it came out. First of all, everybody was crying for a color palette, we need a color palette, and John Follis had already started a color palette but it was very sort of academic and it certainly didn’t have magenta and those crazy colors. He just thought there should be bright colors in the foreground, I think it was, and Mediterranean colors in the background.

Well, when I involve myself with color it’s conceptual. I’m very intuitive, however, but when it comes to color I’m also very conceptual. I don’t just choose colors I like. I choose colors that are appropriate for the program at hand. So I went to the paper drawers – this is so long ago, can you imagine? I’m talking about early ‘83. Nobody used computers. We had paper drawers and we cut up paper, my favorite activity, cut up paper, and I had a mania for collage which was nourished in my years with Ray and with Sandro Girard. And so I pulled these colored papers out of the drawer and they turned out to be the very colors that we used.

AW: And you said they were papers you’d collected?

DS: Well, mostly those papers were solid colored papers, but I also have a paper collection of rarer papers, but that’s how we did color. So I pulled out these colors and I began to play with them, and they were the colors I had observed in celebration and areas of celebration along the Pacific Rim, Mexico, Japan, India a little bit further away, China – the colors basically of the Hispanic communities that impact Los Angeles, and the Asian community.

We have a vast collection of photographs of Mexico, India, Japan – that’s just FYI. Once, when the Olympics were over, we were invited to a conference in Mexico and we went to Mexico and Paul took pictures of fields of flowers, magenta mainly, that were in the Olympic colors, after we had done. So, had I never been at the Eames Office, had I never known Alexander Girard, known as Sandro, I don’t know what I would have done, but nobody else in the world ever would either.

While it was going on, there was [Richard] Koshalek and the head of CalArts. Koshalek was at MOCA and—it’ll come to me—and Koshalek came around while we were working and he said it’s going to get the world’s applause, and it did. But he said that while we were working in this big warehouse.

AW: That’s right. Tell me how you worked, when you had the team assembled.

DS: Well, Robert Fitzpatrick is the name of the head of CalArts who came along and said, he saw what we were designing and he said, I want something of that on every one of my forty-eight, whatever it was, arts venues, so we did that, too.

So in the beginning, the committee was on the UCLA campus, and then it moved to this building where SCI-Arc used to be. Anyway, they wanted us designers to come and work in their headquarters and Jon said no, we have to have our own space. We have to be free. So they rented a warehouse on Sixth Street near downtown. No, it was on Eighth Street.

AW: So, on the other side of the 110 from downtown?

DS: I think it may have been just this side of it. But it was this big space, and I’ve got lots of stories about that but I don’t want to tell anything that’s going to be bad for somebody. So what we had was sawhorses, and it was all temporary, like the Olympics. And Jon rightly strategized for all the Olympic design activity to have them under that one roof. And it was fantastic, because I could walk around, I mean there was a whole group of graphic designers and architects and industrial designers. And we at the peak numbered 150, but in the beginning it was just a few of us rattling around. And then we hired more and more people, and nobody had a budget, nobody knew how much it was going to cost, but we got paid.

So, that’s what happened, and we gradually, I mean I have pictures of me pointing at some presentation board, you know, so people came and worked there. It was in the open, so that the leaders could see what people were doing.  And everybody had goodwill. We were working just like an athletic team. The goal was further, higher, faster, and that’s how we felt. And our group grew and grew, and it finally got organized into teams of people that would make sure that the stuff that was built and in rolls and everything came to Eighth Street and went out to the right venue on the right truck.

Designers were doing this, not just designing, and that was one of the things that was so extraordinary and so fascinating, that people kind of—there were leaders of different components of what needed to be done, and there were people doing it, and we were all living under the same roof.

AW: And just the fact that everything was manufactured here, everything was being produced, it was all local.

DS: Well, it was. At one point the committee said we’ve got all our sponsors lined up now. That was Peter Ueberroth’s outreach program, and money is no object. But by then it was so late in the game, and almost every supplier west of the Mississippi was working on the L.A. Olympics.

I’ll tell you another funny thing. When we were in Eighth Street, maybe there was a conference room area, maybe not, but we put up this huge, huge piece of photo paper, floor to ceiling, and it was going to be the outline and the schedule and the spreadsheet for everything. Well, we got as far as the first week, and then nobody ever filled it out. Nobody knew what to write. We just did, we did it, and we made it, and we got paid. Could that ever happen now? I doubt it. I don’t know, maybe.

AW: What was one of the moments where you were challenged, and I’m sure there were many, but when you were kind of maybe scared that it wasn’t going to be pulled off, or the drama moment.

DS: There were mistakes. I did a boo-boo. But before I forget, I just wanted to mention to you, and I don’t know if this should be on the record or off. This should be off the record.

She tells me something off the record.

DS: Sometimes you get so passionate about every aspect of what you’re doing, at least I do, I get so emotionally involved and I want everything to be just right, and exactly just right, and things were coming along very well. So, there was a design that was supposed to be attached to the walkway to a bridge, above the walkway at the UCLA campus that separated the field from the village and the buildings on the left.  It was the major walkway and there was this bridge, and the bridge had chain link fence on it. And so designers were making this beautiful mural that would have to be sewn or held together out of the different colors of nylon. And it was such a beautiful design.

So I went there. It was going up. It was in the evening, and the colors looked glorious, but all the pieces of nylon, the edges were crooked and sagging and I made them take it down. And I was saying to one of my lieutenants; let’s just make it out of board so it’ll be straight. And the awesome shots of it, unfinished in the nylon, like stained glass, glorious colors coming through, and I made them take it down. Isn’t that awful? Awful, but that’s in the fever, I was having a kind of fever.

AW: Were you actually out there going to every site and looking at things?

DS: No, there were too many sites too simultaneous, so we had teams going to different sites. And Paul and I and Jon decided that the sites that were the most feasible for us to affect, and will be the most seen, were the ones that made our core group’s attention, like the stages at UCLA Village and USC and the USC Village in UCLA, and swimming venue.

And everybody was great. Everybody was great, except there’s always somebody, one or two people, you give them 13 or 14 colors and that’s not enough, they have to get some more colors of their own. That happened very briefly and not very seriously.

AW: So as you’re getting closer to the time and you have so much less time than Olympics now, like it’s crazy how much more time they get to do things.

DS: Oh, they did before, too. Other countries had like ten years.

AW: So why was the time so limited for L.A.? They didn’t have the money?

DS: Maybe Paul remembers. I think it’s partly because it wasn’t going to be handled by the feds. It wasn’t getting any government money, so that means all the money had to be raised, but the work had to be done while the money was being raised, and that’s why everything was on the cheap, on the cheap, on the cheap, and at the end they said you can spend any money you want, and it was too late.

AW: Did you ever get to take advantage of that part of it, maybe for the opening ceremonies?

DS: The opening ceremonies, oh, the ceremonies is a story all by itself, and it’s not very pretty. David Wolper was in charge of ceremonies, and he did everything he could to ignore what we were doing. We had this design guide and it had all the approved colors on it, and even though there was a red and blue, it had next to it approve colors, disapprove relationship. The disapprove relationship was red, white and blue, but David Wolper did everything he could to make the ceremonies red, white and blue with that Sam the Eagle and this fake rocket, and it couldn’t have been more corny and more different from everything else in the Olympics.

AW: But were you behind when everybody held up those—

DS: No. That’s a classic staging trick. We were not involved in that, and I don’t even remember whether David made the colors red, white and blue. There’s a picture of us all looking at the coliseum in the Design Quarterly.

AW: Okay, so there was that tension I guess between the red, white and blue.

DS: Well, that is the only instance that I can remember. Sam the Eagle was a fait acoompli long before we were hired.

AW: Do you remember a moment where, opening ceremonies happens, whatever, did you remember a moment where you could sit back and actually enjoy it enjoy what you had done.

DS: It was hard, because everything I saw, if only it could be this, or if only we had had another one of those over there. But it was pretty exciting. I mean, it was almost like I was in a dream.

AW: Well, it was your dream. Were you seeing your dream coming true everywhere you looked?

DS: Yeah.

AW: The confetti especially. There were a few moments I feel like where I saw videos, the confetti or something, or it just felt like confetti itself was sprinkled across the city. That’s very much the way it looked.

DS: Well, Jon invented this phrase, “An invasion of butterflies.”  And he also invented “Festive federalism,” because we had inherited the story motion. If the story motion was in use, like on a moving vehicle or on a fast moving screen, it blurred.  But if you took the idea of the stripes and then you did playful things with them, you did other things with them in the different colors and not in red, white and blue that became a language that Jon Jerde called festive federalism, and he said that about what I was up to.

AW: What was favorite small detail that maybe people didn’t notice, that only you would notice?

DS: I’ll tell you about two things. One was that there are people who work for the Olympic committee that get involved with the Olympics hoping and thinking and experiencing that it got them a lot of money and they got some notice. So there are these Olympic committee groupies that travel around, and sometimes we saw their picture in the paper, claiming that they did what we did. We never even met them. But we did meet one of them, and this guy was English, I believe, unless he was German.

And we came up with the idea that the winners would all get appropriate local, exotic flowers, including birds of paradise and other southern California or California kind of florae. And this guy said, you must be crazy. Athletes get roses, and that’s what we want them to have. We? He. So we went ahead with our plan and there are all these pictures of the athletes with exotic flowers and birds of paradise, looking great. We have pictures. Sports Illustrated mentioned the flowers.

AW: That’s awesome. That’s the kind of detail I like! You knew it was part of your style guide, you knew that would exactly fit particularly, and somebody wouldn’t understand that who didn’t have that same level of finesse.

DS: That triggered another memory that I wanted to tell you. One day, working down at 8th Street, I was sketching. I sketched; we didn’t have computers, it was all done by hand, paste up, and so there was a picture of the hurdles and athletes jumping over them, and part of our mission was to identify everything that we possibly could as part of the L.A. 84. So I’m sketching on the hurdles, and I’m sketching that L.A. 84. It fit in that Corbu stencil type on the hurdle.

And Harry Usher came walking by and looked at what I had done, and he said, this is going to be very useful to us. And one of the reasons why it’s so useful and so ubiquitous is that it didn’t have those lines in it that the “Stars in Motion” had.  It was very bold, very direct; it said L.A. 84, and that L.A. 84, became the name and everything it could be applied to, it was.

AW: So that actually became the name of everything.

DS: That little sketch, this big. I had another story, too. When we began to work on the village and then everybody began to say, well what are the color