deasy/penner Spends 5 Minutes With: Sam Lubell, Curator of Never Built: Los Angeles

Pereira and Luckman, LAX Airport, 1952

deasy/penner is a proud sponsor of the upcoming exhibition, Never Built: Los Angeles, opening on July 28, 2013 at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum Los Angeles. Co-curated by Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin and designed by Clive Wilkinson Architects, the show looks at visionary works that had the greatest potential to reshape the city, but never made it past the drawing board stage. We recently caught up with Sam Lubell to chat about the buzzed-about exhibition, which will be on view through September 29, 2013. 

How did Never Built come about? The exhibition came out of an offer by the Getty Research Institute to lend the museum some models of unbuilt architecture projects. From there it ballooned into over 100 projects of all types over the span of over 100 years.

How did you go about selecting the works? We chose projects that we considered "game changers," which would have changed Los Angeles in a profound way. A few are pie in the sky, but we focused on projects that were close to moving ahead. They reveal the breathtaking scope of creativity in the city as well as the frustrating barriers to realization that have stayed largely the same for more than a century.

Are there any projects that should have absolutely been built? I have so many favorites, but the one I wish was built the most is the Olmsted and Bartholomew parks plan, which called for thousands of acres of interconnected parks, all brought together by tree-lined parkways.

What are your favorite examples that were built? The visionary work of mid-century LA, including Welton Becket's Capitol Records building, William Pereira and others' LAX Theme Building and A.C. Martin's DWP Building. I also love the city's earlier gems, like the Bradbury Building, and new ones like the Walt Disney Concert Hall.