The Forum is a place, whether temporal or spatial, for
the discussion of ideas and concepts related to architecture and urban design in Los Angeles. But the Forum is also an (ongoing) process of production. Our bi-monthly newsletter and pamphlets are extensions of our events and a central component of our activities.
In the long run, we would like to collect a much wider array of information into a “Building Base”: a unified encyclopedia which collects the fragmentary ways in which the abstract social, economic and physical structures of our community are articulated — in a format which will allows makers of architecture in Los Angeles to comprehend what now appears as a vast and formless context and to create critical moments of coherence within that environment. The “Building Base” project would be both a unified architectural archive and a manual. Both a collection of myths and anecdotes and an analytical and critical survey of the emerging architecture of Los Angeles. In a world of increasingly complex and more manipulable forms of information and communication it would also allow a larger public to understand and respond in a
critical fashion to the representations of their world formed by our architecture.