I don’t mind criticism. This is part of the process for every artist and photographer. What I do mind is an ostensibly educated reviewer giving short shrift to a serious piece of work, simply because she was looking for something funny and sexy and didn’t find it in this piece.
Linear City, now in the collection of the Getty Research Institute at the Getty Center has risen up as a landmark work in Los Angeles urbanism through the efforts and critique of many others at the Los Angeles Center for Architecture and Urban Design, the Art Center College of Design, and the many colleagues at SCI-ARc who have supported this project. It was published in part in The Infrastructural City, a classic handbook on Los Angeles Urbanism at the turn of the century.
No one has to like it but to dismiss this piece as unsexy and the L.A. River as a glorified drainage ditch shows a lack of professionalism and a profound ignorance about Los Angeles.
A Review of Infrastructural City: Networked Ecologies in Los Angeles, Edited by Kazys Varnelis, it has become a landmark classic anthology of writing on urbanism in Los Angeles at the turn of the century.