RIP Todd, 2003-2011

I am very sad to report that earlier today, Todd lost his battle with a malignant nerve sheath tumor that had been aggressively growing on his left hind leg.

Todd was rescued in January of 2004 as a six-month-old puppy, when he came to live with Paul (his brother) and me.

Todd seemed pretty clearly to have a good percentage of Plott Hound in him, as you can tell by looking at the photos in the link.  Plotts are native to North Carolina, and hardly anyone here in L.A. has heard of them.  When we were in Tennessee last summer, however, he was regularly recognized as a Plott by local folk who knew of the breed.

Amazing Gluten-free, High-fat, Semi-paleo Mac & Cheese Recipe

I grew up with Mom's made-from-scratch, baked-in-the-oven Macaroni and Cheese, which was always a favorite in our house. I never even tasted the stuff from the box (that strangely goes by the same name but is almost completely unrelated) until college.

Her basic cookbook, then and now, has always been the 1963 Good Housekeeping Cookbook.

In more recent years, Mom has managed to track down additional copies of that exact same edition...

...and now my sisters and I all have our own.

The recipe presented below was adapted from the "Basic Baked Macaroni and Cheese" recipe from that cookbook. 

Mac + Cheese is one of the things I have missed after going paleo a couple of years ago.  I won't say I never made it again, but I have definitely gotten out of practice, with a recipe that had become something of a specialty. After discovering gluten-free pasta at my local Trader Joe's, I've made it a few times over the past several weeks, and I think I've managed to get my Mac + Cheese Mojo back.

New Community Group: SoCal Obejctivists

I just got back from Chicago where I had an awesome weekend courtesy of the Chicago Objectivist Society, at their MINICON.  Over the past year and a half, I've made many good objectivist friends in Atlanta, Denver and now Chicago (among other places). All those cities have vibrant objectivist community clubs, run by and for people with an enthusiasm for Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.

Once I realized how much fun was being had by these folks, with their monthly socials, dinner lecture events, and conferences, I started thinking how much fun it would be to start such a group here in the L.A. area.  One would think that with the Ayn Rand Institute right here in our backyard, such a club would be thriving, but there isn't really one. (I guess that would make Irvine the backyard of L.A. Well maybe that's a bit of a stretch, but stay with me.)

Meanwhile, I was going back and forth to Tennessee, and even living there for a while, for a house I designed and helped build. Then the new year rolled around and I thought it was a great time to start up the club.  Then I had a freak accident requiring hand surgery, and all that stuff that completely derailed the first half of the year.  My summer was spent getting caught up, and now I'm finally moving forward again.

Which means:

ITS TIME TO START THE CLUB ALREADY!

It also helps that I've become friends with Objectivist sex blogger Jason Stotts over the past several months, and he wants a local club here in SoCal too.  So, without any further ado, we are proud to announce the formation of the SoCal Objectivists.

From the 'About' page on our Google Group:

This announcement list is for Objectivists and others in Southern California seriously interested in Ayn Rand's ideas. It's purpose is to announce our periodic, informal social events, and distribute info about other events of interest, such as Objectivist campus clubs and Ayn Rand Institute Events.

We're planning our first social event for the evening of Saturday, September 17th, probably in the Long Beach area. Meeting locations will alternate monthly between Los Angeles and Inland Empire/Orange County. Our goal is to create simultaneous L.A. and I.E./O.C. chapters under one larger organization.


For now we're running things from the Google Group, but we will have a regular web page up and running soon. You can follow us on Twitter @SoCalOists, or like us on Facebook, or just sign up to get our announcements at our Google Group.  We will also be disseminating information about other local events of interest via the Google Group, such as objectivist campus club events and Ayn Rand Institute events.

The Auditorium Building - Additional Images & Tour Info

Since it's less than two weeks until the Big Tour of the Auditorium Building, as well as the Louis-Sullivan's-Birthday-Edition of my talk on Viollet-le-Duc, Sullivan and Wright, and I'm in full-on final prep mode this week. I'm also very excited!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about with this tour, here's the deal: I'm leading a tour of one of the greatest extant works (the Auditorium Building) by the Godfather of Modern Architecture (Louis Sullivan), on Friday, September 2nd, starting at 2 pm.

The Auditorium Building is now owned by Roosevelt University, and we will be visiting several spaces that are part of Roosevelt that aren't generally available on a walk-in basis to the general public. We will also be seeing some spaces that are viewable on a walk-in basis, as well as visiting the Auditorium Theatre in a private, specially-arranged group tour.  All in all, we will be seeing as complete a picture of the entire building as one can have, and we will see Sullivan's architectural genius on full display.

To kick off the week, I thought I'd post a few additional pictures of the Auditorium Building from my visit there last month.  Let's start off with some of the Roosevelt University portions of the building that are not part of the Auditorium Theatre itself.

John Lautner Tour: Harpel House, 1956

The next house I bring you from last weekend's Lautner Tour is the Harpel House.  Nine years after the Jacobsen House, we can see that structure is clearly a major theme in John Lautner's work. Harpel displays his ongoing interest in developing a fully integrated and expressed structural system, for each project, as an important architectural value.

Harpel is located a few miles west of the Jacobsen House, just down Mulholland and on the opposite side about a block. From the road, there is a long driveway that goes uphill to a level pad where the house sits. You can get a pretty clear picture of the siting of the house from the Google Satellite view:

The Harpel House is the white bar at the lower right.  The octagon to the left is Lautner's famous Chemosphere, aka the Malin House. The small white circle just below the Harpel House is a Futuro which is apparently being restored by the Harpel's owner.

We weren't allowed to photograph inside the house, so I'll give an exterior tour and describe a few things I liked about the inside, using the floor plan for visuals.

John Lautner Tour: Jacobsen House, 1947

Last weekend I had the wonderful treat of participating in the special tour of John Lautner-designed homes that was jointly put on by the MAK Center and the John Lautner Foundation.  The whole thing was done in celebration of what would have been Lautner's 100th birthday on July 16th of this year.

I present them here in the reverse of the order in which I saw them on the tour, for a couple of reasons. First, by reversing the order, I will roughly present them in a chronological sequence from earlier career to later, which I think makes sense with this particular group of projects. Second, it makes little sense to lead with Sheats/Goldstein, since everything is pretty much anticlimactic after that.

One more introductory note: the MAK and Lautner folks who organized the tour did a great job, and produced a booklet for the tour with information about the houses. In my blog posts in this series, all the images are my own photographs, with the exception of one or two archival photos from the booklet, and the Lautner drawings which I scanned from the tour booklet.

The Jacobsen is on Multiview Drive, just below Mulholland Drive, overlooking the San Fernando Valley above Studio City and Universal City.  Multiview is a pretty good street for architecture; Schindler's wonderful Kallis House, with its butterfly roof and quirky stone fireplaces, is nearby on the same side of the street.

This is an early-career project for Lautner, dating from 1947.  According to Wikipedia, he had left Frank Lloyd Wright's employment and gone off on his own by that time, although he did not finally obtain his own architecture license until 1952.

So, this house is the work of an unlicensed individual who would have found himself in violation of California law had he have claimed to have been an architect. Ahem. Don't get me started.

The other houses on the tour were better concealed from the road; this house reveals itself pretty directly to you as you walk up the driveway:

A Little Pre-tour Lautner Fun at Curbed LA

I had a look at Curbed LA this morning to see if there was anything on there about the Lautner Tour, and I wasn't disappointed!

Curbed rarely disappoints.

Earlier this week they posted a neat little video of appearances by Lautner homes in movies. It's good fun, and they even included the sort-of appearance of the Chemosphere house on the Simpsons. Two houses from the tour are shown here, the Jacobsen and Sheats/Goldstein houses.



They have more info about the houses in the video over at Curbed.

Also don't forget to keep an eye on my live tour update posts, starting in a couple of hours, by following me at:
(pick one)
twitter.com/earl3d
earl3d.tumblr.com
facebook.com/earl3d.

I may even throw in some good stuff that's not even part of the tour!