The Perfect Historic Preservation Case Study

Christopher Hawthorne, the Los Angeles Times' new architecture critic, offers a perspective on the historic preservation debate around L.A.'s famed Ambassador Hotel:

"If you were looking for a case study in historic preservation in Los Angeles — for first-year graduate students in urban planning, say, or an architecture critic new to the city — it would be difficult to find one from any era as perfectly, agonizingly balanced as the debate over the Ambassador Hotel.

...As Los Angeles, having reached the limits of its legendary sprawl, continues to double back on itself, more sites like the one where the Ambassador sits will likely be coming under pressure for development. There promise to be fewer pure debates like the one over Bertram Goodhue's Central Library two decades ago, for example, where the need to save a particular building seems obvious, and more like the one that has swirled around the Ambassador."

Thanks to Chris Steins