USC has archived architectural photographer Wayne Thom's vast collection of a decades-long career as the go to photographer for many California late modernist architecture and other international projects. Thom fell into architectural photography via his brother, an architect, and documented the late wave of glass and white brutality that became the aesthetic during the 70s.
The Annenberg School of Communications by A. Quincy Jones (1974-9) now houses other student services and there's a new building for the Communications school. But it's a fabulous building as seen here via Thom in its vintage iteration. I still haven't gotten down to Sunnylands, Jones's other masterpiece for Walter Annenberg, his home in Palm Springs.
Jones was a brilliant, particularly Southern Californian architect but who made that specific design aesthetic ethic every bit as international as his confreres in modernist Europe.
Image by Wayne Thom courtesy USC Digital Archives.
The former home of a Pasadena collector goes Op
USC's Pacific Asia Museum in Pasadena has a more narrow focus than some of its other art venues. Yet Grace Nicholson, in whose 1924 home it now exists, was a kind of west coast version of Edith Halpert (Jewish Museum) collecting artifacts from Asia and the East and so its grounded in its collecting mandate. However: like many other institutions, USC is trying to draw online eyeballs. In turn, they have given Oscar Oiwa and four SC students 120 Sharpies to make a black and white grammable space. It looks very cool, cave-like, a bit sixties psychedelic and I look forward to seeing it.