os Angeles, with its abundant natural light
and equally abundant, stylish stock of housing, is a
decorator's dream, a place to invent and reinvent past
styles, as well, of course, as to celebrate the new. The
slate of the city, historically speaking, is a comparative
blank. I am a native and, like many others, naïve of
California history anterior to the Gold Rush. In my own
mind, conditioned by movies, I trace Los Angeles' built
and visual environment back to the era, 1937, depicted in
Roman Polanski's seminal 1974 film Chinatown, a sort of
film noir in Technicolor. The muted high period style of its
art direction, headed by Richard Sylbert whose team won
an Academy Award for the effort, is a moodily romantic
background to Chinatown's tale of a particularly West
Coast kind of corruption, all amoral beauty.
l
HYLAND
