Marco Kusumawijaya and the Mak Urban Future Initiative

Last week I attended a dinner organized by Linda Pollack for artists working with urban spaces to meet the first fellow of the Mak center's new Urban Future Initiative at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House. The house was recently donated to the Mak center and the house will be home to the visiting international fellows for stays of around two months. Tonight Marco - who is the first fellow and an architect and environmentalist from Indonesia - presented his research at the Schindler house in West Hollywood. It was a stimulating conversation in terms of thinking about imagining forms of sustainable urbanism. Marco highlighted the Grand Avenue development as a potential opportunity to experiment with sustainable development and admitted his skepticism about the current state of the project proposal. He also spoke a lot about transportation in L.A.

The Fitzpatrick-Leland House as photographed by Julius Shulman in 1936



And by Tom Queally in 2006