House Beautiful

Nicolai Ouroussoff suggests that Los Angeles housing developers make use of a deep and talented pool of domestic architects (“Let’s Go Back to the Drawing Board,” May 14). One could hardly fault the need. Many less informed than he decry the overbuilt, under-designed houses besieging views and clogging hillsides. We beg for more suitable solutions than fake Tudor, Cape Cod and just plain Humongous.

But Ouroussoff leaves out a highly culpable element of the design debacle: Bankers loath to lend to developments different from financially successful ones backed in the past.

It takes a village to raise a roof. Keep raising Cain with the decision-makers.

SUSAN LINDLEY

Claremont

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I certainly agree with Ouroussoff regarding the rather banal state of our housing industry. I would certainly welcome new interpretations of our communities by world-respected architects. I would also probably never want to live in one.

I doubt that most people would be able to distinguish the inventive houses of Gregory Ain in Mar Vista from the rather boring, stucco boxes that were built about the same time in my neighborhood in East Long Beach. After 50 years, the houses have been so modified by several owners that they bear little resemblance to their original form. Each modification came about as a result of a change in the way we live, either as an addition for new family members or more room for our “entertainment” centers. As our needs continue to change and grow, so will our home designs, new ones or old.

The problem with so many of these well-intentioned, even brilliant ideas from some of the most respected architects such as Frank Lloyd Wright is that they wanted us to live a very rigid lifestyle to suit their design. The vagaries of our culture suggest that our homes will continue to evolve in more modest ways.

ALAN COLES

Long Beach

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As a painter-sculptor and former professor of studio art for more than 40 years, I have a passionate interest in 20th century architecture and the perplexing question of why we have a mass mediocrity of building when we have an abundance of talented, involved architects. I concluded that architecture as an art (a definition of great architecture) is not found in our education system. We have developed an architecturally ignorant society, with even many great art collections in architecturally embarrassing residences.

Let’s start to educate students at an early age about great spaces. Let’s give them the choices available in our art world to develop an exciting architectural environment.

TONY DeLAP

Corona del Mar

FEIFFER