Modern Plans, Modern Systems, Modern Living

With Cory Buckner

As an essential player in a new approach to planning and architecture, A. Quincy Jones considered all his projects to be a way of reinventing domestic life and the making of architecture. Examples include the cooperative community of Crestwood Hills, Jones and Emmons’s pioneering work on system-built Eichler Homes, and innovative open plans such as Jones’s own steel house, Jones Steel House #2.

This series of six talks ties together themes of public and private real estate development in Southern California.

In conjunction with A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living.

Cory Buckner is a practicing architect and author in the Los Angeles area. She has a degree in Fine Arts from Chouinard Art Institute and an M.Arch from ULCA. She has also studied landscape architecture at UCLA. The firm, Cory Buckner, Architect, specializes in contemporary residential design and mid-century remodel and restoration projects. In 1994, she and her husband, architect Nick Roberts, purchased a home in Crestwood Hills designed in 1949 by architects A. Quincy Jones, Whitney R. Smith and structural engineer Edgardo Contini. After restoring the house, she spearheaded a preservation movement in the neighborhood, which had at one time 150 houses by Jones, Smith, and Contini as part of a housing cooperative called Mutual Housing Association. Through her efforts 15 of the remaining 30 houses have been designated Historic/Cultural Monuments with the City of Los Angeles. She was awarded the 2002 Los Angeles Preservation Award, “For the inspiring effort to protect and restore the original Mutual Housing Association homes in Crestwood Hills, preserving important examples of Southern California Modernism, and enhancing the sense of community in a unique neighborhood.”

She is the author of A. Quincy Jones, published by Phaidon Press in 2002 and was a finalist for the 2003 Rome Prize. She is currently working on a book on her mentor, architect Frederic P. Lyman, and a book on Crestwood Hills.

Design Strategies for Better Living is presented as part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. This collaboration, initiated by the Getty, brings together seventeen local cultural institutions from April through July for a wide-ranging look at the postwar built environment of the city as a whole, from its famous residential architecture to its vast freeway network, revealing the city’s development and ongoing impact in new ways.