Ray Kappe; LA Auto Show colors; Le Corbuffet

·30 min·2 clips

Ray Kappe built his family home on a steep, 'unbuildable' lot for $17,000, creating a split-level masterpiece over a stream.

Thanksgiving is the way in. The program opens with a meal idea for art and design fans: a Robert Rauschenberger-style hamburger on focaccia, treated like a flatbed picture plane for toppings people can share. Then the room gets quieter. Frances Anderton marks a period of loss in L.A. architecture, with Dion Neutra's passing followed by Ray's death at age 92. Ray becomes the person the episode keeps circling. Anderton reaches Hernan Diaz-Alonso, now director of SCI-Arc, and asks what remains of the school Ray helped guide. Diaz-Alonso gives an answer that sounds both institutional and scrappy. SCI-Arc, he says, was built for disagreement, openness, dissent, and the search for architecture's role in a changing society. That rebel pirate ship spirit may live inside a more organized school now, but he treats it as something still worth carrying. After the break, the episode changes gears and looks at color. At the L.A. Auto Show, Anderton points to the bright surfaces of cars and asks what those communication colors are trying to say. Sabine Lepine explains the design logic: car designers use paint to speak to particular segments, quietly but deliberately. Then Esther Choi brings design back to the table with Le Corbuffet, Edible Art and Design Classics. The Rauschenberger sandwich does the job neatly. It is visual, useful, a little funny, and easy to share. The episode keeps asking how design works once people use it: a school has to make room for dissent, a car color has to send a signal, and a cookbook has to make an idea edible.

As heard by us

A brisk arc from Ray Cappy's legacy to car color signals and Esther Choi's design-minded cooking.

Ray Cappy's death gives this Design and Architecture hour its frame, and the episode moves from his houses and environmental concerns into the ongoing SCI-Arc story.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want architecture talk that moves from modernist loss to car colors and lunch.

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