Anyone Home? Los Angeles architect Fritz Haeg’s ‘Salons’ create a sense of community for people from various disciplines who might never meet

One summer night in 1947 the science fiction writer Ray Bradbury and a  friend decided to take an after-dinner walk down Wilshire Boulevard.  Even then, just two years after the end of World War II, Los Angeles was in the expansionist thrall of the automobile. The idea of two men strolling, not driving, down the Miracle Mile was already seen as somehow deviant, anti-social, potentially criminal. Within minutes a police patrol car came up alongside the two suspects, who were questioned at length just for attempting the Old World social activity of flâneurie. In LA, a place that thinks itself a city but is just a centreless agglomeration of low-density hubs that could not communicate were it not for the freeways and boulevards that link them, it has become a cliché that no one walks, that people are separated by distance, by the cocoons of their cars, by their insular lifestyle. It has become the guiding myth of its own self-image of modern alienation. It creeps into films such as Robert Altman’s Short Cuts (1993) or Crash (2004), whose opening voice-over monologue confides that ‘In LA, nobody touches you. We’re always behind this metal and glass. I think we miss that touch so much, that we crash into each other, just so we can feel something’.1

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Haeg has multiple irons in the fire: aside from a nascent private architectural practice, he is also expanding his idea of demanding more from the average home via his Edible Estates project, coaxing enterprising volunteers in nine climatically distinct parts of the country to scalp their placid, sterile American lawns and replace them with productive, regionally appropriate gardens that are completely edible and sustainable. (One already exists in an otherwise trim neighbourhood in Salina, Kansas.) It may be nearly impossible to wean suburbanites from the glories of the over-fertilized, hyper-manicured artifice that is the front lawn, but Haeg isn’t alone in this green insurrection, and if social critics like James Howard Kunstler and the makers of the documentary The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream (2004) are correct in their predictions about the impending implosion of sprawl as a workable model for living, experiments such as Edible Estates may be just the beginning of an infrastructure of agrarian subsistence that will become the norm.

But doom is still down the road, and Haeg, who is compiling a thick book about the salons as a definitive record, diary and instructional handbook (with Rashomon-like recollections by various participants about what actually did or did not take place), recently thought out loud that he might bring the salons to a close in 2006. In fact, expressing a need to leave LA for a while and travel, he mused about holding local Sundowns in cities around the world, taking the salon back to its origins and inviting the locals to bring something new to the idea. That way, like the proverbial one-suitcase man, or a tortoise, you can always take your home with you anywhere you go and still make new friends.

  • 1. From Crash (2004), screenplay by Paul Haggis