CITIES ARE FOR PEOPLE
THE LOS ANGELES REGION PLANS FOR LIVING
Alvin Lustig [Designer], Mel Scott [Author]
Alvin Lustig [Designer], Mel Scott [Author]: CITIES ARE FOR PEOPLE [THE LOS ANGELES REGION PLANS FOR LIVING]. Los Angeles: Pacific Southwest Academy, 1942. Quarto. Photographically printed thick wrappers. Red decorated endpapers. 109 pp. Elaborately designed textblock with photographs, photomontage, diagrams and maps. Closed tear near foot of spine. Covers show some very light wear, but it is mostly confined to the spine tips and edges. A nearly fine copy of this exceptionally influential work. 9 x 12 softcover book with 109 pages elaborately designed by Alvin Lustig with drawings by Bob Holdeman. Figures supplied by the Pictograph Corporation [the American arm of Otto Neurath's Isotype]. Photography collected from a wide variety of sources, including the Farm Security Administration and Julius Shulman [whose photo credit is uniformly misspelled 'Schulman' throughout]. Lithographed by the Homer Boelter Company in May 1942.
"This business requires a certain amount of finesse."
27-year-old Alvin Lustig truly outdid himself with this high profile assignment for Mellier (Mel) Scott, a journalist turned urban planner -- a true synthesis of artistic vision in the service of social and urban problem-solving. Lustig employed every tool at his disposal: photography, photomontage, illustration and typography to produce a document that accurately reflected an optimistic vision for the future of the L. A. Basin based on single-family homes, spacious boulevards and broad freeways.
"Either you bring the water to LA or you bring LA to the water."
CITIES ARE FOR PEOPLE was designed and published concurrently with Lustig's art direction and redesign of John Entenza's California Arts & Architecture, where his sensitive eye and typographic skills helped define the Southern Californian Modern Movement aesthetic.
"The future, Mr. Gittes! The future."
"By the time he died at the age of forty in 1955, [Lustig] had already introduced principles of Modern art to graphic design that have had a long-term influence on contemporary practice. He was in the vanguard of a relatively small group who fervently, indeed religiously, believed in the curative power of good design when applied to all aspects of American life. He was a generalist, and yet in the specific media in which he excelled he established standards that are viable today.
"Lustig created monuments of ingenuity and objects of aesthetic pleasure. Whereas graphic design history is replete with artifacts that define certain disciplines and are also works of art, for a design to be so considered it must overcome the vicissitudes of fashion and be accepted as an integral part of the visual language." -- Steven Heller
Spreads from this volume can be viewed here.
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