Kbrooks single

The September Issue

Whats On the Agenda?

LA's Big on Macarons, Window Dressing & Graphic Design

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FALL MUST HAVES

Mid-Century Modern

Celebrate the End of Summer In Style

Go Lively!

Blake Lively at 26 The Evolution of a Beauty

P.20 SEPT 2013

The Portfolio of Julius Schulman

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CONTENTS•

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Editor-In-Chief: Katie Brooks

Deputy Editor:

Randy Dunbar

Design Director:

Katie Brooks

Creative Director:

Katie Brooks

Managing Editor: Katie Brooks

Senior Articles Editor: Katie Brooks

Features Editor:

Katie Brooks

Articles Editor:

letter from

Katie Brooks

Senior Editors:

Katie Brooks and Randy Dunbar

Senior West Coast Editor: Katie Brooks

Associate Editors:

Katie Brooks and Randy Dunbar

Director of Photography: Katie Brooks

Bookings Director: Katie Brooks

Production Director: Katie Brooks

Assistant to the Editor: Katie Brooks

Fashion Director:

Katie Brooks

Fashion Market Director: Katie Brooks

Fashion Editors:

Katie Brooks

Born and raised in sunny southern California, I wanted to create a lifestyle magazine for women that highlighted all that this fantasy land had to offer.

Apart from the beautiful weather, sparkly beaches, and Hollywood attractions, southern Californian women have a lifestyle that is unlike any other in the world. With the glitz, glamour and excitement that comes from Hollywood, SoCal women have the best of the best at their fingertips, whether it’s shopping, restaurants, or entertainment and SoCal magazine is here to highlight the hottest trends.

However, SoCal does not discriminate against those who aren’t lucky enough to call this amazing place home, but also caters to all women readers as SoCal focuses on the lifestyle of these women. So what makes a SoCal woman and readers so special? SoCal women are fun, outgoing, sexy, and ambitious and I wanted to create a magazine that reflected these values. SoCal magazine not only caters to the hottest topics and trends in southern California, but focuses on why this lifestyle is unlike any other and how if you are lucky enough to call SoCal your home, you should celebrate it and live the golden lifestyle.

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Katie Brooks 7

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agenda food

fashion

featured

fly away

Sweet Spots

Bottega Louie: One of LA’s Best Places to Indulge

By Katie Brooks Photographs by John Myers

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ottega Louie is the loudest place in Los Angeles on a summer evening, happy racket bouncing off the triple-height ceilings, caroming off the bare white walls and glancing off the moldings, pinging off the acres of marble and miles of brass, the roaring wood oven, the market up front, the gleaming open kitchen where military ranks of cooks sweat in their crisp whites.

There is music, an odd selection of B-sides and jazz tunes pouring from the speakers overhead, but you won’t be able to hear it until the ebb of dinner service, when it is time to pay your check and go.

Bottega Louie aims to be all things to all people downtown, and it more or less succeeds — open early enough for breakfast and late enough for supper after the opera, serving elaborate meals and tasty bar snacks, grand enough for a birthday not divisible by five, yet reasonable enough for art students to take out dinner. With bright pink, perfectly wrapped take out boxes that is, of course.

The bar area near the front serves credibility as a cocktail lounge, a wine bar and a cafe.

For dessert there is Bulgarini gelato, and a chocolatey peanut-butter terrine that has already attracted a cult following. Bottega Louie is an easy place to be happy.

“Bottega Louie is an easy place to be happy”

Bottega Louie’s Decadent French Macarons

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a fashion

Window Dressing Themed windows make brilliant vignettes on FIDM’s 5th floor.

By Dagmar Winston Photographs by Kyle Swinehart

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ach semester at fashion school, FIDM, located in downtown Los Angeles, the 5th floor is host to a variety of window displays created by the Visual Communication students. Each semester they are given a theme and told to run with it. The results, quite often, are spectacular. This semester’s theme is nature and

instructor Katherine LoPresti instructed students to build their window displays with “as much organic materials as possible.”

The students work as teams to build everything from the dresses to creating the typography for the windows. The group effort pays off as the nine windows are often the center of attention for visiting parents and prospective students.

“each semester they are given a theme and told to run”

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a featured

Brilliant Berkes Graphic Designer Extraordinaire

Q: What modern day designers inspire you most?

By James Peacock Photograph by Katie Brooks

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riginally from West Vancouver, Sara Berkes is currently in her fourth quarter at FIDM where she is earning her Graphic Design/Branding degree as a Professional Designation Student. She is a graduate of Rockridge Secondary

School (West Vancouver) and University of King’s College (Halifax, Nova Scotia). She is currently vice president of the student AIGA Red Dot Organization as well as is a contributing writer for the FIDM Digital Arts Blog.

A: “Design collective Ghost. They have a design philosophy that I find really fresh and aligns with my own beliefs and values about design.”

Q: What is your dream career?

A: “I really like to learn, and I’m lately discovering that I really like helping other people learn and succeed so I’ve certainly been considering the idea of pursuing a master’s degree and possibly teaching. There are a lot of possibilities!”

Q: The best part about FIDM’s Graphic Design Program thus far has been:

Book Cover Design

Logo Design

CD Cover Design

Applied Branding

A: “Seeing myself improve exponentially since I entered this program. I feel like this program has taught me a lot about my capacity as a student and my creative and technical abilities, and I also feel like it’s really started to help me cement what I’m passionate about and what I’m not.

I’m constantly inspired by my friends and other peers and I love how everyone in the program is always cheering everyone else on. It’s nice to be in a place where people celebrate other people’s successes and help them pick up after their failures. It’s a wonderfully encouraging atmosphere and I’m really thankful I chose to come here.”

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a fly away

Give Me the World Summer’s Top Destinations

By Katie Brooks Photographs by Amy Schiller

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Reader’s Dream Travel Destinations

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Bora Bora.........48% Thailand...........22% St. Tropes.........17% Florence............12% Maui...................5%

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Marc by Marc Ja Phone Case

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Gucci Sunglasses

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Kendra Scott Earrings

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Essie Fall Collection

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Bobbi Brown Fall Lipstick Line

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Steve Madden 'Izzy' Boots

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Live the Golden Lifestyle

magazine

SoCal Magazine is every woman’s chic guide to living the sunny lifestyle of Southern California. SoCal inspires with information on relationships and romance, the best in fashion and beauty, the latest on women’s health and wellbeing, as well as what’s happening in pop culture and entertainment...and just about everything else women need to know about how to live the golden lifestyle. www.socalmag.com

lady

lively

california’s golden girl talks her hot career and sexy new husband

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COVER STORY

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A Sense of Spac

Photographer Julius Schulman’s photography spread California Mid-centu modern around the world.Carefully composed and artfully lighted, his ima promoted not only new approaches to home design but also the ideal of i California living — a sunny, suburban lifestyle played out in sleek, spaciou low-slung homes featuring ample glass, pools and patios.

By Peter Gossell Photographs by Julius Schulman

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ury ages idyllic us,

e

ven if you’re confused by the fork in the driveway, which slopes up to the Edenic apex of Laurel Canyon, or don’t recognize architect Raphael Soriano’s mid-century design landmark, you can’t miss Julius Shulman’s place. It’s the one with the eight-foot-high banner bearing his name—an advertisement for his 2005 Getty Museum exhibition “Modernity and the Metropolis”— hanging before the door to the studio adjoining the house. As displays of ego go, it’s hard to beat. Yet the voice calling out from behind it is friendly, even eager—“Come on in!” And drawing back the banner, one finds, not a monument, but a man: behind an appealingly messy desk, wearing blue suspenders and specs with lenses as big as Ring Dings, and offering a smile of roguish beatitude.

You’d smile, too. At 96, Shulman is the best known architectural photographer in the world, and one of the genre’s most influential figures. Between 1936, when a fateful meeting with architect Richard Neutra began his career, and his semi-retirement half a century later, he used his instinctive compositional elegance and hair-trigger command of light to document more than 6,500 projects, creating images that defined many of the masterworks of 20th-century architecture. Most notably, Shulman’s focus on the residential modernism of Los Angeles, which included photographing 18 of the 26 Case Study Houses commissioned by Arts & Architecture magazine between 1945 and 1967, resulted in a series of lyrical tableaux that invested the high-water moment of postwar American optimism with an arresting, oddly innocent glamour. Add to this the uncountable volumes and journals featuring his pictures, and unending requests for reprints, and you have an artist whose talent, timing, ubiquity, and sheer staying power have buried the competition—in some cases, literally.

Shulman’s decision to call it quits in 1986 was motivated less by age than a distaste for postmodern architecture. But, he insists, “it wasn’t quite retiring,” citing the ensuing decade and a half of lectures, occasional assignments, and work on books. Then, in 2000, Shulman was introduced to a German photographer named Juergen Nogai, who was in L.A. from Bremen on assignment. The men hit it off immediately, and began partnering on work motivated by the maestro’s brand-name status. “A lot of people, they think, It’d be great to have our house photographed by Julius Shulman,” says Nogai. “We did a lot of jobs like that at first. Then, suddenly, people figured out, Julius is working again.”

“I realized that I was embarking on another chapter of my life,” Shulman says, the pleasure evident in his time-softened voice. “We’ve done many assignments”—Nogai puts the number at around 70—“and they all came out beautifully. People are always very cooperative,” he adds. “They spend days knowing I’m coming. Everything is clean and fresh. I don’t have to raise a finger.” As regards the division of labor, the 54-year-old Nogai says tactfully, “The more active is me because of the age. Julius is finding the perspectives, and I’m setting up the lights, and fine-tuning the image in the camera.” While Shulman acknowledges their equal partnership, and declares Nogai’s lighting abilities to be unequaled, his assessment is more succinct: “I make the compositions. There’s only one Shulman.”

“The subject is the power of photography,” Shulman explains. “I have thousands of slides, and Juergen and I have assembled them into almost 20 different lectures. And not just about architecture—I have pictures of cats and dogs, fashion pictures, flower photographs. I use them to do a lot of preaching to the students, to give them something to do with their lives, and keep them from dropping out of school.”

It all adds up to a very full schedule, which Shulman handles largely by himself—“My daughter comes once a week from Santa Barbara and takes care of my business affairs, and does my shopping”—and with remarkable ease for a near-centenarian. Picking up the oversized calendar on which he records his appointments, Shulman walks me through a typical seven days: “Thom Mayne—we had lunch with him. Long Beach, AIA meeting. People were here for a meeting about my photography at the Getty [which houses his archive]. High school students, a lecture. Silver Lake, the Neutra house, they’re opening part of the lake frontage, I’m going to see that. USC, a lecture. Then an assignment, the Griffith Observatory—we’ve already started that one.”

Yet rather than seeming overtaxed, Shulman fairly exudes well-being. Like many elderly people with nothing left to prove, and who remain in demand both for their talents and as figures of veneration (think of George Burns), Shulman takes things very easy: He knows what his employers and admirers want, is happy to provide it, and accepts the resulting reaffirmation of his legend with a mix of playfully rampant immodesty and heartfelt gratitude. As the man himself puts it, “The world’s my onion.”

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I

t all adds up to a very full schedule, which Shulman handles largely by himself—“My daughter comes once a week from Santa Barbara and takes care of my business affairs, and does my shopping”—and with remarkable ease for a near-centenarian. Picking up the oversized calendar on which he records his appointments, Shulman walks me through a typical seven days: “Thom Mayne—we had lunch with him. Long Beach, AIA meeting. People were here for a meeting about my photography at the Getty [which houses his archive]. High school students, a lecture. Silver Lake, the Neutra house, they’re opening part of the lake frontage, I’m going to see that. USC, a lecture. Then an assignment, the Griffith Observatory—we’ve already started that one.”

Yet rather than seeming overtaxed, Shulman fairly exudes well-being. Like many elderly people with nothing left to prove, and who remain in demand both for their talents and as figures of veneration (think of George Burns), Shulman takes things very easy: He knows what his employers and admirers want, is happy to provide it, and accepts the resulting reaffirmation of his legend with a mix of playfully rampant immodesty and heartfelt gratitude. As the man himself puts it, “The world’s my onion.”

Given the fun Shulman’s having being Shulman, one might expect the work to suffer. But his passion for picture-making remains undiminished. “I was surprised at how engaged Julius was,” admits the Chicago auction-house mogul Richard Wright, who hired Shulman to photograph Pierre Koenig’s Case Study House #21 prior to selling it last year. “He did 12 shots in two days, which is a lot. And he really nailed them.” Of this famous precision, says the writer Howard Rodman, whose John Lautner–designed home Shulman photographed in 2002: “There’s a story about Steve McQueen, where a producer was trying to get him to sign on to a movie. The producer said, ‘Look how much you change from the beginning to the end.’

And McQueen said, ‘I don’t want to be the guy who learns. I want to be the guy who knows.’ And Shulman struck me as the guy who knows.”

This becomes evident as, picking up the transparencies from his two most recent assignments, he delivers an impromptu master class.

“We relate to the position of the sun every minute of the day,” Shulman begins, holding an exterior of a 1910 Craftsman-style house in Oakland, by Bernard Maybeck, to the lamp atop his desk.

“So when the sun moves around, we’re ready for our picture. I have to be as specific as a sports photographer—even a little faster,” he says, nodding at the image, in which light spills through a latticework overhang and patterns a façade. “This is early afternoon, when the sun is just hitting the west side of the building. If I’m not ready for that moment, I lose the day.” He does not, however, need to observe the light prior to photographing: “I was a Boy Scout—I know where the sun is every month of the year. And I never use a meter.”

Shulman is equally proud of his own lighting abilities. “I’ll show you something fascinating,” he says, holding up two exteriors of a new modernist home, designed for a family named Abidi, by architect James Tyler. In the first, the inside of the house is dark, resulting in a handsome, somewhat lifeless image. In the second, it’s been lit in a way that seems a natural balance of indoor and outdoor illumination, yet expresses the structure’s relationship to its site and showcases the architecture’s transparency. “The house is transfigured,” Shulman ex30

plains.“I have four Ts. Transcend is, I go beyond what the architect himself has seen. Transfigure—glamorize, dramatize with lighting, time of day. Translate—there are times, when you’re working with a man like Neutra, who wanted everything the way he wanted it—‘Put the camera here.’ And after he left, I’d put it back where I wanted it, and he wouldn’t know the difference—I translated. And fourth, I transform the composition with furniture movement.” “[Shulman] always says proudly that Soriano hated his furniture,” says Wim de Wit, the Getty Research Institute curator who oversees Shulman’s collection. “He says, ‘I don’t care; when I sit in a chair I want to be comfortable.’ He does not think of himself as an artist. He does not think of himself as an artist.

He does not think of himself as an artist. He does not think of himself as an artist. He does not think of himself as an artist. ‘I was doing a business,’ he says. But when you look at that overgrown garden, you know—there is some other streak in him.” That streak—the free soul within the unpretentious, practical product of the immigrant experience— produced what Nogai calls “a seldom personality”: a Jewish farm boy who grew up to create internationally recognized American cultural artifacts—icons that continue to influence our fantasies and self-perceptions. That streak—the free soul within the unpretentious, practical product of the immigrant experience—produced what Nogai calls “a seldom personality”: a Jewish farm boy who grew up to create internationally recognized American cultural artifacts—icons that continue to influence our fantasies and self-perceptions.

I ask Shulman if he’s surprised at how well his life has turned out. “I tell students, ‘Don’t take life too seriously—don’t plan nothing nohow,’” he replies. “But I have always observed and respected my destiny. That’s the only way I can describe it.

It was meant to be. “And it was a destiny that suited you?”At this, everything rises at once—his eyebrows, his outstretched arms, and his peaceful, satisfied smile. “Well,” says Shulman, “here I am.” •

“American photographer Julius Shulman’s images of Californian architecture have burned themselves into the retina of the 20th century.”

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