Los Angeles Boulevard

"Los Angeles Boulevard, Suisman's concise and shamefully underappreciated 1989 study of the history and design of the boulevards, remains the most important take on this gigantic subject.”

-  Christopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic, Los Angeles Times

"Doug Suisman’s Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Public, remains today, as it was 25 years ago, a contrarian essay fashioned with an urbane and civilized pen...in retrospect [it] seems as prescient as any subsequent understanding of Los Angeles."”

-  Greg Goldin, The Architect's Newspaper

“Shamefully -- monomaniac about Los Angeles that I am -- I did not know that the book "Los Angeles Boulevard" existed until Christopher Hawthorne, the architecture critic for the LA Times, started championing it. Suisman is a really good writer, a graceful writer - literature's loss has usually been architecture's gain, but luckily in this book we have both.”

- David Kipen, book critic, Southern California Public Radio

“At this point in my life and career I've read a lot of books on Los Angeles. Doug Suisman's Los Angeles Boulevard: Eight X-Rays of the Body Politic [sic] -- just re-published thanks to the revivalist instincts of Christopher Hawthorne who pens an excellent foreword-- is making me look at the city in totally new ways and making me want to write about it more astutely. There are revelations at every turn, and the writing is as powerful and poetic as anything I've come across in awhile. I want to quote his entire chapter on how advertising and retail have determined the very shape and nature of our most iconic streets (you will never see Wilshire and Lincoln the same way again)."

- Josh Kun, Associate Professor, USC Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism

“The power of this newly packaged, expanded Los Angeles Boulevards lies in its ability to emphasize that, beyond simply being a critical book on a singular aspect of LA’s urban environment, it offers a valuable way of thinking about and approaching urban design problems, more generally. To my mind, this rightfully places Suisman’s contributions beside the various great minds, such as Banham and Davis, that have dissected Los Angeles towards speaking to broadly relevant issues. I don’t hesitate to say, then, that Los Angeles Boulevards is a must-read for architects, planners, designers and urbanists who not only care about improving the urban landscape, but also want to get a glimpse into how a forcefully analytical mind attacks the problem of the city.”

-  Erick Villagomez, Spacing Magazine

“Suisman’s work contributes to a larger understanding of the city both through his careful analyses and through the visual imagery he deploys...He has created a lyrical cartography of Los Angeles’s geopolitical form.”

-  Paulette Singley, “Shaping the City: Studies in History, Theory and Urban Design”

"By turns poetic, by turns forensic, Doug Suisman proves that the boulevards of Los Angeles are the true source of our social vigor.  No one demonstrates with a keener eye nor with more affectionate insight how these arteries fuel our urban life and why we must care for them as the highest expression of the desire to make the city in our own image."

“I think I have learned more about Los Angeles from this monograph than I have in all my prior reading on Los Angeles.”

  - Alex Krieger, Chairman, Urban Design Program, Harvard University

In his seminal pamphlet ‘Los Angeles Boulevard’, urbanist extraordinaire Doug Suisman has been credited with opening the topic of the urban street to discussion among Los Angeles architects. He approached the subject, unlike Reyner Banham, with the idea of inciting action and affecting the built environment.”

- Jesse Brink, Editor, Los Angeles Architect

“An excellent short history of the Los Angeles street system.” 

- Thomas S. Hines, “The Grand American Avenue”

"Conceived as an architectural design project, this booklet explores the development and meaning of Wilshire Boulevard as the linear axis of metropolitan Los Angeles. Suisman has provided a valuable discussion of the urban patterns of this modern suburban city, and offered original insights and research for serious landscape study."

- Arthur Krim, Urban Geography

“Los Angeles Boulevard, by Doug Suisman, is that rare specimen - a literate, beautifully crafted publication by an architect. He argues that the boulevards are the armature of the city’s public space, and as such must be understood both as they have developed historically and as the are today. Aesthetic considerations alone did not fuel boulevard development, and Suisman’s nuanced account outlines the social, technical, economic, and political forces that shaped them and those that have underlain in their dwindling roles as public realm. No finer introduction to, and critical analysis of, L.A.’s legendary boulevards exists. With the goal of helping the boulevards regain their function of public arena rather than traffic thoroughfares, Suisman even proposes a series of urban design strategies for future changes.”

- Diane Ghirardo, Design Book Review

“Suisman’s fuselage concept is a very useful tool for the design and analysis of thoroughfares in all their complexity.”

-  Andres Duany, “The New Civic Art

“Who is the most influential (living) architect in L.A.? In the realm of the city’s infrastructure: Doug Suisman...Although there are relatively few places in L.A. that one can point to and say ‘Doug Suisman designed that’, Doug nonetheless may be the most influential urban designer / architect practicing in the city today. His long-term research, thinking, and extensive involvement with L.A.’s commercial corridors, districts, and transit systems have resulted in a kind of pervasive presence within L.A.’s very infrastructure.”

- Alan Loomis, Editor, “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric Region