Profile: Christopher Hawthorne

Growing up in Berkeley, California, Christopher Hawthorne realized at a young age that there was something unusual about his family home. Passersby would often stop to point and stare at the house — and, every once in a while, ring the doorbell and ask for a tour. The inside was different, too. The walls and part of the ceiling of Hawthorne’s bedroom were made of redwood and the interior choreography of the house was designed in such a way that visitors were inexorably delivered to one of two picture windows with dramatic views over the San Francisco Bay and the Golden Gate Bridge.

The house, completed in 1920, was the work of Julia Morgan, the renowned architect behind Hearst Castle. Hawthorne, former architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times and now L.A.’s chief design officer and a professor of the practice of English at USC Dornsife, says his childhood home had a huge impact on him.

“Even at a very young age, before I knew anything about architecture, I began to understand that a house was designed, as opposed to just built, and that there was somebody who was responsible for deciding — in the same way that a writer would decide how to structure a story — where the rooms would go and how they would relate to one another,” Hawthorne says. “I think it’s not surprising that that led me to be interested in architecture and writing about buildings.”

His mother, Trish Hawthorne, passionate about architectural history and preservation, also influenced Hawthorne’s formative years. In 1974, she helped found the Berkeley Architectural Heritage Association. She led tours of notable local architecture for neighborhood students, as well as her son.

As co-editor of his high school paper, Hawthorne also developed a youthful enthusiasm for print journalism.

“I was kind of a newspaper junkie in high school. I read the San Francisco Chronicle and The New York Times, which both had very prominent architecture critics at the time. So, I arrived in college already thinking that I might want to try to be an architecture critic.”

Hawthorne attended Yale University, which at the time didn’t offer an architecture major that included history and theory. He got around this by “cobbling together a double major that was not officially a double major,” earning a degree in political science but writing a senior essay that was as much about architecture as politics. He also prepared for his future career as an architecture critic by obsessing over the design flaws in his dormitory — a creation of Finnish-American master Eero Saarinen.

After graduating, Hawthorne got a part-time gig at the Seattle Weekly, giving him his first opportunity to publish his architectural writing. Returning to the Bay Area in 1994, he landed a job at the East Bay Express, an alternative weekly, where he juggled posts as the arts editor and the theatre critic.

“I wrote some film criticism, too,” he recalls, “but mostly I was quietly biding my time and wanting to be writing about architecture.”

In 1998, his luck changed. He started a mid-career fellowship in arts journalism at New York’s Columbia University.

The opening of Frank Gehry’s Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, the previous year had sparked a rebirth in interest in covering architecture. Hawthorne seized the opportunity. He remained in New York after completing his fellowship in 1999 and started freelancing, writing full-time about architecture for Slate, The New York Times and various design publications.

“It was suddenly possible to have a career where I could make a living and support myself in New York, writing just about architecture and design,” he says. “It felt kind of miraculous.”

In 2002, Hawthorne moved back to California and in 2004 was appointed architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times, a post he held for 14 years. There, he also wrote about related topics of ecology, economics, housing and urban planning.

Hawthorne’s holistic approach, creative eye and unparalleled understanding of urban design impressed L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti, who named Hawthorne L.A.’s chief design officer in March 2018 — making him the first person ever to hold such a post in a major American city.

As chief design officer, Hawthorne works to find sustainable and equitable solutions to the city’s multiple challenges. His goal: to bring a new level of attention to the quality of design and architecture across L.A., especially in the city’s public spaces.

To that end, Hawthorne is able to draw upon his pioneering 3rd LA initiative, a project he launched in 2015. A laboratory for urban reinvention, 3rd LA starts from the premise that L.A. is a model for the world’s megacities as it navigates demographic change, a mobility revolution, climate change and new frontiers in urban planning and design.

The name and the concept came out of a conversation with USC Dornsife’s Professor of History William Deverell in 2014.

“We were driving to Jackson, Wyoming, where our respective kids were going to science camp,” Hawthorne says.

“Bill knows as much about L.A. history as anybody on the planet, and so I took advantage of my captive audience to start testing out this nascent framework I’d been thinking about.

It was an ideal setup, an expert focus group of one rolling through the middle of Utah.”

The project was born from Hawthorne’s realization that key urban elements L.A. is now working to expand — walkability and pedestrian amenities; mass transit at a regional scale; innovative, multi-family residential projects; a vibrant city center — had in fact all existed to an enviable degree in the L.A. of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

And just as important, the idea that the basic elements of a certain version of L.A. — the single-family house with lawn and swimming pool, the city without a center, the endlessly expanding freeway network — represent not the permanent L.A., as is often assumed, but a historical moment in time.

With that understanding came the idea that it was more accurate to talk about three distinct periods in L.A.’s modern evolution: “First L.A.” from the 1880s through World War II; “Second L.A.” from mid-century to 2000; and then, at the start of the 21st century, the emerging “Third L.A.”

Hawthorne, who joined USC Dornsife in January, says he’s excited about bringing his 3rd LA project as a cornerstone of the Academy in the Public Square initiative, which encourages academic experts to apply their knowledge to solving pressing societal problems.

“I think the ability to tap into the scholarship and faculty expertise at USC Dornsife and also collaborate with the university as it’s continuing to strengthen its connections with the city and the community, and thinking very carefully about its role in our changing city, make this a really remarkable opportunity.”

Currently scheduled to kick off with two public events in the fall, 3rd LA will also include partnerships and projects between USC Dornsife and the city.

Freshmen have already benefited from Hawthorne’s remarkable knowledge of the built environment and his wealth of experience as one of the foremost architecture critics of his generation through his Spring semester writing course — a course that encourages them to draw on their own memories to evoke connection to “place.”

Hawthorne argues that being able to write about one’s surroundings is a fundamental talent that will serve students well.

“Like my memories of the house I grew up in, I think everybody has stories about the ways in which physical environment, the natural and the built environment, has shaped the way they see the world.”

Read more stories from USC Dornsife Magazine’s Spring/Summer 2020 issue >>