"Lebensraum on the Pacific: Anton Wagner and the Urban Geography of Los Angeles"

In 1971 British architectural historian P. Reyner Banham reacquainted the scholarly world with German geographer Anton Wagner's 1935 book Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Form of the City of Two Million in Southern California. Based on extraordinary archival research, field work, and walks across the cityscape, Wagner's encyclopedic study seeks to explain how a small town in a desert region located far from major transport routes and markets become a major metropolis. No less fascinating than Wagner's geography of Los Angeles is his own biography, a tale of travel and international scholarly collaborations set against the background of German-American relations in the twentieth century.

Edward Dimendberg is Professor of Humanities and European Languages and Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is author of Film Noir and the Spaces of Modernity (Harvard University Press, 2004) and Diller Scofidio + Renfro: Architecture after Images (University of Chicago Press, 2013) and a co-editor(with Anton Kaes and Martin Jay) of The Weimar Republic Sourcebook (University of California Press, 1994). He is currently completing a monograph entitled The Los Angeles Project: Architectural and Urban Theories of the City of Exception and editing critical edition of Los Angeles: The Development, Life, and Form of the City of Two Million in Southern California by Anton Wagner for publication by the Getty Research Institute. Dimendberg serves on the editorial boards of the Weimar and Now German Cultural Criticism and FlashPoints book series, on the Faculty Editorial Committee of the University of California Press, and on the Book Publication Committee of the Modern Language Association. He works with individual scholars and offers publishing workshops as the principal of Dimendberg Consulting LLC.