Flares: Los Angeles and Its Afterimages is a multi-perspective portrait of Los Angeles in the millennial window 1980–2020—the stage of recursive urban transformations amidst epochal technological and cultural change. A central theme of the project is the capacity of culture to process, propel, and prefigure the shifts in the very definition and the functioning of what constitutes the city. Interweaving contributions from over 50 prominent artists, writers, cultural producers, and scholars, Flares foregrounds the myriad distributed ways of acting and knowing that characterize this cultural landscape and illuminate it from within. Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) is a school of architectural thinking from which groundbreaking studies of Los Angeles were launched across the last decade of the twentieth century by the likes of Mike Davis, Margaret Crawford, John Chase, and Craig Hodgetts. Flares picks up and expands on this legacy with a piece of polyscopic urban portraiture—by turns essayistic, literary, cartographic, impressionistic—that highlights the cracks and the peripheries of the urban process as sites and subjects of the most meaningful engagement. With this boots-on-the ground report on LA’s evolving urbanity, Flares takes stock of the city’s prospects at a key moment in time, looking through its recent history and beyond its enduring myths toward yet unimagined futures.

Hernan Diaz Alonso, LA8020 editor-in-chief, assumed the role of SCI-Arc director and chief executive officer in 2015. He has served as a distinguished faculty member since 2001, coordinator of the graduate thesis program (2007–10), and graduate programs chair (2010–15). Diaz Alonso is principal of HDA-X. His awards include: Educator of the Year award (2012) from the American Institute of Architects, AR+D Award for Emerging Architecture (2013) and Progressive Architecture Award (2013). Diaz Alonso’s work is in the permanent collections of the FRAC Centre, Orleans, France; SFMOMA; The Museum of Modern Art; Thyssen-Bornemisza, MAK Museum, Vienna; and the Art Institute of Chicago. He has exhibited at the Venice Architecture Biennale, London Architecture Biennale, ArchiLab in Orleans, France; Museum of Modern Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Art Institute of Chicago; and MAK Centre, Vienna. He has taught at Yale University, Columbia University, and the University of Applied Arts, Vienna.

Joe Day is an LA8020 editor. He leads Deegan-Day Design LLC and serves on the design and History and Theory faculty at SCI-Arc. He contributed an additional foreword to the 2009 edition of Reyner Banham’s seminal study, Los Angeles: Architecture of the Four Ecologies (University of California Press, 2009), and in 2012 taught at Yale School of Architecture as the Louis I. Kahn Visiting Chair. Day’s Corrections & Collections: Architectures for Art and Crime (Routledge, 2013), supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation, explores new polarities in contemporary architecture and urbanism. He serves on SCI-Arc’s board of trustees, and as a director at the W.M. Keck Foundation.

Erik Ghenoiu is an LA8020 editor. Ghenoiu serves on History and Theory faculty at SCI-Arc. He previously served as the manager of the Harvard-Mellon Urban Initiative, where he coordinated urban research involving more than twenty departments and institutes across Harvard. He was adjunct associate professor of graduate architecture and urban design at Pratt Institute, where he served as director of publications for the School of Architecture. He has taught or been a fellow at the City College of New York, the University of Queensland, Parsons, Queens University Belfast, Harvard, Freie-Universität Berlin, Technische Universität Berlin, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Namik Mackic is LA8020’s managing editor and project manager. His transdisciplinary career spans cultural and education policy development, environmental media strategy, and performing and visual arts is an urbanist, educator, curator, and artist. A graduate of the Master in Design Studies program at Harvard University's Graduate School of Design, he is currently assistant professor at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design, and was previously visiting instructor at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's School of Architecture + Planning, guest critic at Rhode Island School of Design, and research associate with the Harvard Mellon Urban Initiative. His writings have appeared in New Geographies, The Metropolitan Laboratory, and Sursock Museum’s publication Elements for a World.

Mimi Zeiger is a Los Angeles-based critic, editor, and curator. She was cocurator of the US Pavilion for the 2018 Venice Architecture Biennale, curator of Soft Schindler at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and cocurator of the 2020–21 Exhibit Columbus entitled New Middles: From Main Street to Megalopolis, What is the Future of the Middle City? She has written for The New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Architectural Review, Metropolis, and Architect. She is an opinion columnist for Dezeen and former West Coast editor of The Architects Newspaper. Zeiger is the 2015 recipient of the Bradford Williams Medal for excellence in writing about landscape architecture. Zeiger is author of New Museums, Tiny Houses, Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature (Rizzoli, 2011), and Tiny Houses in the City (Rizzoli, 2016). In 1997, Zeiger founded loud paper, an influential zine and digital publication dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse. She has curated, contributed to, and collaborated on projects that have been shown at the Art Institute Chicago, 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, the New Museum, Storefront for Art and Architecture, pinkcomma gallery, and the Architectural Association School of Architecture. She cocurated Now, There: Scenes from the Post-Geographic City, which received the Bronze Dragon award at the 2015 Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture, Shenzhen. She is visiting faculty at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and teaches in the Media Design Practices MFA program at Art Center College of Design. She was copresident of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design and taught at the School of Visual Art, Art Center, Parsons New School of Design, and the California College of the Arts. She holds a master's of architecture degree from SCI-Arc and a bachelor's of architecture degree from Cornell University.

Against the backdrop of the counterculture movement, the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) was opened in 1972 in a Santa Monica warehouse by a small group of faculty and students seeking a radical alternative to traditional architecture education. SCI-Arc’s founding faculty, guest faculty, and students from those early years—including Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, Eric Owen Moss and Wolf Prix—have since produced some of the world’s most significant buildings and have influenced generations of architects. The mission of SCI-Arc is to teach architects to engage, speculate, and innovate, to take the lead in reimagining the possibilities of architecture.