What this site covers

The subject here is a town of about ninety thousand people on the southern California coast, and the unusually specific relationship it has with the buildings art happens inside. In June 1925 an earthquake took down most of the commercial district. The Architectural Board of Review that supervised the rebuilding pushed Spanish Colonial Revival with enough consistency that the style stopped being a preference and became a condition of approval — and a century later that decision still governs the wall, the light and the ceiling height of nearly every room in the city where work gets hung.

From that one fact the site runs forwards and backwards: the plein-air painters who came for the coastal light before the quake, the courthouse that made the style an identity rather than a rule, the thirty-seven years a non-collecting kunsthalle survived above a shopping-centre retail floor, the schools that trained photographers until the industry stopped hiring, and the rock art in a sandstone chamber up the pass that predates all of it.

Fourteen pieces, six sections. The sections page lays them out; the archive is the flat list.