LA chief design officer joins Dornsife faculty

When professor Christopher Hawthorne isn’t teaching a small freshman seminar class at USC, he’s envisioning the future of the Los Angeles urban landscape. Working to modernize public spaces as the city’s first chief design officer, Hawthorne uses his expertise to teach students the importance of physical settings in shaping their writing.

Hawthorne began his tenure at USC in January as a professor of practice in the English department of the Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences. Alongside his position at City Hall, he teaches one general education seminar, “Writing About Place,” a course designed to teach students how to write about their personal surroundings.

Students in the course read plays, poems, memoirs and criticism by writers such as Joan Didion and Anna Deavere Smith, who use the theme of place to connect to memories and contextualize their subjects.

“It’s really helping students learn about how other writers in a variety of genres have approached this question of writing about place … and how they might bring that same attention to place to their own writing,” Hawthorne said.  

L.A. Mayor Eric Garcetti appointed Hawthorne the city’s chief design officer in March 2018 to tackle issues of urban development, including lack of green spaces and affordable housing. Hawthorne said he utilized his architectural experience examining the design layouts of local communities to develop the course. 

“The same issues that the writers we are reading in the course are thinking about are also central to the work that I’m doing as we want all the design work we do to be appropriate to the places where it’s located,” Hawthorne said. “That can be a complex undertaking … how to advance the city-wide design ambition, but also have designs that are, again, really knit into the neighborhoods where they’re being built.”

Bobby Voong, a freshman majoring in business administration and Spanish, said Hawthorne’s class exposes him to the different communal and architectural issues facing L.A. He also emphasized the role Hawthorne’s professional background plays in the success of the class.

“He worked as an L.A. [architecture] critic for a long period of time, and now he has his own position in the mayor’s office,” Voong said. “It really helps the way he teaches because he’s really knowledgeable … He knows how to motivate students and allow us to see things from a different perspective.” 

Hawthorne also drew on his time as an architecture critic at the Los Angeles Times to hone students’ writing abilities. While working at the paper from 2004 to 2018, he assessed new building developments by prominent architects in the context of contemporary city design and evaluated the evolution of L.A. architecture.

“I would say, particularly in the last few years of my time at the L.A. Times, I was really focusing on Los Angeles itself as a subject and the ways in which it was trying to establish a kind of 21st century identity,” Hawthorne said.

Hawthorne’s experience analyzing the city’s design evolution led to his creation of the 3rd LA Project at Occidental College. The project hosts panels and commissions video essays on the history of L.A. urban planning and how experts should rethink the nature of future development.

“This is a city that has defined itself for much of the 20th century around the single-family house and the freeway and individual freedom and freedom of movement,” Hawthorne said. “We know that those kinds of basic building blocks of a city are not sustainable models for the 21st century.”

Hawthorne brings the 3rd LA Project with him to USC as a part of Dornsife’s Academy in the Public Square initiative, which connects faculty and scholars to industry leaders to collaboratively address complex issues such as climate change and the homelessness crisis.

Hawthorne said the possibility of partnering with the innovative initiative drew him to USC. The projects are currently planning two public events focused on sustainability for the fall.

Academy in the Public Square Executive Director Kate Weber said Hawthorne exemplifies the scholarly vision for the initiative, which emphasizes interdisciplinary collaboration.

“He sits at such an exciting and interesting intersection of urban planning and design and sustainability and landscape architecture,” Weber said.

Weber also said that his unique perspective on the future of Los Angeles development fit with USC’s vision for the city. 

“[Hawthorne] was really a natural fit for Dornsife,” Weber said. “He’s a writer, he’s an intellectual, his ideas of the history and the future of L.A. are right at home in our academic community.”