T

here is a particular kind of Los Angeles that most people never see. Not the Los Angeles of boulevards and billboards, of industry and weather, of the version of itself it has always exported to the rest of the world. A quieter, stranger Los Angeles, tucked into the neighborhoods just northeast of Chinatown, where the light comes off the concrete at unexpected angles and buildings carry histories that predate the freeways that now surround them. This is Lincoln Heights. And at 2450 Daly Street, in a neighborhood most Angelenos have never had reason to visit, stands one of the most quietly remarkable pieces of architecture in the city.

We know this because we lived inside it. From 2021 to 2023, FORM operated its original space from one of the fourteen live-work lofts that architect, critic, and teacher Joseph Giovannini carved from a 1930s telephone trucking garage. A 23,000-square-foot bow-truss structure that had sat quietly in Lincoln Heights for decades before Giovannini decided to turn it into something that would challenge everything its future residents thought they knew about space.

This is the story of that building, the man who made it, and what it felt like to spend two years inside a work of architecture that was always, in Giovannini's own remarkable phrase, thinking back at you.

The Architect

Joseph Giovannini: The Critic Who Builds

To understand the Daly Street Lofts, you first have to understand the man who made them and Joseph Giovannini is not easy to categorize. Born in Los Angeles to a Croatian mother and Italian father, he grew up in the San Gabriel Valley before heading east for a B.A. in English at Yale, then a Master of Arts in French Language and Literature from La Sorbonne in Paris, and finally a Master of Architecture from Harvard's Graduate School of Design. It is a biographical arc that tells you everything and nothing: here is someone who moves between languages, between disciplines, between the act of making and the act of describing what has been made.

For more than three decades, Giovannini has been one of the most respected and feared architecture critics in America. He has written for The New York Times, Architectural Record, Art in America, ArtForum, The New Yorker, Esquire, and Architectural Digest. He served as architecture critic for New York magazine and the Los Angeles Herald Examiner. He has been nominated for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism three times. He has taught at Columbia, UCLA, USC, and the University of Innsbruck. His 2021 book for Rizzoli 'Architecture Unbound: A Century of the Disruptive Avant-Garde' represents perhaps the most comprehensive survey of experimental architecture's radical twentieth century that anyone has yet attempted.

But Giovannini is not only a critic. He heads Giovannini Associates, a design practice based in New York and Los Angeles, and the Daly Street Lofts represent his most ambitious built work. A project that allowed him to do something that critics rarely get to do: translate a lifetime of thinking about space into an actual building that people would actually inhabit.

The results are, by any measure, extraordinary. And they begin with a 1930s garage.

The Building

Optical Space: A Cavernous Garage Reimagined

The building at 2450 Daly Street was, until Giovannini found it, a vintage telephone trucking garage. Giovannini saw in it not a blank canvas but a specific set of conditions. Variable light, structural rhythms, the individual character of each bay that demanded fourteen individual responses. He did not carve fourteen identical lofts from the shell of the garage. He invented fourteen distinct spatial experiences, each one responding to the particular conditions of its location within the building, each one pursuing what he called "optical space", an approach to interior architecture drawn from drawing techniques dating back to the Renaissance, in which perception itself becomes the primary material.

The concept is more radical than it might first sound. In conventional architecture, space is defined: walls establish boundaries, ceilings establish height, floors establish ground. You know where you are. Giovannini's "painted space" built on complex abstract optical interplays between surface, light, color, and form, deliberately undermines that certainty. The forms are "active," in his description: they move you through space that is always shifting in viewpoint. The space you think you are standing in is not quite the space you are standing in. Your eye assembles the room differently each time you look.

When the Museum of Architecture and Design, the LA Forum, and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture co-sponsored a public opening of the lofts in 2008. Fifty years after the famous Case Study House Program, they were making a pointed comparison. The Case Study Houses had shown Los Angeles its architectural future by inviting the public inside. The Daly Street Lofts, in the same spirit, were doing something similar: demonstrating that the live-work loft, that most familiar unit of urban creative life, could be reimagined from the ground up. That architecture could still, in the early 21st century, produce genuine surprise.

Our Time There

FORM Vintage, 2021–2023: Living Inside the Experiment

When FORM first set up inside the Daly Street Lofts in 2021, we were a different kind of business than we are today. The space was a curated environment of rare vintage furniture, lighting, art prints and more. The kind of carefully assembled world in which each object had been chosen for its relationship to the others, and to the space itself. The inventory ranged across decades and movements: mid-century Dutch lighting, 1970s Italian chunky chrome  furniture, French modernist prints and iconic American artists.

Giovannini's optical space is not neutral. It doesn't recede politely behind the objects placed within it the way a white gallery wall is supposed to. It engages. The shifting planes of color and light that he built into the architecture. The way a surface that appears to be one distance away reveals itself, on approach, to be another; the way the painted geometries create depth where depth shouldn't be. Meant that every piece we placed in the loft became part of a larger composition that included the walls, the ceiling, the floor, and the particular quality of Los Angeles light coming through at different hours of the day.

FORM Vintage at 2450 Daly Street, 2021–2023. Vintage furniture, art, and lighting in Giovannini's optical space.

It was, in retrospect, an unusually privileged context in which to sell things. We were asking people to consider objects. Their history, their craft, their beauty in a space that was itself demanding consideration. The building made you slow down. It made you look twice. It made you aware that what you were seeing was not simply what was there, but a version of what was there shaped by your own perception. Which is, if you think about it, precisely what the best vintage objects also do. They carry their own history, their own accumulated meanings, and they look different depending on what you bring to them.

We did not fully appreciate, in the middle of it, quite how extraordinary those two years were. You rarely do, when you're living inside something. It takes distance and in our case, a relocation, to look back and understand what the building was giving you.

The Legacy

What a Building Teaches You

The Daly Street Lofts are not famous in the way that Gehry's Disney Concert Hall is famous, or the way that the Case Study Houses have become famous. They sit in Lincoln Heights, quiet and specific, doing what Giovannini designed them to do. Providing fourteen people with spaces that challenge and reward and occasionally confuse them, in a neighborhood that the architecture world has largely overlooked.

But for those who know the building, it occupies a particular place in any serious account of Los Angeles architecture. It represents something that the city's architectural culture has always generated at its best: an experimental intelligence applied to the most ordinary of briefs. In this case, the adaptive reuse of an old industrial structure and transformed into something that asks genuine questions about how we inhabit space, how we see it, and what it means to live inside someone else's idea of beauty.

Giovannini spent a career as a critic describing what architecture could be at its most ambitious. The Daly Street Lofts are what happens when that critic picks up a pencil instead of a pen. The result is a building that thinks — and that makes you think in return. We are glad we spent two years inside it. We carry it with us.

FORM Vintage is now based in private studio to Los Angeles.

Focused exclusively on online sales of rare vintage art prints,

no in-person appointments available.