All our artwork is by Ray Kappe, known in Southern California for his residential designs. Kappe was also deeply involved with city and transit planning. He developed, among other things, a park plan for Santa Monica and revitalization schemes for Inglewood and Watts.

The architect found himself particularly taken with L.A's transportation challenges. While he helped local leaders develop one of several people-mover proposals for downtown, with sleek, glass-canopied stations, he didn't believe that rail transport was the only answer for mobility throughout the spreading metropolis. He offered a plan in which the city's freeways would be traversed by a fleet of small, electric-powered, automated cars. These single-seaters, controlled by computer or radar, would, he claimed, increase freeway capacity as much as ten-fold. The tiny vehicles would also free up precious residential space, replacing driveways and garages with narrow, sidewalk-adjacent storage lots, hidden behind leafy trellises. Kappe was perfecting this scenario 30 years before Google announced its nascent fleet of self-guided cars.

He also posited, far ahead of his time, a "video communication system which could eliminate a large portion of the present automobile trips" through teleconferencing the equivalent of today's online shopping. Perhaps taking his plans a little too far into the world of Ray Bradbury, Kappe suggested replacing trucking with "goods moved through tubes in capsules." Once his system was in place, Kappe foresaw transportation becoming merely recreational and social. That day, as evidenced by tightening traffic gridlock, is still far in the future.

Artwork by Ray Kappe, FAIA, his mid-century concept for "LA People Movers," with illustration by William Simonian. Appears thanks to the Kappe family.