An appreciation: How Thomas Hines basked in the “Architecture of the Sun”

In 2017, as I began working with a tiny crew to make “That Far Corner,” an hourlong documentary for public television on Frank Lloyd Wright’s Los Angeles houses, I discovered something known to directors and segment producers the world over: that the leading experts on a given subject, whether it’s architecture or the Federal Reserve, are very rarely the people best equipped to explain it to a general audience.

In Thomas S. Hines, though, who died this week at 90, we found our unicorn: an architectural historian who had an encyclopedic grasp on L.A.’s urban development and a genuinely winning onscreen presence. It helped that he related his anecdotes about the city’s architecture in a rich Southern accent he’d earned growing up in Oxford, Mississippi, in the 1930s and ’40s, and that he seemed able to dial up or down depending on the setting.