A Love Letter to LA, and Caltech, by Joseph Gordon-Levitt
Credit: The Selby.
by Andrew Moseman
There are all kinds of places in greater Los Angeles that exemplify Angelenos’ love for their hometown. For Joseph Gordon-Levitt, the actor famous for Inception, (500) Days of Summer, and Third Rock from the Sun, that place is Caltech.
To mark the anniversary of the devastating January 2025 LA wildfires, the magazine Architectural Digest turned its latest issue into a tribute to the City of Angels and tapped a variety of subjects to note the places that mean the most to them. In a video filmed on campus, seen above, the actor explains why the Institute has so much meaning for him.
“Caltech, right here in LA, is one of the really preeminent hubs of science and technology throughout the world. People do research here and take classes here and teach and learn and read and study and come up with important ideas that define the world,” he says in the video. “If you listed all the things that have been thought of and invented here, it’s really quite impressive. Americans would not have gone to the Moon if it hadn’t been for the work done here and at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which was spun out of this institution here.”
Peter Collopy, university archivist and head of Archives and Special Collections, appears in the clip to explain some of Caltech’s history and walk viewers through its architectural evolution, from the Spanish Revival structures that echo the style of California’s missions to the more modern designs typified by buildings such as Beckman Auditorium.
While visiting campus, Gordon-Levitt reflects on not only the power of the scientific method to reshape our world but on the surprising overlaps between art and science that many Caltech minds love to explore. “One of the greatest scientific communicators of our time, Carl Sagan, talks about a balance between reason and wonder,” he says in the clip, “because early in any scientific process, they have to have an idea first. They have to think, well, maybe the world works like this. There’s something similar between that and a storyteller. You have to use your imagination.”
