November 15, 2022

“A radical politics of hope”

AN shares tributes to Mike Davis (1946–2022)

TAGS

It didn’t matter that I never had a class with Mike Davis when I was at SCI-Arc: His presence was felt. City of Quartz was on the summer reading list; I remember reading my copy on Santa Monica Beach, my brain recalibrating all my preconceptions. Los Angeles was not as superficial—as “sunshine,” as Davis put it—as I had been indoctrinated growing up in the Bay Area. It was layered and dark like a Raymond Chandler paperback. Forget it, Jake.

The forces that shaped L.A. post-1992 uprising were to be explored and critiqued with architecture as a complicit actor: defensive, militarized, surveilled. After reading Davis, it’s impossible not to look for the all-seeing security cameras in every public space. His books have caught flack for being hyperbolic and making sweeping generalizations, which is probably what made them such cinematic page turners. Looking back now, I see that his work seeped into my subconscious, swirled around with the words of other now-passed writers Dave Hickey, John Chase, Joan Didion, and Eve Babitz, and the resulting brew seeped into my criticism. For this, I’m grateful.

October 28, 2022

The Broken Dreams of L.A.’s Grand Avenue

Frank Gehry’s decades-in-the-making tower complex in the center of Downtown Los Angeles fails to live up to its signature.

Metropolis

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Eli Broad, Frank Gehry, Urbanism

View Original

The Grand LA is the last lot on Los Angeles’ Grand Avenue to be developed. Located across the street from the iconic Walt Disney Hall Concert Hall on a slope pitched toward City Hall, its site was once a parking lot for jurors heading to the nearby courthouse. For decades, as it sat underutilized and as new office buildings and cultural institutions piled up in Downtown L.A.’s Bunker Hill neighborhood, the plot—a centerpiece of the so-called Grand Avenue Project master plan—represented pure potential. Could another piece of esteemed architecture finally pull together this mismatched Acropolis and make it the kind of civic destination so desperately envisioned by late philanthropist Eli Broad and city planners?

Spoiler alert: Nope.

September 29, 2022

Architecture of Good Intentions

Gehry Partners designs a new campus for Children’s Institute in Watts

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Chait Co, Frank Gehry, Perkins&Will

View Original

In Frank Gehry’s oeuvre there are the big, career-defining projects—like Walt Disney Hall and the Louis Vuitton Foundation—and there are the minor works: buildings that have smaller footprints and more humble design ambitions but are fortified with good intensions. Gehry Partners has been dabbling in this latter category of late, first with the Beckmen YOLA Center, a community center and youth music conservatory built for the LA Phil’s youth orchestra housed in a retrofitted bank building in Inglewood, and recently, a new 20,000-square-foot campus for Children’s Institute in Watts.

The firm provided architectural services pro bono to the 100-year-old support organization, which addresses poverty and health inequity. It’s an imprimatur that is as much philanthropic as it is architectural—perhaps even more so, as Gehry’s name conveys instant recognition to board members and donors. “The Children’s Institute is about helping families who are victims of trauma and violence,” said Sam Gehry, associate at Gehry Partners and Frank’s son. “[Its mission] is something that we are passionate about.”

August 22, 2022

The L.A. River Gets A Geometric New Pedestrian Crossing

Metropolis

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Gehry Partners, SPF:architects, Studio-MLA

View Original

One part railroad trestle, one part Sol LeWitt sculpture, the Taylor Yard Bikeway/Pedestrian Bridge traverses the Los Angeles River with a minimalist gesture: An 18-foot-wide pathway seems to float inside a structural grid. The 400-foot-long, traffic-cone-orange steel-frame structure is part of a larger revitalization of the 51-mile river, which once was seen as nothing more than a concrete drainage channel. But in the past decade, Angelenos have found a new love of the waterway—especially its soft-bottomed stretches, which are dotted with islands of tall grasses and scruffy trees and edged with the Los Angeles River Trail, a popular greenway and bike path connecting Downtown L.A. to Griffith Park.

August 18, 2022

The American Dream, Updated?

In Los Angeles, recent interest in ADUs prompts an honest look at the housing type

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

ADU, Architecture, Articles, IT House, Jennifer Bonner, LA Más, SO-IL, Urbanism, Welcome Projects

View Original

ADUs will not solve L.A.’s housing crisis. Last February, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority gathered staff and volunteers for the 2022 Greater Los Angeles Point-in-Time Homeless Count, its first since the start of the pandemic. When the count was last conducted in 2020, close to 67,000 people were reported unhoused in Los Angeles County, a place where the median single-family home price is just over $800,000. Both the number of people who live in tents, in cars, and on the street and the cost of buying a home continue to rise more than 10 percent annually. These figures should leave us aghast and angry, but in California these yearly escalations have a numbing effect, even as the underlying precarity remains real and insistent.

July 28, 2022

The Once and Future Bridge

Can the Sixth Street Viaduct predict the future of Los Angeles?

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Deborah Weintraub, Michael Maltzan, Urbanism

View Original

Nearly every article about the demolition of the old Sixth Street Viaduct in 2016 mentions Terminator 2: Judgment Day. In Los Angeles, where every location is scenery, the iconic, double-arched span played backdrop to the Skynet apocalypse. Architect Michael Maltzan, designer along with engineering firm HNTB, of the new expressive, ribbon-like Sixth Street Viaduct, has a rosier vision—one of equity and accessibility. L.A. infrastructure, however, is linked to unjust acts of clearance and partition, localized catastrophes not always captured by Hollywood. Can a new bridge rewrite the narrative?

June 2022

Review: “ORDER” by Óscar Monzón

Aperture

TAGS

Art, Articles, Óscar Monźon

View Original

In 1956, Alison and Peter Smithson, then enfants terribles on the British architecture scene, penned a treatise for Ark magazine celebrating the popular art of advertising and effectively collapsing distinctions between lowly and venerated forms of cultural production: “For us it would be the objects on the beaches, the piece of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and the pop-package. For today we collect ads.”

May 10, 2022

OP-ED: Calls for a permanent COVID memorial neglect our fragmented political culture

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Daniel Libeskind, MASS Design Group, Maya Lin, Sekou Cooke, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, Thomas Heatherwick

View Original

In early March, just as case numbers and mask requirements were dropping, the New York Times editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Why New York Needs a Covid Memorial.” City and citizens, the op-ed argued, would be stronger if it could “confront its grief instead of trying to outrun it.” The authors were necessarily hazy about shape and size, style and site, but particular about the need for a place for people to gather and mourn.

In year three of the pandemic, the United States is just shy of a million COVID-related deaths. Global deaths are six times that number, with each data point representing an individual with a constellation of loved ones, friends, co-workers left behind. Clearly, there’s a need to honor the dead. But when and how? Read More …

April 28, 2022

MCASD Has a Complicated Relationship With Its History

Metropolis

TAGS

Annabelle Selldorf, Architecture, Articles, Denise Scott Brown, Mosher Drew Architects, Robert Venturi, Selldorf Architects, Sol LeWitt

View Original

We generally want to interpret contemporary art museums in good faith—not as mausoleums of wealth, but as open, accessible places, removed from the vicissitude of the market and designed to produce an experience, foster education, and nurture communion with art. The recently reopened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla checks all those boxes, even adding a gentle Pacific breeze and the sound of crashing breakers. Yet the $105 million renovation and expansion gives off monied vibes, accommodating a mushrooming collection and driven by the ambitions of the museum board.

Low-slung on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and conservatively clad in travertine panels, the expanded Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building, by New York-based Selldorf Architects, greets visitors with a pavilion-like entry shaded by a massive Mission fig tree. Maybe it’s the glass and aluminum storefront facade, or the gift shop positioned to the right of the ticketing desk, but the details smack of high-end retail. The vibe: minimalist, tasteful, functional. In short, everything that Venturi Scott Brown and Associates’ (VSBA) weird, whimsically vaulted Postmodernist lobby is not.

January 25, 2022

On Futures: Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo

SCI-Arc Channel

TAGS

Art, Articles, Arturo Ernesto Romo, Sesshu Foster

View Original

Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo are authors of ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. A surrealist history that flows backwards and forwards in time, their novel tells a utopian story about airships and revolution—including how groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. The text, a series overlapping narratives and imagined artifacts, grew out of a long collaboration between Foster and Romo and is accompanied by drawings, collages, and photographs.

Based in Alhambra, CA, Foster is an award-winning writer. He taught composition and literature in East L.A. for over 20 years, and at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Romo was born and lives in Los Angeles. His artwork, mostly collaborative mixed media works and drawing, has been circulated internationally.

Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

“A radical politics of hope”

AN shares tributes to Mike Davis (1946–2022)

The Broken Dreams of L.A.’s Grand Avenue

Frank Gehry’s decades-in-the-making tower complex in the center of Downtown Los Angeles fails to live up to its signature.

Architecture of Good Intentions

Gehry Partners designs a new campus for Children’s Institute in Watts

The L.A. River Gets A Geometric New Pedestrian Crossing

The American Dream, Updated?

In Los Angeles, recent interest in ADUs prompts an honest look at the housing type

The Once and Future Bridge

Can the Sixth Street Viaduct predict the future of Los Angeles?

Review: “ORDER” by Óscar Monzón

OP-ED: Calls for a permanent COVID memorial neglect our fragmented political culture

MCASD Has a Complicated Relationship With Its History

On Futures: Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo