August 29, 2024

A Place In The Sun

In the Eastern Coachella Valley, where shade is a luxury, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative focuses on empowering the residents through design.

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Chelina Odbert, Christian Rodriguez Ceja, Design, Kounkuey Design Initiative, Urbanism

It’s a blustery, early spring day in the Eastern Coachella Valley, or ECV. The basin is tinted green and purple by wildflowers and grasses encouraged by a surprisingly heavy rainy season, a departure from its usual brown. Wild yellow mustard pokes through the asphalt road edge, and palm trees stand shoulder to shoulder in orderly military rows. These shaggy, shady oases are date orchards, managed by commercial growers that have been in the valley for generations. Since 2011, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative (KDI) has worked in this landscape, painstakingly building relationships with community members and leadership as well as county and state politicians to address the need for public space. KDI’s approach is remarkable because it values residents over a finished product. Throughout the process, residents find the confidence to speak out on their own behalf, and the design team listens.

May 23, 2024

PATTERNS’s medical campus in the San Fernando Valley disrupts the strip mall typology

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Georgina Huljich, Marcelo Spina, PATTERNS

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Victory Boulevard cuts a straight line through the suburban San Fernando Valley. It’s a 20th-century time capsule: a wide swath of asphalt lined by lowrise retail, gas stations, and fast food outlets that sprung up after acres of orange groves were bulldozed. More recently, infill housing has sporadically plugged in the gaps between strip malls and midcentury apartment buildings, but as a place, the Valley’s commercial corridor is bleak and sunbaked, even on a winter day.

May 17, 2024

What will come of Downtown Los Angeles’s Oceanwide Plaza?

The Architect's Newspaper

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Architecture, Articles, CallisonRTKL

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Is Oceanwide Plaza an object lesson? Stalled for more than five years, the project in Downtown Los Angeles stands half-built, filling an entire block across the street from the Crypto.com arena and the L.A. convention center. Tall grasses grow in the gaps between materials and equipment abandoned when its bankrupt Beijing-based developer, Oceanwide Holdings, pulled the plug in 2019. This $1.2 billion ruin of global capital sat untended all through the pandemic, quietly emblematic of overreaching speculative development.

April 1, 2024

Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture

A new book compiles an archive of work by Minerva Parker Nichols, the first American woman to practice architecture independently.

Untapped

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Architecture, Articles, Julia Morgan, Minerva Parker Nichols

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Minerva Parker Nichols: The Search for a Forgotten Architect (Yale University Press) is about absence as much as it is about the presence of its protagonist. Organized by the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, the 336-page book of essays and photographs is forensic, collecting things that are ineffable: demolished structures, gaps in a fragmented archive, and a figure missing from the architectural canon.

Slightly older than the much more celebrated architect and engineer Julia Morgan, the first female architect licensed in California, Nichols (1862–1949) is considered the first American woman to establish her own independent architecture practice—a feat accomplished without generational wealth or the financial support of a husband in 1888, a time when professional paths for women were narrow. Although Nichols later married Reverend William Ichabod Nichols, the book opens with a note explaining the editorial decision to refer to the architect as “Minerva” rather than to define her by her married name (moving forward, I’ll do the same), and for clarity: 53 of the 81 known projects she worked on were commissioned before her marriage.

March 23, 2024

Pearlman Cabin by John Lautner is an organic Californian mountain retreat

Wallpaper

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Frank Lloyd Wright, John Lautner

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Nancy Pearlman is many things: radio personality, environmentalist, dancer and storyteller. Chief among these is passionate host. On occasional days throughout the year, she opens the doors to her family’s midcentury modern cabin to friends, architecture enthusiasts, artists and hikers she met on the trails in the surrounding San Jacinto Mountains. Located in Idyllwild, a resort town 5,000ft above Palm Springs, the home was designed by architect John Lautner for her parents, Dr Carl Kenneth and Agnes Branch Pearlman, as a holiday retreat.

February 22, 2024

West World

New York Review of Architecture

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Morphosis, Thom Mayne

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The thing about architectural models is that they are both the thing and not the thing—a point reiterated across the 150 accumulated texts that make up M³: modeled works [archive] 1972–2022, the recent monographic release from Thom Mayne and Morphosis Architects. M for Morphosis, M for Mayne, M for model, one presumes. About the size and shape of a doorstop, with a large, M-shaped hole carved out of the chipboard cover (yes, the same stuff models are made from), M³offers endless ruminations on the architectural maquette. Models are the world in miniature; models are between the real and the abstract; models are, in the words of twin philosophers Zoolander and Dank Lloyd Wright, “a center for ants.”

December 20, 2023

Los Angeles based studio MILLIØNS’ ‘expansive’ view of architecture

MILLIØNS is a multi-hyphenated practice from California, inspiring with their expansive view of architecture

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Architecture, Articles, John May, MILLIØNS, Zeina Koreitem

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Zeina Koreitem and John May are the founders of MILLIØNS, a small, L.A.-based studio with an outsized vision for architecture. They describe their practice: ‘We find it impossible to imagine architecture apart from a kind of expansive, ongoing project of observation and investigation—cultural, historical, technical, political—as a way of continually understanding the world around us.’

Deceber 19, 2023

The Open Workshop explores the radical in architecture

The Open Workshop is an emerging Californian studio from San Francisco making waves with its ideas around what's 'radical' in architecture

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TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Coop Himmelblau, Neeraj Bhatia, The Open Workshop, Urbanism

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The Open Workshop’s Neeraj Bhatia would like to change what it means for architecture to be radical. When the San Francisco–based architect and urban designer, entered architecture school the epitome of radical was Deconstructivism. This meant wild drawings and rare but daring constructions in a pre-digital age. Early in his career he was drawn to this definition, and even did a stint at the famously avant-garde firm Coop Himmelblau, but the pursuit of ‘form for form’s sake’ wasn’t satisfying. Simply looking radical wasn’t enough, for architecture to truly be radical it needed to have an effect on people and policy.

December 19, 2023

Disguised Density

An Excerpt from “The State of Housing Design 2023”

Harvard Design Magazine

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Barbara Bestor, Beebe Skidmore Architects, Duvall Decker, Koning Eizenberg Architecture, Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects, Urbanism

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In 2016, architect Barbara Bestor used the term “stealth density” to describe a multifamily residential development that her firm, Bestor Architecture, designed in Los Angeles’s Echo Park. The neighborhood, historically a mix of Latinx families and bohemian artists and writers, was slowly, then very rapidly, gentrifying in LA’s overheated housing market. Any new construction was bound to be suspect—both as a harbinger of displacement and disruption of the old, streetcar-era urban fabric. Although the term “stealth” conveys a contextually sensitive approach, a way to fit into an existing condition, it also reflects the anxieties of a neighborhood in transition. Changing a neighborhood’s physical character threatens both longtime and recent residents.

December 18, 2023

Terremoto and its ‘unapologetically ecologically focused landscapes’ in California

Terremoto, the dynamic and gentle landscape architecture firm, is part of our series of emerging studios that spearhead change in California

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TAGS

Alain Peauroi, Architecture, Articles, David Godshall, Lawrence Halprin, TERREMOTO

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Terremoto is the kind of firm that enthusiastically describes its approach to a recent project as ‘hippie-dippy gooey goodness.’ The landscape architecture design studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco digs a countercultural vibe. After all, they did restore and enhance the landscape of the Sea Ranch Lodge, the historic (and famously hippie modernist) outpost on the Northern California coast master planned by landscape architect Lawrence Halprin.

Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

A Place In The Sun

In the Eastern Coachella Valley, where shade is a luxury, the nonprofit Kounkuey Design Initiative focuses on empowering the residents through design.

PATTERNS’s medical campus in the San Fernando Valley disrupts the strip mall typology

What will come of Downtown Los Angeles’s Oceanwide Plaza?

Tracing the Agency of Women as Users and Experts of Architecture

A new book compiles an archive of work by Minerva Parker Nichols, the first American woman to practice architecture independently.

Pearlman Cabin by John Lautner is an organic Californian mountain retreat

West World

Los Angeles based studio MILLIØNS’ ‘expansive’ view of architecture

MILLIØNS is a multi-hyphenated practice from California, inspiring with their expansive view of architecture

The Open Workshop explores the radical in architecture

The Open Workshop is an emerging Californian studio from San Francisco making waves with its ideas around what's 'radical' in architecture

Disguised Density

An Excerpt from “The State of Housing Design 2023”

Terremoto and its ‘unapologetically ecologically focused landscapes’ in California

Terremoto, the dynamic and gentle landscape architecture firm, is part of our series of emerging studios that spearhead change in California