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.

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

Wallpaper

TAGS

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

View Original

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

View Original

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.

September 21, 2023

Landmark Award

Vista Hermosa Natural Park

Landscape Architecture

TAGS

Articles, Mia Lehrer, Studio-MLA, Urbanism

View Original

At the turn of the last century, the 10 acres on which Vista Hermosa Natural Park sits was a forest of oil derricks. Located on the outskirts of a nascent downtown Los Angeles, dozens of wellheads replaced the native sage and chaparral scrub. A photograph from 1901 shows a poisonous landscape glistening with pools of what might be water—or oil.

Fast-forward a century and the land was still a toxic mess. Working-class homes (built decades after drilling) were bulldozed to make way for the Belmont Learning Complex. A project of the Los Angeles Unified School District, the $200 million middle school campus and housing complex was once deemed “the most expensive school in America” and was meant to bring high-tech learning to the city’s Temple-Beaudry neighborhood. But by 2000, construction had halted, and the planned complex was enmeshed in political scandal that bubbled up to mainstream news outlets.

November 15, 2022

“A radical politics of hope”

AN shares tributes to Mike Davis (1946–2022)

The Architect's Newspaper

TAGS

Articles, Mike Davis, Urbanism

View Original

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 1, 2022

Everyone’s a critic

The Urbanist, Episode 568

Monocle

TAGS

Architecture, Podcast, Urbanism

View Original

We explore why it’s so important to be critical about our urban environment, as we delve into the world of architecture-and-design criticism to see how it helps us to better understand and form the cities we live in.

— Andrew Tuck, The Urbanist

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?

May 17, 2022

Reyner Banham Double Bill (PG) (LC) + ScreenTalk

Architecture on Film

Architecture Foundation

TAGS

Adrian Forty, Architecture, Events, Reyner Banham, Urbanism

View Original

Two pioneering works of radical television from the mind of the iconoclastic architecture critic Reyner Banham.

The writings and thinking of Reyner Banham, born 100 years ago this year, came to define and create architectural culture. His hugely innovative and engaging analyses of architecture, the city, culture and its artefacts continue to mark generations.

Banham’s trademark formal and intellectual wit, invention and creative critique found a perfect home on TV. In tonight’s first episode he drives the streets of his beloved LA, aided by an Alexa-like technological tour guide. In the second, he departs from there for Las Vegas, finding his own personal jackpot in the desert landscapes on route.

The ScreenTalk is chaired by Professor Richard J Williams, author of Reyner Banham Revisited, with guests writer and journalist Owen Hatherley, architectural historian Adrian Forty and LA-based critic, editor and curator Mimi Zeiger.