Archinect - News

Frank Gehry talks to the LA Times about his ever-expanding vision for downtown Los Angeles

2024-04-12T17:50:00-04:00

Frank Gehry has provided some interesting comments to the LA Times to coincide with last week’s groundbreaking of the new Colburn Center in downtown Los Angeles, a vital lynchpin for the city’s post-COVID economic rebound.

Speaking on the record for an article to the paper’s business section, the 95-year-old Walt Disney Concert Hall designer told reporters about his still-expanding vision for the Grand Avenue corridor and beyond. The neighborhood has been a bit of an obsession of his since the end of the 1990s. Now, he says, "we still have work to do," adding that Little Tokyo, the Arts District, and other neighborhoods near Bunker Hill can and should have their own culture-backed transformations performed to facilitate a revival pushed by LA Mayor Karen Bass and other civic leaders.

The Broad museum also recently announced its own $100 million expansion plans. Our February preview of the new $335 milli...

Now you can experience LA’s erstwhile Bunker Hill neighborhood thanks to a 3D reconstruction from USC

2022-07-15T14:26:00-04:00

Seven decades after it was razed to do away with what the federal government deemed “urban blight,” the University of Southern California’s Ahmanson Lab, working with the Bunker Hill Refrain Collaboratory, has created an interactive 3D reconstruction of Downtown Los Angeles’ Bunker Hill neighborhood. The initiative gives users a sense of what was lost when the area was turned over to developers and slowly remade into what is today an unrecognizable warren of commercial and luxury residential projects consistently fought over by some of the city’s most powerful names.

The 3D tour captures the area as it appeared between the late 1930s and the beginning of the government-led “slum clearance” initiatives that began in the last two years of the 1940s.

A typical Queen Anne style home in the neighborhood ca. 1940. Image courtesy USC.

Mayor Fletcher Bowron was the domineering political figure at that time, overseeing an unprecedented second wave of urban expansion in Los Angeles that inclu...

Los Angeles the latest city to adopt digital twin technology to cut carbon emissions

2022-06-09T21:11:00-04:00

Cityzenith, a Chicago-based digital twin platform, announced last week that it is partnering with the Los Angeles branch of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Better Buildings Challenge to help construct a digital twin, or virtual replica, of a section of the city to help make its buildings more sustainable and reduce carbon emissions.

The project will initially center on the downtown Los Angeles neighborhood of Bunker Hill. Cityzenith’s SmartWorld digital twin product will be implemented to enable building owners to simulate their financial paths to net-zero emissions. This is part of Cityzenith’s "Clean Cities — Clean Future" initiative, which provides cities with a free digital twin in order to virtually test potential decarbonization efforts before implementing costly plans in the real world.

Previously on Archinect: Digital twin of downtown Las Vegas unveiled in effort to cut emissions

As noted by Melissa Goldin of Construction Dive, the Bunker Hill project will focus on data related to decarbonization efforts for a major public building and the surrounding area. Energy or building management systems, occupancy readings, and architectural information are among the variables that will be examined. The digital twin will have the potential to expand to cover the rest of the city and address other city planning i...

L.A. gives the O.K. to massive Angels Landing high-rise development

2022-03-30T15:15:00-04:00

The city of Los Angeles is moving forward with a historic plan from Handel Architects and OLIN for a slice of Downtown’s Bunker Hill neighborhood called Angels Landing.

The LA Times is reporting the city’s granting of entitlements needed to build on the parcel designated Y-1, which features the site of the historic Angels Flight funicular railway system.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

The project, backed by developers Victor MacFarlane and R. Donahue Peebles, is being hailed as the largest ever by a Black-owned development firm and, at 1.26 million square feet, is one of the largest in the recent history of the city.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

A once bespoke residential area west of LA’s downtown core, Bunker Hill has developed into a commercial high-rise district since the city initiated a redevelopment scheme in the late 1960s.

Image courtesy Handel Architects

Now, with only the funky funicular railway remaining as a vestige of what used to be, MacFarlane and Peebles will lo...

Watch seventy years of Downtown LA's architecture compared side-by-side

2016-07-22T13:37:00-04:00

Bunker Hill, an area of roughly five square blocks in downtown Los Angeles, holds a place in city lore similar to that of the water wars or the construction of Dodger Stadium: beginning in 1959, it was the subject of a massive urban-renewal project, in which “improvement” was generally defined by the people who stood to profit from it [...] subject of this short film by Keven McAlester, which compares what the same streets in downtown Los Angeles looked like in the nineteen-forties and today.

Stills via YouTube.