Archinect - News

Montalba is making over Edward Durell Stone's iconic 9720 Wilshire building

2021-11-02T13:56:00-04:00

A Beverly Hills icon is getting a long overdue facelift thanks to a top-notch local firm.

Santa Monica-based Montalba Architects is behind a newly announced renovation that will transform the former Pacific Mercantile Bank building, an eight-story office tower on Wilshire Boulevard by New Formalist master Edward Durell Stone.

Image courtesy Montalba Architects

Stone was the architect of the Ahmanson Center and responsible for several other midcentury commercial developments on Wilshire Boulevard that have become synonymous with the visual landscape of Los Angeles thanks to artists like Ed Ruscha and David Hockney.

Image courtesy Montalba Architects

The building’s characteristic Romanesque facade will remain untouched as the fronting fountain and plaza area are reimagined in order to make space for a “sunken garden” that allows the architects to activate its previously unused basement substructure. Interior renovations will be made using a “reserved palette of materials that harken th...

How do you critique a city? What is city criticism, and why is it important?

2019-10-29T11:18:00-04:00

Criticism: Everyone in architecture experiences it regularly. The importance of this consistent facet of the profession provides ongoing possibilities for discourse and improvement. However, like other areas where criticism plays a necessary part of establishing a significant impression or progression within society, it’s not always easy to have others detract or contradict the ideas embodied by your work.

Colin Marshall of the Guardian brings up a specific category within criticism that has particular relevance today, "the city critic." Marshall argues, "In our increasingly urban world, perhaps city criticism should be recognized as distinct and necessary." So, where does "city criticism" differ from "architecture criticism," and why should it be recognized as an integral part of understanding the built environment?

Jane Jacobs. Image via Wikipedia Commons.

Marshall speaks with critics and editors alike to help further understand and decipher what this distinct subject of criticis...

A 'radical alternative': how Reyner Banham changed the perception of Los Angeles

2016-08-25T12:00:00-04:00

"it performs the functions of a great city, in terms of size, cosmopolitan style, creative energy, international influence, distinctive way of life, and corporate personality [proves that] all the most admired theorists of the present century, from the Futurists and Le Corbusier to Jane Jacobs and Sibyl Moholy-Nagy, have been wrong.”

"In the 1960s, British architectural critic Reyner Banham declared his love for the city that his fellow intellectuals hated. What Banham wrote about Los Angeles redefined how the world perceived it – but what would he think of LA today?"

With a nod to Glen Small's Biomorphic Biosphere is a noteworthy paragraph from the book.

Hippie Modernism: How Bay Area design radicals tried to save the planet

2015-10-29T11:05:00-04:00

Hippie modernism focused not on rigorous form but rather on a kind of socially inspired bricolage. Hippie modernism has been not only misunderstood but also underestimated. Buckminster Fuller’s concept of a ‘design science revolution’ inspired the hippie bricoleurs to shoulder their generation’s emerging notion of environmental stewardship.

Greg Castillo pens a great article about one of the most overlooked and often dismissed role of hippies in what we have today greedily claimed by the millenials and known as "environmental movement."

“Hippie Modernism” is published in coordination with the Walker Art Center exhibition,Hippie Modernism: The Struggle for Utopia,

The Digital Future of Architectural History

2013-09-23T15:34:00-04:00

In creating associated descriptive metadata, in tagging building entries to describe their materials, types, and, perhaps most especially, their styles, the author of metadata is practicing the historian’s craft and engaging in the historian’s stock in trade. "Name it, then we’ll know what it is," Reyner Banham suggested at the end of “The Great Gizmo.” We can name it metadata creation, but we already know what it is: architectural history.

For several years Gabrielle Esperdy has been part of a team working on the development of SAH Archipedia — an online encyclopedia of American architecture sponsored by the Society of Architectural Historians. Here she explores the critical challenge of creating structural and descriptive metadata for the new resource — and argues that the digital platform has the potential "not only to publish scholarship but to produce it."

Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship 2013-2014

2013-03-21T14:36:00-04:00

Peter Reyner Banham spent his time in Buffalo engaged in a scholarly project on the imaginary of American industrial architecture that took the form of historical research, hands-on engagement and seminar instruction, resulting in his landmark work, A Concrete Atlantis. In celebration of Banham’s legacy of experimental criticism, the fellowship is intended to support the research and creative activity of emerging practitioners. Candidates are encouraged to propose a research trajectory that will be developed in tandem with a pedagogical agenda.

The Banham Fellow will teach a design studio and an elective course each semester for the duration of the one-year fellowship. In addition, the fellow will deliver a public lecture as part of the school wide series and prepare an exhibition that culminates from the research, teaching, and/or creative work conducted while in residence at the school.

Applications should be composed of a well-considered proposal for research/creative work ...

Reyner Banham on the Road

2012-03-19T16:44:00-04:00

If you drove far enough, from Maine to Georgia, from the Midwest to Southern California, or simply from one end of Los Angeles to the other, you would start to notice that there were different ecologies, and that some were geographical and some were cultural, but that they intersected and collaged to form a vast, sprawling, layered network whose patterns were discernible only if you took the long view and just kept driving.

In an essay for Places, Gabrielle Esperdy (of American Road Trip) follows architectural critic Reyner Banham out of Los Angeles and out onto the open road, placing him in the tradition of European travelers, from de Tocqueville and Dickens to Alistair Cooke and Stephen Fry, whose observations tell us Americans "something important about ourselves."