Archinect - News

Remembering the civic architecture of Paul Revere Williams

2019-12-18T18:55:00-05:00

A new episode of the Lost LA series on Los Angeles channel KCET highlights the civic architecture of noted and prolific architect Paul Revere Williams.

Williams, who built over 3,000 structures over a more than 50-year-long long career, is largely known for designing stylistically eclectic Hollywood movie star houses, but the breadth and scope of his legacy far exceeds works that simply cater to the rich and famous. Instead, Williams, who was posthumously awarded the American Institute of Architects (AIA) Gold Medal in 2017, worked across styles, building types, and formal approaches to arrive at one of the most diverse and visionary bodies of work of any American architect of the 20th Century.

During his time, Williams helped design key components of the Los Angeles International Airport complex, for example, as well as the Pueblo del Rio housing projects, the Founder's Church of Religious Science, and a number of public schools, churches, and commercial structures for communities...

Editor's Picks #266

2012-05-28T20:14:00-04:00

In Still Ugly After All These Years: A Close Reading of Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center, Alexander Maymind argued the center's "grid-based diagrams instantiate disestablishment effects[2]...hinge on a particular aesthetic reading of architectural ugliness." 18x32 responded "I like where you've gone with the 'Ugly' here, but I don't think this building offers the best example. Nothing about Wexner is viscerally repellant, abhorrent or disgusting."

Alexander Maymind shared his essay Still Ugly After All These Years: A Close Reading of Peter Eisenman’s Wexner Center, recently published in One: Twelve Issue 4, April 2012. Therein he begins by suggesting how the center's "grid-based diagrams instantiate disestablishment effects[2] related to the aims of a contemporary art institution sited in a traditional neoclassical campus plan. These effects; critical, discursive and haptic, hinge on a particular aesthetic reading of architectural ugliness."

18x32 responded "I like where you've gone with the 'Ugly' here, but I don't think this building offers the best example. Nothing about Wexner is viscerally repellant, abhorrent or disgusting. Everything is too clean, too precise, too clinical, too withdrawn, too intentional to be grotesque. The 'Uncanny' might be a more accurate descriptor and be more in line with Eisenman's own position (see, for example, his comments on Moneo's Town Hall in Logroño in discussion with Christopher Al...

Orhan Ayyüce: L.A. Love At First Sight

2012-05-24T17:01:00-04:00

I met this gray-haired woman. I lit her cigarette and she asked me what I was doing there? I said I just wanted to meet some architects and learn where I could go to school. "She said, okay, 'If you have a car, tomorrow go to this place in Santa Monica called SciArc, it's a new school. Ask for Ray Kappe and tell them that Esther McCoy sent you.'

KCET just sat down with Archinect senior editor Orhan Ayyüce for an interview about his Turkish roots, the arrival in Los Angeles, and his unlikely introduction to the world of architecture.

Proposition 13's Hidden Effects On the Built Environment

2012-04-30T14:39:00-04:00

Ayyüce also says that with governments such as Los Angeles now less financially able to maintain parks and other such amenities, big business set about increasingly co-opting -- or, picking up the slack for -- the creation and safeguarding of a bastardized brand of community commons. "You go to The Americana, you go to The Grove, you got to the Santa Monica [Third Street Promenade], these are places that thousands of people visit," Ayyüce says. "But this is not really public space."

KCET's Jeremy Rosenberg talks to Archinect's own Orhan Ayyüce about Proposition 13.