Archinect - News

With opening of Expo Line to Santa Monica, L.A.'s dream of a "subway to the sea" finally comes true (again)

2016-05-20T20:32:00-04:00

The $1.5-billion second leg of the Expo Line, which opened Friday from Culver City to Santa Monica, adds seven light-rail stations and more than six miles of track to the growing Los Angeles County transit network. [...] In the immediate context of L.A.'s attempts to turn its public-transit network from national punch line to something that increasingly resembles a mature system, 13 new Metro stations in less than three months qualifies as a pretty dramatic upgrade.

The aggressively expanding LA Metro system in recent Archinect news stories:

How LA is changing, one rail line at a time

2016-05-02T13:07:00-04:00

“A good part of any day in Los Angeles,” Joan Didion wrote in 1989, “is spent driving, alone, through streets devoid of meaning to the driver, which is one reason the place exhilarates some people, and floods others with an amorphous unease.” I quote this statement every chance I get; it is among the most trenchant ever written about the place. But all that is changing, or might be, if the promises implied by the Expo Line expansion can be kept.

On May 20, Los Angeles's Metro will open the expansion of its Expo Line, stretching from downtown past its current terminus in Culver City all the way to Santa Monica, blocks from the Pacific Ocean. The dream of "Broadway to the beach" by train in LA will soon become a reality, and stands to be a watershed moment in the city's transit development, as David Ulin reflects in the New York Times:

Regardless of what the Expo Line ultimately does or doesn’t do for traffic, this is, I think, the essence of what it offers: the notion of Los Angeles as a space we occupy together, collective and evolving, where in the act of getting lost, as I discovered on Venice Boulevard, we may also unexpectedly be found.

Related on Archinect:

Editor's Picks #263

2012-05-07T16:49:00-04:00

Elected officials in Goshen, N.Y., voted Thursday against a resolution to demolish and replace the Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph. Steven Ward, hoped “mr diana will now get behind this decision and determine how best to renovate to meet the needs of the community...score one for preservation of the modern!"

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Elected officials in Goshen, N.Y., voted Thursday against a resolution to demolish and replace the Orange County Government Center by Paul Rudolph, a late-1960s building in the small Hudson Valley town that sparked debate on the value of modern architecture. Steven Ward, hoped “mr diana will now get behind this decision and determine how best to renovate to meet the needs of the community. ...the fact that the local government's elected representatives have taken this position is a huge deal, an indicator that they are hearing that the community wants to keep this special place. score one for preservation of the modern!” and Scribbler argued “We have to keep a few of these so that we have real examples of the variety, forms, and experiments modernism has made so that we have a record to remind us to not do this kind of modernism again". Donna Sink, for her part agreed “Even if one doesn't find this building beautiful (which I definitely do!), it's important to history to kee...