Archinect - News

SFMOMA acquires Nakagin Capsule Tower pod

2023-06-13T19:37:00-04:00

A unique piece of architectural history is headed to America following the purchase of a remaining Nakagin Capsule Tower pod by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

The LA Times’ Carolina A. Miranda was first to report on the museum’s acquisition last week, which she said will join examples from fellow adherent to Metabolist architecture Fumihiko Maki and photographer Noritaka Minami (who documented his life inside the tower from 2010 to 2021) in the museum’s collection.

The A1302 capsule is one of just 23 preserved through the Tatsuyuki Maeda-led Nakagin Capsule Tower Preservation and Restoration Project and was personally owned by the building's architect Kisho Kurokawa himself, before his death in 2007.

Earlier on Archinect: Nakagin Capsule Tower capsules see new life following building's demolition in 2022

"It’s so rare to collect a 1-to-1 scale piece of architecture. It can fit inside, outside, and that’s phenomenal for us," the museum's architecture curator, Jennife...

Carolina A. Miranda thinks Tom Wiscombe's new billboard should prompt a 'reckoning in architecture'

2022-08-25T17:09:00-04:00

Formally known as the Sunset Spectacular, it consists of a trio of massive steel panels that converge at a height of 67 feet, two of their surfaces draped in irregularly shaped digital screens bearing ads for tech overlords Amazon and Meta. If a game designer for “Halo” were to imagine a billboard, this is probably what it would look like. [...] There is an important story embedded in the design of the Sunset Spectacular. It has nothing to do with its forms.

Responding to the New York Times’ recent “puff piece” on embattled SCI-Arc professor Tom Wiscombe’s long-awaited Sunset Spectacular billboard in West Hollywood, critic Carolina A. Miranda offered a rather cutting take on Joseph Giovannini‘s “extra curious” failure to mention what has become a rather viral academic and professional controversy.

Previously on Archinect: Controversy at SCI-Arc over labor practices leads to faculty members placed on leave. Isolated incident or a wake-up call for the industry at large?

Wiscombe was the centerpiece of the recent investigation into student intern labor abuse at SCI-Arc and has been placed on administrative leave as a result of his alleged actions. “To many skeptics, it seemed as if the architectural establishment were intent on scrubbing the record clean,” Miranda wrote, citing the chorus of derision that has swelled on social media. “This whole episode also calls into question how critics (myself included) write about architecture.”

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A group of UCSB students pitches a thorough alternative to Munger Hall

2022-06-06T17:50:00-04:00

In an amazing rebuke of their university’s purblind pursuit of the Munger Hall megadormitory project last week, students at the University of California, Santa Barbara staged a public forum in order to showcase research-based alternatives to the development and long-term strategic plan.

Led by Professor Rita Bright, a group of 43 Environmental Studies concentrators took school administrators to task with a thorough proposal that simultaneously meets the campus’ attendant student housing crisis and a host of UCSB’s other stated objectives, according to a write up by Carolina A. Miranda in the LA Times.

Previously on Archinect: Munger Hall now has a walkthrough for the skeptical

The alternative plan calls for several new smaller dorms to be erected either above existing one-story dining hall structures, or else on a site currently occupied by a parking lot. It also recommended building at a smaller scale at the proposed site of Munger Hall, which is currently a maintenance facility. Mi...

Catherine Opie will join Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda at The Broad for a discussion on memory and public space

2022-01-19T18:38:00-05:00

Who gets to be remembered in a city, and why? That will be one of the questions on the dais when artist Catherine Opie joins current and former LA Times architecture critics Christopher Hawthorne and Carolina A. Miranda for a conversation on the topic at The Broad Museum in Los Angeles tomorrow evening.

The conversation will take as its focus the works of Opie as they tie-in with the mission of the city’s Civic Memory Working Group that Hawthorne helped found. The museum will also present Opie’s recently-acquired work monument/monumental, which documents a 2020 road trip from Richmond, Virginia and the attempt by Black Lives Matters activists there to reclaim a noteworthy statue that depicted Robert E. Lee. Opie’s work will be presented in the context of how commemoration can best be processed through the built environment in the 21st century using lessons from the past as a critical guide.

From left to right: Catherine Opie, Christopher Hawthorne, and Carolina Miranda. Image cour...

Los Angeles was a constant source of inspiration for Richard Rogers

2021-12-24T15:40:00-05:00

Rogers never designed any buildings in California. (The closest he came was the competition for the Transbay Transit Center in San Francisco, where his firm’s concept ultimately lost out to a proposal by César Pelli.) But California remained an influence and Los Angeles remained top of mind — though frequently as an example of what not to do.

The colorful architect, who passed away last week at the age of 88, looked to the city’s expansive stock of mid-century modern showcase pieces to inform his own designs, including the Wimbledon House and later in his attempts at urban planning, referencing the city’s notorious sprawl repeatedly in his 1998 book Cities for a Small Planet.

“The Eames House is one of the prime exemplars that have shaped my mind,” he said in a 1989 interview of the Pacific Palisades Home built by the Eameses in 1949. “Its amazing simplicity and economy of style, that seems to have sprung fully fledged from Eames’ head, is a model of perfection in Modern design.”

Rogers was hooked after a trip he made with fellow Yale classmate Norman Foster in the late 1950s, according to the LA Times’ Carolina Miranda.

"We raced around California, seeing as many of the Case Study houses as possible," Rogers recalled in his 2017 memoir A Place for all People. "I had written my thesis at Yale on Schindler, so I felt lik...

Influential modern icon Bernard Judge has passed away in Los Angeles aged 90

2021-11-24T13:08:00-05:00

Leading modernist Bernard Judge passed away in his Los Angeles home last week at the age of 90.

The LA Times’ Carolina Miranda has an excellent write-up on the man who once designed a home for Marlon Brando on an atoll in French Polynesia.

Judge was in many ways the living definition of a “champion of modernism,” pioneering the geodesic dome form exhibited in his Triponent House and working to restore Rudolph Schindler’s then-eponymous West Hollywood home after taking out a personal ad in the Times in the early 1970s.

Judge was born in New York City to an artist mother and architecture professor father. He went on to study at USC at a time when the school was dominated by prominent residential designers like Gregory Ain and Conrad Bluff III.

Section drawing of Judge's Triponent House project. Source: Southern California Architectural History.

Judge designed a number of resorts and inexpensive and easy-to-construct homes through his firm Environmental Services Group. He was a lectur...

An artist is honoring Eileen Gray’s iconic E1027 villa with a new research-intensive exhibition

2021-10-01T19:04:00-04:00

Situated on the French Riviera, about a 30-minute drive east of Nice, the graceful 1929 villa was originally designed by architect Eileen Gray as a retreat for her and her lover, critic Jean Badovici. Over the course of its nearly century-long life, it has borne witness to one naked starchitect vandal, one world war, various drug-fueled orgies and a murder.

The original 1929 villa reopened in August after a five-year-long restoration effort led by the French Association Cap Moderne. The house was the site of a 1996 murder in addition to several other sordid affairs and outré episodes that have helped create a rather useful mythology surrounding Gray’s modernist icon. Artist Kim Schoenstadt incorporated three year’s worth of research into the home and its architect, whom many now count as an unheralded icon of the International Style.

“Gray wasn’t forgotten, but the way she was written about and the way her work was dismissed — that’s an important discussion to have with students,” curator Julie Joyce told the LA Times.

View this post on Instagram A post shared by ArtCenter Exhibitions (@artcenterexhibitions)

The exhibition will be on view until February 27th at the ArtCenter College of Design’s Mullin Gallery in Pasadena. The Times’ Carolina Miranda has more on the house’s inspirational backstory here.

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Does LACMA have its financial house in order?

2020-02-21T14:37:00-05:00

According to the museum’s most recent 990 tax forms, filed in 2018, LACMA is carrying $331 million in county bond debt that was used to pay for construction of the Resnick Pavilion, the Broad Contemporary Art Museum, the Pritzker Parking Garage and other projects. In addition to that debt, the museum has $112 million in other liabilities, such as accounts payable and accrued expenses. This brings LACMA’s total debt to almost $443 million.

Carolina Miranda of The Los Angeles Times takes a hard look at the finances for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) as the institution prepares for the imminent demolition of its legacy William L. Pereira Associates- and Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer-designed campus to make way for a $750 million Atelier Peter Zumthor-designed replacement facility.

In the report, Miranda compares LACMA's assets and debts with those of other leading cultural institutions around the country, finding that the Los Angeles museum is carrying an abnormally high debt-ratio. The worrisome financial situation has already lead to a series of revisions for the project, including a one substantial downsizing.

LA's Marciano Foundation museum closes amid staff unionization push

2019-11-10T18:00:00-05:00

On Tuesday night, the Marciano Art Foundation laid off nearly six dozen visitor services employees who had been attempting to unionize. The museum then issued a public statement saying that the space would be “closed to the public until further notice.” By Wednesday, the museum had issued yet another statement: There are “no present plans to reopen.” Staffers who had announced their intent to unionize decried the shutdown as an illegal union-busting scheme.

The Marciano Art Foundation debuted in 2017 and was designed by wHY within a building originally designed by storied Los Angeles architect Millard Sheets.

Describing the abrupt closure, Carolina Miranda writes in The Los Angeles Times, "The Marciano situation has also highlighted issues of pay equity at museums, which frequently have a coterie of well-remunerated administrators at the top, followed by a much larger subset of poorly paid workers at the bottom, many part time."

In Los Angeles, institutions build, but they can't plan

2019-07-12T18:34:00-04:00

“We have this museum district,” says architect and theorist Dana Cuff, who oversees cityLAB, an urban research and design center at UCLA, “but the stuff that holds everything together is the part we call the city, and that is the part that Los Angeles has never gotten right.”

Carolina Miranda of The Los Angeles Times reports that despite a number of new and forthcoming institutional expansions coming to the Miracle Mile museum district in Los Angeles, the area's urban design is sorely lacking.

The problem, according to Miranda, is worse by the fact that the designers and directors of the forthcoming building projects, which include Atelier Zumthor's Los Angeles County Museum of Art overhaul, have largely ignored a planned subway extension slated for the district.

Miranda writes, "all of the development raises concerns about how the architectural pieces—and, more important, the public spaces around them—will come together after the last nail has been banged into place."

Dana Cuff of UCLA's CityLAB tells Miranda, “There is no there there,” adding, “there is no urban design that has been created for this chunk of Wilshire that will be one of the most pedestrian and populated parts of the city.”

This anonymous L.A. artist is installing new bus-stop benches in the city's Eastside

2018-11-28T15:18:00-05:00

Some of his benches have become part of the fabric of the city — sat on and rained on, captured on Google Street View and even vandalized. Scrawled in tidy handwriting on one bench was, “i love it, thank you,” punctuated by a small heart. His greatest frustration is that whoever is removing them is leaving bus riders with no place to sit. The benches and their removal get at one of the more byzantine corners of transit bureaucracy in Los Angeles.

Realizing he had no place to rest at the bus stop near his Eastside home while recovering from a knee injury, this anonymous Los Angeles artist took matters into his own hands and began installing benches at neglected bus stops around the area, Carolina Miranda writes. Unsurprisingly, some of his benches have been removed, shedding light on L.A.'s frustratingly tedious process to approve the installation of more bus benches and shelters.