Archinect - News

Former LA Times print facility reborn as creative offices by EYRC Architects

2022-10-17T11:35:00-04:00

Ehrlich Yanai Rhee Chaney Architects (EYRC) has completed their adaptive re-use of an abandoned Los Angeles Times print facility in Costa Mesa, Orange County. The 430,000-square-foot scheme titled ‘The Press’ saw the three-story complex converted into flexible office spaces.

Photo credit: Matthew Millman

The grounds surrounding the facility see an existing rail line reincorporated as a bike and pedestrian trial to link with a wider pathway network. Inside, EYRC’s approach to the building’s rehabilitation saw a combination of ‘selectively subtracting’ elements to enhance usability, and the retention of elements to convey the facility’s industrial past.

Photo credit: Matthew Millman

“The subtractive design interventions tie landscape and structure together, suggesting ruins recaptured by nature,” EYRC told Archinect. “What remains is a celebration of both material and organic markers of time, history, and context. Paint chips, rail spurs and conveyor belts were left as-is, and matured t...

Will the Los Angeles Times Mirror Square complex become a historic monument?

2018-07-18T15:11:00-04:00

The 378-page recommendation report filed by a group of preservationists, including preservationist Richard Schave and architect and 20th century architectural historian Alan Hess, calls on the city to protect the three most iconic structures of the Los Angeles Times complex [...] Purely from a design perspective, preserving The Times complex — once known as Times Mirror Square — is a difficult proposition.

The Los Angeles Times complex consists of three iconic structures which preservationists are pushing to make historic monuments. There is the 1935 building by Gordon B. Kaufmann featuring “The Times” neon sign and the grand Globe Lobby, Rowland Crawford’s late moderne style Mirror Building built in 1948, and the luxe Times Mirror corporate headquarters designed by William Pereira in 1973. Old enough to be out of date but not enough to necessarily be revered as historic, these structures hang in limbo with an undermined fate in Los Angeles history.

A tour of The LA Times' historic HQ

2018-04-16T18:02:00-04:00

The buildings were constructed and built by the Chandler Family. The different sections of the block have different cornerstones set by succeeding generations. – at Los Angeles Times

With the news that Patrick Soon-Shiong is moving the LAT’s newsroom from its historic HQ, to El Segundo, Ben Welsh Editor @LATdatadesk took readers on a wander through the interlocking buildings, at 1st and Spring.

Woodbury's Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter talks ethics and culture with LAT

2017-08-22T18:47:00-04:00

Very rarely does ethics become a selling point for a client or a selling point when you’re talking about a studio project. It’s very rarely the idea generator. I think most practitioners traditionally came from a comfortable or upper-middle-class. It’s the Jeffersonian ideal: the gentleman designer. Architects in this country tend to have clients who are in the upper income level. And I think that has really been a problem. Our students, many of them, come from underserved communities.

Back in July, Archinect featured Woodbury's new dean, Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter, as a part of the Deans List series, in an interview about the importance of economic diversity and the school's commitment to egalitarian and practical education. The Los Angeles Times recently conducted a similar interview, in which Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter discusses her priorities as the new head of the school, Woodbury's culture and ethics.

Where do you hope to take the school? What are your priorities?

One of the things I’ve been focusing on over the last 10 years is our institutes. Our civic engagement institute started as Architecture and Civic Engagement. It was incubated in the school of architecture. Now the rest of the university is seeing this conversation as something they want to participate in, and it’s called the Agency for Civic Engagement, with Jeanine Centuori as director. The Julius Shulman Institute [on architectural photography] is another, with Barbara Bestor as the executive direc...

Take a VR tour of the new L.A. Federal Courthouse, an “unusually polished work of civic architecture”

2016-10-25T20:01:00-04:00

The $350-million, 633,000-square-foot courthouse, designed by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, is an unusually polished work of civic architecture — especially by the standards of Los Angeles...This is a building that wants to look respectable and rational but not staid, one that is fairly conventional on the horizontal plane and takes a significant if measured chance on the vertical one. Still, it’s a chance that pays off.

Christopher Hawthorne gives a thumbs up in his review of SOM's design for the now-completed Los Angeles U.S. Courthouse, which appears to “float” in mid-air. Don't forget to check out a virtual tour of the building in the video below.

Previously on Archinect:

LA Federal Courthouse under construction

Skidmore, Owings & Merrill to Design Federal Courthouse

Historic LA Times Building to be redeveloped

2016-06-30T13:06:00-04:00

A Vancouver developer buying the storied Los Angeles Times building plans to demolish portions of the 750,000-square-foot complex to make way for a residential and retail development [...] [The developer] intends to build apartments in place of a 1970s-era chunk of the building at Broadway and First Street, according to sources familiar with its plan. The stone-clad segments from 1935 and 1948, along Spring Street, would undergo renovations to house offices and retailers.

According to the article, the developer – Onni Group – paid around $120 million for the building. It was previously owned by the Chicago-based company Tribune Media Co. The Los Angeles Times remains a tenant in the historic structure.

For more Downtown Los Angeles news, check out these links:

How L.A. can reboot its "creative economy" so artists can actually live in town

2015-12-11T14:26:00-05:00

But if L.A. is going to remain a creative capital, its civic and cultural leaders are going to need to do more than offer really great talk about how great we are...This can start with the Otis Report on the Creative Economy...If this report is to be more than just a feel-good data dump, it could use some solid recommendations on how L.A. compares to other cities culturally and how we might improve the situation for artists and cultural organizations, both small and large.

More about arts districts on Archinect:

Venice Beach's ongoing grapple with the tech titan invasion

Downtown LA's vision of an architecture and design super cluster

How one urban planner is helping revamp a Miami suburb "without gentrification"

With a little compromise, illegal urban squats like Ljubljana's Metelkova Mesto can do a city good

How Many Artists Does It Take to Make an Arts District?

"A lean and sneakily ambitious show," Christopher Hawthorne reviews Wayne Thom's retrospective at WUHO Gallery

2015-11-17T13:59:00-05:00

You're familiar with pretty much every phase of Julius Shulman's long career as an architectural photographer. You started following the globe-trotting Iwan Baan on Instagram way before he became a design-world celebrity. You can't recommend Ezra Stoller's black-and-white pictures of midcentury Manhattan highly enough. But Wayne Thom? The name may draw a blank.

Christopher Hawthorne on repairing L.A.'s long-broken relationship with its freeways

2015-08-07T20:27:00-04:00

The truth is that Los Angeles, once a pioneer in defining the freeway’s place in urban life, has fallen behind other cities. From Dallas to Paris to Seoul, the most innovative ideas about freeways and how they can be redesigned are coming from places far from Southern California. It’s time for L.A. to catch up...

Following his recent review of the 405 Freeway expansion through the Sepulveda Pass, Christopher Hawthorne sums up why the time is ripe for Angelenos to refresh their perspectives on the city's freeways.

Powers of 10 with Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic at the LA Times, on Archinect Sessions #10!

2014-12-11T17:39:00-05:00

How far we've come: this week, we're thrilled to have Christopher Hawthorne on the podcast, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Paul, Amelia, Donna and Ken talk with Christopher about his recent 3-part series on architecture and immigration in southern California, the role of the architecture critic at a major national newspaper, and his take on new media journalism.

We're also proud to introduce our inaugural bit with Archinect's lawyer-correspondent, Brian Newman at Dykema Gossett PLLC, where we submit our architectural legal queries to an actual lawyer. And per usual, we check in on recent news, discussing the stormy marketing campaign for a Steampunk luxury condo building.

And has it really already been ten episodes? To celebrate Archinect Sessions' rite-of-passage into double digits, we reflect on how it's been going so far – what we'd like to change, criticism we've received, and our favorite episodes.

Send your architectural legal questions, comments or questions abou...