Archinect - News

A new LA Times map shows 6,000 structures in need of seismic retrofit across Los Angeles

2023-12-18T12:17:00-05:00

The LA Times recently debuted a useful map of seismic retrofit projects in major sections of the city months after official updates to the building code were enacted to address risks posed to soft-story and non-ductile concrete structures before 2033.

The map was made by surveying available records from Los Angeles, West Hollywood, Santa Monica, and Pasadena. More than 6,000 of the 16,000 buildings in the dataset are categorized as still requiring retrofits, including many homes and offices built before 1996.

Clusters of buildings in Pasadena’s Old Town and near the California Institute of Technology, most sections of Downtown LA and its nearby constituents (Koreatown, Jefferson Park, and Pico-Union), and a large swath of Hollywood between Beverly Hills and La Brea Avenue contain the majority of what has yet to receive seismic retrofits. The year ahead should see a decisive turnaround, as 60% of the yet-to-be-retrofitted soft-story buildings in the city are mandated to be completed ...

On the mystery and magic appeal of LA's iconic visual language

2022-05-19T16:51:00-04:00

The apartment signs of L.A. announce location through flair, decadence, strangeness, absurdity, signification. When you see an otherwise unremarkable name affixed to a building in your neighborhood, you know — probably to the exact number of paces or miles, if you counted — how much further your intended destination is. That’s the thing about L.A. apartment signs — they point you toward where you need to be: home.

The LA Times has a really cool new series I am personally obsessed with wherein the “architecture of everyday life” is explored in and around the city. In this iteration, the Times’ style editor Ian Blair waxed poetic about LA’s midcentury typographical elements, best embodied on the facade of Paul Revere Williams’ iconic Beverly Hills Hotel, that are now synonymous with the visual imagination of Southern California feted by David Hockney and so many others.

Image courtesy Joe Wolf via Flickr (CC BY 2.0).

Blair spoke to the alien nature of the language contained in apartment typeface, commenting on their need to communicate intimations of luxury and class in a way in which words alone become a most effective means of conveying the interiority of space (no matter how illusory).

“Apartment signs affect us because of the amount of effort put into the premise: Please stop, look, come inside, see if you desire to belong here. There’s innuendo baked into the concept; the main selling poi...

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...

'We all did': The Los Angeles Times' Patt Morrison on who authored the fate of LA's long-lost streetcars

2021-11-03T12:01:00-04:00

Red Cars didn’t just get people from Point A to Point B. They helped to create Point A and Point B. Towns like Burbank and Alhambra grew spectacularly once the Red Car reached them. Other sellers of land wised up and made sure their advertising told prospective buyers how to get there by Red Car; so did merchants and amusements. The system made even the farthest towns and neighborhoods feel connected.

The trolley system was not entirely undone in part by the nefarious hand of some elite corporate entities with decided interests in seeing an alternative to the then-burgeoning interstate highway system destroyed. Movies like Clint Eastwood's Changeling (2008) and (my favorite) Who Framed Roger Rabbit? (1988) do a more-than-adequate job presenting the system as a great democratic uniter of Los Angeles’ proletariat, which is how many people view the defunct system correctly or incorrectly six decades after its operation was shut down.

The city is currently working on an expansion of its modern-day equivalent — the Metro — that will vastly increase access to the city’s Westside via a series of new Purple D line stations that will terminate near the campus of UCLA. The present east-to-west commute is considered to be one of the worst in Los Angeles county. The city is expecting 78,000 daily commuters on the line once construction is completed in 2027.

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.

0 for 25? Christopher Hawthorne challenges the 25 Year Award

2018-01-23T12:45:00-05:00

In that spirit I set a challenge for myself: Could I come up not just with one but with 25 buildings that might have deserved the award this year? It took me a few days — and I was helped by some terrific suggestions from architects, critics and historians on Twitter and elsewhere online — but in the end finding 25 wasn't that difficult.

LA Times journalist Christopher Hawthorne has penned, or passionately typed, an inquiry into the fact that this year's 25-Year-Award was awarded to—no one.

In the article, Hawthorne walks us through the importance and aim of such an award and how to him, there are more than a few projects that could have claimed the award this year. Hawthorne even goes as far to produce a personal 25 for 25 list that emphasizes the lack of clarity and potential rigor that might have gone into this year's decision. The Hawthorne list is as follows:

Temporary Powell Library, UCLA, Hodgetts & Fung, 1992 (dismantled 1997); Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Baltimore, HOK Sport, 1992; restoration of Majestic (now Harvey) Theater, Brooklyn Academy of Music, Hardy Holzman Pfeiffer, 1987; Hayden Tract, Culver City, Eric Owen Moss, begun 1986; Hollywood Duplex, Los Angeles, Koning Eizenberg, 1987; Temporary (now Geffen) Contemporary, Los Angeles, Richard Meier, 1983; Fire Station No. 5, Columbus, Ind., Susana T...

Are you bored yet?

2017-11-17T15:10:00-05:00

Its forms are basic, totemic: Euclidean shapes dredged from the long memory of the field. It sometimes relies on modules or grids. It’s often monochromatic. It’s post-digital, which means it rejects the compulsion to push form-making to its absolute limits that overtook architecture at the turn of the century. As a result, it sometimes looks ancient or even primordial. It never looks futuristic.

Famed LA Times architectural critic, Christopher Hawthorne, released his view of contemporary architecture that culminates in it being classified as boring, and yet, that might be exactly what the architectural discipline ordered. As a reaction to 'hyperactive form-making,' Hawthorne argues that contemporary architects are getting 'boring.'

One could understand that as an insult or derivative comment, but Hawthorne states that their work is well considered and measured and that the 'Room Temperature' of the work is just right but is also aware of the viability of such a project to be under question and scrutiny.

Christopher Hawthorne on Chris Burden's 'architectural intelligence'

2015-05-12T14:04:00-04:00

The fundamentally architectural character of "Urban Light" -- the artist called it "a building with a roof of light" -- was no anomaly for Burden, who grew up in France and Italy and studied at Pomona College and UC Irvine. Themes connected to architecture and urbanism run through his work, typically with the same wry attitude about the relationship between structure and art-making that the lampposts suggest. “Originally I was going to study architecture,” Burden said at a lecture...in 2003.

The conceptual artist Chris Burden died two days ago at the age of 69.

No robots in our homes, but many predictions about 2013 come true

2013-03-22T12:44:00-04:00

The April 3, 1988, magazine's cover illustration showed bubble-shaped cars traveling in "electro lanes" on a double-decked, high-rise-lined 1st Street in downtown's Civic Center area. The cover's headline was "L.A. 2013: Techno-Comforts and Urban Stresses — Fast Forward to One Day in the Life of a Future Family."

To read the 1988 Los Angeles Times Magazine's future prediction, DOCUMENT: 1988 'L.A. 2013' essay, click here.

Shining a spotlight on L.A.'s landscape architects

2011-04-20T12:40:53-04:00

How to explain, much less minimize, the relative obscurity of L.A.'s landscape architects? There's no easy answer but our open spaces and preservation efforts give the issue added urgency.