Archinect - News

Ray Bradbury's old house has been reincarnated as bookends

2015-07-08T14:09:00-04:00

While not exactly preserved in situ, Ray Bradbury's former home in Cheviot Hills is getting a second life in an appropriate, if nonconventional, form – bookends. When Thom Mayne bought the property last year, with plans to build his own house, he had the modest yellow home carefully deconstructed by The ReUse People (TRP), so the lumber could be salvaged and reused. TRP then used the home's 2x6's to make a custom, limited set of 451 rustic bookends, nodding to Bradbury's bestseller, Fahrenheit 451.

The bookends were listed at $88.50 (they have since sold out), with a fraction of the proceeds going to Indiana University's Center for Ray Bradbury Studies. From there, the funds are to be used in a reconstruction of Bradbury's home office.

Prior discussion of the history and preservation of Bradbury's home:

h/t The ReUse People and scpr.org

Ray Bradbury, The Pomogranate Architect

2015-03-14T15:08:00-04:00

Disney sent that article to his friends in New York City who were, at that time, helping build the New York World’s Fair, and they read the introduction and they came to Los Angeles a month later and they knocked on the door, and I opened the door and they said, “Mr. Bradbury, shall we tell you why we are here?” I said, “Why?”  “We are here to give you a fifty-million-dollar building.” I said, “What!? Come in, come in!”

This essay appears in Ray Bradbury: The Last Interview and Other Conversations, out this month. Reprinted with permission of Melville House.

Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) is the author of twenty-seven novels, including Fahrenheit 451and The Martian Chronicles, and more than six hundred short stories. Bradbury won many awards throughout his lifetime, including the Grand Master Award from the Science Fiction Writers of America and a National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

Sam Weller is the author of The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury andListen to the Echoes: The Ray Bradbury Interviews, and the coeditor of Shadow Show: All-New Stories in Celebration of Ray Bradbury, which won a Bram Stoker Award. Weller is an associate professor in the department of Creative Writing at Columbia College Chicago.

Session 14: His bjark is BIGger than his bjite – A chat with Bjarke Ingels at the opening of BIG's "Hot to Cold" exhibition

2015-01-29T15:25:00-05:00

This episode is a doozy. Paul and Amelia left the temperate sunshine of Los Angeles for Washington, DC's frigid monumentality, to interview Bjarke Ingels on the eve of his "Hot to Cold" exhibition at the National Building Museum. The 40-year old architect shared some quick-won wisdom about scaling a business, the Danish condition, and the indispensability of humor and play in architecture.

Donna and Ken joined Paul and Amelia to speak with Lian Chang about her recently published visualizations of the Archinect Salary Poll for the ACSA, in charming emoji-based data sets. The Sessions co-hosts also discuss Aaron Betsky's new appointment as the head of the deeply troubled Taliesin West, and what Thom Mayne's demolition of Ray Bradbury's house means for architecture preservation and sentimentality.

And for another climatological analogy, Paul and Brian Newman, Archinect Sessions's legal correspondent, poke at the tip of the iceberg concerning issues of copyright in architecture.

A remind...

The sky is falling! Weekly News Round-Up for January 12, 2015

2015-01-19T18:05:00-05:00

Friday, January 16:

Architecture for Humanity to shut down: The San Francisco HQ has laid off all employees and will file for bankruptcy, however it's unclear how this will affect operations of the many national/international AfH outposts that function through volunteers.
Work at Manhattan's 432 Park Ave tower ordered to stop after pipe falls from 81st floor: The latest in a recent series of similar incidents, including a bolt falling from London's cheesegrater, falling art in Mons, the 2015 European Capital of Culture, and concrete panels dropping from Zaha Hadid's library in Vienna.

Thursday, January 15:

Norm's Coffee Shop, an LA Googie icon, is temporarily saved from demolition: Along with the first Taco Bell being in peril of demolition, part of southern California's architectural heritage is being considered.

Wednesday, January 14:

Jean Nouvel boycotts opening of his Philharmonie de Paris: Despite the restaurant and exhibition space not being fully complete, Nouvel's Philharmonie hel...

Thom Mayne razing Ray Bradbury's house to build his own

2015-01-14T13:11:00-05:00

[Ray Bradbury's] Cheviot Hills house ... hit the market last May, and sold in a little over a month for $1.765 million [...] the buyers were Pritzker-Prize-winning architect Thom Mayne, of the firm Morphosis, and his wife, Blythe Alison-Mayne. [...] the new property owner's plan is to demolish Bradbury's house to put in a new house with three underground levels—one of which will hold a swimming pool—and two stories above ground.

CurbedLA also points out that, according to Morphopedia, this will be Mayne's first residential project in LA in more than ten years.

More photos via File 770.