Archinect - News

Christopher Hawthorne, LA's architecture czar, breaks down the city's problems

2021-09-02T12:55:00-04:00

No other city has understood its connection to mobility the way Los Angeles has. There’s a longstanding view that the city is most legible through motion. You read it by moving through it.

Christopher Hawthorne, LA Mayor Garcetti's architecture czar, and previous LA Times architecture critic categorize the city's problems into two groups. One is housing, housing, and housing. The other is housing, mobility, and equity.

In the interview, these challenges are explained and some solutions are offered in an objective and sober language which advocates its creative approaches.

Los Angeles has started its parley into the next iteration of itself in the early 80's by rebuilding its mass transportation system. The changes to its societal breakdown and the urban environment becoming more accelerated and visible.

Hawthorne explains the changes necessary and gives a loose timeline to achieve some of the solutions. Considering, the current political makeup of the city will remain in similar lines.

OMA’s Audrey Irmas Pavilion nears completion, their first religious building

2021-09-01T16:01:00-04:00

OMA New York have released an update on their Audrey Irmas Pavilion taking shape in Los Angeles, California. The scheme, designed for the Wilshire Boulevard Temple, is OMA’s first cultural building in California, and the first religious institution building in the firm’s portfolio.

Image by Jason O'Rear, courtesy of OMA New York

Having been selected for the scheme’s design in 2015, OMA have progressed construction of the scheme through the COVID-19 pandemic. “The making of the Audrey Irmas Pavilion sustained forward momentum through the COVID-19 Pandemic, a period in which the act of human interaction was questioned and contemplated,” explains Shohei Shigematsu, the OMA Partner in charge of the project. “Its completion comes at a time where we hope to come together again, and this building can be a platform to reinstate the importance of gathering, exchange, and communal spirit.”

Image by Jason O'Rear, courtesy of OMA New York

The 55,000-square-foot pavilion sits adjacent to the cent...

Neutra Reunion House added to Los Angeles' list of Historic-Cultural Monuments

2021-06-11T18:43:00-04:00

The Los Angeles City Council on Wednesday added the Reunion House, by prominent modernist architect, Richard Neutra, to the city’s list of Historic-Cultural Monuments.

The hillside residence was built in 1950 and sits at 2440 Neutra Place in Silver Lake. It was built as a speculative house, designed to accommodate grandparents and visiting family members, hence the name Reunion.

The Neutra family bought the home in 1963, and in 1966, it was transferred to Richard’s son Dion who lived there until his death in 2019. Dion, also an accomplished architect, trained under his father starting at the age of 11. He studied at the USC School of Architecture, where he graduated in 1950. Neutra went on to work in his father’s firm, where the pair worked together through the 1950s. He became a partner of the practice in 1965 and led the company following his father’s death in 1970. Over decades, minor alterations were made on the house by both Richard and Dion. Most notably, Dion added an apart...

Architensions prioritizes outdoor space with speculative cooperative fourplex proposal in Los Angeles

2021-06-08T19:30:00-04:00

New York and Rome-based architecture firm Architensions and architect and design educator, Andrew Bruno, have designed a speculative, cooperative fourplex sitting in the Vermont Knolls neighborhood of south Los Angeles.

Called Knolls Co-Living, the project is a proposal for the Low-Rise: Housing Ideas for Los Angeles competition. The $100,000 design challenge tasks architects and landscape architects to envision appealing and sustainable models for low-rise, multi-unit housing. The project also expands, as stated by the firm, “...Architensions’ interest in reimagining contemporary housing as multi-generational and deeply communal.”

Previously on Archinect: Winning designs for the City of LA's Low-Rise Design Challenge explore new opportunities for housing through research and community engagement

This project follows other cooperative housing proposals by Architensions, such as Big Ideas Small Lots in New York and Ex-Galateo social housing in Italy. Knolls Co-Living challenges tradit...

Christopher Hawthorne dissects Zumthor's inkblot with LACMA Director Michael Govan

2015-03-28T09:02:00-04:00

Since opening the doors of its original William Pereira buildings in 1965, the Los Angele County Museum of Art has grown along with its home. The version of the city beloved by Reyner Banham and Pereira was alive then on the historic Miracle Mile, proselytizing megasized car-infrastructure and New Suburban models of living. From the 1980s through the 2000s, the museum expanded and reorganized, adding Bruce Goff’s Japanese Pavilion and Renzo Piano’s additions. Now, the entire conglomerate is slated for a redesign, into a singular swath by famed museum architect Peter Zumthor, with new attention paid to an incoming Metro station. And according to the Los Angeles Times’ architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, this is distinctly on track with where the megaregion as a whole is going – part of his so-called “Third Los Angeles”.

This third stage of Los Angeles is “an altogether more integrated, metropolitan-oriented” place, and is the namesake for Hawthorne’s ongoing lecture series exp...

The Days of Infinite Thinking: What "City of Quartz" means for Los Angeles 25 years later

2015-03-10T20:19:00-04:00

If you conceive of Los Angeles as having three distinct historical periods – as Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and the driving force behind The Third L.A. series, does – then the first period encapsulated the 1880s to the 1940s, the second the 1940s to the new millennium, and the third from 2000 to now. It is this current period which The Third L.A. series situates itself. It's also the era which fascinates Hawthorne: specifically, his series investigates how the city's denizens are conceiving of and working toward creating an altogether more integrated, metropolitan-oriented Los Angeles. In partnership with southern California public radio station KPCC and Occidental College, Hawthorne assembled Los Angeles Deputy Mayor Rick Cole, Occidental Art History Professor Amy Lyford, and fellow L.A. Times book critic David Ulin to discuss the influence on city politics and culture of Mike Davis' frothy, passionate, anti-booster classic City of Quartz, a book w...