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Ian Volner on the changing face of Los Angeles

2021-09-07T18:21:00-04:00

The rude stop-start of the pandemic economy has meant that scads of new marquee developments—new infrastructure, new performance venues, new housing, new museums, new everything—are now hurtling toward completion almost simultaneously. Five days spent crisscrossing from the hills to the beach and back, occasionally by car but also by bus, by train, and, yes, by bike, revealed a city seized by startling, epochal changes. For Los Angeles, it has been a long time coming.

The city is starting to ramp up for a development spree spurred on by attendant social and environmental issues that will fundamentally change the urban landscape of the city in a building boom which may also herald the end of Christopher Hawthorne’s “Third Los Angeles.”

Recently published on Archinect: Reyner Banham Is Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies at 50

LA has set very ambitious goals for development during the coming decade of transition. Ian Volner gives us a scope of some of the architectural changes coming to the city here.

What comes next in the "Third Los Angeles"?

2016-05-12T17:57:00-04:00

We’re facing climate change, and our attitude about the natural world, natural resources has changed. What’s really come to an end is this kind of frontier mentality about the city—this idea of infinite growth and infinite expansion, and that the way to study the city is to look at the edges, where it’s gobbling up new territory. [...] This idea that we can grow our way out of any problem and that we’re always a city that’s expanding and finding or even colonizing new territory—that has ended.

Related on Archinect:

Eric Garcetti vs the Car: how LA's mayor plans to change the way Angeleños get around

2016-01-14T13:15:00-05:00

Now in his third year as mayor, the 44-year-old [Eric Garcetti] wants Los Angeles to be “the first postmodern city,” as he tells me, speaking in his art-filled office one morning in October. Throughout the past year, he has made a series of proposals that would fundamentally alter the city by deposing the automobile, which has reigned over Los Angeles for a half-century like a cocksure Third World despot... Call him the Che Guevara of Southern California infrastructure.

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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...