Become the proud tenant of a Neutra-designed office space in Los Angeles

2016-08-09T12:49:00-04:00

If you’re looking for some exceptional LA office space, you’re in luck. The Neutra Institute Museum in Silver Lake, Los Angeles—formerly known as the Neutra Office Building—is leasing 160 square feet in the front of the building for $1,200 a month to a “sympathetic Neutra fan/tenant”. The rest of the 1200 square feet space is intended to house a museum or gallery that would “become a cultural center for Silverlake”, among other programs.

Currently, an attorney rents the space. Before being converted into an institute, Richard and Dion Neutra Architects and Associates occupied the site. The office space that’s available for lease must be “voice activity tolerant” as it’s adjacent to a conference room.

The newly-created Neutra Institute Museum will create an “community room”-cum-gallery for artists to display work; host exhibitions curated by local museums such as LACMA; display parts of the Neutra archive; and serve as a retail space. It will also develop support programming for the VD...

Turn the 2 into housing (or a park or a solar array): Christopher Hawthorne's pitch for one of LA's most awkward freeways

2016-01-04T13:58:00-05:00

An elevated park filling a retired stretch of freeway may sound reminiscent of the High Line, the hugely popular park built along an abandoned elevated train line in Manhattan. In symbolic and practical terms, the potential of a remade 2 spur is greater than even that project. It would take a working stretch of freeway in Los Angeles, a city still synonymous with car culture, and reinvent it as a vibrant, diverse urban landscape.

Critics rarely take advantage of their position to propose urban initiatives of their own, but when they do, it usually merits some serious consideration.

Christopher Hawthorne has issued an inventive, but well-reasoned, proposal to remake the awkward terminus of the 2 Freeway, where it "bends south and west from Interstate 5 and dips into Silver Lake and Echo Park, two miles or so from downtown Los Angeles," into a new urban space.

Noting the general feasibility of the idea – similar projects have had little to no harmful effect on traffic conditions – Hawthorne asserts that transforming the freeway could turn "noise into quiet, gray into green, dangerous into healthful, a no man's land into a destination."

Hawthorne proposes a variety of possible programs, from parkland to housing to storm water treatment (or all of the above), rather than prescribe a single idea. In the process, his call reads more as an invitation for designers than an edict.

He concludes by suggesting a glimmering ...

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Become the proud tenant of a Neutra-designed office space in Los Angeles

Turn the 2 into housing (or a park or a solar array): Christopher Hawthorne's pitch for one of LA's most awkward freeways