Archinect - News

LA City Council places Dodger Stadium Gondola project on hold pending further reviews

2024-03-25T11:48:00-04:00

The contested plan to build an aerial gondola tram line from downtown LA to Dodger Stadium has been placed on hold after city council members voted last week to halt the Los Angeles Aerial Rapid Transit (LA ART) for the time being.

Local outlet ABC 7 was first to report on the council’s decision to pause the approvals process “until further studies can be conducted on its potential impacts.”

Opponents of the project had lobbied against its invasiveness and potential for displacement in communities that have been historically marginalized through gentrification. Councilmember Eunisses Hernandez, who introduced the measure, said: “We owe the public a real analysis of the issues and evidence-based solutions around Dodger Stadium.” The Los Angeles Department of Transportation will now hire a special consultant to conduct the assessments.

(An unrelated assembly bill, meanwhile, is being advanced that would compensate displaced families who fell victim to the construction of Dodger Stadiu...

SPF:architects' anticipated LA River pedestrian bridge opens to the public with a unifying gesture

2022-04-27T09:00:00-04:00

A major milestone in the ongoing LA River revitalization has been reached after SPF:architects announced the completion of its new Taylor Yard Pedestrian Bridge earlier this month.

Connecting an area north of Dodger Stadium known as Elysian Valley to the neighboring Cypress Park district, the bridge sits on a 42-acre former railway site and has been given the nickname ‘Rumblefish’ by its creators. The bridge takes its namesake and vibrant orange color from a lesser-known Francis Ford Coppola film that SPF:a felt reflected the same ideas of cohesion and brotherly unity expressed in its architecture and will thus serve as the most important piece of infrastructure in the larger Taylor Yard G2 River Park Project currently being undertaken by LA’s Bureau of Engineering.

Photo: Mike Kelley

Construction on the bridge began in 2019 and eventually yielded a 400-foot box-trussed span, in touch with the area’s industrial character and opposing elevations, with two cantilevered central viewing ...

A landmark designation effort backfires in the push to save one historic Los Angeles restaurant from the wrecking ball

2021-06-18T13:23:00-04:00

LA's famed Taix Restaurant on Sunset Boulevard made headlines earlier this month after a strange ruling by the City Council to designate only certain elements of the century-old establishment a historic landmark in an unprecedented move that could have ramifications for preservation efforts in Los Angeles and across the country for years to come.

The LA Times is reporting that efforts to save Taix from an encroaching redevelopment scheme culminated in a unanimous decision to limit the designation to the restaurant’s signage and cherrywood-topped bar.

The decision is unlike any other in recent history in that it eschews almost the entirety of the Norman Revival building in favor of a plan that recognizes only non-structural components as historic landmarks. By limiting the designations to the bar and advertising, critics say Los Angeles City Councilmember Mitch O’Farrell has created a dangerous standard that can be abused by development-hungry business interests where the opportunit...

Designer Trina Turk turns 'forgotten' John Lautner house into midcentury jewel box

2017-06-07T18:42:00-04:00

News of the “long-lost” Lautner echoed around Los Angeles and the world. The architecture community marveled at how a home designed by a modernist genius could go unnoticed for decades. [...] Somehow, the Salkin Residence, which was completed around the same time as more acclaimed Lautner projects like the Desert Hot Springs Motel, was left out of the architect’s list of works when it was assembled by his devotees years later.

The NY Times portraits the 'long-lost' John Lautner-designed Salkin Residence, built in 1948 in LA's Echo Park neighborhood and, over the last three years, painstakingly restored to renewed beauty by designer/business woman Trina Turk and her husband, Jonathan Skow.

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 ...

Spacious house on tiny lot? L.A. architect aims high in Echo Park

2012-01-30T20:54:00-05:00

“I never thought of this as a ‘house,'” Storey said. “It was designed to be a ‘container' of daily life. It made me realize there is work and there is life, but more often these are inseparable.”

"Whenever you are, we're already then"

2008-01-07T13:36:00-05:00

826 opens up its second Los Angeles area center, designed and built by archinector, Scott Mitchell. 826 is a "free literacy and writing center for kids that was started by author Dave Eggers in San Francisco," with centers in New York, Chicago, Ann Arbor, Seattle, and Boston. 826 is always looking for volunteers and tutors.