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Foster + Partners and Arup release first designs of California High-Speed Rail stations

2024-06-28T15:46:00-04:00

Foster + Partners and Arup have announced the first four designs for the hotly anticipated California High-Speed Rail as part of a series of open house sessions currently being undertaken with key stakeholders across the state’s Central Valley region. The first set of designs will stand as models for all future nodes in the 500-mile linkage that connects San Francisco to Los Angeles/Orange County.

Construction is underway, and planners expect to have the first operable line readied between 2030 and 2033 after years of financing issues and a recent multibillion-dollar boost from the federal government.

Image: courtesy of Foster + Partners

Stefan Behling, the Head of Studio at Foster + Partners, said: “We are developing an architectural language for the four Central Valley stations, including soaring canopies that draw in fresh air and shield waiting passengers from harsh sunlight. The station design reflects the sustainable ethos of the wider project.”

Meg Cederoth, the Authority Di...

Foster + Partners and Arup to deliver first four California High-Speed Rail stations

2023-04-05T17:45:00-04:00

A joint venture of Foster + Partners and Arup will design the first four California High-Speed Rail stations in the state’s Central Valley region, the firms announced this week.

The plans they are developing for the transit organization will eventually deliver stations in Fresno, Kings/Tulare, Merced, and Bakersfield, serving the ambitious but still heavily scrutinized project’s initial 171-mile segment in an area that’s home to roughly 6.5 million people.

The joint venture announced its intentions of working with local interests during the two-stage Notice to Proceed (NTP) design and development process following the delivery of a "system-wide vision plan" for the proposed 500-mile project that will become America's first-ever high-speed railway.

Image courtesy Foster + Partners

Stefan Behling, Head of Studio for Foster + Partners, said: "After delivering our systemwide vision plan, we are now delighted to be working with Arup on detailed designs for the network’s first four station...

Frank Lloyd Wright-designed Fawcett Farm lists for $4.25M in California's Central Valley

2022-12-14T18:37:00-05:00

One of Frank Lloyd Wright’s final Usonian designs is now on the market in central California. Real estate firm Crosby Doe Associates recently listed Wright’s Fawcett Farm in Los Banos for a cool $4.25 million and is beginning to take offers on the 7-bed, 6-bathroom home that was completed just two years after his death in 1959.

Image: Jim Simmons

The house was built by local football legend Buck Fawcett and his wife using plans Wright drew up for them before his passing. It includes a koi pond, small museum, Japanese garden, workshop, and recessed pool. The lot it sits on is sized at 76 acres and offers the opportunity for commercial crop development on what Fawcett described to Wright at the time as “the most fertile agricultural land in the world.”

Image: Jim Simmons

Featuring an L-shaped interior with open plan, classic mid-century wooden built-ins, and furnishing arrangement designed by Cornelia Brierly. Other enhancements include a high-end sec...

California's high-speed rail project could be going in a new direction

2022-03-15T12:12:00-04:00

14 years after voters approved a nearly $10 billion bond to start building the rail system that would whisk riders from Los Angeles to San Francisco at speeds of more than 200 miles per hour, many California residents have long since lost track of what is being built where, and when or if it will ever be completed. “We’re teetering on the edge,” said Ashley Swearengin, a former mayor of Fresno who now leads the Central Valley Community Foundation. “We could get it right.”

The budget for the California high-speed rail project has now swelled to more than double its originally proposed cost of $40 billion from fourteen years ago. Construction on a 31-mile segment of the project has already begun near Fresno in the Central Valley.

The fight now is over whether or not to complete the segment, which would run through only three counties; or, as the state’s Assembly Speaker Anthony Rendon is calling for, to focus on the “bookends” (San Fransico and Los Angeles) in a cost-saving venture that would maintain at least some portion of the rail’s original intent and purpose to unite the two most populous nodes.

“The project is by all objective measures in distress,” Rendon told the Times. “Connecting the two largest urban areas in the state is the best thing we can do from an environmental standpoint and an economic development standpoint. To link two cities in the Central Valley would doom the project.”

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120,000-resident suburb under construction in California's Central Valley

2019-09-25T18:15:00-04:00

About 450 houses have been sold so far at Riverstone and 73 at Tesoro Viejo, which already has a school (Hillside Elementary) plus a cafe and fire/sheriff’s substation in its fledgling “town center.” Together, these “master-planned communities” along with other proposed developments with names like Gunner Ranch West, North Shore at Millerton and TraVigne form what Madera County officials project will be a city of 120,000 people.

California's urban housing crisis, fueled by lackluster housing production in the state's population centers, is fueling sprawl that is eating up wilderness and agricultural land around cities like Fresno.

Madera County supervisor Brett Frazier told The Fresno Bee, “The assumption was this was just going to be another bedroom community. But when you drive through it you see it’s something different. In the next 20 years, it’ll truly be a new city.”

Silicon Valley is creating a homeless crisis in rural California

2017-04-13T12:40:00-04:00

California’s Central Valley is best known for supplying nearly 25% of the country’s food, including 40% of the fruit and nuts consumed each year. Yet today, backcountry places such as Patterson, population 22,000, are experiencing an increase in homelessness that can be traced, in part, to an unlikely sounding source: Silicon Valley.

As home prices rise staggeringly high in Silicon Valley and San Jose, aspiring homeowners have increasingly headed inland to the agricultural regions of the Central Valley, which lie alongside the I-5. In towns like Patterson, rents have risen from $900 to $1,600 over three years, forcing more and more people out of homes and into the street. According to the last census, in the county at large, there are 1,400 homeless people with nearly 18,000 at threat of becoming homeless.