Developer Jason Illoulian of Faring Capital is the new owner of the land under the restaurant and its 43 parking spaces ... his plan: To build a “community of shops” where the parking lot now stands. [...]
“It’s such a beautiful building and that sign is just like fucking awesome,” he says.
Will there be room in this new village for an $11.99 steak dinner? “We’re hoping to keep it as a 24- hour diner,” says Illoulian of the restaurant space. “Whether it’s Norms or somebody else.”
— lamag.com
This upcoming Thursday, the Cultural Heritage Commission will decide whether the La Cienega Norms that faced imminent demolition back in January will be given monument status. Meanwhile, development plans for the site are chugging along. Developer Jason Illoulian, who purchased the site back in... View full entry
We are in the midst of another industrial revolution – softer, less obtrusive, faster, and more pervasive. All aspects of daily life are changing through the integration of things made of atoms and things made from bits. Surrounded by an increasing number of sophisticated devices, digital heartbeats, and sensors are now standard components in products. How should architecture education respond? — Center for Design Research at Virginia Tech College of Architecture and Urban Studies
Advances in digital technology are creating an explosion of possibilities related to the basic building blocks of design: material and form, light, movement, and pattern. Virginia Tech student work featuring 3-D printing, robotics, and dynamic fenestration is currently on display in Clark... View full entry
The Louvre Abu Dhabi looks set to open in 2016, as work on Jean Nouvel’s colossal construction speeds up and his vision of a modern medina starts to crystallise on what was once a desert island. This vast project has been stupendously controversial...Abu Dhabi’s new cultural centre is being built by exploited and abused migrant workers...Fifty years from now, when the Louvre Abu Dhabi has established itself as one of the world’s great museums, how clearly will its dark beginnings be remembered? — Jonathan Jones / the Guardian
In Jones' op-ed, he makes a strange case, stating point blank: "Nothing excuses the inhuman working conditions that have been reported." Yet, for him, these "unexcusable" working conditions might produce nothing short of "a revolutionary subversion of the old European imperialism of knowledge."... View full entry
A lawsuit challenging plans for the Lucas museum along Chicago's lakefront can proceed, a federal judge ruled Thursday, leaving legal hurdles in place if the selected site remains between Soldier Field and McCormick Place. Friends of the Parks filed a lawsuit in November against the Chicago Park District and the city of Chicago over the museum plans, contending the proposed site near Lake Michigan violates the public trust. — Chicago Tribune
The lawsuit asserts that proposed site for the Lucas Museum requires approval by the Illinois General Assembly, something contested by the Park District and the city who argue the museum will be provide public benefits. It was filed last year by the Friends of the Parks, who assert that since the... View full entry
Despite making recent news for a particularly antisocial public display, Frank Gehry remains a highly influential and crowd-drawing figure, as evidenced by SCI-Arc’s completely full Keck Lecture Hall over an hour before Gehry took the stage on Wednesday, March 4, for a lecture with Eric Owen... View full entry
In founding a town for some 10,000 of his employees to call their own, the Facebook mogul is following generations of entrepreneurs, from the Dutch East India Company to Walt Disney. [...]
Zuckerberg’s version is to take the form of a 200-acre private municipality adjacent to Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters, masterplanned by long-time collaborator Frank Gehry and ever-so-humbly dubbed “Zee Town”.
— theguardian.com
Previous news from Gehry's work with Zuckerberg:Facebook, Gehry Build Idea Factory for RipStik GeeksFrank Gehry about his Battersea Power Station project, Norman Foster, Mark Zuckerberg View full entry
Nicholas Korody profiled the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND). jla-x was excited as has "been looking for a way to get involved with something like this". News - The world lost visionary Frei Otto and his death moved up the announcement of his winning the 2015 Pritzker Prize. Plus, the... View full entry
"Do you have any skills?...You don't need to have any skills to come volunteer...this is still a story". — The Daily Show
Jordan Klepper investigates a story of reconstruction in Staten Island. Two and a half years post-Sandy, four locals offer criticism of the NYC Build it Back program. He then chats with Enrique Norten about Mercedes House, a recent TEN Arquitectos project (totaling 1.2 million square feet)... View full entry
In the 1960s and '70s, like many of his contemporaries, Piano was involved in the battle to revive forlorn and decaying historic centers of cities. Now he's fighting to save their often desolate outskirts.
Unlike the suburbs of U.S. cities, which are often well off, the suburbs of many European cities tend to be the poorest parts of the metropolitan area. [...]
Piano believes "the suburbs are the place where energy is in the city — in the good, in the bad."
— npr.org
For many longtime readers of The Times, Thursday was tinged with sadness. One of their favorite weekly sections, Home, was no longer in the paper. The section was discontinued after the March 5 edition, almost exactly 38 years after its debut. — publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com
Last Thursday, the Architectural League of New York launched its 2015 Emerging Voices lecture series with firms Aranda\Lasch and MANUEL CERVANTES CESPEDES / CC ARQUITECTOS. Architects Benjamin Aranda, Chris Lasch and Manuel Cervantes Cespedes presented a survey of their work, ranging through a... View full entry
Ten minutes before we sat down to record this week's episode, the Pritzker Prize Laureate was announced – posthumously. The winner, Frei Otto (1925 - 2015), was a German architect whose impressive work and research with lightweight and sustainable structures influenced countless architects... View full entry
Places Journal has long targeted an interdisciplinary readership — practitioners, scholars, and students in architecture, landscape, and urban design.This week the journal has launched a new tool — Reading Lists — that promises to strengthen ties between the design disciplines and related... View full entry
He’d traveled the world on assignment, compiling a trove of dazzling images — the soaring, dusk-lit arches of the Metropolitan Opera; the golden, cathedral-like spires of the General Electric Building; the limestone prism of a Saudi Arabian bank jutting above the Red Sea. — NYT - Sunday Magazine
Alex Hoyt penned a tribute to his uncle, the late architectural photographer Wolfgang Hoyt, who died on October 17, 1996. View full entry
a huge sum representing 27 percent of all the architects on the Continent...more architects than there are in the United States — NYT
Stephen Hayman talked with Luciano Lazzari, an architect in Trieste who is also the president of the Architects’ Council of Europe. Late last year ACE released their biennial Sector Study of the profession. h/t @Geoff Manaugh View full entry
