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As part of Archinect's month-long Spotlight on Los Angeles, we have selected ten of our favorite residential projects across various cities and suburbs in Los Angeles County designed by practices with offices in LA. While the region is bustling with stunning homes and raw design talent alike (too... View full entry
Continuing with our Spotlight on Los Angeles, we venture out west to LA's coastal cities. If you're a fan of working minutes from Venice Beach, Santa Monica, or if you're intrigued by LA's own Silicon Beach, check out these nine firms that are currently seeking the right candidate to join... View full entry
The City of Santa Monica issued a notice of preparation for an environmental impact report for the Ocean Avenue Project...The project, as currently imagined, calls for the construction of mid-rise and low-rise structures, as well as the preservation of two landmarks homes fronting Ocean Avenue. — Urbanize LA
The City of Santa Monica issued a notice on December 21 to prepare an Environmental Impact Report for Frank Gehry's proposed Ocean Avenue Project. The mixed-use development includes retail/restaurant space, a public observation deck, cultural uses, that hotel tower (which had its height reduced... View full entry
A developer looking to erect a hotel tower designed by Frank Gehry on Santa Monica’s iconic Ocean Avenue has reworked its plans and released a new rendering of the project.
Originally proposed five years ago as 22 stories, the hotel has been reduced to 12 stories—or 130 feet—to comply with the city’s new development plan for downtown. It’s just one part of a larger project that would also include a museum, shops, ground-floor open space, and 79 apartments.
— Curbed LA
The newly released rendering shows the Gehry-designed hotel tower as a considerably shortened and reworked version of what was originally proposed in March of 2013 — before the city's new height rules and design guidelines for downtown Santa Monica were implemented. For comparison, check out the... View full entry
Then we have good news for you, that is, if you have $7,600 a month to spare on rent. The LA-based architect's Santa Monica home has been put up for lease following his recent re-location to Cheviot Hills. Two years ago, Thom Mayne and his wife, Blythe Mayne, bought beloved science-fiction author... View full entry
Combining the swiftness of contemporary dating with the decades-long process of urban planning, the city of Santa Monica has introduced "CitySwipe," an app that allows you to comment on everything from transportation to building design to the availability of fine dining in Santa Monica's... View full entry
On a small and skinny lot wedged behind its historic city hall, Santa Monica is trying to accomplish something that has never been done before in California. By 2020, the city hopes to construct a 50,000-square-foot city services building that will meet the requirements of the International Living Future Institute’s “Living Building Challenge” — the most stringent environmental building standard in the world. — latimes.com
"Should the city succeed it will prove that net-zero water is possible in our arid climate, even in a drought — and that if we’re serious about staving off the effects of drought and climate change, we should settle for no less. It will also familiarize code officials with new innovations... View full entry
The $1.5-billion second leg of the Expo Line, which opened Friday from Culver City to Santa Monica, adds seven light-rail stations and more than six miles of track to the growing Los Angeles County transit network. [...]
In the immediate context of L.A.'s attempts to turn its public-transit network from national punch line to something that increasingly resembles a mature system, 13 new Metro stations in less than three months qualifies as a pretty dramatic upgrade.
— latimes.com
The aggressively expanding LA Metro system in recent Archinect news stories:How LA is changing, one rail line at a timeWill LA's new metro extension bring growth to the city's peripheries?L.A. seeks to accelerate infrastructure projects in advance of potential Olympics View full entry
"Small houses can tell big stories," read the apt white words on the pamphlet's blue cover.
The shotgun house's Ocean Park neighborhood had once been full of such modest dwellings. It was a working-class place — home to carpenters and painters and people who washed other people's laundry.
But that kind of history most often is erased over time, as little houses make way for bigger ones. Ordinary people often don't chronicle their lives — and when they leave, their stories do too.
— LA Times
Related:"Stop the unpermitted demolition": Roche Dinkeloo's shiny UN Plaza Hotel lobby might be remodeledIt's easier now to tear down "historic homes" in Beverly Hills than before – is this progress or folly?Preserving a Home in All Its Marred GlorySelective memory: Old Penn Station, ruined... View full entry
In the 1930s and '40s, the Mabery Road house in Santa Monica Canyon belonged to Hollywood screenwriter Salka Viertel, who made her house a home not only for her family but for hundreds of refugees, some very famous and others unknown... While anti-Fascist volunteers were spiriting people out of Europe, Viertel in Santa Monica was taking them in... She helped to rescue, among many others, the German Expressionist writer Leonhard Frank, the Dadaist poet Walter Mehring, and Alfred Döblin... — Los Angeles Times
The historic home is currently on the market, with an asking price of $4.5 million. It was also the childhood home of noted author Peter Viertel. View full entry
"The public sector stopped making public space a long time ago," Los Angeles architect Jon Jerde told Wired magazine rather matter-of-factly in 1999. [...]
A little more than two decades later, there is something quaintly fatalistic about Jerde's attitude toward the frail state of public space. In Los Angeles, at least, it has returned pretty dramatically to health.
— latimes.com
KCRW, the NPR-affiliated public radio darling of Southern California, broke ground yesterday on its new 35,000 square-foot Media Center, located on Santa Monica College's Academy of Entertainment & Technology campus. For the past thirty years, KCRW was run out of a basement underneath the... View full entry
Oren Safdie, architecture-turned-playwright (and son of Moshe Safdie), has taken his play False Solution to Santa Monica, after a run in NYC last year. False Solution, Safdie's 3rd architecture-themed play, following Private Jokes, Public Places and The Bilbao Effect, follows German-Jewish... View full entry
[Santa Monica will] be able to offer its residents real net neutrality, which the [FCC] is working on rolling back for just about everyone else in the US. [...]
Santa Monica has cleverly and quietly been installing its own network of city-owned fiber-optic cables for years, and they intend to keep the net neutral. [...]
Santa Monica has also made about $5 million providing internet service and leasing out the cables to other providers, and their competition has driven down rates.
— la.curbed.com
The Federal Communications Commission recently proposed that internet service providers (like Verizon, AT&T, and Time Warner Cable) should be able to charge companies extra for faster service -- so for example, Netflix could pay AT&T more to ensure faster download speeds for its viewers... View full entry
The design called for a series of rectangular buildings skewed on an axis comprised of ground-floor retail, office development and proposed residential and flex office space and the upper section would be a hotel, according to city officials.
“I have to say that the Metro Pacific is a beautiful project and you look at it and it’s stunning architecturally,” Davis said. “The affordable housing is kind of an afterthought … . It’s a little unclear of how many units we are going to get.”
— smdp.com
