A six-story-tall floating "Rubber Duck" is making its West Coast debut at the Port of Los Angeles, where it will lead more than a dozen battleships and sailboats in the Tall Ships Festival L.A. parade [...]

Dubbed the world's largest rubber duck, the giant inflatable was created by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman.

"The friendly, floating Rubber Duck has healing properties," Hofman said on the event's website. "It can relieve the world's tensions as well as define them." — latimes.com

The Emerald Necklace Expanded Vision plan, a multi-partner visionary project spearheaded by Amigos de los Rios and the Conservation Fund, aims to connect the forests of the San Gabriel mountain range with the waters of the Pacific through a network of public park space, bike and walking trails, and restored waterways. It’s an ambitious plan that will require coordination of the 88 cities and and dozens of public agencies in the L.A. Basin to achieve. — nextcity.org

Certainly, it's a minor miracle that Epiphany wasn't gutted at some point in its long life to make way for late 20th-century design nightmares such as drop ceilings and wood paneling. But more significantly the church represents an interesting period in Southern California history. — latimes.com

It relates to scale, who's going to be there, what reflects the culture and interests of the community. People's first notion about a park is Central Park — big, grassy, lush. So adjusting expectations about that aesthetic, we have a hard row to hoe in L.A. This is the era for our city to think about parks and the river and the urban forest as all one thing. — latimes.com

It has been the setting for music videos, TV commercials and scenes from the '80s movie "Less Than Zero." Now, the unusual Los Angeles home by influential architect John Lautner is slated to go on the market for $7.5 million.

Known as Silvertop, the house has a striking design: It is made up of a series of interlocking half-circles, with a massive, arched concrete roof over the living room. — online.wsj.com

From buckling sidewalks to potholed thoroughfares to storm drains that can’t handle a little rain, the infrastructure that holds [Los Angeles] together is suffering from years of deferred maintenance. Bringing pipes that deliver water to 3.9 million people up to snuff could cost $4 billion [...] The bill for repaving streets will be almost that much, according to estimates from a city consultant, and patching or replacing cracked sidewalks will require $640 million. — Bloomberg BusinessWeek

Our friends at PAR — or Platform for Architecture + Research — were announced as the 2014 recipient of the Presidential Emerging Practice Award from the AIA Los Angeles. In a constantly evolving setting like the City of Angels, the award is the highest honor that the AIA|LA Presidential Board presents to an emerging architecture firm in recognition of consistently creating innovative work. It also highlights individuals who take leadership roles in advancing the architectural profession. — bustler.net

Materials & Applications in Los Angeles has some fun social Saturday night events lined up for the entire month of August! The four-part VIS-Á-VIS performance series will include dance, music, a video and sound installations, and a film screening. — bustler.net

...Countless contradictions [are] embedded in Los Angeles' zoning code, the 800-plus-page document that governs what can be built where in the city, and what it should look like [...] City planning officials are hoping to iron them out by rewriting the 70-year-old code, with an eye to making development here more predictable, less expensive and more in tune with the needs of a modern city. — LA Times

There are more than 3,000 active oil and gas wells in Los Angeles County. Almost 4,680 new wells were drilled in 2012 across the state, bringing the total number to 210,000, according to the Division of Oil, Gas and Geothermal Resources of the California Department of Conservation [...] Oil industry officials argue that drilling in California provides many economic benefits, and they downplay any potential health hazards. — LA Daily News

...In the 1970s, the streets east of Little Tokyo and west of the L.A. River made up a dingy district of hollowed-out warehouses that landlords rented to artists who needed a lot of space for little money [...] Then a decade ago, what started with a new restaurant on this block and then another up that street, turned into an avalanche of development [...] — LA Times

Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles partnered with the Department of Defense to build out the OR360, a new innovation center where doctors and military personnel can simulate hypothetical scenarios in order to simplify and streamline trauma care. [...]

Designed by CannonDesign, the nearly 10,000-square-foot space is the hospital’s answer to the big question of: How can you make trauma care, both in hospitals and in military situations, faster and more effective? — wired.com

As shocking as it is to look upon the rows and rows of makeshift encampments and thousands of roving, hopeless people, perhaps even more shocking is this: Los Angeles is the last major American city with a single district of anything approaching this magnitude of homelessness and extreme poverty [...] — LA Weekly