A coalition of environmental activists and community advocates has mounted the first major legal challenge to a planned downtown [Gensler-designed] Los Angeles NFL stadium, filing a suit Thursday that says a state law intended to assist the project is unconstitutional. — latimesblogs.latimes.com

Swishing below, all but invisible from the park and motorway above, is the Los Angeles river. A river with water, fish, tadpoles, birds, reeds, banks, a river that flows for 52 miles skirting Burbank, north Hollywood, Silver Lake, downtown and Compton and empties into the Pacific Ocean.. A regular river, except that to most it's a secret. I ask three other people and receive the same blank looks until finally a park ranger confirms that, yes, there is a river at the bottom of a ravine 150' away. — guardian.co.uk

When I was growing up, teenagers on the weekend would be on certain streetcorners selling maps to star’s homes. Yes, I lived amongst the myths. — Hildegarden’s Blog

This week, after a $56-million renovation, that 12-acre rectangle from the top of Bunker Hill to the base of City Hall will be christened as L.A.'s Grand Park, providing downtown with its first sizable amount of open space. — latimes.com

Could the entire mood of a neighborhood depend on something as simple as street width? That was the question David Yoon, a writer, designer, photographer, and self-confessed urban planning geek living in Los Angeles, asked himself after returning from a trip to Paris. He started documenting existing streets of Los Angeles and narrowing them to see the effects that his manipulations had on the city. — mascontext.com

...how would you like something that can never crash, is immune to weather, it goes 3 or 4 times faster than the bullet train... it goes an average speed of twice what an aircraft would do. You would go from downtown LA to downtown San Francisco in under 30 minutes. It would cost you much less than an air ticket than any other mode of transport. I think we could actually make it self-powering if you put solar panels on it, you generate more power than you would consume in the system. — theatlantic.com

The 70-foot channel has for years operated as a flood-control channel, wildlife sanctuary and escape valve for treated waste water befouled with chemicals and trash. Now, the soft-bottom swath of weedy islands, dense brush and willows draped with fast-food wrappers, plastic bags and clothes is one of the newest summer attractions in town. — latimes.com

If you're in Los Angeles this weekend, don't miss the opening of UNFINISHED BUSINESS – 25 Years of Discourse in Los Angeles, a major retrospective exhibition by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design. The exhibition will be on view from July 13 through August 26, 2012 at the WUHO Gallery in Hollywood. — bustler.net

Dear Mr. Ayyuce,

I have read your article regarding the destruction of the Lautner Concannon residence and would like to set the record straight. Prior to my purchase and demolition of the Concannon Residence, I had extensive discussions with John Lautner regarding his feelings about the home. He was 100% in favor of the demolition of the Concannon Residence... — archinect.com

Another bigger picture repercussion of the Act is the cognitive and cartographic dissonance that occurs in Los Angeles where the Jeffersonian city grid abuts a pre-existing Spanish or French grid. — KCET/Departures

Its character is determined not just by the color and texture of the boulder itself but also by the detailing and proportions of the ramp. To experience the piece, you descend the ramp, you stand in the shadow of the rock and then you ascend. That trajectory is an architectural one; in fact, Heizer has been upfront that he takes cues in his work directly from architecture. — latimes.com

The Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) Board of Directors today approved LA-based Gruen Associates, in association with London's Grimshaw Architects, as the consultant team for the creation of a master plan for the historic Union Station and its surrounding 40 acres. Metro CEO Art Leahy was authorized by the board to execute a firm fixed price contract not to exceed $4,150,000. — bustler.net

Googie was used as a deragatory term almost from the start — born in Southern California and named for a West Hollywood coffee shop designed in 1949 by John Lautner, a student of Frank Lloyd Wright. Architecture critic Douglas Haskell was the first to use “Googie” to describe the architectural movement, after driving by the West Hollywood coffee shop and finally feeling like he had found a name for this style that was flourishing in the postwar era. — blogs.smithsonianmag.com

The High Line in New York succeeds because it unites neighborhoods and gets people outside, building a community in a space that was planned to be demolished: it brought life from rehabilitation. As we all know, Los Angeles has many places that need rehabilitating and that could serve as a point of unification. The problem though is that unlike the High Line we don’t have an area that stretches between neighborhoods without feeling forced or unantural. — laimyours.com