...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

Gehry Partners has signed on to design a campus for the Children's Institute, Inc. (CII), a social services not-for-profit that provides youth development and education programs, as well as other family support and clinical services. For the project, the firm is collaborating with (fer) studio of Inglewood.

The new campus will occupy a 2-acre lot on East 102nd Street near its intersection with Compton Avenue. It is just a half-dozen block walk to the northwest of the Watts Towers. — latimes.com

The story of Boyle Heights reminds us that urban highway teardowns don't always end in victory. [...]

"What we don't know, however, is the story of the losers, the urban men and women who fought the freeway, unsuccessfully, on the conventional terms of political struggle, who weren't able to pack up and move on, and who channeled expressive cultural traditions to register their grievances against the presence of unwanted infrastructure." — citylab.com

It would be better to reconsider this wholesale demolition. Especially as the proposed replacement, designed by the Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, leaves much to be desired. [...] Or maybe it’s the quintessential Angeleno building? After all, replacing an aging faithful spouse with a younger, more stylish trophy wife is an established Hollywood custom. — Zócalo Public Square

Architect Peter Zumthor has dramatically revised his design for a new Los Angeles County Museum of Art, creating a new bridge-like section of the building that would span Wilshire Boulevard.

The new design is meant to address concerns that the original plan would encroach on, and potentially damage, the La Brea Tar Pits at the neighboring Page Museum, casting a shadow over the largest pit. — latimes.com

“The future — of a walkable, transit-friendly Los Angeles — is being built right now,” the report says. “It will allow people to drive everywhere they want, assuming they can put up with the traffic, and provide the option of walkable urbanism for those who want it.” — latimes.com

Work is already underway in Bel Air on a megacompound that will include the largest single-family house in the US. The enormous project, at the dead-end of Airole Way above the Bel-Air Hotel, comes from megamansion developer Nile Niami, and is slated to total 85,000 square feet with a 70,000-square-foot main house. [...]

The [Los Angeles Business Journal] guesses America's newest mega-megamansion will be listed "in the $150 million-plus range." — la.curbed.com

Downtown Los Angeles’s historic core is about to get its first major museum, if that’s what you want to call it. Local developer Tom Gilmore and architect Tom Wiscombe are teaming up on the complex project, which they are calling the Old Bank District Museum. It will be dedicated to contemporary Los Angeles art and located in the sub-basements, basements, ground floors, mezzanines, and roofs of three interconnected buildings along Main and Fourth streets. — archpaper.com

A new video by doctoral student and an associate professor at Arizona State University visualizes the expansion of LA's roads, starting in 1888 and running all the way up to 2010 [...]

Variations in color denote the age of the thoroughfares, with green being the oldest roads and red being newest. Watch as the map blooms with color in the fifties and the trend carries on through the eighties to the present. — la.curbed.com