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"The Dodge House in West Hollywood was considered one of the most architecturally significant American houses of the 20th century. Designed in 1914 and completed in 1916, the masterwork by architect Irving Gill made a profound break from the traditional pitched-roof, symmetrical house design ... — By Jeffrey Head, Special to the Los Angeles Times
... Gill had the radical notion to elevate reinforced concrete to the "architectural importance of stone," but perhaps more important than the house's form — a horizontal box lacking roof overhangs, surface details or other ornaments — was a revolutionary vision of what a modern... View full entry
Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City (LTDW) celebrates the power and energy of cutting edge design and technology now emerging from Japan and its intersection with current trends materializing in Los Angeles. Design’s ability to move us towards a more sustainable and creative urban lifestyle is at the heart of this four-day festival, which will be open to the public from July 14 – July 17, 2011 (VIP Preview Night: 7/13). — ltdesignweek.com
If you're in or around Los Angeles from now until Sunday night, and aren't afraid of a little carmaggedon, make sure to come check out the really fun line-up. I'll be presenting at the Pecha Kucha event on Saturday night along with Pecha Kucha founders Astrid Klein and Mark Dytham, local... View full entry
...doesn't the general freakout over the shutdown suggest, in and of itself, its fundamental folly? It hurts to lose the 405 even for a weekend not because freeways are so valuable or because we love them so much but because we've painted ourselves in a corner in terms of mobility. We have left ourselves no escape hatches or viable alternatives. — LA Times
LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne eyes impending automotive doom. Follow the link for a thoughtful piece on "the city's great synecdoche" and how its future might impact architectural landmarks. View full entry
LA architecture office INABA and NYC graphic designers MTWTF have shared with us their design for the information center for Little Tokyo Design Week: Future City. The festival, which opens this Thursday, July 14, celebrates the intersection of Japanese design and technology with experimental... View full entry
This exhibit is comprised of four recent projects by the New York based firm Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis Architects (LTL). This site specific installation foregrounds the productive role of drawing in LTL's work, turning the walls and floor into etched and printed surfaces. — Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design
Coinciding with the recent completion of a building at Claremont College, LTL will be showing recent work through their rigorous drawings in an installation within the WuHo gallery, curated by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design. The work exemplifies a unique trajectory that... View full entry
William Shakespeare wrote plays in five acts; now comes Watts Village Theater Company, organizing a theater piece in five light-rail stops. Dubbed "Meet Me @Metro II," it'll be performed along the Metro Blue Line between Watts and downtown Long Beach over the coming two weekends. — latimesblogs.latimes.com
But the real show is outside, where the garage includes a number of large-scale public-art installations, including pieces by Anne Marie Karlsen (along 2nd Street) and L.A. firm Ball-Nogues Studio (along 4th Street). The Ball-Nogues piece, called “Cradle,” features hundreds of stainless-steel spheres suspended from one of the garage’s exterior walls. The design is open-ended enough to suggest both sea foam and a Newton’s Cradle... — latimesblogs.latimes.com
Architecture firm Populous is now playing for both sides in the contest to bring pro football back to Southern California.
The firm, already the architect of record for the 75,000-seat NFL stadium planned for east Los Angeles County, has been hired to do work on a rival proposal that sports and entertainment firm AEG wants to build on downtown Los Angeles' convention center campus, AEG said Wednesday.
— mercurynews.com
"These people have been the stewards of Watts Towers all these years and have a tremendous sense of ownership to them. So while superstars like Walt Disney may be thought of as the consummate 20th-century Los Angeles hero, for those living on 107th Street and nearby, it's Simon Rodia." — WSJ
One of my favorite cultural landmarks of Los Angeles, Watts Towers, goes on yet another restoration. Still, we need more Angelinos to visit the Towers. "Now the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the city's Department of Cultural Affairs are working on a plan to restore Rodia's sculpture and... View full entry
As I look back, I recall memories from that time of successive, lovely, serpentine journeys through and across the city. As a montage of images and impressions, the memories have no beginning or end — just the pleasure I found while riding within an unspooling stream of experiences. — places.designobserver.com
Those homeboys over at the American Institute of Architects, Los Angeles (AIA|LA) are so bad, drumming up biz for their May 15 architectural home tour called "Ve ≠ SaMo (Venice is not Santa Monica)" by asking if the two locales drove different architecture -- say, Santa Monica soccer mom versus Venice Bohemian daddy. Everyone knows Venice is dead, cemented over by gentrification, and the emerging artist crew has moved onto Inglewood. — blogs.laweekly.com
An ambitious zero-energy retrofit proposal for a downtown Los Angeles federal building has just won the first prize of the 8th Annual Next Generation Design Competition, presented by Metropolis magazine in partnership with the General Services Administration. The brief of the competition's 2011 edition asked architects and planners to design a Zero Environmental Footprint for this 1,172,746 sqft, eight-story, 1960s energy-guzzling federal building, considering any scale of intervention. — bustler.net
The John Lautner Foundation is pleased to present the John Lautner Turns 100 series this July 16-November 13, 2011. In celebration of what would have been John Lautner’s 100th birthday on July 16, 2011, the series will showcase Lautner’s extraordinary body of work while informing and inspiring the public about the importance of preserving it. — johnlautner.org
Since last year, every semester at USC School of Architecture ends with a public spectacle called BLUE TAPE. These two day marathon review sessions bring together nearly half of the architecture faculty from all five accredited architecture schools of Los Angeles and from other states.Last year... View full entry
When architect Cesar Pelli built his aka 'Blue Whale' Pacific Design Center in 1975, the West Coast officially declared it was going to be the center of the decorating universe. Almost forty years later, and with the addition of green and red compartments, that primary-shaped colorful dream is... View full entry