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"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
Once a free-flowing, biomorphic design inspired by the La Brea Tar Pits and the work of the Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer, the design has become noticeably more angular and muscular in recent weeks. It now features double-height galleries made of white or light-gray concrete and poking up above the roofline of the rest of the museum [...]
"No one will call it a blob anymore," LACMA Director Michael Govan said ... "Peter hasn't given up the curve. But he's really, really reined it in."
— latimes.com
Related news: Peter Zumthor pushes LACMA redesign to the curb to make room for tar pitsL.A. County supervisors approve initial funding for new LACMA buildingPeter Zumthor's $450,000,000 'Black Flower' for LACMA View full entry
In an era when many architects are acclaimed for impressive rhetoric or jaw-dropping computer renderings — or both — [Ito] has earned his following in purely architectural terms. He knows how to build, to shape space in a way that respects traditional craftsmanship and seems utterly contemporary. [...]
That odd and productive co-dependence of design and place, architect and site, is a relationship that doesn't really exist in any other art form.
— latimes.com
If you conceive of Los Angeles as having three distinct historical periods – as Christopher Hawthorne, architecture critic for the L.A. Times and the driving force behind The Third L.A. series, does – then the first period encapsulated the 1880s to the 1940s, the second the 1940s to the new... View full entry
These were the words of the year in architecture: Basic. Fundamental. Primitive. Ancient.
If fashion had normcore — the flaunting of a bland, practical and Gap-like aesthetic, the plain sweatshirt as statement of principles — architecture reset itself this year in an even more fascinating (if occasionally desperate) way.
In a culture and an economy being dizzyingly remade by technology, architecture chose to embrace not the future, where architects [...] can seem superfluous, but the past.
— latimes.com
For more Christopher Hawthorne listen to episode 10 of Archinect Sessions. View full entry
How far we've come: this week, we're thrilled to have Christopher Hawthorne on the podcast, architecture critic for the Los Angeles Times. Paul, Amelia, Donna and Ken talk with Christopher about his recent 3-part series on architecture and immigration in southern California, the role of the... View full entry
When Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne looks at L.A., he sees the city shaped by immigrants. Landmark buildings in Koreatown that adapt and evolve with a new generation. Houses in Arcadia that allow Chinese homeowners a proud, conspicuous place in a new country. Street life across the region that takes its cue from the way Latino neighborhoods blur the line between public and private. — latimes.com
In Screen/Print #26: an interview with Jessica Walsh, currently half of design firm Sagmeister & Walsh, was excerpted, from the 2nd issue of Intern Magazine (devoted to "intern culture" in the creative industries). Darkman was confused "Strange choice to interview the most hated... View full entry
It is a fractal of contemporary Los Angeles architecture, the fragment that both contains and helps explain the whole. [...]
What gives the $165-million project its unusual symbolic power is that it takes the generic stuff of a typical L.A. apartment building — a wood frame slathered in white stucco and lifted above a concrete parking deck — and expands it dramatically to urban scale. [...]
The design takes banality and stretches it like taffy in the direction of monumentality.
— latimes.com
A few minutes after sitting down to talk with Renzo Piano in his large, airy Paris studio Tuesday, I asked the architect about the progress of the film museum he is designing for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences on Wilshire Boulevard.
"The academy?" he asked. "Ha. The academy is a good story.
"Look, I know you don't like that scheme," referring to my recent coverage of the design.
"I don't think it will be that bad. Actually, I'm struggling to do something good."
— latimes.com
"We're working with the other owners of the property and with Metro," said LACMA Director Michael Govan. "There's good reason to build a major development there. You've got subway access and density on Wilshire. My dream is some beautiful piece of architecture with an architecture and design museum at the base, which would add to Museum Row."
If built, the tower would offer a dramatic vertical complement to the relentlessly horizontal LACMA gallery building by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor
— latimes.com
How's this for a yin-yang in the new Los Angeles: if this goes through, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) would be responsible for two majorly different impositions on Wilshire Blvd., the city's foremost thoroughfare and itself an icon. One: a street-straddling horizontal art... View full entry
Last night on the bucolic hilltop campus of Occidental College, Los Angeles Mayor Eric Garcetti spoke with the Los Angeles Times architecture critic, Christopher Hawthorne, about the state of L.A. urbanism. This broad topical platform positioned Hawthorne's interview not as a political... View full entry
"I think that the press has been too fast to reduce the conversation to heroes and villains and martyrs, and to suggest that what MoMA is doing is necessarily bad. We want to get more information out. We want to share the problem with others and invite them to really take a hard look" - Elizabeth Diller — LA Times
They discuss the almost uniformly negative reaction to the announcement as well as the details of DS+R’s proposal for MoMA, which is still in an early design phase. In response Michael Kimmelman tweeted "Her answers are deeply unsatisfying". View full entry
For the latest edition in The Deans List interview series, Amelia Taylor-Hochberg spoke with Sarah Whiting, Dean of the Rice School of Architecture in Houston, Texas. Therein, Dean Whiting discussed her belief that one of "the biggest challenge faced by any architect today is how not to... View full entry
Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times