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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
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an acclaimed Swiss architect is hoping to pull off what an acclaimed Dutch one could not.
Next month LACMA will publicly unveil a $650-million plan by Pritzker Prize winner Peter Zumthor for a dramatic new museum building along Wilshire Boulevard.
— latimes.com
Stern's architecture is always steeped in strategic references to past landmarks; there is no doubt he knows how to send, and shape, an architectural message. And the message the front entrance to the Bush Library delivers is clear: This is a building meant to honor a particularly blunt and plain-spoken kind of political power. — latimes.com
Archinect was excited to announce a competition we're co-hosting with Designer Pages and the LA Film Festival. This competition seeks proposals for the interior design/layout of the VIP Director's Lounge for this year's LA Film Festival. The winner will have their design executed, with a cash... View full entry
It is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration. Mayne's design appears to put innovative architecture on a literal pedestal — or a plinth, to be exact — while actually allowing it to become peripheral, noticeably separate from the heart of the museum and its galleries. — latimes.com
An overscaled monument flagrantly aloof from its surroundings, the addition is a laggard symbol of an era when the Netherlands, like this country, was awash in capital for boldly sculptural new projects.
As such it's a reminder of how slow architecture can be. The $159-million extension is the architectural personification of boom-time thinking.
— Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times
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
Although as a preservation-minded fellow, he probably wouldn't suggest that the two-bedroom, one-bathroom house off Colorado Boulevard is a teardown: "Now is your chance to live in the cottage and oversee construction, or you can just move in, enjoy the charm, the seclusion, the views--and write that novel." — la.curbed.com
Designed primarily by Roland Genick, chief architect for rail and transit systems at Parsons, the huge Pasadena-based construction conglomerate, the new stations are topped by undulating light-blue canopies of perforated metal panels that are not only dated — bringing a public-art project from the early 1990s to mind — but provide almost no shade or rain protection. Or solar power, for that matter, though from certain angles the stations look a bit like they're covered with photovoltaic panels. — latimes.com