The fundamentally architectural character of "Urban Light" -- the artist called it "a building with a roof of light" -- was no anomaly for Burden, who grew up in France and Italy and studied at Pomona College and UC Irvine. Themes connected to architecture and urbanism run through his work, typically with the same wry attitude about the relationship between structure and art-making that the lampposts suggest. “Originally I was going to study architecture,” Burden said at a lecture...in 2003. — LA Times

As the museum turns 50 this year and debate continues about LACMA Director Michael Govan's plan to replace the Pereira buildings (and a later addition by Hugh Hardy) with a giant new wing by Swiss architect Peter Zumthor, it's worth remembering how the original LACMA campus was greeted — as well as a few things about the Los Angeles into which it was born. — latimes.com

"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

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

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

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

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