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Los Angeles architect Francois Perrin (anyone remember the face-melting Skateboard House?) has shared with us his recently completed project, a private residence in the Hollywood Hills here in sunny Southern California. Project Description from the Architect: This private residence is located in... View full entry
To create a smarter space, Kennedy constructed a 160-square-foot test home (the smallest legal-sized apartment for California) inside a Berkeley wherehouse. SmartSpace 1.0 is filled with innovations like the SmartBench, an adjustable banquette that converts from a dining table to a guest bed. — youtube.com
I've read that it's biodegradable, right? I ask Ball.
"It's degradable," he says. "I don't know about bio."
— domusweb.it
Our friend Katya Tylevich covers Ball Nogues Yucca Crater installation in Joshua Tree National Park, CA. You may recall Katya's UpStarts feature on Ball Nogues that we published here a couple years ago. View full entry
Gov. Jerry Brown has appointed a Los Angeles architect and former president of the American Institute of Architects to be state architect, the governor's office announced this afternoon.
Chester "Chet" Widom, 71, was a partner at the firm Widom Wein Cohen O'Leary Terasawa from 1964 to 2008 and advised the Los Angeles Community College District on construction projects from 2009 to 2011.
— blogs.sacbee.com
The source of the disconnect between San Francisco's transit-first heart and its car-centric hand is an arcane engineering measure called "level of service," or LOS. In brief, LOS suggests that whenever the city wants to change some element of a street — say by adding a bike lane or even just painting a crosswalk — it should calculate the effect that change will have on car traffic. — Eric Jaffe
Changing a city from being car-centric isn't just a matter of building better bike lanes and drawing up better bus routes. Sometimes, developers have to go up against restrictions which won't let them build at all if it interrupts too much car traffic. View full entry
Lautner's homes have appeared in Hollywood movies, but the architect himself wasn't particularly well-known when he died in 1994. Still, in 2011 — the centennial year of Lautner's birth — his hometown of Marquette, Mich., has honored him with two exhibitions: one at Northern Michigan University's DeVos Art Museum and one at the Marquette Regional History Center. — NPR
John Lautner's homes have been featured in many movies, but few people actually know who the architect was who came up with the designs. His space-age designs were probably a favourite of the cinematic because the designs themselves look like something which might be dreamed up by a set... View full entry
An ex-designer and supervisor of building projects at UC Berkeley, two former national presidents of an architectural organization, and the state architect for ex-Gov. Gray Davis are among the candidates being considered for chief regulator of seismic safety standards for public school construction. — huffingtonpost.com
Despite strident appeals from some neighbors, it looks like Zaha Hadid is coming to San Diego.
The city’s planning commission on October 20 approved a request to have Hadid and San Diego firm Public demolish an existing house on 8490 Whale Watch Way in La Jolla and replace it with a 12,700 square foot residence with four bedrooms, six bathrooms, and an indoor pool.
— archpaper.com
Anthony J. Lumsden, a prolific Southern California architect who helped develop new ways of wrapping buildings in smooth glass skins, accelerating a shift that reshaped skylines around the world, died Sept. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 83. — latimes.com
Councilwoman Diaz said she heard about the Cal Poly student's proposal accidentally during a chance encounter on a plane flight to the Bay Area. — North County Times
I always tell graduating students to take their projects to real life and grass root campaign them. Well, so it happened to one Cal Poly, Pomona architecture student John Barlow, class of 2010 advised by professor Kip Dickson, when his project fell into the hands of... View full entry
The city of Sacramento has launched a new campaign to keep the public in the fight for a new arena. The city is asking its neighbors to become citizen architects. Now you don’t really have to be an architect to sign up. In fact, if you’re a Kings fan and you want a new, downtown arena then you’re probably just who the city is looking for. — fox40.com
![Soon to be "California Gurls" Charles Renfro, Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller ©Diller Scofidio + Renfro](https://archinect.gumlet.io/uploads/gp/gppuhe0j69mu27e9.jpg?fit=crop&auto=compress%2Cformat&enlarge=true&w=514 "Soon to be "California Gurls" Charles Renfro, Ricardo Scofidio and Elizabeth Diller ©Diller Scofidio + Renfro")
Robgin Pogrebin of the New York Times reports that Diller Scofidio + Renfro have been tapped to design the 90,000 square-foot Burton and Deedee McMurtry Building. The building was named after the alumni who graciously donated $30,000,000 to its construction. Construction is expected to begin in... View full entry
Top management with the Division of the State Architect – the chief regulator of school construction – for years did nothing about nearly 1,100 building projects that its own supervisors had red-flagged. Safety defects were logged and then filed away without follow-up from the state. — Corey G. Johnson, California Watch
In the wake of the arrest of AI Weiwei, his objections and criticism regarding school construction safety in China were not taken lightly by anyone including the Chinese people and the Chinese government.A similar case is unfolding in the State of California. California Watch is covering a... View full entry
But one of the firm’s smaller clients, the city of Elk Grove, population 153,000, recently conjured far different kinds of aquatic life when members of the City Council and the public chose words like “squid,” “octopus” and “starfish” to describe the latest renderings for a proposed civic center. — nytimes.com
