Hollywood Freeway Park Gains Allies in High Places
LA’s proposed 44-acre Hollywood Central Park, which would be set atop the capped 101 Freeway between Santa Monica and Hollywood boulevards, made new friends in Washington last week, according to the LA Daily News. U.S. Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood met with local congressman Adam Schiff and Friends of the Hollywood Central Park (FHCP), a non-profit formed in 2008 to raise funds for the park. LaHood expressed interest in the project, and provided insights on its development and possible benefits. He also offered to have members of his staff contribute to its planning process.
Addressing Water Scarcity at A+D
Tom Kosbau's winning vision for the Drylands Design Competition uses the LA River as a fertile agrarian center.
Last Thursday, we visited the opening of the A+D Museum’s new show, Drylands Design. While politicians squabble about oil and other resources, the show drives home the point that water is the reserve that will become the most fraught in the future as populations increase and climate change worsens. The Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University culled the exhibit from the winners of their Drylands Design Competition, which encouraged architects, engineers, and urban designers to respond to the challenges of coming water scarcity.
Jeff Koons Proposes Bringing Trains Back to the High Line
Courtesy Friends of the High Line
When preliminary designs for the third and final section of the High Line were revealed, the designers presented several options including flowerbeds and amphitheater seating for the Tenth Avenue Spur, an offshoot of the park that stands above the intersection of 10th Avenue and 30th Street. The design team’s aim is to make the Spur one of the main gathering spaces in the park. Now, with the proposal of a massive installation by artist Jeff Koons calling for a suspended locomotive over the park, the Spur may become exhibition space as well.
Google Fires Ingenhoven from Mountain View Headquarters Project
An early conception of the campus created by the city of Mountain View.
You can’t even, well, Google it yet, but we’ve picked some meaty news from the grapevine: Google has fired German firm Ingenhoven Architects as the designers of its new headquarters in Mountain View, California. The building, to be located on 18.6 acres next to the current “Googleplex,” off of North Shoreline Boulevard, would measure a maximum of 595,000 square feet and house 2,500 to 3,000 employees, including executives, engineers, and scientists.
America’s Cup Carousel Keeps Turning
Piers 27-29 would be the focus of the scaled down event, although piers 30-32 may still be in play. (Courtesy America's Cup)
The real estate roulette wheel known as the San Francisco America’s Cup is still in spin. In the latest turn of events, the city has kicked in a modest $8 million or so to complete partial repairs to Piers 30-32, which had previously been removed from the deal by the privately-run America’s Cup Event Authority (ACEA). Then, citing difficulties in securing corporate sponsors, the Authority named a new CEO and cut its staff in half.
Urban Intervention Finalists Imagine Seattle Center 2.0
"Seattle Jelly Bean" by team PRAUD.
How can technology and science revolutionize and restore our public spaces—particularly those disconnected and decaying districts that remain after colossal events such as the Olympics, biennials, and world’s fairs? These immense programs have shaped many an urban core, for better or for worse, from the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893 to the 2004 Athens Olympics.
As part of the Seattle Next Fifty, the 50th anniversary of the Seattle 1962 World’s Fair Century 21 Exposition, the Howard S. Wright Design Ideas Competition for Public Space challenged global designers, architects, and urban planners to re-imagine the 9 acre Seattle Center site that was part of the larger 74-acre campus, which hosted the original 1962 fair.
On View> Architecture in the Expanded Field
(Courtesy CCA Wattis Institute)
Architecture in the Expanded Field
CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts
1111 8th St., San Francisco
Through April 7
Theorist and critic Rosalind Krauss’s 1979 text “Sculpture in the Expanded Field” attempts to identify the scope of sculpture in a time when artists were redefining its traditional limits to include considerations of architecture, landscape, and space. The Wattis attempts a similar redefinition of the field of architecture; installations explore material, spatial, and perceptual concerns with emerging experimental technologies outside the limits of traditional architectural practice. A full-scale installation within and outside of the gallery transports visitors into the immersive environment, while a surface component presents the mapped expanded field of architectural installation.
Well that didn’t take long. Less than a month after opening it’s first pedestrian plaza carved out of underused road space in Silver Lake, a hit-and-run driver in Los Angeles careened into massive planters meant to protect the plaza just before 5 a.m., spewing dirt across Rios Clementi Hale’s polka dotted plaza. Resident Sarah Dryden (whose car was also smashed up) snapped a photo of the mess. No one was hurt, but the city is now looking for more robust bollard options to keep the plaza safe from motorists. (Via Curbed LA.)
Eavesdrop> AIA/LA Has Architecture Center Envy
New York's Center for Architecture: model for LA?
It appears that AIA/LA is serious about opening a new architecture center, a storefront, multi-use space similar to that of the Center for Architecture in New York (above). According to a now expired post on Idealist.org, they’re looking for (and rumored to have already hired) a new fulltime “Campaign Director” for an $8 to 15 million capital campaign to “support the acquisition and renovation of an existing building for the new Center for Architecture and Urban Design Los Angeles,” and “create an endowment to maintain this new property.”
According to the post the center will be “a highly collaborative organization that builds strong relationships with other organizations to carry out its mission.” The center is rumored to contain not just AIA offices and exhibition and event spaces, but perhaps spaces for the A+D Architecture and Design Museum and the Urban Land Institute’s Los Angeles chapter.
LA Kicks Cars to the Curb, Opens First Pedestrian Plaza
Sunset Triangle Plaza opens to the public. (Alissa Walker / Flickr)
You’d better get used to it, Los Angeles is remaking itself from a one trick pony town where car is king into a multimodal city for pedestrians, cyclists, and transit users. The latest improvement is Sunset Triangle Plaza, the city’s first pedestrian plaza created by a new collaboration called Streets for People (S4P) that hopes to churn out dozens new pedestrian-oriented spaces a year across the city. The green-on-green polka dot plaza officially opened this month to crowds of gleeful pedestrians in the hip enclave of Silver Lake, northwest of Downtown LA.
LACMA’s Rock Star Reaches Los Angeles
"The Rock" rolls down Wilshire Boulevard in Los Angeles (Jonathan Louie)
A piece of performance art for the ages wrapped up early Saturday morning as the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass finally reached LACMA to fanfare typically reserved for a Hollywood premier. The star was a 340-ton rock that had enraptured spectators throughout its week-and-a-half journey into the city from a quarry near Riverside, CA.
Hung from a 22-axle, football-field-long carrier, the rock was greeted by thousands of spectators in the streets of LA as it slowly crawled towards its final destination on the northwest corner of the LACMA campus. “We’re really pleased it got here in one piece,” said Miranda Carroll, LACMA’s director of communications, who clocked the boulder’s touchdown at the museum around 4:30 a.m on Saturday morning. Read More
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