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
Seattle to Study Self-Funded Arena for a New NBA Team
Seattle's Key Arena, former home of the Seattle SuperSonics (via Flickr by jscatty).
Thanks to Jeremy Lin’s meteoric rise, Kobe Bryant’s broken nose, and Blake Griffin’s dunks, basketball is once again on everybody’s mind. Now Seattle, missing an NBA team since the 2008 departure of the Seattle SuperSonics to Oklahoma City (renamed the Thunder), has a concrete plan to bring the NBA back. Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and King County Executive Dow Constantine have announced plans for a self-funded arena sponsored by private investor Christopher Hansen, according to King County.
Architects Design Fashions for A+D Museum’s Celebrate Fundraiser
Richard Meier's white linen blazer has a colorful and chaotic collage lining.
This Saturday, LA’s A+D Museum will host its annual fundraising banquet, Celebrate. This year’s event will not only include music from KCRW DJ Raul Campos (himself a trained urban planner) and some impressive celebs (including our favorite architecture fan Moby), but it will feature a runway show with custom clothing and accessories by architects and designers like Richard Meier, Neil Denari, Predock Frane, BMW Designworks, Karim Rashid, Robert A.M. Stern and many others. The runway show and live auction will be hosted by LA humorist Charles Phoenix and by Frances Anderton, host of KCRW’s DnA.
Amazon’s Seattle Expansion To Fill Three Blocks of Parking
Denny Triangle aerial view (via NabeWise). The area is named after Denny Hill that was regraded in the 1900s and later in the 1930s, removing more than 7 million feet of earth from the area.
Even in these recessionary times, there are still big buyers who can afford to expand when the market is low. In Seattle, Amazon is in the preliminary stages of purchasing three city blocks in the Denny Triangle neighborhood north of the business district from developer Clise Properties, The Seattle Times reports. The properties are bounded by Westlake Avenue to the east, 6th Avenue to the south, and Blanchard Street to the west.
Amazon is going big: intending to convert what are now parking lots into three office towers measuring one million square feet each. The total space will double the size of the largest skyscraper in Seattle, the Columbia Center.
Amazon’s current office space—over a million square feet distributed over several locations—is rented. This will mark Amazon’s first office ownership. An agreement with Clise will give Amazon the option to buy more of their holdings, which are part of a larger 13-acre site in Denny Triangle.
The SF Chronicle reports that tech company Salesforce.com has put its big plans for a 2 million square foot Mission Bay campus on hold. Recently deceased architect Ricardo Legoretta was to lead the project, which would have included four colorful buildings and a large public plaza on 14 acres across from the UCSF Mission Bay campus. The company will instead rent big blocks of space throughout the city until it decides what to do with the site. Stay tuned for more.
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