CityCenter: Hold The Fireworks
New Las Vegas megaresort City Center, which we reviewed in January (it features buildings by Daniel Libeskind, Cesar Pelli, Rafael Viñoly, Helmut Jahn, and others) just reported its first quarter results. They weren’t good. The’s $8.5 billion project, owned by MGM Mirage and Dubai World (which has finally worked out a debt restructuring deal with its creditors), recorded an operating loss of $255 million, and has only been able to sell about 100 of its 2,400 luxury condominiums, according to the Wall Street Journal. MGM is also locked in a lawsuit with its contractor, Perini Building Co, for defective workmanship and overbilling. For what it’s worth the company claims that it will soon begin to turn a profit on the project. Now that’s a Vegas bet we’re interested in following.
New Age Modern
View from 450 Architects' Sausalito Residence
The houses showcased in this year’s AIA SF Home Tours in Marin County have a common theme in their responsive attitude to the landscape; permeable skins allowing a transparent transition between interior and exterior, embedding into their sites, and visually enlarging the volume of their comparatively modest footprints on steeply situated hillside lots. Each of the homes have unassuming public facades, displaying a circumspect propriety among its neighbors. The architecture of these residences say as much about their setting as the spaces inside. Read More
You Can Leave The Light On
What’s that on the roof of Hollywood’s Standard Hotel? Is it a….giant light bulb? Well, yes. Artist Piero Golia has installed a permanent, orb-shaped light (clad in acryclic, lit by eight fluorescent tubes, and sitting on a large steel spindle and crown) on the roof, called Luminous Sphere, that is quite visible from traffic below. It looks a little bit like a glowing golf ball on a steel tee. In a particularly quirky (and egotistical?) move, the light will go on when Golia is in town and off when he is out of town (it can be controlled via the internet). The project was organized by Culver City’s LA><ART and executed by Zellnerplus architects, Buro Happold engineers, and Benchmark Scenery fabricators. LA><ART, which focuses on site-specific work while also maintaining its own gallery, is celebrating its fifth anniversary. Sphere launches its LA Public Domain (L.A.P.D, get it?) program (also sponsored by local group For Your Art) , promoting artistic interventions in experimental contexts. Now is that lightbulb a halogen?
Not-So-Great News For Great Park
Is the air coming out of the big orange balloon? Orange County’s Great Park, which is rising on the former El Toro Marine Base in Irvine, has since its inception in 2002 been the last great hope for OC residents hoping for a great rural retreat (landscape architects like Ken Smith and Mia Lehrer are among those working on it). But the housing market has now officially gotten in the way, delaying the needed $1.4 billion in construction funding by years. According to The Orange County Register, the 1,347-acre park will have only $17 million in unallocated funds by next summer, and building money is still years away. “I don’t know where the idea materialized out there that somehow we would have the great metropolitan park developed full scale within a matter of a few years,” said Great Park Chairman Larry Agran. “Nobody ever promised that, and certainly I believe we have been quite clear that you build out a park of this magnitude in typically a 15- or 20-year process.”
Grow Baby Grow
Sure, sports fields are great. But wouldn’t it be cool if your school had a great garden? GOOD Magazine and the LA Unified School District think so too. They’re looking for architects as well as teachers, students, parents and anyone else to create affordable, scalable, modular school garden designs that any school can use. There’s more to it than you might think. Plans can include not only plants and plant beds but pathways, tool storage, irrigation schemes, greenhouses, benches, seating, trellises, plant beds, paths, trees, potting tables, farmstands, and so on.. It’s a great idea to unleash creativity and learning in a place that’s so often dominated by tests. Winning designers will attend a one-day workshop with landscape architect Mia Lehrer to refine their proposals, and one garden will be installed in a Los Angeles school by October. Submissions are due by June 15, and the winners will be chosen by July 1.
AIA SF Awards
Marcy Wong Donn Logan Architects' Ford Assembly Building renovation won a merit award for historic preservation. Image © Billy Hustace.
Once again our friend Stanley Saitowitz—San Francisco architecture’s answer to Meryl Streep— took home the most honors at the AIA SF’s annual awards, held at the San Francisco War Memorial & Performing Arts Center last Thursday. Saitowitz took home prizes for his elegant, and relatively affordable, Tampa Museum of Art, his screen-obsessed Costa Rica house, and his effervescent Toast Restaurant in Novato, CA, which the jury described as “like walking inside a loaf of bread…..like swimming in sparkling champagne….” . Other big winners included Jensen Architects, noted for their SFMOMA rooftop garden and Walden Studios in Sonoma; EHDD, which took home awards for its UC Merced Science and Engineering Building and its Pritzker Family Children’s Zoo in Lincoln Park, IL; and Min Day, which took home prizes for its L Residence and its Community CROPS Center, both in Nebraska.
SFMOMA Extension: Channeling Your Inner Maya Lin
CCA student Annie Aldrich envisions a mysteriously enticing Howard St. entrance.
On Tuesday, SFMOMA will reveal the final contenders for the city’s most prestigious project of the moment, the extension of its 1995 Mario Botta building. But imagine an alternate universe, where an open competition would invite a broad range of concepts from established firms and fresh talent alike. This parallel world could be experienced a couple of weeks ago, during a final review for an architecture class at CCA. Read More
Salesmanship, Snohetta-Style
An opera house, or a site for extreme sports?
Just by looking at the mind-boggling New Norwegian National Opera and Ballet in Oslo, an architectural cliff on the edge of a fjord, you might think there’d be a lot of dense archibabble floating around at the firm Snøhetta. We have been paying closer attention to them out here in San Francisco, after hearing rumors that they are in the running for the SFMOMA extension in partnership with locals EHDD. Read More
The Grand Sleep
If built, the $3 billion, mixed-use Grand Avenue project would be one of the largest ever constructed in downtown LA.
According to the Los Angeles Business Journal, downtown LA’s long-delayed Grand Avenue project is going to, er, keep being delayed. Related, the developer, has asked the city for an extension to its deadline to begin construction on the $3 billion Frank Gehry-designed behemoth. The way things stand now, if they don’t get the pile drivers working by February 2011 LA will take their baby away. Related wants until February 2013, a period of time they’ll presumably spend with their fingers crossed, waiting for the condo market to climb back out of the hole it’s fallen into. Also caught up in this mess is a parcel of land that billionaire philanthropist Eli Broad wants to use to build his very own art museum. Could this cultural component be a bargaining chip that will invoke the city’s leniency? Well, Related sure hopes so.
The Difference a Year Makes
The Sacremento County Courthouse, home of the Superior Court that made the authorities ruling. (Tom Spaulding/Flickr)
For better and worse, a Sacramento Superior Court judge ruled yesterday that the California legislature had not violated the state constitution in seizing some $2 billion from hundreds of local redevelopment authorities across the state, money that will continue to be used to cover educational shortfalls within the state’s sagging budget. This is good news in that it does not further imperil already tenuous state finances that have pretty much been trimmed well into the marrow. At the same time, as we detailed last year, this is an unprecedented taking of local funds—covered through special property taxes having nothing to do with the Legislature—that could also imperil the state’s economy by limiting the work the redevelopment authorities can do, work that often times goes to architects. Read More
AIA SF Marin Home Tours: Sneak Preview
In the 1960 home designed by Daniel Liebermann and renovated by Vivian Dwyer, time stands still.
This year the AIA SF is debuting a second home tour, up in Marin, in addition to its popular home tour in San Francisco happening later on in September. Smart move: there’s some great architecture going on in this area just north of the city–the area is so close, yet a world away. Freed from the strictures of squeezing in between row houses, and surrounded by bucolic landscapes and bay views, architects have come up with some lovely examples of contemporary living.
The one-day tour on May 15 offers a look at five homes. But the one that is a definite “can’t miss” is architect Daniel Liebermann’s first home, which he built in 1960. Read More
Brody House Is Money ($25 million worth)
A Quincy Jones’ Brody House in LA’s Holmby Hills has hit the market for a whopping $24.95 million, report the Wall Street Journal and LA Curbed. The 11,500 square foot modernist home has nine bedrooms, a tennis court, pool, and a guest house on 2.3 acres. It also features a floating staircase, floor-to-ceiling glass windows, and plenty of indoor-outdoor spaces. Not coincidentally the art collection of the home’s owners, Sydney F. and Frances Brody, is going up for auction today at Christie‘s in New York. It includes works by Picasso, Giacometti, Matisse, Degas, Renoir (not bad staging pieces for a house sale). The couple were founding benefactors of LACMA, major patrons of the Huntington Library and Gardens, and known for throwing legendary parties full of stars. Frances Brody died last November. We think Mr. and Mrs. Brad Pitt would like living here.
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