Los Angeles: The Latest Architecture and News

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The Los Angeles Department of City Planning has unveiled details on the restoration of the Streamline Moderne Firestone Building. First opened in 1938, the project operated until its closing in 2016. Built by the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company, it was used as a retail outlet for the company’s tires and related automotive products, and the garage remained one of the flagship stores of the company’s operations in Los Angeles.

Weiss/Manfredi have been selected to lead the new La Brea Tar Pits master planning in Los Angeles. The team's ‘Loops and Lenses’ concept was developed to create new connections between "the museum and the Park, between science and culture, and envisions the entire site as an unfolding place of discovery." The team will work with NHMLAC on a multi-year process of public engagement, master planning, design and construction on the Tar Pits’ 13-acre campus.

SPF:architects has topped out construction on WE3 at Water’s Edge, a six-story creative office building in Playa Vista. The 183,000 square foot structure along Silicon Beach encompasses four floors of open creative workspace, with upper floors of the structure wrapped in a “floating” perforated aluminum skin.

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Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects have broken ground on a modular design for supportive housing in South Los Angeles. Dubbed Isla Intersections, the project is part of a triangular parcel of land next to the freeway being developed as LA’s first shared street. Designed with open public space and 54 homes for some of LA's most vulnerable residents, the project was made to explore the future of housing.

Videos

Architect, educator and founding director of SCI-Arc, Ray Kappe, FAIA, passed away last week at the age of 92. Kappe experienced lung failure after battling pneumonia. As a renowned architect, Kappe designed more than 100 residences, pioneered a new approach to architectural education, and shaped both Los Angeles and California Modernism as we know it.

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Shifts in technology reflect how designers are creating experiences of architecture and cities. New advances engender novel ways of working, and in turn, shape our design process. As a practice defined by pushing boundaries, experimenting with workflows, and embracing new design technologies, Morphosis has a forty-year history of enthusiastically wondering at the future.

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Contemporary architecture is increasingly created as a product of the market. Human experience and natural systems are traded for convenience and the bottom dollar, resulting in buildings that become commodities rather than spaces for daily life. When architects SelgasCano set out to design the new Second Home in Los Angeles, they aimed to challenge the status quo. In doing so, the team created one of the city’s most inspiring developments in recent memory.

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Brooks + Scarpa and Plant Prefab have developed a new toolkit to address housing shortages. Scalable as an infill solution, the Nest toolkit can be configured in multiple ways using site types and typical lot sizes, or a combination of them. The toolkit was made to address LA’s shortage of supportive housing for the homeless and provide flexibility to meet the needs of a particular site, neighborhood, and bed count.

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Videos

The Midnight Charette is an explicit podcast about design, architecture, and the everyday. Hosted by architectural designers David Lee and Marina Bourderonnet, it features a variety of creative professionals in unscripted conversations that allow for thoughtful takes and personal discussions. A wide array of subjects are covered with honesty and humor: some episodes provide useful tips for designers, while others are project reviews, interviews, or explorations of everyday life and design. The Midnight Charette is also available on iTunes, Spotify, and YouTube.

This week David and Marina are joined by Christopher Hawthorne, to discuss his transition to becoming the city's first Chief Design Officer of Los Angeles, how LA is preparing for the 2028 Olympics, strategies for solving LA's housing shortage, why multi-family projects in California often look the same, balancing community outreach and design, why Elon Musk's tunnel system is flawed, and much more.

Hope on Alvarado, designed by KTGY Architecture + Planning, is the first modular housing project in the series of Hope On developments, aiming to find sheltering solutions for the chronically homeless, in Los Angeles.

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Morphosis has unveiled new images of the proposed 15-story mixed-use development along the Sunset Strip in Los Angeles. Spanning along Sunset Boulevard between San Vicente Boulevard and Larrabee Street, the 369,000-square-foot building is designed with a gym, movie screening room, and a rooftop pool. The project would include a new home for the landmark Viper Room, as the sinuous residential tower and hotel redefines one of L.A.'s most iconic streetscapes.

The Natural History Museums of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) have unveiled three new concepts for a master plan of the La Brea Tar Pits. The proposals were designed to improve the entire 12-acre site, which has not been renovated or considered comprehensively since it opened more than forty years ago. The three proposals were made by Dorte Mandrup, Diller Scofidio + Renfro and WEISS/MANFREDI. The concepts aim to create a more integrated experience of the museum and the landscape in Hancock Park.

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