The Hollenbeck Replacement Police Station (see below) is winning prizes for greenness, and beauty. Last week it took an honor award bestowed by the Cultural Affairs Commission at the annual AIA/LA Awards gala. While this awards program is a measure of what the architectural profession views as good architecture of the moment, it is also an interesting reflection of where the money and creativity is, in terms of building types. As mentioned below, it used to be that experimental single-family homes made up the lion's share of award-winning projects but this year not just Hollenbeck but three police stations garnered awards for strong design. Also singled out were some striking condo buildings, of the type that have sprung up in West Hollywood and Hollywood in the last five years, setting a fine example for multi-family housing design. Also a gas station that seems to say, hey, the heyday of the car ain't over yet. And Inner City Arts, a school providing arts classes to impoverished downtown kids, designed and built in phases over the last ten years by architect Michael Maltzan Architect, rounded out with luscious landscaping by Nancy Goslee Power, and graphic design by Michael Hodgson. This project deservedly won another award this year, the prestigious Rudy Brunner Award, which assesses a building based on its social and economic impact on a neighborhood, and unlike most awards programs, (including the AIA's) which judge buildings based on photographs of them, involves the jurors visiting the buildings in the flesh, meeting the clients, users and designers. Inner City Arts is shown, above and below.
This past Thursday I emceed the annual gala of the Los Angeles chapter of the US Green Building Council. This is the group responsible for introducing the LEED (Leadership and Environmental Design) certification program into the building industry and from inauspicious beginnings 11 years ago, when real men still drove the biggest gas guzzlers on the market, it has become an industry standard. While LEED has been criticized as a marketing tool by those who choose to build in an environmentally sensitive way without investing in the costly and voluntary ratings program, it has provided a framework for green design and construction after several decades in which the art of building in concert with the land and climate had been lost.
Don't miss the chance to hear architect-designers Greg Lynn and Elena Manferdini talk about designing at multiple scales -- in the age of the computer. The talk takes it name from the show, curated by Bobbye Tigerman, of designs in LACMA's collection by architects from Frank Lloyd Wright to Frank Gehry; that show in turn takes its name from the famous Ernesto Rogers phrase, dal cucchaio alla citta, pronounced in an essay in Domus in 1952. I'll discuss the challenges and pleasures of switching scale with Elena and Greg, and hope to see you there.
At the AIA/LA's annual awards gala last week, design awards went to three police stations (the new LAPD building, left, in downtown, by AECOM architects; the Hollenbeck Replacement Police Station by AC Martin and the Olympic Police Station by Gruen Associates). This was an intriguing break from the past when experimental single family houses tended to scoop up the bulk of LA architecture awards, and police stations didn't even enter the radar screen as examples of high quality design. Of course it's a challenge for a client whose primary function is to maintain safety and security to present a warm and accessible face to the world. But concommitant with the rising emphasis on community policing there is an effort on the part of the police department to create new stations that engage with the public and the neighborhood. Despite its somewhat impenetrable reflective glass edifice, the new LAPD headquarters, left, is in key ways a civic space, with public gardens on each side of the block it sits on, and a diagonal path through the site permitting pedestrian and visual connection from City Hall to Saint Vibiana's. We will talk about this building and its urban intentions on Which Way, LA? with Warren Olney and on a future DnA.
That's the topic of DnA today. In the many months of discussion about healthcare reform, one topic we don't hear about is the role the healing environment plays in healthcare. It turns out that a growing body of evidence verifies what millions of us already knew -- that time spent in a hospital is miserable, and not just because one is sick, or visiting a sick loved-one; but also because the very design of most hospitals is downright unhealthy and unsafe. On the show we'll hear from the client, Chief Nurse Executive Lorie Shoemaker, of PPH, and architect, Tom Chessum of CO Architects, of Palomar Medical Center West, a new hospital in Escondido, dubbed the "hospital of the future." We'll also hear from Ellen Taylor, with the Center for Health Design, about the new field of evidence-based design and why it's leading to hospitals that are more welcoming and less prone to medical error. And we'll hear from Todd Hutlock, a healthcare design journalist, about the connection between healthy hospitals and money.
In the second half of the show we'll lighten up with a look at Halloween and creative ways of doing scary design. With the release of the movie adaptation of one of childhood's best-loved haunting stories, Where the Wild Things Are, we hear about the art of making a costume that is really specific to character, from costume designer Casey Storm, creator of Max's wolf suit for the movie. We also hear from two window-dressers, Lucy Spriggs at Lawson-Fenning in Silverlake, and Anthony Schmitt, at BNY in Santa Monica, about doing a low-cost and unconventional spin on ghoulish.
Much has been said about the late great photographer Julius Shulman, but there is more to learn, and more to delight in, in Eric Bricker's movie, Visual Acoustics, a passion project many years in the making, that screens this Friday and Saturday at the Nuart in West Los Angeles. Q and As with follow the 7:30 p.m. and 9:50 p.m. shows, as follows:
10/16:
7:30 pm Eric Bricker and Cindy Olnick, Los Angeles Conservancy
9:50 pm Eric Bricker and Erla Dögg Ingjaldsdóttir, architect
10/17
7:30 pm Eric Bricker and Steven Ehrlich, architect 9:50 pm Eric Bricker and Phil Ethington, co-writer of VISUAL ACOUSTICS
"From the spoon to the city" ("Dal cucchiaio alla città) is a slogan created in 1952 by the Italian architect and journalist Ernesto Rogers. He was describing the typical approach of a Milanese architect, who in the course of a day might work on a spoon, a chair, a lamp and a skyscraper, applying a similar approach to analysis and resolution whatever the scale of the problem. It's now the name of a show curated by Bobbye Tigerman at LACMA -- From the Spoon to the City: Objects by Architects from LACMA's Collection -- featuring work by architects past and present, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Rudolph Schindler, Frank Gehry, Greg Lynn and Elena Manferdini. On Monday, October 26. at LACMA you can hear from Lynn and Manferdini, two LA-based designer-architects whose cross-disciplinary work, from product design through fashion design and installation to architecture, is very much interrelated to the digital process of design and fabrication (and, in the case of Manferdini, also rooted in her own design education in Italy). They will explain how -- in a way that I guarantee will be very interesting -- and I'll be moderating. NOTE: This event was originally scheduled for October 15 and will now take place on the 26th.
It's an archi-licious Sunday this October 4 with two tours of LA residential architecture on the calendar, one in Silverlake, the other in Manhattan Beach. Join AIA/LA for its self-driven Fall Home Tour this Sunday, October 4th and see contemporary homes in Manhattan Beach by LA architects Grant Kirkpatrick, Michael Lee, James Meyer and Jess Mullen-Carey and William Beauter. For tickets and informatio, click here.
Or go with the MAK Center tour to visit no less than seven residences, dating from 1926 through 1964, by seminal architects Rudolf Schindler, Gregory Ain, Raphael Soriano, Harwell Harris and Craig Ellwood. Learn more, here.
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