Succulent Walls tackle how architecture can respond to Southern California’s precarious relationship to water and lack of disaster preparedness. The work of a Master of Architecture (M.Arch.I) Research Studio taught by Heather Roberge, this collaboration between Mary and David Martin's MADWORKSHOP and UCLA Architecture and Urban Design prototypes a series of residential water catchment systems. By integrating a system for easily installed water storage and food production into the residential vernacular, the class of eleven graduate students hopes to transform our laissez-faire attitude towards this critical and finite resource into one of proactive self-sufficiency. Five group projects were distilled into two super-group designs that will be showcased at the LA Design Festival.

Students: Christopher Doerr, Daniel Greteman, Ian Rodgers, Caroline Watts, Jenny Zhou, Nichole Tortorici, Talia Landes, Xiangkun Hu, Xihan Lyu, Xinwen Zhang, Yiran Chen

Video teaser: https://vimeo.com/342820070. ABOUT MADWORKSHOP Mary and David Martin’s MADWORKSHOP is a design education foundation. The foundation supports technological craftsmanship through university partnerships and an immersive fellowship program. With a focus on socially conscious projects, MADWORKSHOP supports radical, sustainable, and lasting contributions to design discourse and society at large. Find out more about MADWORKSHOP: http://madworkshop.org

Second Home, the London-based workspace company, is designing a Los Angeles offshoot with longtime architectural partner SelgasCano. The new-ish startup is poised to open in September and compete with other big names like Soho House and WeWork by nature of its cultural programming and wellness focuses. All cultural events will be open to the public, and the space will even allow local charities and neighborhood groups to use conference rooms free of charge. These inclusivity measures have the potential to breathe fresh air into the elitist luxury workspace arena—the website has a tab labeled “social impact”—not only culturally, but also physically. The spaces will be surrounded with thousands of plants and trees. Entrepreneurial duo Sam Aldenton and Rohan Silva opened their first space in East London in 2014. Their unconventional ideas about design—from hanging hats from the ceiling for muffling sound to large swaths of colored glass fittings—attract eccentric creative types from all sorts of industries. Second Home Hollywood will be more than just a workspace of colorful couches and succulents, as SelgasCano plans to integrate an outpost of the acclaimed Libreria bookstore within it, as well as an auditorium, cafe, and restaurant. All these amenities will be open to the public, giving more and more individuals and companies access to “sneak peaks” of the new 90,000-square-foot urban campus. SelgasCano has designed all but one of the Second Home campuses, but this one is specific to the Los Angeles architectural vernacular in ways that depart strictly from the more high-rise, corporate-leaning designs that can be seen at Second Home Clerkenwell, for example. The L.A. campus is inspired by the city’s iconic 20th-century bungalow court residences, with the 60 one-story oval buildings of the campus, called studios, fitting in with the horizontality of the surrounding environment off Sunset Boulevard in East Hollywood. All of the structures are connected by a continuous yellow roof plane, and the gardens surrounding the campus are lush and colorful, taking advantage of the Southern California climate, and open to views with wraparound floor-to-ceiling windows. Second Home is also bringing a new architectural trophy to its new city—SelgasCano’s 2015 Serpentine Pavilion, which will be used as an events space. The Madrid-based practice also has many other accolades under its belt, including a residency at MIT and exhibitions at the Guggenheim and MoMA in New York, the Venice Biennale, and the Akademie der Kunste in Berlin. Its work is acclaimed for embracing environmentally conscious materials and technologies, abundant color, and social impact priorities—all facets that can be seen in its work alongside Second Home. As workspaces continue to skyrocket in popularity (and price—a resident membership at Second Home starts at £450, or around $572) smart wellness decisions and cultural collaboration are rising to the forefront of design decisions. How the next generation of creatives and entrepreneurs will work, socialize, and network is being tinkered and reconfigured as the workspace industry continues to grow around the world.

The Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) announced yesterday that it would be reimagining its 12-acre campus in Hancock Park in Los Angeles, home to the iconic La Brea Tar Pits and George C. Page Museum. To that end, three firms will compete to lead a master planning team that will be responsible for renovating and future-proofing the campus. The NHMLAC first launched the search for a master planner in March of this year, and the three teams have been invited to create conceptual designs for review. The proposals will be unveiled in August of this year and the NHMLAC will take public feedback on each. After internal and public review, the winning team will be announced by the end of the year and will be responsible for leading the master plan team through the public review, planning, and construction phases of the renovation. The shortlisted teams are as follows: Dorte Mandrup is leading one team. While the Copenhagen-based firm's most recently publicized project may be a blockbuster tower in Denmark, the NHMLAC noted in a press release that the firm has worked on five UNESCO World Heritage Sites in the past, including several museums and libraries. The Dorte Mandrup team includes the London-based landscape architecture firm Martha Schwartz Partners, design firm Kontrapunkt, L.A.-based executive architects Gruen Associates, and Arup. The WEISS/MANFREDI team was singled out for its experience in designing large landscapes that invite public interaction, from Hunters Point South in Queens, to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden, to the Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle. WEISS/MANFREDI’s collaborators are notably distinct in focus from the other teams: paleobotanist Dr. Carole Gee, graphic designer Michael Bierut, artist Mark Dion, and Karin Fong, renowned storytelling designer and cofounder of Imaginary Forces, were all tapped. Rounding out the three finalists is the team led by Diller Scofidio + Renfro (DS+R). DS+R is no stranger to realizing large park projects either, and its Broad Museum project previously won the firm critical accolades in L.A. The DS+R team consists of the California-based landscape studio Rana Creek, and landscape architect, urbanist, and Hood Design Studio founder Walter Hood. Whoever wins will have to balance the preservation of a unique paleontological resource with improving the flow and visitor capacity of the park campus. “La Brea Tar Pits and the Page Museum are the only facilities of their kind in the world,” said Dr. Lori Bettison-Varga, president and director of the NHMLAC, “an active, internationally renowned site of paleontological research in the heart of a great city, and a museum that both supports the scientists’ work and helps interpret it for more than 400,000 visitors a year. We are excited to seize this once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to not just renovate these facilities thoroughly but also to think deeply about how to make them function as well for neighbors and guests over the next 40 years as they have for the last 40—perhaps, even better.”

La Cienega Park and Recreation Center in Beverly Hills, California, is slated for a transformational new master plan by Culver City–based architecture firm Johnson Favaro. Unfolding over the next several years, the 17-acre park will gain a brand new indoor recreation and tennis center, aquatics center, community space, pre-school, as well as 12 acres of sports fields and open green spaces. Opened in 1925, the original park design was novel as it incorporated a water treatment plant with an open public green space. The plant, which was the first on the West Coast to offer municipally-softened water to the community, was designed in a Hacienda architectural style, but fell out of use as larger regional water systems took over the Beverly Hills requirements. But while the plant was discontinued, the park remained very much alive. In 1986, landscape architect Patrick Hirsch proposed a redesign of the park to shift its land use from the majority open space of the original layout to a more “active” layout that included the organized sports fields that were in demand at the time for the surrounding community. The new elements planned by Johnson Favaro continue this trend towards a more “active” parkland, as customized spaces will become more and more important for after-school activities, community gathering, and the arts. Architecture is a main focus of the master plan, with the architects at Johnson Favaro designing two new indoor facilities for the site. A 30,000-square-foot recreation center will house 3 basketball courts, 16 tennis courts (8 indoor, 8 outdoor situated on the facility’s roof), and encompass the indoor sections of the aquatic center. The 25,000-square-foot community center will accommodate multipurpose rooms, art and dance studios, classrooms for educational programming, as well as a teen center. An advanced stormwater retention system will also be installed below the park and new structures, facilitating drainage and limiting runoff. Cars will also be accommodated with two above- and below-grade parking structures located on either side of the boulevard, with space for 600 vehicles. However, the park is set to be accessible via public transit as well, with entrances within walking distance from the purple line of the LA Metro currently under construction. Construction is set to begin as early as 2021 and is expected to be completed by 2023.

Working between Los Angeles and Joshua Tree, California, artist Aili Schmeltz culls from a wide array of architectural and design iconographies, reducing and remixing them in paintings and sculptures, to question their ideological underpinnings. In A Future Perfect, her solo show on display now at the Los Angeles gallery Edward Cella Art & Architecture, Schmeltz toys with art deco and modernist visual languages that compose so much of the built landscape of Southern California. She pushes motifs from both styles into abstraction in order to trouble the “utopian” ideologies underpinning both the modernist architectural project and the United States’ westward expansion. The work in A Future Perfect was in part inspired by another, large-scale undertaking of Schmeltz's. According to the gallery, she had been working to turn “a homesteader cabin near Joshua Tree into an exhibition space and live-in gallery called Outpost Projects.” While painting the walls gallery-white, she “noticed an optical effect of the surrounding landscape shifting forward spatially through the windows while the walls receded into background.” This strange visual experience compelled her to play with flatness and three-dimensional architectonic forms with her paintings and sculptures designed to be interpreted as “both objects and windows.” It also pushed her to investigate the legacy of artists, architects, homesteaders, and others who have shaped the perception of our world, particularly of the post-colonial Western United States. Schmeltz is thinking through history and ideology not just with visual motifs, but also with ways of seeing. With references as wide-ranging as Louise Nevelson, Donald Judd, Le Corbusier, John Lautner, Richard Neutra, Hilma af Klint, and Frank Lloyd Wright, Schmeltz’s painted de- and re-constructions (all part of a series titled Object/Window/Both/Neither) challenge us in their total flatness, while the cinder block plinths that the sculptural forms sit on evoke the very fundamentals of the act of building, turning architectural decoration into strange objects. Schmeltz's geometric abstractions, in their obvious constructedness, toy with the artificiality of our own contemporary “landscapes,” universes that have been built and shaped by human action and that carry so many hidden meanings and histories. Aili Schmeltz: A Future Perfect Edward Cella Art & Architecture May 11 through June 22, 2019

It’s not often that Los Angeles moves to demolish one of its 1,158 Historic-Cultural Monuments (HCM), a list of relics that includes Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, and three of the city’s majestic Moreton Bay Fig trees. But if developers Townscape Partners had their way, their Gehry Partners–designed 8150 Sunset project could do just that.

The controversial three-tower 8150 Sunset development aims to bring 229 apartments—including 38 low-income homes—and 60,000 square feet of commercial programming to the site of the Lytton Savings bank, a commercial structure with a folded concrete roof designed by local architect Kurt Meyer in 1960, an advocate for architectural preservation in L.A.

Designated HCM no. 1137 on the HCM list, Lytton Savings was recognized in 2016 after Gehry’s project was initially proposed. If demolished, it could be the first time a city monument is intentionally destroyed in 27 years, following the demolition of the A. H. Judson Estate—HCM no. 437—in 1992. The site of the Judson Estate, a mansion designed by George H. Wyman, the architect of L.A.’s Bradbury Building, remains empty to this day. In 1985, the deliciously gaudy Philharmonic Auditorium—HCM #61—in Downtown Los Angeles was also reduced to rubble and remained vacant until 2017.

This troubling legacy haunts Steven Luftman and Keith Nakata, two preservationists fighting to save Lytton Savings. They have been trying to work out a way to relocate the structure, though a new site and funds to relocate the 180-foot-long building have yet to materialize.

“It's a long shot, but it's important to make a try,” Luftman explained while highlighting the lengthy and complicated effort, adding, “The biggest obstacle to moving it is the building’s sheer size.” A recent 180-day grace period to create a plan to move the building expired on April 30, clearing the way for the developers to seek a demolition permit.

Like many buildings in Los Angeles, Lytton Savings has a hotly contested history that goes back to its prior incarnations. The structure was built atop the site of the former Gardens of Allah, a collection of bucolic hotel villas frequented by famous personalities, including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Greta Garbo, and Ronald Reagan.

Frank Gehry, however, has no nostalgia for Meyer’s bank. “I came to L.A. when the Gardens of Allah were still there and was witness to [Bart Lytton] tearing them down,” Gehry said. “The way it was done was ruthless.”

Gehry explained that he was bothered by “the history of [how Lytton Savings] got there” and that he “didn't feel compelled to fight to keep it,” adding, “I offered to live with it, but the client did not want to.”

“Four of my buildings have been torn down without anyone asking,” Gehry added. “It’s kind of a better way to have it happen.”

Leong Leong and Killefer Flammang Architects (KFA) have finished the first phase Anita May Rosenstein Campus, a series of spaces for the Los Angeles LGBT Center. The 72,000-square-foot project in Hollywood, California, occupies nearly a full block and will house a variety of social services for LGBT youth, seniors, and general community. The three-story buildings are an aggregation of white and glass blocks irregularly stacked and carved by swooping curves. Anamorphic projections were used to create oval patterns in the fritted glass surfaces that appear as circles from certain vantage points in the area. Picking up on local Southern California building traditions, a series of courtyards and covered walkways open up the structures and bring the outside in. The new campus includes a youth center, a senior center, events spaces, 100 beds for homeless youth, the Ariadne Getty Foundation Youth Academy, retail and administrative spaces, along with an observation deck looking toward the Hollywood sign.

Taking a cue from environmentally-conscious legislators in the nation’s capital, Los Angeles–area municipal entities are making plans to transform and repackage the region’s existing sustainability goals under the mantle of the Green New Deal with the aim of eliminating carbon emissions and boosting social equity. This week, Los Angeles mayor Eric Garcetti unveiled a wide-ranging “Green New Deal” plan for the city that calls for eliminating carbon emissions in the city entirely by 2045. Like the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez– and Ed Markey–backed Green New Deal initiative, Garcetti’s vision for the future of L.A. aims to unify environmental and social policy to reduce the city’s carbon footprint. Under the vision, Los Angeles would reduce building energy use by 44 percent by 2050, reduce vehicle miles traveled (VMT) per capita by 45 percent by 2045, and ensure that 75 percent of the new housing units built in the city would be less than 1,500 feet from a transit stop, among other goals. These efforts would be guided by new job training initiatives that would help deliver economic promise to the city’s residents. Under the plan, the city hopes to shore up its chronic water issues, as well, and plans to source up to 70 percent of L.A.’s water locally while capturing 150,000 acre-feet per year and recycling 100 percent of the water used within city limits by 2035. Simultaneously, Los Angeles County, the most populous county in the country, is crafting a long-term regional sustainability plan with the help of BuroHappold, the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), and social justice nonprofit Liberty Hill Foundation. The initiative will deploy a “set of strategies and actions for creating a resilient, inclusive, equitable, and sustainable county,” according to a press release, and calls for eliminating on-road diesel particulate emissions by 100 percent by 2035, sourcing 80 percent of water locally by 2045, and achieving carbon neutrality countywide by 2050. The team behind the plan recently unveiled a draft proposal, available at OurCountyLA.org, that is being workshopped with the help of community members and over 630 stakeholders from 292 regional organizations. If the plans are successful, they would signal a major shift in how the county’s 10 million inhabitants live their lives and could reshape the county’s built environment and transportation infrastructure. Mayor Garcetti’s plan, however, has come under fire for not going far enough from environmental groups like the local chapter of the Sunrise Movement, the youth-driven organization that helped develop Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s Green New Deal legislation. Juan Matute, deputy director of the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies, told Curbed that because the mayor’s plan only posits a reduction in VMT and relies heavily on the use of electric vehicles, “nothing that’s listed here will produce more than a 5 percent reduction,” adding, “It probably won’t bring them anything.”

The ethereal, colored fabric tunnels of 2015’s Serpentine Pavilion will arrive at Los Angeles’s La Brea Tar Pits this summer. From June 28 to November 24, the public can wander through the repurposed pavilion courtesy of a collaboration between the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County (NHMLAC) and London company Second Home. The installation, designed by the Spanish studio SelgasCano, will be transformed into a multi-purpose space that will host events at the intersection of art and science. Public talks and film screenings, including a series from streaming service MUBI, as well as other free events curated by Second Home and NHMLAC will be held regularly at the pavilion. Bringing the double-skinned, 866-square-foot playscape to the park adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits will precede the opening of the Second Home Hollywood office space later this year. This will be the first time that a Serpentine Pavilion will be displayed in the United States, and the installation won’t leave L.A. The pavilion will be open to the public from 10:00 a.m. to 6:00 p.m. daily and will be free to enter. Second Home Hollywood, also designed by SelgasCano, will introduce a sprawling 90,000-square-foot urban campus to L.A. once complete, and the company expects to host up to 250 organizations in the new workspaces. A restaurant, book store, auditorium, and other event spaces across the development will be open to the public. Once Serpentine pavilions finish their tenure at the Serpentine Gallery in London, they tend to be sold off and often travel the world. BIG’s 2016 installation, Unzipped, toured Canada courtesy of developer Westbank last year, and more recently, Frida Escobedo’s 2018 pavilion was sold to a green spa company.

Although the Office of Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) has been in business for decades and keeps a steadily growing constellation of offices around the globe, the firm has, until recently, had a relatively modest profile on the American West Coast.

But things are changing. As West Coast cities pursue new building efforts—including new neighborhoods, ecologically sensitive public parks, and experiments in multiuse complexes—OMA’s brand of frank intellectualism has slowly found a preliminary foothold in California.

The firm’s expanding Golden State presence includes a recently completed urban master plan for Facebook’s Willowbrook campus in Menlo Park, a residential condominium tower in San Francisco, as well as a trio of inventive projects in Los Angeles. Over the next few years, these projects are poised to join the Seattle Central Library and the Prada Epicenter Los Angeles, both from 2004, OMA’s only completed West Coast projects to date.

The latest westward push represents an ascendant energy emanating from the firm’s New York office, where OMA partners Jason Long and Shohei Shigematsu lead many dynamic projects taking shape across the continent and in Japan. When asked if a new California outpost was in the works for OMA, Shigematsu replied, “It’s always been a dream of ours,” before adding that current conditions were favorable but not exactly right for a potential OMA West branch. “Maybe if we get more projects out here.”

First and Broadway Park (FAB Park)

Also created in collaboration with Studio-MLA, the new First and Broadway Park in Los Angeles is set to contain a playful 100,000-square-foot retail, food, and cultural programming pavilion that anchors the ecologically sensitive park. The pavilion will be capped with an edible rooftop garden and a dining terrace that overlooks L.A.’s City Hall.

Along the ground, the park will be wrapped with ribbons of bench seating, elements fashioned to create interlocking outdoor rooms and plazas surrounded by native oak and sycamore trees. Water-absorbing landscapes around the seating areas are designed to harvest and retain rainwater while solar collection and a “Golden California” landscape lend the project its ecological bona fides.

The Avery (Transbay Block 8)

Related California’s crenelated 575-foot tower, known as The Avery, is part of a larger development created in conjunction with Fougeron Architecture for a blank site in downtown San Francisco’s bustling Transbay District.

For the project, the designers have carved a generous paseo through the buildable envelope for the site, creating a new retail and amenity plaza while also lending a tapered look to the 55-story tower. The gesture animates views for a collection of condominiums, market-rate apartments, and affordable housing units while also bringing sunlight down into the paseo and to the mid-rise block designed by Fougeron. Currently under construction, the tower is expected to open in 2019.

Audrey Irmas Pavilion

The Audrey Irmas Pavilion is the firm’s first cultural and religious project in the region. The trapezoidal building shares a site with the Wilshire Boulevard Temple and is made up of three interlocking volumes that connect to the outdoors via a sunken rooftop garden designed by landscape architecture firm Studio-MLA. An arched portal connects to a shared breezeway between the pavilion and the temple, which is framed by the leaning pavilion. The latter was designed with a pronounced slant both out of deference to historical structure and to illuminate the courtyard.

Referencing unbuilt proposals for Universal City and the L.A. County Museum of Art, Rem Koolhaas, OMA cofounder, said, “[The Pavilion] is part of a very consistent effort to do things here. It’s exciting if one thing happens to succeed, because architecture is a very complex profession where maybe a quarter of all attempts get anywhere.”

The Plaza at Santa Monica

Shigematsu explains that one concern driving the firm’s California projects involves delving into the region’s rich history of indoor-outdoor living. The approach is fully on display in The Plaza at Santa Monica, a 500,000-square-foot staggered mass of interlocking buildings intended to create a new mix of public outdoor spaces.

With a cultural venue embedded in the heart of the complex and ancillary indoor and outdoor public spaces laid out across building terraces, the complex aims for a unique take on the regional indoor-outdoor typology. The building is set to contain offices, a 225-suite hotel, as well as a market hall and public ice-skating rink.

Gehry Partners, Worthe Real Estate Group, and Stockbridge Real Estate Fund have unveiled renderings for a new 800,000-square-foot office complex slated for the Warner Bros. studio campus in Burbank, California. Urbanize.LA reported that the developers behind the so-called "Second Century Project” aim to break ground later this year and that the project will be completed in time for Warner Bros.’ centennial celebrations in 2023. Plans for the complex call for a pair of cool, iceberg-like mid-rise office towers articulated in Frank Gehry’s signature fluted and twisted forms. One tower will rise seven stories and is set to contain 355,000 square feet of offices while the second tower will rise nine stories high and offer 450,000 square feet of office space. In a press release announcing the project, Gehry said, “Once upon a time, Hollywood Studios had an important architectural presence in the city—they were like monuments to the movie-making process. With this project, I was trying to recapture that feeling of old Hollywood splendor.” To achieve his goal, Gehry Partners has created a two-faced complex. For the more public exposure that faces an adjacent freeway, the architects have designed icy glass facades that will catch the sunlight. Renderings for the project show the towers ablaze in Southern California’s red-orange-pink golden hour light, for example. The office’s second main exposure, which the architects have wrapped in perforated metal panels, will face existing warehouse-like studio spaces. Gehry added, “We created large open floorplates with the single goal of creating the highest quality office space. From the freeway, the buildings are composed as one long sculptural glass facade that creates a single identity like icebergs floating along the freeway. On the studio side, the metal punched facade is terraced to relate to the scale and character of the existing studio buildings.” The project is the latest local proposal from the ever-busy Gehry Partners. Other projects on deck include the Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles project in South Los Angeles, a planned hotel and mixed-income housing complex in Santa Monica, the controversial 8150 Sunset mixed-use complex, and The Grand, a pair of mixed-use residential towers slated for a site directly across the street from Gehry Partners’ Walt Disney Concert Hall in Downtown Los Angeles, among others.

Crumbling Empire, an exhibition combining dozens of Soviet-era political posters with works by American street artist Shepard Fairey, is currently on view at the Cold War–centric Wende Museum in Los Angeles.

The Soviet political paintings were recently acquired by the Wende from local collectors Tom and Jeri Ferris, two Americans who traveled regularly to the Soviet Union during the 1980s to collect works of contemporary art. The colorful and subversive works, produced during Mikhail Gorbachev’s outward-looking tenure, present critical takes on the waning years of the Soviet empire.

Fairey’s graphics and illustrations present contemporary foils to the posters while touching on similar themes. Also included in the exhibition is the central panel from Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid’s monumental 1993 work Unity, a portion of a large mural created by the Sots Art artists for the lobby of the U.S. Bank tower in Los Angeles. The exhibition also includes works from the American Institute of Graphic Arts, San Diego’s Ron Miriello Soviet Poster Show Collection.

Crumbling Empire: The Power of Dissident Voices The Wende Museum 10808 Culver Boulevard Culver City, CA Through June 2