In an effort to better highlight its extensive collection of historical drawings, The Huntington Library in San Marino, California, is presenting Architects of a Golden Age: Highlights from The Huntington’s Southern California Architecture Collection, an exhibition focused on some of the region’s most eye-catching historical architecture. For the exhibition, curators at The Huntington have collected nearly 20 historical drawings to highlight the “elegant, powerful, whimsical, and iconic buildings” proposed and built in Los Angeles from between 1920 and 1940. The era is considered a “golden age” in Los Angeles’s development wherein the city not only saw tremendous population growth but also built itself up in a variety of dramatic and evocative styles. According to a press release, the inception of The Huntington’s print and drawing collections came in the late 1970s, as preservation awareness first rose to a fever pitch in the city following several decades’ worth of post–World War II development, which often pitted new development against aging structures from previous eras. Erin Chase, assistant curator of architecture and photography at The Huntington, said, “For curators at The Huntington, that was the time to actively seek out and salvage as much of the architectural record as possible, as dozens of significant buildings fell to the wrecking ball and the downtown skyline was forever changed.” Because of this fact, the collection enjoys a wide diversity of representational works. Included in the collection, for example, are drawings by architect Roger S. Hong, one of the developers behind L.A.’s modern Chinatown. Also highlighted are floor plans and other working drawings from the Foss Building and Design Collection depicting early craftsman houses in Pasadena and a large rendering by A. Quincy Jones and interior designer William Haines from 1952 depicting the Sidney and Frances Brody residence in the Holmby Hills area of Los Angeles, an early Modernist work in the region. Describing the exhibition, Chase added, “This show is an opportunity to showcase our collection, which has become invaluable in the study of the history of the region’s built environment.” The exhibition will be on view until January 21, 2019.

A project team led by developers Wilson Meany and Stockbridge has unveiled the latest batch of renderings for a 2,500-unit mixed-use neighborhood set to rise around the forthcoming Los Angeles Rams stadium in Inglewood, California. Gensler, BCV Architecture + Interiors, Architects Orange, and Hart Howerton are providing architectural design services for the project while Studio-MLA is the landscape architect for the 298-acre site, Curbed reports. The new HKS Architects–designed, $2.66-billion stadium is in the midst of heavy construction and topped out earlier this year. The teardrop-shaped structure will come wrapped in over 36,000 perforated metal panels and will be punctuated by a large-format elliptical screen located at its uppermost levels that will play advertisements and other graphic projections. A large artificial lake will be located beside the stadium, as well, and will feature a series of waterfalls. The stadium is due to be completed in 2020. According to a project website, the new surrounding neighborhood will open in phases starting in 2020 with an initial batch of 314 apartments of various configurations, including three-bedroom units, spread out over two structures. Eventually, the development will contain 2,500 dwelling units, 620,000-square feet of retail spaces, a 300-key hotel, and a new casino. The new renderings portray a series of porous outdoor shopping areas connected by covered outdoor spaces, programmed landscape areas, and indoor-outdoor venues like a foodie-friendly dining hall and several covered lounge areas. The plans also call for a long and narrow amphitheater and a performance stage. Residential areas for the development will see structures two- to four-stories in height while the hotel complex is slated for a five-story structure anchored by groundfloor retail. An unspecified amount of office space will also be included in the project. The size and market-driven nature of the new development—there are no new affordable housing units slated in conjunction with the project—has already jump-started gentrification in the renter-heavy, predominantly working-class area. Estimates indicate that property values have increased by as much as 80 percent in recent years, Curbed reports. New housing and shopping are not the only things coming to the area, however. A recently-unveiled plan seeks to link the new neighborhood with the regional transit system by building a new 1.8-mile automated people mover. The new infrastructure aims to provide easy access to the site when it will be used as a venue during the 2028 Olympic games, which Los Angeles is hosting across a series of scattered regional sites and facilities that will include the new stadium complex. *Correction: This story incorrectly reported that 3,000 housing units were being built in conjunction with the development; The correct figure is 2,500 units. 

Wireframes: The History of Architecture Visualization, a show now up at the A+D Museum in Los Angeles, takes a critical look at the role of architectural visualization in the contemporary art world. By featuring an assortment of established and emerging artists who work at the intersection between art and architecture, Wireframes organizes the discipline’s work chronologically to establish its place in the artistic canon. The exhibition and accompanying series of events coincide with the announcement of the CG Architect Awards, which honors excellence in architectural visualization. The prize winners’ work will be celebrated, and the awards will honor artists who incorporate translation, storytelling, and the contextualization of memories with the process of image-making. As the A+D Museum puts it, “we present what the future could hold and question what the past has told us.” Wireframes: The History of Architecture Visualization A+D Museum 900 East 4^th Street Los Angeles, California 90013 Through November 25

Lorcan O’Herlihy Architects (LOHA) completed work earlier this year on a spate of renovations and alterations to LAXART gallery in Los Angeles, a project the firm initially designed back in 2015. The gallery originally opened under the stewardship of founding curator Lauri Firstenberg 13 years ago in a Culver City space designed by architect Peter Zellner. It was intended to serve as an alternative gallery that provided a platform for emerging L.A.-based artists. LAXART came under the leadership of the curator Hamza Walker in 2016, shortly after its move to the LOHA-designed spaces. Now solidly established, the gallery has been opened up by LOHA in order to accommodate larger exhibitions and public events. Lorcan O’Herlihy, founding principal at LOHA, explained: “The interiors have changed from an organization of small galleries for several concurrent solo shows to a reoriented space that is organized around a single central gallery.” LAXART is currently showing Remote Castration, a group exhibition curated by Catherine Taft that focuses on the #MeToo and Time’s Up movements as related to feminist thought in contemporary art. LAXART 7000 Santa Monica Boulevard West Hollywood, California 323-871-4140

Maps often reveal as much about the beliefs and culture of the mapmaker as they do about the locations they depict. Taking this in stride, the collective Mapping Feminist Los Angeles has begun to put together the Angelena Atlas in order to “to share intersectional feminist resources, services, and events for womxn in Los Angeles County.” The organization, which is based out of the Women’s Center for Creative Work, comprises three core members—Leana Scott, Yasmine Batniji, and Brittany Arceneaux—who bring together skills in everything from urban planning and tech development to community organizing and digital art. Mapping Feminist Los Angeles member Leana Scott points out that “cities often have networks of resources...but bringing those to light is quite difficult. And information remains underground or piecemeal and disjointed.” Brittany Arceneaux goes on to say that far too often access to this information is “very much based upon your existing social networks,” which further limits knowledge of these resources to those already in the know. The Angelena Atlas confronts this problem head-on by collecting, collating, and annotating a wide range of resources from reproductive health centers to performance spaces while attempting to promote itself outside of just the networks its members already exist in. The goal is to make a map as widely accessible as possible, certainly no small feat. The Angelena Atlas will feature resources across the entirety of Los Angeles County, so people can find organizations that serve them, collectives to participate in, or spaces to share their work no matter their locale. It will also, as its explicitly intersectional mission suggests, be centered around resources that are, among many other things, anti-racist, anti-ableist, pro-immigrant, and LGBTQ friendly. Additionally, the various points on the Angelena Atlas will be annotated to help people understand the purpose, audience, and accessibility of the various spaces While the collective has presented zines and other preliminary materials at zine and artbook fairs and other events (they have an upcoming fundraiser and awareness-building brunch that will also bring together some organizations on the map), the final form of the Angelena Atlas is still under construction. Part of what they’ll be focusing on is what Batniji calls a “creative representation of data” that will help people highlight “the impact that the resources have on them.” In this way, the Angelena Atlas will be a participatory project, radically horizontal and ever evolving. They also are looking into open source solutions for the online map so that they, and the public, retain ownership of their information. In addition, they plan on making a print version to make sure they truly can create a resource for as many people as possible. Arceneaux says that this approach to mapmaking “goes back to the core values of the project by making sure that everything we're doing and every design decision that we make is really tied back to intersectionality and making sure that these places are friendly and accessible to people of all abilities and experiences.” Arceneaux goes on to point out that many people, especially in the current political environment, are interested in joining conversations and finding community, but may not even realize that there might be “an organization in [their] own backyard.” As Scott puts it, the Angelena Atlas not only has the direct effect of providing useful information but also “fosters a new spatial awareness through data.” It’s all about “recontextualizing Los Angeles.” Arceneaux’s hope is that “by highlighting and visualizing the activity that is happening in our city people will start to look at their communities a little differently.” Thinking about feminist mapping and radical mapping inevitably begs the question of what an intersectional feminist city would look like. However, Batniji says the group is “not interested in creating utopias because that's where things get really sticky.” In the public sphere “there's always going to be contention, there's always going to be issues. A feminist city would be a place for having these conversations. A feminist city would be just a place for possibility to happen.” It would be, as Arceneaux puts it, “a place where everyone feels empowered.”

Roundabouts are all the rage in Europe, but Americans have been slow to adopt this particular form of street design. Despite Los Angeles’s car-centric culture, the glitzy city is no exception, but that might start to change following the success of Riverside Roundabout, a stormwater-retaining traffic island at the intersection of Riverside Bridge, San Fernando Road, and Figueroa Street. The city’s first roundabout definitely brings the spectacle. Greenmeme, a studio working at the intersection of art and architecture, brought nine eye-catching granite sculptures to the site and created a resilient, varied landscape. The egg-shaped pods, ranging from 8 to 12 feet tall, each feature a face from a randomly-chosen local resident. Designers used 3-D scanners to capture the faces of the selected volunteers, and the sculptures bear the likenesses on either side, displaying 18 individuals in total. The sculptures were carved in slices by fabricator Coldspring using a CNC mill, with three sculptures carved from one block of granite. The end result, Faces of Elysian Valley, joins a proud tradition of face-based decorative art. The remaining granite offcuts were used to form a sculptural barricade around the center of the island and protect the “eggs” from traffic. Elongated faces have been stretched into the granite ring as well, creating a perspective trick that reveals undistorted visages as drivers circle the roundabout. Greenmeme worked with Ourston Roundabout Engineering to determine the sculptures’ size constraints, as the team needed to preserve sightlines across the island for drivers without distracting them. In designing the traffic island’s topography, Greenmeme sought to channel stormwater away from the street and adjacent bridge. The landscaped areas have been planted with native plants, and a 25,000-gallon cistern is buried underneath the roundabout, which uses captured rainwater to irrigate the green spaces and feed a water feature. Everything is powered by sun-tracking solar voltaics, including the lights used to illuminate the sculptures at night. The entire roundabout is ringed with permeable green pavers for drivers who need to pull off, and overall the landscape can handle and treat up to 500,000 gallons at a time (a once-every-ten-years rainfall event). Riverside Roundabout and Faces of Elysian Valley opened to the public in February of 2017.

Elon Musk has had a summer of ups and downs in 2018, even after putting aside all of the twists-and-turns of his personal life and turmoil at Tesla. In May, Musk announced that The Boring Company would be turning its excavated dirt and rock into bricks for low-cost housing. What started as an attempt to sell more Boring Company merchandise ala their flamethrower—in this case, “giant Lego bricks”—soon morphed into an unspecified commitment on Musk’s part to build future Boring Company offices from muck bricks. Future Hyperloop tunnels might be able to swap out concrete for the seismically-rated bricks, but they’re unlikely to lower affordable housing costs much; land and labor are the most expensive aspects of new construction.

New Boring Company merch coming soon. Lifesize LEGO-like interlocking bricks made from tunneling rock that you can use to create sculptures & buildings. Rated for California seismic loads, so super strong, but bored in the middle, like an aircraft wing spar, so not heavy.

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 26, 2018

While The Boring Company hasn’t actually constructed much except for a short test tunnel in Hawthorne, Los Angeles, Musk scored a win when the City of Chicago chose the company to build a high-speed train route connecting the city's Loop to O’Hare International Airport. Or did they? After a lawsuit was filed against the city in mid-August by the Better Government Association (BGA), the city claimed that the plan was still “pre-decisional” and that no formal agreement had been struck yet. If the loop is ever built, The Boring Company would dig two tunnels under the city and connect Block 37 in the Loop to O’Hare. Electrically-driven pods, with capacity for up to 16 passengers, would arrive at a station every 30 seconds and complete a one-way trip in 12 minutes. There are still major concerns over the project’s feasibility and cost, as Musk had pledged that construction would take only one year if the company used currently non-existent (and unproven) tunneling technology. The project could cost up to $1 billion, which The Boring Company would pay for out of pocket and recoup by selling $20 to $25 tickets, advertising space, and merchandise. On Tesla’s end, problems with the company’s much-vaunted solar roof tiles have bubbled over. Production has slowed at Tesla’s Gigafactory 2 in Buffalo, New York, as equipment problems and aesthetic issues have prevented the factory from rolling out tiles on a large scale. Tesla is pledging that they can ramp up production at the state-owned factory by the end of 2018, as the company tries to fulfill the $1,000 preorders placed after the tiles’ reveal nearly two years ago. Not to let the end of summer slip by without one last announcement, Musk took to Twitter to release a Boring Company proposal for an underground “Dugout Loop” in L.A. Several conceptual designs were included for different routes between the Red Line subway and Dodgers Stadium that would use technology similar to what Musk has proposed in Chicago to ferry passengers along the 3.6-mile-long trip in only four minutes. It’s unlikely that the Dugout Loop will come to pass, as L.A. is already looking to realize a $125 million gondola system that could carry up to 5,000 passengers an hour. What the fall will bring for Musk, we can only guess.

The City of Los Angeles has dedicated a section of sidewalk outside the city’s historic Grand Central Market food hall in honor of the late Los Angeles Times food critic Jonathan Gold. Gold passed away July 21, leaving behind a storied legacy of trailblazing and award-winning food criticism that appreciated and elevated haute and down-home cuisine in equal measures.

Gold was given a hero’s send-off this weekend during a food festival that was organized in his honor. As part of the celebrations, LA-Más designed a pair of powder-coated aluminum medallions and a plaque to honor the food critic. The medallions will hang from lampposts adjoining the plaza while the third, more elaborate work will be installed in the plaza itself. The installed plaque bears the following inscription: “The huge number of multiple cultures that live in this city…and the fault lines between them are where you find the most beautiful things.”

The black-and-gold painted plaque features a representation of Gold’s trademark silhouette framed by decorative borders studded with stylized representations of burritos, bowls of ramen, tacos, and pizzas.Elizabeth Timme, co-executive director of LA-Más told AN, "For Angelenos, the sidewalk is our piazza as food trucks are our four-star Michelin restaurants. It's also a place that represents our cultural attitude surrounding public space." Timme added, "It is fitting that we honor [Gold] by celebrating something that most people, outside of the city, would overlook and not notice at first glance, because that's what [Gold] was all about." Gold was perhaps best-known for his annual Jonathan Gold’s 101 Best Restaurants list, an eagerly-anticipated ranking of the region’s best kitchens. For many, Gold’s rankings represented a brand of nuanced and open-minded food criticism that matured with the city as its residents worked to embrace a newfound and increasingly-interconnected urban identity.

Remarking upon Gold’s passing, L.A. mayor Eric Garcetti praised the critic as “One of the greatest in L.A.” while adding that Gold was “a man who made L.A. soar, who articulated this moment, who was Los Angeles in many ways." Equal parts food critic and cultural historian, Gold was immortalized in the 2016 documentary City of Gold, a film that chronicled his life. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his criticism in 2007. At the time, Gold was the first food critic to win the Pulitzer.

  Gehry Partners has unveiled designs for the new Youth Orchestra of Los Angeles (YOLA) complex in Inglewood, California.  The 25,000-square-foot, $14.5 million adaptive reuse project will retrofit an existing former Security Pacific Bank branch office located at 101 South La Brea Avenue in the city’s civic center, transforming the complex from within by adding a new multi-functional auditorium, among other components. Plans call for creating a “light-filled, flexible facility” at the heart of the community in an effort to further expand YOLA’s footprint to this underserved area.  The facilities will include the aforementioned auditorium, which is designed to be subdivided into two multi-purpose rehearsal spaces and features retractable seating that will accommodate 190 guests. The space will also include a balcony area with capacity for an additional 70 seats.  The complex is set to include a variety of spaces for orchestra, sectional, chamber, and individual practices as well as a choir room, an ensemble room, and a small practice studio that will come outfitted with recording equipment. The building will also house offices and an open lounge space for parents and family members to use. The acoustic envelope for the project is designed by Gehry and Yasuhisa Toyota, founder and president of Nagata Acoustics America.  The building is designed with a glass-walled light cannon that will that bring natural light into the performance spaces. A grand loggia space will front the building along its principal facade. YOLA is an initiative of the Los Angeles Philharmonic that was started in 2007 by its director, Gustavo Dudamel. As a child, Dudamel, a native of Venezuela, participated in that country’s El Sistema youth orchestra, an activity the acclaimed conductor credits with exposing him to the world of music. The YOLA program similarly serves at-risk youth across the region’s working-class neighborhoods, providing a critical means of professional arts education. Describing the proposal in a press release, Frank Gehry said: “It’s a privilege for me to work with Gustavo to create a place where students can feel comfortable, secure, and welcome as they learn to express themselves through music. We hope that the building will become a center for the community to gather to hear performances of all types. I designed the Center to be a world-class instrument for the community, and I can’t wait to see how they use it.” YOLA expects to begin construction on the project in 2019 in the hopes of completing the project by 2020. 

Los Angeles County’s transit system is poised to become the first in the country to deploy airport-style security measures to screen its passengers.  The Los Angeles Times reports that the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority (Metro) is rolling out new portable body scanners that can be deployed in response to terrorist threats and during large crowd events like protests and sporting matches in an effort to thwart potential “mass casualty” attacks.  The scanners can be used to screen passengers using radio waves from up to 30 feet away and are designed with an integrated split-screen display that produces a black square over the part of a person’s body where a gun or non-metallic explosive device might be located.  Metro currently operates 93 subway and light-rail stations—with many more on the way—and has plans to utilize the mobile devices as necessary across its system. Officials at Metro explained that areas where passengers might be subject to body scanning will be clearly labeled in each station with signs that read: “Passengers proceeding past this point are subject to Metro security screening and inspection.” Plans call for making “randomized” scans of passengers traveling within these zones. Officials at a press conference announcing the plan explained, however, that passengers seeking to opt out of the possibility of being scanned will not be allowed to ride transit from that station.  The scanners can process roughly 2,000 passengers per hour, according to Dave Sotero, spokesperson for Metro. The figure is an improvement over previous technologies, The Times reports, but likely to fall short of what would be required to process crowds efficiently during rush hour or large scale events. Recent protests in Downtown Los Angeles, for example, have drawn hundreds of thousands of people at a time and have snarled Metro service even without the scanners in place. 

Lifestyle brand 69 is the brainchild of an anonymous Los Angeles–based designer whose non-gender and non-demographic-specific clothing exuberantly suggests ideas of freedom, inclusivity, and a more fluid future. Since its founding in 2011, 69 has developed a cult following for its playful and exaggerated designs. With a strong focus on transforming denim, a typically utilitarian everyday fabric, into deeply elegant garments that resist easy categorization, 69 welcomes people of all ages, races, sexualities, and sizes into its community. For its first museum solo exhibition, 69 presents a survey of its groundbreaking clothing along with a selection of irreverent and inventive videos and photographs that blur the line between promotional material and artwork.