The history of aviation in Long Beach, California, is legendary—from the landing, on its sandy shores, of the first transcontinental flight to its female-powered aircraft production during World War II and its more recent output of mammoth commercial and military jets.
A stylized version of the hollyhock adorns the roofline. When Frank Lloyd Wright built the Hollyhock House, between 1919 and 1921, he couldn’t have imagined it would one day appear as the Piranha Temple in the 1989 movie Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. But perhaps not entirely by coincidence, he had designed it for a female client with an independent and adventurous spirit and a passion for the theatrical. And with this project—his first in Los Angeles—he was clearly beginning to explore the Mayan, or Mesoamerican, themes that would evolve throughout his work in Southern California. Though
Architecture schools are applying innovative educational models that foster new ways of thinking and challenge the role of the profession. Photo courtesy UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Thom Mayne and graduate students visit an artists’ collective in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, as part of a yearlong studio course at the university’s Now Institute. Toyo Ito’s Tokyo office hosted students in 2012, who worked on tsunami relief projects. Related Links:America's Top Architecture Schools 2014Interview with James P. Cramer View the 2012 Rankings View the 2011 Rankings View the 2010 Rankings Architecture School isn't what it used to be. While core fundamentals, including tectonics
Never Built: Los Angeles at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum revives a century of ambitious schemes that might have been. B+UDowney Office Building, 2009 A history of what didn’t happen can sometimes be even more revealing and thought provoking than what did. That curious inversion of circumstance fuels Never Built: Los Angeles, a show at the A+D Architecture and Design Museum focused on more than a century of ambitious designs, some right on the brink of realization—that never broke ground in the city. Alongside visionaries who have vanished into obscurity, the thwarted include such famous names as Neutra, Lautner,
A Temple to Good Taste: A design team embraces a building's Colonial roots while infusing the restaurant inside with a new flavor of tempered minimalism.
If A carpaccio of octopus, tender and razor thin, with notes of mellow olive oil, tangy citrus, and smoky piment'n, could be translated into restaurant design, you might end up with the Workshop Kitchen + Bar in Palm Springs, California.
Running through July 7 at SCI-Arc's downtown Los Angeles space, the show—part of the Getty-sponsored Pacific Standard Time series—highlights the pivotal role of the temporary gallery that Thom Mayne ran out of his home for a few weeks in the late 70s. Zago Architecture, the exhibition designers, wrapped the entry zone in skewed, blown-up reproductions of Morphosis' mock postage stamps – a clever riff on Graphic Wrap, one of the six spatial strategies the curators identified in the featured work, most notably Eric Owen Moss' Fun House. In the fall of 1979, Los Angeles’ first gallery for architecture came into