Chistopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
-
-
-
-
Storygallery:
Christopher Hawthorne in China
October 24, 2009
Architecture Review
A neighborly new police headquarters
From the earliest stages of the design process, architects for a new Los Angeles Police Department headquarters downtown have been torn between two very different goals: giving the building a meaningful civic presence and keeping it safe from potential attack.
October 25, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Frederick Fisher's radical vision
The Los Angeles architect Frederick Fisher, who turned 60 earlier this year, is anything but a doctrinaire designer or a dogmatic personality. His houses, museum galleries and other buildings have over the years been executed in a relatively broad stylistic range, reflecting his curiosity, his interest in context and place and the diverse tastes of his well-connected clients. On the website of his firm, Frederick Fisher and Partners, you'll find curtain walls as well as gables, mahogany a few clicks away from corrugated metal.
October 11, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
1960s architecture: L.A. and the paradox of preservation
Modern architecture is growing old. The groundbreaking designers at Germany's Bauhaus began building nearly a century ago. Many landmarks of midcentury Modernism, while somewhat younger, are also showing their age, their curtain walls taking on water, their cantilevers askew. And now the most recent examples of the style, late-modern buildings from the 1960s, are nearing the half-century mark.
July 31, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
L.A. as filtered by love in '(500) Days of Summer'
"(500) Days of Summer" is a movie about obsessions -- gentle, often charming and non-stalkerish obsessions, for the most part, but obsessions all the same. Chief among them -- after romantic love, the subject that stands always at the heart of the story, its existence always up for impassioned, practically theological debate -- is architecture.
June 28, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Abu Dhabi's fortune favors the bold
The longstanding sibling rivalry between the two biggest members of the United Arab Emirates, always complex, has taken a remarkable turn in recent months.
June 21, 2009
ARCHITECTURE
Dubai development may be down, but it's not out
If a city can be spectacularly quiet, this waterfront city-state has certainly qualified in recent months. Hundreds of abandoned construction cranes languish above Dubai's gated communities and beach-side developments and, most dramatically, up and down Sheikh Zayed Road, its high-rise spine. According to a recent estimate in the Middle East Economic Digest, projects worth a staggering $335 billion in the United Arab Emirates -- of which Dubai, with a population of about 2 million, is the largest member -- are stalled or have been canceled outright.
June 1, 2009
ARCHITECTURE
Century Plaza as L.A. statement
If nothing else, the debate over the fate of the Century Plaza hotel is a reminder that there is no preservation controversy quite like a preservation controversy in Los Angeles.
May 31, 2009
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
Pass/fail for L.A.'s new arts school
At the new arts high school downtown, it has become nearly impossible to separate the substance of the architecture, by Wolf D. Prix and the Austrian firm Coop Himmelblau, from debates over cost overruns or questions about who will attend the campus when it opens in September.
March 1, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Frank Gehry considers an accomplished past and uncertain future
Frank Gehry, who turned 80 on Saturday, is the most famous architect in the world by a healthy margin. He is also, arguably, the most significant talent in American architecture since Frank Lloyd Wright. His firm, Gehry Partners, has streamlined a process in which his free-flowing sketches are turned into digital designs and then into dazzlingly unorthodox buildings around the world.
February 15, 2009
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
What's the future of 'The Infrastructural City' of L.A.
The timing could hardly be better for "The Infrastructural City," a new collection of essays on Los Angeles edited by Kazys Varnelis, director of the Network Architecture Lab at Columbia University. A book with a title like that, unless written by Mike Davis or John McPhee, would typically have a tough time steering clear of the remainder bin. But in recent weeks, as the details of the stimulus package were being hammered out in Congress, the same few questions moved near the top of the political agenda not just in Washington but in cities around the country: In 2009, what is infrastructure, exactly? Is it just roads, bridges, train lines and tunnels -- the muscle and bone of the city -- or can we update that New Deal-era definition to include a greener, more flexible or even purely digital set of urban initiatives? If so, how best to integrate that new, "soft" infrastructure with the hard variety?
November 30, 2008
Jorn Utzon dies at 90; Danish architect of Sydney Opera House
Jorn Utzon, the Danish architect whose eye-catching, nautically inspired design for the Sydney Opera House overcame a series of controversies surrounding its budget and acoustics to become one of the most recognizable landmarks of the 20th century, helping to usher in the current era of buildings beloved for their daring and photogenic forms, has died. He was 90.
October 30, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Measure R is more than roads and rails
This is the first of two articles on the intersection of public transit, urbanism and architecture on next week's ballot.
October 11, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
The Eli and Edythe Broad Stage
THE NEW Eli and Edythe Broad Stage at Santa Monica College, which will open officially tonight with a program featuring the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade, is a happily, even confidently unresolved piece of architecture. Rather than try to smooth over the gaps between its various architectural impulses -- and between its wide-ranging technical and programmatic requirements -- it seems content, for the most part, to leave them on display. It's not a bad strategy: The design gains some power from its all-over-the-map variety, and in fact it's in those spaces where it tries to hide its character or engage in a bit of architectural sleight-of-hand that it begins to falter most obviously.
September 27, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
California Academy of Sciences designs sustainability
RENZO PIANO'S original concept for the new California Academy of Sciences building in Golden Gate Park was elegantly simple: Slice out a huge, rectangular section of the park landscape, lift it 36 feet into the air and slide a new piece of architecture underneath. The floor of the park would become a green roof atop the facility -- a feature Piano dubbed "the flying carpet."
September 17, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
Venice Architecture Biennale
WHILE THE Venice Architecture Biennale remains the most anticipated and ambitious design show in the world -- not to mention the only one featuring cocktail parties in canal-side palazzi -- every edition is marked by a curious split personality. There is a core exhibition, organized by a single curator and displaying work by the leading names of the profession, and along with it a scattered collection of national pavilions filled with designs by mostly anonymous younger architects. Because the pavilions vary so much in quality -- and theme -- they always knock the central exhibition at least a bit off message.
August 30, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Obama turns to Greek columns for support
In 1960, after John F. Kennedy decided to move his convention acceptance speech from the brand-new Sports Arena to the larger Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum next door, he addressed a crowd of 80,000 from a stage that seen through 21st century eyes looks innocent and modest, if not clumsy. On the front of the lectern, just beneath the microphones, was a simple sign, its capital letters as skinny as Kennedy's tie, reading "Democratic National Convention." Below that, a large painted eagle spread its wings.
August 22, 2008
ON SECOND THOUGHT
Architecture critic finds no regrets
Everyone has had the experience of disagreeing with a critic, but do critics ever second-guess themselves? We asked Calendar's critics whether there are any reviews they regret. One in a series of occasional articles.
August 8, 2008
ARCHITECTURE IN THE NEW BEIJING
Architects take Beijing's smog into account
Last in a series
August 6, 2008
ARCHITECTURE OF THE NEW BEIJING
Rising generation of Chinese architects thrives on innovation
Fourth in a series on the changing face of China's capital.
August 5, 2008
ARCHITECTURE OF THE NEW BEIJING
Ethics' place in China's building boom
Third in a series on the changing face of China's capital.
July 29, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
The renovated Mark Taper Forum
OF THE three buildings that make up architect Welton Becket's original Music Center on Bunker Hill -- the Ahmanson Theatre, the Mark Taper Forum and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion -- it is the smallest of the group, the Taper, that can make the most credible claim to true landmark status. The decorated drum of a design, its exterior wrapped in a lacy precast relief by Jacques Overhoff, is among the most finely detailed and conceptually coherent buildings of Becket's long and varied career, during which his firm seeded Los Angeles with a number of its most recognizable pieces of architecture: the Capitol Records tower, the Beverly Hilton, the Theme Building at LAX (with William Pereira, Charles Luckman and Paul Williams) and the Equitable tower on Wilshire Boulevard, among countless others.
July 14, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
John Lautner retrospective at the Hammer Museum
If there is a single big idea driving "Between Earth and Heaven: The Architecture of John Lautner," which opened Sunday at the Hammer Museum, it's that Lautner needs to be rescued from his own hardened reputation. Most museum retrospectives begin with an effort to dust off or polish up the historical record. This one, at times, feels like a full-on rehabilitation campaign.
July 7, 2005
L.A.'S ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE
It's all about the house
The private home vividly expresses the ideas on which Southern California was built. In this issue, we begin an occasional series on the architecture that defines the city past and present.
June 7, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Stunt climbers use buildings for their own causes
Renzo Piano, the Italian architect who designed the New York Times tower on 8th Avenue at 40th Street in Manhattan, made a point of keeping the building transparent at ground level. His goal, he said before the building opened last summer, was to avoid the forbidding, fortress-like appearance that marks other post- 9/11 towers in Manhattan. He wanted the final product to look inviting.
June 3, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
At auction: architectural history
As part of a high-powered campaign to promote Richard Neutra's 1946 Kaufmann House in Palm Springs, which it auctioned during its big evening sale of postwar and contemporary art two weeks ago, Christie's produced a glossy booklet on the house and its setting. Near the front was a quote from Neutra himself: "The desert is subject to an infinity of moods, some of them violent."
May 27, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
Huntington Art Gallery's grand plan
From the start, the Beaux-Arts house in San Marino that Myron Hunt designed for Henry and Arabella Huntington was marked by a level of ambition far beyond the merely residential. The couple always envisioned it as much as a place to show off their growing fine art collection -- and frame their worldliness -- as rest their heads. Not long after moving in, in 1915, they began making plans to turn their estate over to the public after their deaths.
April 27, 2008
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
Architect Rafael Viñoly gets inventive for UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute
UCLA's California NanoSystems Institute, or CNSI for short, is the first Los Angeles project by the New York-based architect Rafael Viñoly. It is something of a stealth building. Its broad, low façade, overlooking the Court of Sciences near the southern edge of the UCLA campus, has a modesty that borders on the bland.
April 21, 2008
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
A grand park plan? Not really
When Mark Rios takes the microphone Tuesday evening at a public hearing inside Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, he'll be presenting two very different designs for the new civic park downtown. The first is what his Los Angeles firm, Rios Clementi Hale Studios, calls a "base" plan, for which the projected $56-million cost is already in hand -- paid by Related Cos. as part of its deal to develop a commercial project with Frank Gehry across Grand Avenue from Walt Disney Concert Hall. The second is an "enhanced" version showing what might be possible with an infusion of new funding.
September 10, 2006
ARCHITECTURE
Seeing stars — in the sky
Compared to other cities its size, Los Angeles has always been short on icons of public architecture; when one falls out of commission, as the Griffith Observatory did 4 1/2 years ago, we notice the absence all the more.
May 19, 2006
MOVIE REVIEW
'Sketches of Frank Gehry'
Architecture is the slowest of the arts, by far: It often takes a full decade for a building to go from sketch to ribbon-cutting, a journey that can be pushed off course by zoning officials, fussy clients and the laws of gravity. But in "Sketches of Frank Gehry," director and first-time documentarian Sydney Pollack manages to make his own art form look like the sluggish one.
August 12, 2005
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
Their declarations of independence
The 1970s and 1980s were an odd, freewheeling and sometimes combative golden age for Los Angeles architecture. During those two decades, a handful of young designers, each trying do his own thing with as much stubborn independence as possible, managed to come together as a loose band of self-styled mavericks.
June 30, 2005
DESIGN
Green, with a high gloss
What sort of image comes to mind when you hear the phrase "green architecture"?
May 9, 2005
ARCHITECTURE REVIEW
A glitch in the glitz
You've probably heard by now that the Wynn Las Vegas is something of a rarity: a new hotel and casino on the Strip that doesn't have an architectural theme, the way the Venetian, the Paris, the Luxor and countless others do. But it turns out the Wynn does have a theme — just a very odd one:
Copyright © 2009, The Los Angeles Times
E-mail
Digg
Twitter
Facebook
StumbleUpon
Save more than