Chistopher Hawthorne, Architecture Critic
6:00 AM PDT, June 15, 2013
Le Corbusier as a force for nature?
NEW YORK — It's easy to imagine that "Le Corbusier: An Atlas of Modern Landscapes," a vast, dense and beautifully installed new exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, began as a kind of parlor game. You can almost picture the curators, Jean-Louis Cohen and Barry Bergdoll, brainstorming to come up with the most unlikely, counterintuitive thesis about Le Corbusier they could — and then setting out to defend it with straight faces, deep scholarship and a good deal of museological firepower.
5:00 AM PDT, June 7, 2013
Sunnylands presidential summit spotlights estate's public mission
Even when it was just an architectural glimmer in the eye of Walter and Leonore Annenberg, the desert estate where President Barack Obama will greet Chinese President Xi Jinping on Friday was never in danger of being confused with a mere vacation house.
7:30 AM PDT, June 2, 2013
LACMA's future unfurls in Peter Zumthor's design
Imagine you are heading east on Wilshire Boulevard, in a car or on foot. As you approach Wilshire and Fairfax Avenue, you see the rounded, gilded corner of the former May Co. building and Renzo Piano's travertine-wrapped Broad Contemporary Art Museum, with its wide shoulders and careful posture.
7:00 AM PDT, May 11, 2013
Review: '10 Buildings That Changed America' is a rewarding tour
The new PBS program "10 Buildings That Changed America" is nothing if not efficient.
5:00 AM PDT, May 1, 2013
LACMA draws up ambitious plans for a $650-million new look
At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, an acclaimed Swiss architect is hoping to pull off what an acclaimed Dutch one could not.
5:00 AM PDT, April 18, 2013
Keeping the idea of city streets safe in Boston Marathon aftermath
A marathon is among the most open and egalitarian of sporting events. It doesn't come cluttered with superstar egos or luxury suites.
5:00 AM PDT, May 3, 2013
MOCA's 'A New Sculpturalism' faces uncertain future without Gehry
Frank Gehry has pulled out of a major architecture exhibition set to open June 2 at the Museum of Contemporary Art, a move that could force the show to find a new venue or face the prospect of being canceled altogether.
5:30 AM PDT, April 18, 2013
Review: L.A.'s satisfying sprawl
Architecture exhibitions are notoriously tricky to pull off. It's hard to squeeze a whole building inside a museum, after all. And the number of forces that shape any piece of architecture — engineering, politics and money, to begin with — make it impossible to say with perfect clarity how a building came to be or what it means.
7:00 AM PDT, April 20, 2013
Architecture review: Bush presidential library is fittingly blunt
DALLAS — What do neo-classicism and neo-conservatism have in common?
1:50 PM PDT, April 10, 2013
Paolo Soleri dies at 93; architect of innovative city Arcosanti
Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect who created a visionary prototype for a new kind of ecologically sensitive city in the remote Arizona desert four decades ago, only to watch the suburban sprawl he detested begin to creep near it in recent years, has died. He was 93.
5:00 AM PDT, April 12, 2013
Motion Picture Academy unveils ambitious plans for film museum
Will the Academy's big bubble pop before it has a chance to be built?
7:00 AM PDT, April 6, 2013
Southern California architecture: the missing early years from PSTP
Two years ago, when the Getty Trust helped organize and fund more than five dozen exhibits on 20th century art in Los Angeles, a massive enterprise it labeled "Pacific Standard Time," it wasn't difficult to guess which era the museum would focus on. It was clearly going to be the postwar period, and the 1950s, '60s and '70s in particular.
6:00 AM PST, March 8, 2013
With modern architecture spotlighted, PST series looks beyond landmarks
There's sure to be much to pore over in "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990," the ambitious anchor show of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time series on modern architecture in and around Los Angeles. But it's on the periphery of this giant undertaking, which is funding nine major exhibitions and will sprawl across the calendar from early spring to midsummer, where the real surprises are most likely to be found. That's especially true of the shows aiming to look beyond well-known midcentury landmarks and reassess the work of the L.A. architects who emerged in the 1960s and '70s and challenged orthodox modernism in a range of ways.
8:00 AM PST, March 2, 2013
Los Angeles' major public spaces remain broken works in progress
Los Angeles, more than most cities, has defined itself by continual bursts of expansion and an unflagging optimism about its place in the world.
5:00 AM PDT, March 17, 2013
Architect Lebbeus Woods' turbulent brilliance still resonates
SAN FRANCISCO — On the morning of Oct. 30, as New York surveyed the damage left by Hurricane Sandy, word began to spread that Lebbeus Woods, the experimental architect known for his dystopian and densely layered drawings, had died in Lower Manhattan at the age of 72.
10:35 AM PST, November 23, 2012
On Harbor Boulevard, a pretense of business as usual
The protests that roiled Anaheim this summer had no regular home base, no Zuccotti Park or Tahrir Square. Instead, demonstrators angry over a series of shootings by Anaheim police marched on several days along Harbor Boulevard and a handful of other streets.
2:40 PM PST, January 8, 2013
Ada Louise Huxtable dies at 91; renowned architecture critic
Ada Louise Huxtable, the architecture critic who in two decades of writing for the New York Times became a powerful force in shaping New York City and was better known than many of the architects she was covering and certainly more feared, has died. She was 91.
February 2, 2013
On eve of Super Bowl, football caught between a rock and hard tackle
One afternoon in early January, I took a tour of the refurbished Memorial Stadium in Berkeley with a pair of architects from the firm HNTB. For me it was a visit brimming with nostalgia: I grew up about three miles north of the stadium, in the Berkeley hills, and spent dozens of Saturday afternoons in the late 1970s and '80s watching the Cal Bears play, and usually lose, to other teams in the Pacific 10 Conference.
June 10, 2012
New Barnes Foundation offers up its treasures in Philadelphia
PHILADELPHIA — Philadelphia, the city that gave us Poor Richard, cheese-steak sandwiches and the American Constitution, just opened a new treasure: the Barnes Foundation, one of the premier privately assembled collections of painting in the U.S. with more dreamy Renoirs and searching Cézannes than in the whole of France.
6:40 PM PDT, May 16, 2012
On the boulevards
Atlantic on the move
As Los Angeles' boulevards reassert their place in the public realm, the transformation along Atlantic offers glimpses of a new city identity taking shape.
May 13, 2012
Portland, Ore., is a smaller, cleaner, wetter alternative to L.A.
The Portland Hop. I know, it sounds like a dance craze in 1937. But really, it's what you do when Southern California gets you down and you need to drink small-batch beer, eat Northwestern locavore meals and see bike commuters in the rain. My wife, daughter and I hit Portland, Ore., for a few days last August. Here's the report.
11:39 AM PDT, August 25, 2012
Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia: What did the critics think?
One of the most controversial moves in recent art-world memory, the relocation of the Barnes Foundation, has drawn the national press to Philadelphia where the venerated art institution opened its new building earlier this month.
January 8, 2012
Ricardo Legorreta dies at 80; Mexican modernist architect
Ricardo Legorreta, the architect who introduced Mexican modernism to a global audience and who brought his crisp, brightly colored aesthetic to downtown Los Angeles with a controversial 1993 redesign of Pershing Square, has died. He was 80.
August 12, 2011
September 11: A decade after
Architecture review: National September 11 Memorial
If you were expecting the National September 11 Memorial to turn out to be a visionary or uncompromising monument to human tragedy and architectural destruction, you probably haven't been paying sustained attention to the process that created it. And who could blame you? The rebuilding effort at the World Trade Center site has been marked by enough grandstanding, backbiting and power grabs, among politicians and designers alike, to push even the most dedicated optimist toward utter cynicism.
April 6, 2011
'Julius Shulman Los Angeles' has some new angles
This week, Rizzoli publishes "Julius Shulman Los Angeles," a new book featuring a variety of shots taken in Southern California by the famed architectural photographer, who died two years ago at age 98. Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne recently caught up with one of the book's co-authors, Sam Lubell, who is also West Coast editor of the Architect's Newspaper. What follows is a condensed version of their email exchange.
5:30 AM PDT, April 27, 2012
Critic's Notebook: Metro douses expectations on Union Station project
Talk about raining on your own parade.
7:24 AM PDT, October 10, 2011
Anthony J. Lumsden dies at 83; Southern California architect
Anthony J. Lumsden, a prolific Southern California architect who helped develop new ways of wrapping buildings in smooth glass skins, accelerating a shift that reshaped skylines around the world, died Sept. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 83.
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."
September 4, 2011
Critic's notebook: Skyscrapers remain powerful symbols, post 9/11
Any skyscraper is a contradiction.
7:28 PM PDT, July 30, 2011
Critic's Notebook: Shifting horizons in Santa Monica parks design
Standing atop a patch of churned-up dirt on a recent morning, James Corner was surrounded by mismatched palm trees, chipped sidewalks and sagging chain link: a typical slice of Southern California landscape caught unawares, hardly ready for its close-up.
August 8, 2010
'Inception' dreams big, unlike its architect
Everybody has an opinion about "Inception," and mine comes in the form of a question: Why are the movie's architectural settings, for the most part, so hackneyed?
May 29, 2011
Critic's Notebook: Hollywood landmark at a crossroads
When it opened in 1956, the Capitol Records building was surrounded mostly by surface parking lots, making it easy to spot from the nearby — and brand-new — Hollywood Freeway. The cylindrical design for the building, by Welton Becket and a young architect in Becket's office, Louis Naidorf, played beautifully to its mobile audience and that wide-open urban landscape. The result was a 13-story tower with the confidence and allure of a major skyscraper.
March 21, 2010
ARCHITECTURE CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
U.S. embassy: An outpost as a signpost
The two stories that have dominated the architectural press over the last few weeks -- the unveiling of a winning design for a new American embassy in London, and the death, in a downtown Los Angeles traffic accident, of the 76-year-old Austrian architect Raimund Abraham -- have more in common than just a spot on the calendar.
August 18, 2010
John Chase dies at 57; writer, urban designer for West Hollywood
John Chase, who as a writer and urban designer championed civic space and vernacular architecture in Southern California, finding poetry in stucco-clad apartment buildings, down-market modernism and overlooked corners of the urban realm, died Friday morning. He was 57.
July 18, 2010
L.A. Unified's faulty vision for schools on Ambassador site
Along one edge of the old Ambassador Hotel site, where the Los Angeles Unified School District has been building a controversial collection of schools, there is a new park dedicated to the life and work of Robert F. Kennedy. Created by artists May Sun and Richard Wyatt and running parallel to Wilshire Boulevard, the park includes a series of quotations from Kennedy, who was shot and killed inside the hotel on a June night in 1968, and a few others.
January 17, 2010
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Jeanne Gang brings feminine touch to Chicago's muscled skyline
Before we turn to an assessment of Aqua, a new residential skyscraper in Chicago, permit me a quick (and relevant!) detour to a sidewalk news conference in Lower Manhattan, held recently at the foot of the under-construction Beekman Tower.
August 24, 2010
Critic's Notebook: Eli Broad and the Diller Scofidio + Renfro museum design
The news that New York firm Diller Scofidio + Renfro has finally, officially been named architect of the new Broad Collection museum in downtown Los Angeles proves a couple of things quite clearly. One is that in a design competition as constrained and carefully controlled as the one Eli Broad has been running, a few big conceptual ideas dramatically presented — rather than an inventive treatment of a building's shape — can go a long way. Another is that a little flattery never hurts.
April 29, 2010
Critic’s Notebook: What L.A. might ask of Eli Broad
It's a familiar recipe for urban revitalization in downtown Los Angeles.
March 6, 2010
OBITUARY
Raimund Abraham dies at 76; Austrian-born architect, theorist and teacher
Raimund Abraham, an Austrian-born architect known for his powerfully enigmatic drawings and fierce idealism, and whose narrow, blade-like 2002 Austrian Cultural Forum building in New York is among the most forceful pieces of architecture built in the last decade, was killed early Thursday when the car he was driving collided in downtown Los Angeles with a Metropolitan Transportation Authority bus. He was 76.
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.
August 1, 2010
Critic's Notebook: 'Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970'
Thomas S. Hines, a professor emeritus at UCLA, is the dean of architectural historians in Los Angeles, the author of major studies of the pioneering modernists Richard Neutra and Irving Gill. In "Architecture of the Sun: Los Angeles Modernism 1900-1970," he has produced a doorstop-sized magnum opus: a massive but terrifically detailed distillation of his thinking on the city where he has lived and taught, with only minor interruptions, since 1968.
December 20, 2009
NOTES ON THE DECADE
Architecture: Star architects emerge, but even they find limits
Architecture, arguably for the first time in its history, found itself at the very center of American cultural and political life in the decade that is wrapping up. That centrality helped make stars out of architecture's top talents. With the aid of powerful software, adventuresome clients and, not least, a flood of new wealth and easy financing, it also produced a rush of inventive buildings, in styles stretching from fluid to wildly sculptural to neomodern.
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.
January 24, 2010
CRITIC'S NOTEBOOK
Digital video runs a screen on the cityscape
Apple is expected to unveil its much-anticipated touch-screen tablet on Wednesday morning. A few journalists see the device as a possible savior for the newspaper business. Me? I'm wondering how it'll affect the skyline.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
June 30, 2005
DESIGN
Green, with a high gloss
What sort of image comes to mind when you hear the phrase "green architecture"?
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.
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.
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 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:
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.
Copyright © 2013, Los Angeles Times
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