Downtown Riches

On Saturday, a new perspective on downtown Los Angeles will be on display, free to the public. This block party/intellectual exercise titled “Downtown L.A.: Where Design Hits the Road” is intended to change people’s view of the area as a wasteland by showing many of the new developments, as well as the possibilities for the future. The event is centered in the area south of Main Street near Traction Avenue and Merrick Street.

“I was sitting around with some of the downtown storeowners talking about how clueless people were about what is happening downtown,” says Ann Gray, publisher of Balcony Press and L.A. Architect magazine, the sponsor of what is hoped will become an annual event. “There are lots of design studios, major and emerging architectural firms and furniture showrooms moving into the area. And loft spaces are being turned into artists’ studios.”

Gray believes that Los Angeles is a center for good design, especially with what is happening downtown. “Behind many of the hideous facades on Traction Avenue, there’s a great creative energy,” she says. On Saturday, from 11 a.m. to 5 p.m., Traction and other nearby streets can be explored in self-directed walking tours, with architects, artists, furniture showrooms and others holding open houses. There will be booths for exhibitors, including a Hennessey + Ingalls booth, which will have book-signings throughout the day by authors with books relating to downtown.

Also worth a visit is the Form Zero bookstore at 811 Traction Ave., which carries more than 10,000 books and magazines on architecture, photography and typography and has a reading area with Wassily chairs designed by Marcel Breuer. The House of Blues is supplying five bands for entertainment; food is by Ciudad and Border Grill restaurants.

The tours will extend to other parts of downtown, as well. Docent-lead bus tours will take off every 15 minutes to transport people to key projects. “We’ll show new developments and new lofts as well as historic properties,” some with stops so people can leave the bus for a tour, says Tara Jones, president of Historic Consultants, preservation consultants of loft conversion projects. Highlights include Little Tokyo, Disney Hall and the 1915 Victor Clothing Building on 242 S. Broadway that’s being converted into 38 live/work lofts, as well as Broadway movie palaces, the Department of Water and Power building and DWP solar installations, and the new Architecture and Design Museum at the Bradbury Building at 304 S. Broadway.

“We’ll have goodie bags with information about downtown, because our goal is to get people to come back,” says Jones.

In conjunction with the event, a series of panel discussions will be held at SCI-Arc, 350 Merrick St. Topics include “City on the Verge: What’s the Plan for Downtown,” at 1:30 p.m. moderated by Dan Rosenfeld, a principal in Urban Partners, LLC; And at 3:30 p.m., Larry Scarpa, principal of Pugh & Scarpa Architects and founder of Livable Places, a developer of inner-city housing, will moderate a panel discussion on architects as developers titled “Rewriting the Rules: The Architect’s Role in Shaping Projects.”

“Right now, contractors and developers control how our cities look,” Scarpa says. “Architects are now used only as designers. That isn’t the way it used to be. It’s time that design professionals get more involved in shaping our communities.” Livable Places seeks to provide affordable, sustainable housing for urban areas. “As an architect, I’ve always been interested in housing, but we hope to provide an alternate model to what’s currently available. We don’t want to dictate style or have gated communities, and we want to use in-fills instead of raw land to build on.”

Architects, Scarpa says, are no longer trying to design cool doors, but now want to design cool communities. And downtown L.A. is where many plan to do just that.

An architects’ contest to design a Teen Park will have as judges teenage art students from Art Share Los Angeles, a downtown community arts facility. Current Art Share programs focus on providing after-school activities for at-risk teens in the inner city.

“This is a huge collaborative event,” says L.A. Architect publisher Gray. “We want to open up the public’s eyes to what’s happening here.”

“Downtown LA: Where Design Hits the Road” is Saturday from 11 a.m.-5 p.m. at Traction Avenue between 3rd and Merrick Streets. Free parking is at SCI-Arc, 960 E. 3rd. St. For additional information, check the Web site at www.laarch.com/designwalk.html. or call L.A. Architect at (818) 956-5313.

American Creations

On Saturday and Sunday the Art Furnishings Show, now in its fourth year, will again showcase one-of-a-kind and limited-edition studio furniture and art furnishings. More than 100 exhibitors, including artists and craftsmen from throughout the United States, will be on hand to show their works and talk to the public.

Local artists include Los Angeles’ Stephen Courtney, who designs modern, sleek furniture, usually in wood. “Mine are useful objects of art designed to enrich, to elevate the living experience,” he says. L.A.’s Meredith Sattler has an entirely different take on furniture-making, since under the business name of cambioform, she constructs “pure pieces” by working mainly with birch plywood. She leaves the wood bare, not covering plywood edges with veneer or edge-band.

From Pasadena, Cindy Vargas’ furniture is playful and shows her interest in choreography as some of the chairs seem to be dancing. Long Beach’s John Nyquist has been crafting furniture for more than 30 years, and his classic designs for rocking chairs are timeless. Glass is represented by Kent Kahlen of Orange, who does glass sculptures as well as light fixtures and doorknobs.

Garden accessories, floor coverings, lighting and more also will be on view.

Pasadena Center Exhibition Hall, 300 E. Green St., Pasadena. Saturday 10 a.m.-7 p.m.; Sunday 10 a.m.-5 p.m. Admission is $8. For information, call (805) 778-1584 or check the Web site at www.artfurnishings.com.

Kathy Bryant can be reached at kbryant@socal.rr.com.