[AlvinofDiaspar]

From CBC News:

Gehry redesign aims to revitalize downtown L.A.
Last Updated Mon, 24 Apr 2006 17:08:47 EDT
CBC Arts

Canadian architect Frank Gehry has unveiled an ambitious redesign for downtown Los Angeles that will change the skyline of the city.

Architect Frank Gehry shows the pavilions of translucent glass and stone to be built as part of the Grand Avenue revitalization in Los Angeles. (AP Photo/Nick Ut)

His plans for the $1.8-billion US revitalization of Grand Avenue, next to his landmark Walt Disney Concert Hall, were released Monday.

The plans, which had been hotly anticipated by the architectural community, include two L-shaped towers 47 and 24 storeys tall, one at each end of the block.

Los Angeles is hoping the redesign will revitalize its Civic Centre area and bring nightlife to a district where few people venture after dark.

"I think that there is a desire on the part of the city and county to do something special there," Gehry told the Los Angeles Times.

The largest tower would include 250 condominiums, three rooftop pools, a 275-room hotel, a spa and a health club. The smaller one would include 100 affordable housing rental units and 150 condos. There is also a large shopping concourse in three pavilions undulating between the two buildings.

"It needs a mix of populations. It's got to be a mix of different age groups, economic groups and ethnic groups to really function," he said of the area.

Developer Related Cos., philanthropist Eli Broad and top city and county officials are backing the project, which could break ground as early as December.

Gehry's design drew criticism from the Los Angeles Times' Christopher Hawthorne, who found the plan far from public-minded.

The development has the potential to be a "commercial cul-de-sac," he wrote, with little connection to the city around it.

There is an overemphasis on people coming by car, he said, although Gehry has tried to make the passages on Grand Avenue welcoming for pedestrians by installing a grid of light strings crisscrossing Grand Avenue, from the towers and pavilions to the concert hall.

Gehry also wants to repave Grand Avenue in a pattern of varying shades of stone, to create connections among the street, the buildings and the planned civic park nearby.

Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall is known for its curving steel exterior, so reflective that motorists have complained about the light bouncing off it.

The towers, Gehry's first Los Angeles skyscrapers, are all straight lines and curtained with translucent glass. The pavilions will curve like the concert hall, but will be made of stone and glass.

Gehry drew praise for preserving the sightlines to Disney Hall in this redesign. The completion of Disney Hall in 2003 helped spark some life in downtown Los Angeles and the nearby Music Center and Museum of Contemporary Art give the people of Los Angeles more reason to stay downtown after hours.

About 20,000 people are expected to move into the core of the city over the next decade. Many of Gehry’s design details – including the facades of the two towers – are not yet finalized.

Los Angeles-based Gehry grew up in Toronto and became widely known after designing the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain. He has also redesigned the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto.

AoD

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

From LA Times:

Gehry Sees His Glass Towers Transforming Downtown L.A.
He Hopes to Foster a Vibrant Urban Scene
By Cara Mia DiMassa, Times Staff Writer
April 24, 2006

Architect Frank O. Gehry plans to erect a translucent, glass-curtained tower rising 47 stories above his landmark Walt Disney Concert Hall as the centerpiece of the Grand Avenue project, a bold statement that would alter downtown Los Angeles' skyline and reinforce the civic center area as a hub of cutting-edge architecture.

His schematic designs, which have been eagerly anticipated in world architecture circles for months and are to be unveiled at a news conference today, call for two L-shaped towers, the 47-story structure and a 24-story building, at opposite ends of the block east of the concert hall.

The designs are for Phase 1 of an ambitious plan by developer Related Cos., philanthropist Eli Broad and top city and county officials to transform a part of downtown known as a 9-to-5 office community that turns off the lights at sunset into a vibrant place where people would live, shop and dine.

"I think that there is a desire on the part of the city and county to do something special there," Gehry said. "We are trying to make that happen, so that that connectivity would result in a sense of place that's bigger, that the whole would be greater than the sum of the parts."

The plans to be disclosed today will detail the initial step in a $1.8-billion, three-phase project, which ultimately would include eight condo and office towers, shopping arcades, a 16-acre park and a boutique hotel.

City and county officials see it as a way of tying together many of the cultural monuments that line Grand Avenue, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, the Music Center and the Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels.

"This area is not a thriving residential, high-end section yet," Gehry said. "It needs a mix of populations. It's got to be a mix of different age groups, economic groups and ethnic groups to really function."

The design attempts to connect the new buildings to the Disney Hall by installing a grid of light strings crisscrossing Grand Avenue, from the towers and pavilions to the hall. Also to that end, Gehry wants to repave Grand Avenue in a pattern of varying shades of stone, to create connections among the street, the buildings and the planned civic park nearby.

The taller of Gehry's buildings would be covered in a dramatic glass design. Preliminary models show either striped panels of alternating shaded glass or a pleated glass surface that looks like fabric folded around the building. The smaller building would have a more austere form, looking like a light-filled glass box.

Three shopping and dining pavilions would rise near the base of the two towers, mimicking the undulating lines and rough forms of Disney Hall but constructed of stone and glass rather than steel. Elaborate plantings of trees and other greenery on above-ground floors would create the effect of a hanging garden.

By placing the tallest buildings at opposite ends of the block and the lower ones between them, Gehry's design would preserve sightlines to Disney Hall, assuaging concerns that the project would essentially block the view from many points downtown.

Gehry's foray into high-rise design — his first major retail development — gives the project and the surrounding area an instant architectural cachet. Along with Disney Hall, Jose Raphael Moneo's cathedral and Thom Mayne's headquarters building for the California Department of Transportation, the plan creates a pocket of world-class building design in the city center.

Most large-scale downtown projects built in the last few decades have been primarily functional, said architectural historian Robert Winter. As a result, he said, downtown has suffered, "with all that money wasted on mediocre and sort of dumb architecture."

"There's very little good modern architecture in downtown Los Angeles," said Winter. He had not yet seen Gehry's designs but said he was "terribly delighted" by their possibilities.

The Grand Avenue project is part of a major renaissance in downtown Los Angeles, which after decades of decline has become a destination for professionals, artists and others, who are moving into long-vacant former office buildings-turned-lofts and new condos.

The completion of Disney Hall in 2003 helped spark downtown's revival.

And with 20,000 new residents expected in the next decade, officials hope this project will help provide services, including a market, restaurants and other businesses, that downtown dwellers say they need.

"We are working on designing the buildings in scale with what's around us, so we create an open village or community relationship to the buildings that exist," Gehry said. "And doing it in a California way, so it looks and feels like L.A., with plantings and trellises and stuff like that."

Gehry's plan is the latest in a long string of proposals touted by city leaders over the last six decades to improve the area around Bunker Hill. Once a charming if seedy residential district dotted with Victorian homes, the area was flattened by the city in the 1960s to make way for office towers and cultural institutions.

City officials have long talked of turning this part of downtown into a 24-hour district on par with parts of New York, Chicago, London or Paris — without success.

It now falls to Gehry and his partner, Craig Webb, to create the "urban mix."

"This is an opportunity for us to expand the continuum, to shape the neighborhood," said Webb. "We're trying to respond to what is there now and what will be there in the future."

Related Cos., which recently completed the Time Warner Center in Manhattan, was signed two years ago by the Grand Avenue Committee, chaired by Broad. The park is included in the first phase, though designs for it will be unveiled later.

The second phase is to be built on the block south of Disney Hall, with preliminary plans calling for two 30- to 35-story residential towers, one five- to six-story residential building and more retail stores and parking. The third phase would go east of Disney Hall. Preliminary plans call for a 35- to 40-story residential building that would include some retail shops and possibly a 15- to 20-story building that would be be office space or condos.

Completion of a draft environmental impact report on Phase 1 is expected by summer, after which it will go before the County Board of Supervisors and the city's Community Redevelopment Agency. The timetable for the rest of the project is less clear, though Related's contract states that it must begin Phase 2 by 2011 and Phase 3 by 2014. No architect has been selected for the second and third phases.

Related officials said they hoped to start work on Phase 1 — on land that now has a multilevel parking garage — late this year and complete the project in 2009. They have estimated that construction will cost about $750 million.

Financing for the project is complicated because the city and county own the land on which the first two phases are to be built.

Related is essentially leasing the land for 99 years. Last year, it wrote the city and county a check for $50 million, which is the projected rent the developer owes the agencies for Phase 1 and part of Phase 2.

The city and county plan to pour the $50 million back into the development of the park and street improvements.

Plans for Phase 1 call for a variety of pedestrian and vehicular entrances. A 50,000-square-foot market and a major bookstore would have separate entry-points; a light-filled elevator shaft and escalator lobby from the parking garage at the east end of the property would also take people into the development.

Webb said the designers' aim was "to create a unique L.A. building, with a focus on landscape and outside terraces," working with landscape designer Laurie Olin.

The taller tower — projected to rise 600 feet above the pavement — would include three rooftop pools as well as 250 high-end condo units, a 275-room hotel, a spa and an Equinox health club.

The second tower, at 250 feet, would include 100 rental units — designated as affordable housing — and 150 condominiums, as well as the supermarket at the corner of 1st and Olive streets.

The 47-story tower would extend downtown's skyline north, a trend that would continue if some of the other towers planned in Phases 2 and 3 are built. Gehry's building would be the 13th tallest downtown, 20 feet shorter than the 611 Place tower on 6th Street and more than 400 feet shorter than the 73-story U.S. Bank Tower, the West Coast's tallest.

The buildings would be Gehry's first skyscrapers in Los Angeles and among his first anywhere to reach completion if they are finished on schedule. Several other Gehry-designed skyscrapers are in the works, including some that are part of a large-scale project on the site of the Atlantic Rail Yards in Brooklyn, N.Y. for developer Forest City. But so far, no Gehry tower taller than 12 stories has reached completion, according to his office.

Robert Harris, professor emeritus in USC's School of Architecture, who had not yet seen Gehry's plan, said the project's first phase is "critical" to downtown's future.

If the project is successful, he said, it would be catalytic and "stimulate and encourage subsequent stages, and other projects by other people. It has to provide such an important experience that we notice it, we enjoy it, we remember it, we may even have a chance of associating symbolic meanings with it."

AoD

 

[TdotTrickyRicky]

Does claiming this kind of ownership (Canadian Architect) to Gehry for instance make any sense? If we must we could say Canadian born, but really Gehry the adult person and Gehry the Architect have little to do with Canada have they not?

 

[Mystery Man TO]

That would look great at Yonge and Gerrard ...

 

[tudararms]

If only we could get a little of that 1.8 billion budget here!!

 

[mpolo2]

from an article in the NY Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/04/25/arts/25gran.html

 

[wyliepoon]

Architectural Record

Link to article

In Los Angeles, Downtown is a Boomtown

April 25, 2006
&nbsp &nbsp &nbsp &nbsp


Nowhere in Los Angeles is more construction under way than in and around its long-neglected downtown. A study conducted in February 2006 by the Los Angeles County Economic Development Corporation estimates that there has been $12.2 billion worth of built and planned construction here since 1999. Roughly $8.7 billion of that is for private projects, including more than 26,500 residential units, with $3.5 billion for cultural and civic works.

Approaching downtown from the freeway, the most visible construction site is AEG’s L.A. Live! retail, residential, hotel, and entertainment development, next to the Staples Center. The project, master-planned by RTKL, includes nearly 3.8 million square feet of space, including a high-rise tower for ESPN. The 40,000-square-foot Nokia Plaza anchors the development.

Another huge downtown project is the $1.8 billion Grand Avenue plan, across from Frank Gehry, FAIA’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. Developed by The Related Companies of California, it is set to include up to 3.2 million square feet of residential, hotel, retail, and park development along the street, which is also lined by commercial high-rises, the Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. AC Martin Partners is developing the master plan, and Gehry is designing much of the project, including two residential towers, which were unveiled on April 24. The scheme is still in preliminary stages, but so far the towers appear to be rectilinear buildings based on L-shaped floor shapes. Smaller buildings in the development seem to exhibit Gehry’s flair for deconstructing the normal building envelope.

Some have questioned Gehry’s ability to undertake such a large, urban-scaled project, but Eli Broad, chair of the Grand Avenue Committee, says that Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa and the county’s Board of Supervisors have been positive. “I think it’s very complementary to Disney Hall,†Broad says. Gehry’s model will now go on public view, though the public’s role in the process is unclear. Rios Clementi Hale Studios, which in 2003 completed improvements to Grand Avenue, is designing a $50 million park just to the north.

Condos and lofts are everywhere. Blocks from the Staples Center is Johnson Fain Partners’ recently completed Metropolitan Lofts, a 274-unit, eight-story, Modernist-style residential building with at least five new projects nearby. Historic properties are being snatched up thanks to the 1999 Adaptive Reuse Ordinance, which relaxed the city’s regulations for restoring older buildings. Thomas P. Cox Architects—working on several Downtown projects—converted Shultze and Weaver’s Renaissance-inspired Subway Terminal Building, constructed in 1925, into 277 luxury apartments, called Metro 417.

North of Union Station, Rios Clementi Hale just opened a new, 118,000-square-foot building for the California Endowment’s Center for Healthy Communities. This organization raises money for groups serving underprivileged neighborhoods, which underscores downtown’s homeless problem. Unfortunately, little of the new development here addresses that issue.

Grand Avenue Project Model. Image courtesy Gehry Partners.

Model of LA Live! Courtesy RTKL

Metropolitan Lofts. Courtesy Johnson Fain

California Endowment. Courtesy Rios Clementi Hale Studios

 

[SD2]

Does claiming this kind of ownership (Canadian Architect) to Gehry for instance make any sense? If we must we could say Canadian born, but really Gehry the adult person and Gehry the Architect have little to do with Canada have they not?

I guess when most of your readers are Canadian, it's a way of increasing interest in the piece.

I'd have to see more of this before I passed any judgement.

I wish we could get Gehry up here to do a stand-alone project in Toronto.

 

[Abeja de Almirante]

Argh, enough of this man's steel beams, and bizarre glass designs.

Just my opinion granted, but I can't stand what the Gehry inspired Daniel Libeskind is doing to the ROM, taking a classically Edwardian
design, with it's pillars, detailed brickwork and symetry, and replacing it with glass at all angles, and visible steel support beams.

 

[AlvinofDiaspar]

Nothing really gets "replaced" - besides, the Bloor Street facade of the building is decidely uninspiring, compared to say the University (or even Philosopher's Walk) one.

AoD

 

[interchange42]

Abeja - are you advocating an expansion that would blend in seemlessly?

If you are, here's my rant:

Do you really want to ape the architecture of the past and pretend that the new section has been there as long as the old?
That kind of treatment rarely fits handsomely with the original, and can virtually always be picked out as faux-old. Besides, faux-old would say nothing of the era when the expansion was built, other than that society was too timorous and insecure about contemporary architecture.

Or maybe you're just saying that you don't like Libeskind's diagonals, and you wouldn't like swoopy Gehry were he to have designed the addition, but that something more sedate, yet still modern, would have suited. If that's what you're getting at, I'd say, hmm maybe, but we're getting KPMB all over town, and they can't have all of it.

42

 

[Darkstar416]

but I can't stand what the Gehry inspired Daniel Libeskind is doing to the ROM

Save the fact that both are "starchitects" and often get discussed in the same sentence, I don't think either's work is that inspired by the others to be honest.

 

[FutureMayor]

Louroz

 

[andreapalladio]

I wish they still held the Oscars there at the Dorothy Chandler Pavillion...

 

[MrOttawa]

Wow!

"Downtown" LA will finally be a destination at night time. When I lived there it was boring.

The term "Downtown" is new to LA. Unlike eastern cities LA did not develop from an old core and grow outwards. The end of the 19th and early 20th century saw many cities develop concurrently. Pasadena, LA, Century etc. So when in the 70s they wanted to develop a "Downtown" LA they had to choose which "CBD" would become the Central Business District. They choose rightly to put it near the old city hall and the Federal Court building.

When I was living in LA they had a bad fire in the central library building. Very sad. Because of a lack of funds and commitment they had to sell off some land to pay for the renovation. The resulting tower is approx 1,100 feet high. Pretty tall for an area that suffers from frequent earthquakes.