| |
Posted May 18, 2024, 3:15 AM
|
|
Registered User
|
|
Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,478
|
|
Quote:
Reviving Downtown Los Angeles: Why Design Thinking Matters Even More Now
Long-range planning in Los Angeles created a growing light-rail network, which in turn reduces reliance on automotive transport and allows dense, mixed-use development with reduced parking along transit corridors[/URL]. The Los Angeles Metro line from downtown to Santa Monica has led to iconic architecture and walkable nodes along that line. Here’s an example: as large development sites become rarer and rarer in geographically constrained cities, smaller sites become the predominant opportunity for development. Throughout L.A., the development of small infill lots in such neighborhoods as Koreatown, Echo Park, and Los Feliz are stymied by the need for parking (most of these sites don’t require parking by code; despite L.A. having an overall abundance of parking, it’s not always where people need it and the city has not urbanized to the point where most people can access transit conveniently, so parking, in most instances, is still needed) and the expense of a small parking podium.
Retail and commercial district parking garages represent a well-known strategy to energize historic retail and commercial corridors—why couldn’t a private or public collective create a residential district garage, making feasible small-lot developments in and around it? Further alliance opportunities might come from collective battery storage for a microgrid to shared open space on the roof—all of which could offset the costs of individual projects. The idea of design alliance starts with the premise that a single development can never be entirely self-sufficient, so it makes sense to look for creative collaborations with neighbors to increase project feasibility while adding something of value to the community.
The Trust Building in Los Angeles’ historic core is a case study in the long-term value of design quality. Originally built for the offices of a title insurance and banking firm, the building opened in 1928 and has been adapted to multiple uses over its history, including light manufacturing and even as a temporary home for the city’s central library. The building’s appeal comes from its crisp terra cotta facade, its inventively grand entry lobby, and its engaging tile murals within a bronze-gated portico.
Renovated in 2020 by Rising Realty for creative office use, the building has recently been acquired by University of California, Los Angeles to serve as an urban satellite building. Although the Trust Building has been preserved substantively intact for nearly 100 years, the predominant character of its context— physical, cultural, and economic—has been constant change. Design quality is a significant factor in preserving the Trust Building’s value over time. It’s worth noting that the back of the Trust Building is simple brick, not terra-cotta, and the high level of finish extends mainly through the public areas of the building.
Three blocks from the Trust Building, the historic Tower Theater reopened in 2021, reimagined by architect Foster + Partners as an Apple store. Although the reimagined space has been exquisitely adapted to its current use, the original building, one of a group of historic theaters along the Broadway Street corridor, was notably short on bronze. Its design was economical for the time, done like a stage set to create an engaging and attractive exterior that would draw people into the theater. Architecture purists might debate the integrity of buildings with skin-deep, decorative cladding, but this expedient approach to design has an inventive quality that created value over time and played a part in the birth of a vital architectural and cultural district for the city.
It’s important not to conflate high design quality with high cost. Often, the value of design isn’t what a particular building looks like or is made of, but the space created and shaped by it. None of the now-historic theaters along the Broadway corridor in L.A. are themselves architectural masterpieces, but together they form an urban space with lasting and incontrovertible value, despite their economy of construction.
Consider the trajectory of the design idea in a contemporary project: the mixed-use collaboration between Related and Gehry Partners across from Disney Hall in L.A. The long-anticipated project opened in 2022 and includes a hotel, rental apartments, and a group of restaurant and retail spaces. Transforming a parking lot on a sloping site at the edge of an internally focused performing arts center into an engaging urban environment is a tall order. The project, spanning almost two decades from its initial conception, went through many design revisions, many of them open to public scrutiny.
Through its various iterations, the project’s program, urban presence, and architectural expression shifted significantly, but what remained constant was a strong design idea: a clear-eyed solution to the problem of creating an urban environment that (for now) is disconnected (but not distant) from its surroundings. The design concept of two relatively short towers bracketing an engaging series of multilevel indoor and outdoor spaces that step down the sloped site and up from the street create, define, and protect a small-scale urban environment that anticipates connections and continuity with future developments—essentially, a mini-city providing a deft synthesis of uses, views, and architectural perspectives.
|
.
|
|
|
Prev
Linear Mode
