The Urban Art Ordinance was initiated in 2006 with the adoption of the Downtown Specific Plan, and expanded city-wide in 2010. The Ordinance requires the installation of public art on-site for all new development over $500,000, or payment of an in-lieu fee. Since adoption, the Ordinance has raised more than $3 million for public arts programming.
Programmed as a “study aboard” course at home, students document, investigate, analyze and map a district in greater Los Angeles as a means of illustrating their understanding of the themes, issues, trends and theories outlined in the lectures and readings. This research focuses on the relationship between the theoretical ideas and actual places.
This Strategic Master Plan guides the phased reconstruction of Glendale’s Downtown Central Park, including built work by Shimoda Design Group, AECOM, and Gruen Associates.
“We are challenging the architects who work here to produce better work than they might have been accustomed to when they came to Glendale five or ten years ago,” said Loomis. “We’re trying to push Glendale into that echelon of cities like West Hollywood, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Pasadena, where architects want to do their best work.”
The Glendale News-Press profiles the City’s urban design agenda. Glendale’s “new ‘design studio’ is in place to make sure that as the city becomes more dense, it does so with engaging design, concessions to the pedestrian and protection for the past.”
“The Grove’s popular success reinforces entertainment retail (retail-tainment) as the only legitimate activity for creating urban places.” – LA Times Book Critic David Ulin quotes my 2002 article “The Once and Future Mall” in his profile of developer Rick Caruso that ran in this past weekend’s LA Times Magazine.
The Downtown Mobility Study gathers under a single umbrella the full range of best-practices to reduce auto congestion and promote multi-modal transportation. Each of these – parking benefit districts, in-lieu fees, and transit-priority streets, among others – is tailored to the physical vision articulated by the Downtown Specific Plan.
The Glendale Downtown Specific Plan is an award-winning design-based planning document that guides development in the 200-acre urban heart of Glendale, California.
Housing and Community in Southern California as seen from Pasadena | Presented at “Surfacing Urbanisms,” the 2006 ACSA West Conference, hosted by Woodbury University
The CalTrans building is a work-a-day office for the regional bureaucratic functions of the state’s transportation department. As such, it is most appropriately viewed against the offices of other large regional agencies, like the Department of Water and Power. In this context, Morphosis has created the most stunning architectural expression of bureaucratic power Los Angeles has seen in decades.
The North Montclair Downtown Specific Plan, adopted in 2006, mitigates the City’s sprawl by establishing a framework and development strategy for a pedestrian-oriented retail and residential District surrounding the city’s regional transit center
Commentary published in “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric City” for the 13th Congress of New Urbanism, June 2005
Commentary published in “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric City” for the 13th Congress of New Urbanism, June 2005
Commentary published in “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric City” for the 13th Congress of New Urbanism, June 2005
Commentary published in “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric City” for the 13th Congress of New Urbanism, June 2005
Commentary published in “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric City” for the 13th Congress of New Urbanism, June 2005
Commentary published in “Los Angeles: Building the Polycentric City” for the 13th Congress of New Urbanism, June 2005
This 300-acre Specific Plan, adopted in 2006, reestablishes the community’s connections along two Corridors, intensifies the two historic Neighborhoods that flank the downtown and transforms the original 1870s settlement into a Transit-Oriented District linked by commuter rail to Los Angeles.
Orcutt Ranch is an infill area within the suburban neighborhoods of south San Luis Obispo. This study for a traditional neighborhood design was created as alternative to conventional suburban models to demonstrate a strategy for developing the ranch while also maintaining featuring a large hill and small arroyo creek within a conversation area.
This General Plan and Development Code transforms the City of Azusa from a typical postwar suburb of production house tracts and commercial strips into a town of distinct, compact neighborhoods that surround a vibrant downtown.
The Farmers Market, The Grove and the future of the Shopping Mall | Published in the LA Forum 2004 Annual
The Los Angeles River and the Renewal of the City | Published in the Winter 2003 issue of ArcCA
“… because that is all downtown Los Angeles deserves.” Editorial to the Fall 2003 LA Forum Online Newsletter on Downtown LA.
In so far as Exposition Park has been and continues to be encroached upon by development (and simultaneously subject to abandonment), it is an allegory for Los Angeles in general. Just as LA’s natural and agricultural landscapes have been systematically developed without consistent open space protection, Exposition Park has been treated as vacant land waiting for buildings.
Commerce is a fundamental function of the city, if not the primary reason for urban life. What else is the city but a giant machine for making money? | Editorial to the Fall 2002 LA Forum newsletter.
Delirious LA 