chinatown03 by Juan23

LA hot dogs should really be added to this list.  Even my vegetarian wife agrees that when you wrap hot dogs in bacon and serve with fried onions and peppers you have achieved a superior product.  Take that New York.

Echo Park, Los Angeles photo by newsphotog2.

I was in Echo Park (the gentrifying neighborhood of LA) today and was struck by how hobbled Echo Park (the park) is by it’s gigantic lake that easily takes up 90% of the park’s area. Absurd! Among the 50 largest US cities, Los Angeles ranks 41st in park acreage per [...]]]>

Echo Park, Los Angeles photo by newsphotog2.

I was in Echo Park (the gentrifying neighborhood of LA) today and was struck by how hobbled Echo Park (the park) is by it’s gigantic lake that easily takes up 90% of the park’s area. Absurd! Among the 50 largest US cities, Los Angeles ranks 41st in park acreage per capita — worse than Houston, San Diego, Phoenix, and Dallas. (But not New York! Take note big apple partisans.) Here’s a chart based on data from the Trust for Public Land’s 2002 study (click for a readable version):

My chart of open space per capita for major cities per Trust for Public Land data.

A measly 7.9 acres per 1000 people (including water!), which is why if you walk by any inner city park on a weekend you’ll see families barbecuing on top of each other or playing halfcourt soccer (it doesn’t work as well as basketball). Given that, it’s especially crazy for a city to spend valuable park area on space that’s essentially useless. Lakes can be beautiful and help create nice microclimates, but so can verdant tree-covered spaces, and the latter can also be used for hiking, sleeping, sports, picnics, etc.

Plus lakes are much more difficult to construct and maintain, and as a result they tend to be extremely unclean, to the extent that the one nice feature about a lake, the one thing that would make that park the place to be on a hot summer day, swimming, can’t be done. The water just sloshes around temptingly, but you can’t jump in. Frustrating!

I doubt there is an ability to fill in existing park-lakes, given that “filling in the lake” sounds like the nefarious plan of an eco-villain and Echo Park itself is now a historic monument, but even reducing in size the lakes at certain parks would reclaim valuable land. At minimum, future parks, assuming we ever build more, should certainly not be designed around lakes.

La Live by Gensler

It’s not often you see a building get larger as it goes up. [...]]]> Light posting of late, as I’m working on a different online project that I’m quite excited about. When it’s of at least beta quality you’ll hear me chattering about it endlessly, but until then…your moment of zen phallacy:

La Live by Gensler

It’s not often you see a building get larger as it goes up. Something to do with physics…

Airspace Tokyo

I like looking at architecture models, but check out the designers’ website above for the as-built version. This skin was developed for a new building, but what’s most exciting is its potential uses on existing structures. In LA, we love us some low-rise stucco box apartments, [...]]]> The impressive facade stylings of Thom Faulders:

Airspace Tokyo

I like looking at architecture models, but check out the designers’ website above for the as-built version. This skin was developed for a new building, but what’s most exciting is its potential uses on existing structures. In LA, we love us some low-rise stucco box apartments, and while economical, they’re no one’s idea of high design (well, few people’s). The easiest way to mod this blight is to attach lightweight structures to the exterior –no demolition, no retrofit, no loss of resident access.  Moreover, these typical apartments tend to have bad insulation, too little privacy, and only token transitions between indoors and out — all problems that a perforated facade can address, by acting as a sun and privacy screen.

See Loud Paper for the conceptual basis for the Airspace Tokyo design, which utilized computer algorithms — giving me hope that I’ll one day be able to put my killer programming skills in long-defunct programming languages (fortran) to use on something more exciting than my moment of inertia calculator.

Apparently, [...]]]> I’m a big fan of scalable architecture — go ahead and throw ladders, spiral stairs, fireman poles, terraces, monkey bars, ropes, balconies, slides, whatever up your buildings (like La Meme!). It ‘tames’ steep vertical rises making them comprehensible to users and passer-bys….and it’s just fun for getting inside to involve Rube Goldberg like complexity.

Apparently, people more daring than I aren’t satisfied with waiting for architects to start designing walkable cladding and are just climbing the facades as is. A friend came over with LA Climbs in hand, and I had to read it all look at the pictures.

It charts prime climbing spots in some of the LA areas most famous buildings: Griffith Observatory, Disney Concert Hall, Case Study #22 (aka “That House From All Those Ads”), After Corbu favorite Schindler House (and every other important modernist home), Bradbury Building, the LAX restaurant (you’ll get arrested), and, of course, the Hollywood Sign. If nothing else, the author has exquisite taste in structures, and gets props for choosing so many modern buildings — those clean lines make for sparse handholds.

No climbing for me anytime soon — there’s a reason I do buildings with math not tools, and it rhymes with plumsy — but I hope it takes off. If I don’t look out my office window someday to see some fool spidering there way up the exterior with nary a rope in sight, I’ll be severely disappointed.

I am 34, married with 2 kids and have accepted a new job in Los Angeles. I’d like to live in a White suburb, do you have any recommendations?

Oh no he didn’t!  And then:

I turned down the job.

After seeing those Mexicans [...]]]> Crazy shit from 2006 from my wife’s research into racism in LA housing:

I am 34, married with 2 kids and have accepted a new job in Los Angeles. I’d like to live in a White suburb, do you have any recommendations?

Oh no he didn’t!  And then:

I turned down the job.

After seeing those Mexicans making a ruckus on the freeway on the news I realized it isn’t a safe place. I also read that prisoners are deported after their sentences back to Mexico and then they simply return to America to rape/murder again.

It’s unfortunate also that California is now apparently, “Aztlan”. What the HECK is that?

Ah.  A silver lining to Richard Beddington’s racism: he gets to be some other city’s problem.  Of course, according to the 2000 census, 35% of LA County’s white people live in areas that are 75% white or more.  So it’s not like there’s a dearth of places where white people can escape the brown menace.  And if  75% is too colorful for you?  Well there’s always Malibu or Huntington Beach where residents are proudly pushing towards 90%.

The extremely diverse, Latino-majority city core has fueled the “white minority” narrative, but the truth is that there’s still a lot of white folk, and they tend to segregate themselves.  So nostalgia for the good ol’ days of racial covenants seems a little displaced.  Oh, and pretty disgusting too.

Today is the awesome Dias de los Muertos at Hollywood Forever Cemetery,and if you’re in LA, you really should go. Families line the pathways with altars to dead loved ones packed with pictures, favorite foodstuffs, stuffed animals, etc. (It’s something of a mindfuck regarding the ways we’re remembered after we’re [...]]]>
Photo by Xispas. Thanks!

Today is the awesome Dias de los Muertos at Hollywood Forever Cemetery,and if you’re in LA, you really should go. Families line the pathways with altars to dead loved ones packed with pictures, favorite foodstuffs, stuffed animals, etc. (It’s something of a mindfuck regarding the ways we’re remembered after we’re gone.) There’s Aztec dance troupes from the Nahuatl-teaching charter school, and theater of the oppressed types dresses as ghosts of American soldiers in a difficult to understand anti-war statement.

Then there’s the cemetery itself, where various famous people are buried in sometimes ridiculously ostentatious plots (I’m looking at you Johnny Ramone). People actually own their plot and can do anything with it, so results vary with your loved ones’ taste.

In earlier times the cemetery was segregated by race, which makes for an odd visitor experience as you wander through various immigrant community “neighborhoods” — as if to say that we don’t leave our racial divisions behind when we die; they follow us into the white light. The perimeter of the cemetery is occupied by tiny child plots, many featuring stuffed animals slowing dying of exposure to the elements, happy meal toys, and school pictures.

It’s eccentric and with0ut regard for tradition; a perfect LA place. I want to be buried there just to force family members to visit.

It’s actually a kind of depressing read; I don’t recommend it.

Not that they don’t make a convincing case, but if anything we have entered an accelerated period of tower construction since 9/11. Even in LA, home of the earthquake, we’re racing up as fast as we can. An example of the wonderful city of [...]]]> From the Bad Futurist Pantheon: The End of Tall Buildings

Not that they don’t make a convincing case, but if anything we have entered an accelerated period of tower construction since 9/11. Even in LA, home of the earthquake, we’re racing up as fast as we can. An example of the wonderful city of tomorrow, being brought to you today: the Staples Center expansion. Which completes our development cycle:

• Expired — suburbs
• Tired — exurbs
• Wired — downtown.

Repeat as necessary.