owner Wendy Gilmartin Architecture, architect, writer, educator at @cppenv, proud leftist & feminist 🌈 former president @LAForum_AUD, bleeds Dodger blue
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Articles by Wendy Gilmartin
Municipal Pastiche
There’s something uncanny and deceptive about the Van Nuys Government Center. Indeed, the complex seems to deceive even itself: Government Center is only one of its three designations, along with The Van Nuys Civic Center and The San Fernando Valley Administrative Center. The program is just as variable: Ten local, state, and federal government office buildings flank an open-air plaza, within which lie garden areas, monuments, and memorials.
El Bordello Alexandra: How a Venice Beach Landmark Came to Be
When Tony Wells and Brittany Stevenson bought the apartment at 20 Westminster Ave. in Venice ten years ago, the place was a heroin den with a slumlord owner who never fixed things. The front was covered with decaying wood shingles, grimy linoleum hid the historic tile work in the foyer and low dropped ceilings made the rooms inside feel dark and claustrophobic. "We completely gutted the place, tore off all the finishes and started over again," Brittany says.
340 N. Western Avenue in Koreatown: The Postmodern KFC
The The Postmodern KFC at 340 N. Western Avenue in Koreatown. Get it? It's a chicken and a bucket! Conceived at the tail end of the radical eighties by architect Jeffrey Daniels and completed in 1990, this KFC franchise epitomizes the blocky, colorful, asymmetrical, and never subtle building-as-symbol style that typified postmodernist architecture twenty years ago.
Jimmy Fallon Bashes Trump With Surprisingly Powerful Version Of Famous Protest Song
The famously apolitical Jimmy Fallon shows even he has his limits with a pointed (and very entertaining) update to a Bob Dylan classic. In the run-up to the Trump presidency, and amid the tumultuous first few months, Jimmy Fallon was widely criticized for failing to speak out on the social issues that permeated the daily headlines.
How Frank Lloyd Wright's Ideas Could Cure Today's Urban Design Challenges.
Revisiting architect Frank Lloyd Wright’s solutions-based-design thinking could inspire fixes for the most confounding of current housing crises, urban design challenges, and forthcoming climate change problems. Clogged freeways, skyrocketing housing costs, vanishing resources — they’re all-too-common problems for today’s urban dwellers.
How Smart Kids From Low-Income Families Become America's 'Lost Einsteins'
Innovation is widely viewed as the engine of economic growth. To maximize innovation and growth, all our brightest youth should have the opportunity to become inventors. But a study we recently conducted, jointly with Neviana Petkova of the U.S. Treasury, paints a different picture. We found that a child’s potential for future innovation seems to have as much to do with the circumstances of their family background as it does with their talent.
Bold form mixes layers of public and private in Brooks + Scarpa's The Six
The new 52-unit permanent supportive-housing project for formerly homeless individuals, many of them veterans, designed by Los Angeles firm Brooks + Scarpa, takes its name—The Six—from military slang for a person who “has your back.” The project is Skid Row Housing Trust (SRHT)’s first outside Downtown Los Angeles, and it continues the organization’s very successful run developing functional, neighborhood-scale, and formally transformative housing.
10 Biggest L.A. Architecture Stories of 2013
This year saw downtown continue its rapid-fire gentrification, organized groups of kayakers toured the wilds of the L.A. river through Frogtown, the city's housing market bounced back hard, we continued to densify and use our cars less (surprised?), and the city was awash in architecture exhibitions, lectures, panels, tours and conversations thanks to the Getty's citywide series Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. Hours before opening-day crowds meandered up the hill...
After the Blaze, Ire Over the Da Vinci Apartments Still Smolders | KCET
OP-Art: Opinions and editorials about art, institutions, and the relationship between them. In December, as 75,000 square feet of obliterated, burnt debris smoldered at the Da Vinci apartments complex at 900 Temple Street downtown, the public roiled.
THE HOMELESS WANT MORE THAN HOUSING | Landscape Architecture Magazine on WordPress.com
THE HOMELESS WANT MORE THAN HOUSING October 17, 2016 by LAM Staff BY WENDY GILMARTIN For the residents of L.A.’s Skid Row, public space is a priority. Speed bumps and curbs that narrow the street to slow traffic. Safety zones for women and LGBTQ residents. Vegetable gardens with citrus trees. Drinking fountains, storage units, and cell phone charging stations.
SETTLING IN | Landscape Architecture Magazine on WordPress.com
SETTLING IN September 13, 2016 by LAM Staff BY WENDY GILMARTIN A Los Angeles firm turns to super-light interventions for a landscape bent on change. It’s been nearly three years since Los Angeles County Waste Management’s fleet of rumbling trash trucks ceased their daily climb up and down the massive landfill in Puente Hills, for years one of the nation’s largest.
Is Los Angeles a Horizontal City? | KCET
Architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne partners with Artbound for an episode that looks into the future of Los Angeles. "Third L.A. with Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne," debuting June 14 on KCET, considers the city's changing architecture, urban planning, transportation and demographics. From Venice Beach to Leimert Park, and Hollywood to East L.A., the program also analyzes long-held cliches and stereotypes about city.
Radical Remodeling
Since the 1920s, the single-family home of California has been, in its most elemental form, a snug, one-story, wood-framed house. But then came the remodels: the replacement windows, home-office additions, and backyard renovations in a continuous loop of demolition, rebuilding, and reinvention. Drive through any community in California, and you’ll see it, the basic bungalow—sometimes built more than a century ago and updated in 1961, 1989, 2007, 2015.
Golden state cities calculate how to use unspent revenues - Archpaper.com
Los Angeles’s San Fernando Valley Reseda neighborhood is poised to spend $23 million in reactivated excess bonds as a result of post-redevelopment bills signed late last year by Governor Jerry Brown.
The Future Look of Wilshire's Museum Row | KCET
For years now, politicians, and developers have reminded Angelenos that big changes are coming to the stretch of Wilshire Boulevard between Fairfax and Ogden. Museum Row will soon be transformed, they've promised, by public transit, contemporary architecture, high-rise development, and much more housing.
Subtle Commemoration: Pasadena's Armenian Genocide Memorial
In the northeast corner of Memorial park -- the quiet and the less accessed side -- where the park's original 1945-built stair entrances and ramps give way to Walnut Avenue, the new Armenian genocide memorial structure activates a portion of the park that had been bare since late 2013 when wind storms in the area felled three 75-year-old oak trees.
As the Music Center Turns 50, It Should Shake Up the Way We Use Its Courtyard
On Dec. 6, dancers from L.A. Dance Project will slide and sway across the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion’s stage in resident choreographer of the New York City Ballet’s and California native Justin Peck’s premiere of, a rhythmic piece based on Esa-Pekka Salonen’s 2005 musical composition with the same name.
Santa Monica's New Big Blue Bus Stops: The L.A. Weekly Review
The renovation of Santa Monica's Big Blue Bus route stops began in 2009, when city stakeholders chose local firm Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects to re-think the functionality, look and feel of the city's stops, and accommodate for new amenities like solar lighting and real-time arrival information.
Young Designers Create Interactive Experiences at the A+D Museum
There's a seven minute long video projected on the back wall of the A+D Architecture and Design Museum's recently opened exhibit, "S, M, L, XL, L.A.," in which, from a driver's point of view, the viewer is catapulted along a series of freeways from the Port of L.A. out to both valleys. Every few seconds along the way the trip freezes on one frame just long enough for text to pop up and call out passing geographical highlights just beyond the freeway's walls.
Eat Your Art Out
For more than a decade, the city of Pasadena has been partnering with the Armory Center for the Arts to celebrate Mother Earth and promote the arts with the annual Pasadena Earth & Arts Festival. This Saturday, two stages, one inside the Armory and one on Raymond Avenue along Memorial Park, will be alive with dancers, rock bands, storytellers, drummers and musical instrument builders, all day long, for free.
10 Biggest L.A. Architecture Stories of 2013
This year saw downtown continue its rapid-fire gentrification, organized groups of kayakers toured the wilds of the L.A. river through Frogtown, the city's housing market bounced back hard, we continued to densify and use our cars less (surprised?), and the city was awash in architecture exhibitions, lectures, panels, tours and conversations thanks to the Getty's citywide series Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. 10.
A Tour Through the L.A. That Could Have Been
A Tour Through the L.A. That Could Have Been This week, the Architecture+ Design Museum's long-awaited exhibition "Never Built: Los Angeles" opens, highlighting plans for the city that never made it off the page. To mark the occasion,L.A. Weekly takes a tour through the L.A. that would have existed today if these proposals had been realized. Our account is based on a conversation with "Never Built" co-curators Greg Goldin and Sam Lubell.
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