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Posted Mar 11, 2016, 5:51 AM
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Registered User
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Join Date: Feb 2002
Posts: 6,730
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^ your vid made me think of what dtla was like when I was your age, which is a perfect segue to this person's observations about the difference from when he was a youth & visited dt & what things are like there today. however, the glimpses in the vid of the huge parking lots across from disney hall are a reminder that what was a major gap in the distant past remains a major gap today. The related cos really needs to get off the dime....if the devlprs from china....responsible for big projs like metropolis or oceanwide plaza....can do it, why can't related?
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I’ve had to spend most of the last week and a half in downtown Los Angeles, hanging around the Central Library. When I was young this would have been a terribly boring location -- not the Library itself, as I’ve always been a bookworm, but the neighborhood. Now, though, I could hardly wait for breaks so I could get outside and explore Flower Street, Seventh Street, the Maguire Gardens at the west end of the library (once a parking lot), the Bunker Hill Steps, and, well, just about everything.[/B]
I even walked one of the old “pedways,” elevated sidewalks that were supposed to channel pedestrians about and keep the streets safe for cars. That hasn’t happened, of course. Fortunately, much of the area has been re-redesigned with street life in mind and walkers abound everywhere.
Homeless folk mingle peacefully with office drones, pompous managers, school tours, tradespeople, and no small number of tourists. Many times, more people in the crosswalks than on the bridges.
The Pershing Square subway stop, of course, brings hordes of human beings who then get about on their own two feet; and around the corner on Seventh is another stop where the Red and Purple subway lines join with the Blue and Expo line light rail routes. This means there are generally happy hordes of people walking…and bicycling.
Fountains, sculptures, bikes and happy smiling faces all around…and the air clean after a rain. Not your daddy’s old Downtown LA, these days. Sometimes things do get better.
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Why does DTLA's huge new Hauser Wirth & Schimmel art complex underwhelm? It's a familiar story
Hauser Wirth & Schimmel occupies an entire city block on East 3rd Street in the downtown Arts District.
(Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times)
Sometimes the credits tell you everything you need to know. Take the slightly unusual way Annabelle Selldorf's name appears in the materials promoting Hauser Wirth & Schimmel, the massive and much-anticipated Arts District outpost of the international gallery Hauser & Wirth, which was founded in 1992. Selldorf — born in Germany and based for more than three decades in New York, where her firm is best known for crisply remaking historic buildings for museums and other art-world clients — is listed as the project's "consulting architect."
This is closer to Selldorf Lite. Or maybe Selldorf Once Removed.
Most of the architectural decisions that have shaped the gallery, which fills an old flour mill built in phases from 1896 to 1929, were made by Creative Space, a Los Angeles firm, in close collaboration with Paul Schimmel, the talented, voluble and well-connected former Museum of Contemporary Art curator who has been the driving force behind the project. The landscape architect is Mia Lehrer.
Selldorf, for her part, helped choreograph many of the big moves in this complicated urban and architectural rehabilitation effort. Together with Schimmel she decided to carve a big public walkway through the complex from 2nd to 3rd streets. It opens in the middle onto a large courtyard.
In the final product, Selldorf's organizing ideas seem mostly intact — the spine of the internal street, the openness of the circulation, the range of gallery spaces. It is in the details — the placement of duct work, the choice of handrails and hardware, the angle at which light fixtures are attached to walls or ceilings — that the project falters a bit.
That's not to say that HW&S — at 116,000 square feet big enough to feel more like a museum than a gallery — isn't an appealing or significant addition to one of the most rapidly changing neighborhoods in Los Angeles.
Occupying nearly a full city block at the corner of 3rd and South Garey streets, making it a close neighbor of both the Southern California Institute of Architecture and Michael Maltzan's One Santa Fe apartment block, the gallery complex is especially impressive for its public-mindedness.
In the densifying heart of a city less and less defined by the deep supply of private garden space that so dramatically marked its 20th century character, the gestures that HW&S makes to its neighborhood, the room it provides for residents looking for a cup of coffee or a place to sit down and read email rather than buy a piece of art, may prove particularly meaningful.
Unlike One Santa Fe, which is packed with architectural ideas but marked by cruise-ship-like bulk, HW&S brings new energy to the area by stringing together and remaking a collection of existing buildings. It has helped keep not just the scale but the urban character of this slice of downtown intact.
Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
Kirk McKoy / Los Angeles Times
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