LOS ANGELES | Downtown Project Rundown 6.0

[Quixote]

Originally Posted by sopas ej

I do too.

Same.

[caligrad]

The design is great. those balconies tell me small/micro units which in all honesty is something that should have been a thing a while ago. If buildings have parking podiums, the city should mandate they be wrapped/covered with micro units. I would feel it be a win win for the housing crisis and the developers.

[Easy]

Originally Posted by caligrad

The design is great. those balconies tell me small/micro units which in all honesty is something that should have been a thing a while ago. If buildings have parking podiums, the city should mandate they be wrapped/covered with micro units. I would feel it be a win win for the housing crisis and the developers.

To be clear for anyone confused by your comment, this building has one level of underground parking and no podium. Edit to add that it's only 14 parking spaces total.

[mousquet]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

Call me crazy but I like this design more.

Of course you're crazy... You're lying to yourself. Both those designs were wrong anyway.
Architects could do some effort and work on massing, dammit.

Oh, don't worry. We've got our latest sins in Paris too. But they're not quite the same.
Ours are related to the size of windows and materials to facades.
Not so much about massing or bulk, though.

[ocman]

Originally Posted by Illithid Dude

Call me crazy but I like this design more.

Feels more substantial and better designed. Shame about that parking lot facing 9th street. But they seem to have designed the sides in preparation or expectation for another develop to build up against it. Hopefully someone does soon.

[homebucket]

The new design reminds me of an off strip Vegas casino. Not a fan of those big blank vertical walls flanking each side, as well as the big wall stretching across the first level and some of the second level.

[citywatch]

It's frustrating how many blocks in dtla still have parking lots, such as the strip along 9th st that the relevant group proj won't cover but will sit next to. Couldn't the devlpr convince the other property owner to join them in a joint venture or get him to outright sell them the parking lot?

btw, to all the forumers of ssp who are big fans of tall bldgs...esp super talls....& prefer sleek nouveau architecture, few cities in the world mark off their check list the way that Dubai does....

https://youtu.be/tJuqe6sre2I

the youtuber briefly mentions LA, but not necessarily in a good way.

Even more so after watching a closer review of dubai, which comes off like a big nothing burger, I really prefer the lower rise, old time format of historic london, full of a lot of ppl walking around during the day & night.

similarly, ppl are out & about in one of the few brick & mortar malls in america that still has some relevancy....a shopping ctr over 50 miles south of dtla. As I was fast forwarding through this this vid, it made me realize that an oceanwide proj on fig & the Grand ave proj with all their retail space run the risk of being dinosaurs because dtla...unlike london or costa mesa....still doesn't have a big enough population base of both residents & visitors to support businesses dependent on walk-in trade.

Personally, the crowds & old time feel of london blow away the plastic burban vibe of southern OC. But dtla is caught in the middle. It currently lacks enough of the good features of either area, while at the same time also having some of the weaknesses of both too. dtla is still more low rise than highrise (without a lot of london's lower rise historic charm) & dtla's sidewalks often roll up like a burban costa mesa.

dtla is getting there, but it remains a work in progress...that proposal for the block north of 9th st & south of the stillwell hotel would have been a totally done deal & already built if dt were keeping pace with other cities. If it were, the discussion today would be about what a proposed devlpt on that parking lot directly along 9th st was going to be like.


• Video Link

[ocman]

Originally Posted by homebucket

The new design reminds me of an off strip Vegas casino. Not a fan of those big blank vertical walls flanking each side, as well as the big wall stretching across the first level and some of the second level.

Only the front of the building matters. There's no reason to design the sides of the buildings if it’s going to be covered up by neighboring buildings. The expectation is that the parking lot doesn’t remain a parking lot in the future, and when it doesn’t, the development will be an arms length from this building, unless there’s some type of alley gap.

[Quixote]

^ +1

845 Olive is exactly the type of infill I would love to see all over DTLA, as opposed to horizontal skyscrapers or towers attached to huge podiums. If given the choice between a tall, dense skyscraper cluster between Figueroa and Main or this typology throughout the entire DTLA loop, I choose the latter without hesitation. You’d basically be building a vernacular similar in scale to prewar Midtown Manhattan. Not too many cities have endless blocks of 150-250-foot buildings — I think only NYC and Buenos Aires.

[202_Cyclist]

Not quite to that height but DC has continuous 90 - 120 foot buildings for approximately 25 blocks in its downtown core. I think there are only one or two surface parking lots in the entire downtown core of DC and they are on the periphery in NOMA.

[Easy]

I imagine that lower floors in a high rise get less $/square foot because who wants to move to a high rise and live on the 2nd floor? Parking podiums solve that problem by having apartments start on the 4th floor or higher. With no podium my guess is that all of the affordable housing will be at the bottom.

[LAisthePlace]

Originally Posted by Easy

I imagine that lower floors in a high rise get less $/square foot because who wants to move to a high rise and live on the 2nd floor? Parking podiums solve that problem by having apartments start on the 4th floor or higher. With no podium my guess is that all of the affordable housing will be at the bottom.

Except they solve it horribly. Instead of having "eyes on the street" or natural stewards of the neighborhood through people living on the first, second and third floors of a building and seeing what is happening in their neighborhood (both good and bad) with a parking podium not wrapped by units we get residents who only see what is happening at street level when they leave their gated skyscrapers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSdBin1PAtQ

DTLA by and large lacks smaller, row-home type apartment buildings, so it is even more important than in a city like Philadelphia or Boston.

[Easy]

Originally Posted by LAisthePlace

Except they solve it horribly. Instead of having "eyes on the street" or natural stewards of the neighborhood through people living on the first, second and third floors of a building and seeing what is happening in their neighborhood (both good and bad) with a parking podium not wrapped by units we get residents who only see what is happening at street level when they leave their gated skyscrapers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iSdBin1PAtQ

DTLA by and large lacks smaller, row-home type apartment buildings, so it is even more important than in a city like Philadelphia or Boston.

My reality of living on the second floor in a building downtown is that I didn't like it. And I suspect that few or none want to sign up for the job to be an unofficial neighborhood steward. I know that such a concept is a thing, but I think that the reality is much less desirable. But even if it were a thing, I think that you see the street just as well and maybe even better from a few floors up.

[LAisthePlace]

But that is what the nice thing about build lots of housing and giving people choices. What wasn't your preference (living on a low floor) might end up being someone else (either because its more affordable or more convenient to just walk down one set of stairs vs. wait for the elevator).

I'm not saying that I would choose it either, but I could imagine that people would and if those people exist then having housing on the 2nd/3rd/4th floor is much much more preferable to the well-being of Downtown LA than a parking podium.

Originally Posted by Easy

My reality of living on the second floor in a building downtown is that I didn't like it. And I suspect that few or none want to sign up for the job to be an unofficial neighborhood steward. I know that such a concept is a thing, but I think that the reality is much less desirable. But even if it were a thing, I think that you see the street just as well and maybe even better from a few floors up.

[Illithid Dude]

For what it’s worth, I think the bridge is nice too, though I have some qualms with the formwork and wish it was painted or they used colored concrete.

[Niftybox]

Does a huge development proposal like Olympia block other towers proposals where Olympia's would stand? If so, maybe it's a strategy by China to block prime areas from developing faster. Similar can be said about Oceanwide, very suspicious since China takes this city development thing pretty seriously from what I gather. Optics are everything to the CPC.

[Easy]

Originally Posted by Niftybox

Does a huge development proposal like Olympia block other towers proposals where Olympia's would stand? If so, maybe it's a strategy by China to block prime areas from developing faster. Similar can be said about Oceanwide, very suspicious since China takes this city development thing pretty seriously from what I gather. Optics are everything to the CPC.

Well they purchased the land (the last I heard was that they agreed and I assume that money/deeds changed hands) and you can't just build towers on someone else's land, if that's what you're asking. And I don't agree that China would consider having stalled projects all over the world as any sort of successful strategy. It makes them look the opposite of how they want to be perceived.

[colemonkee]

The Chinese government has nothing to do with the construction or site selection of buildings outside of China. These are all projects of Chinese companies who use their own capital - or capital loaned from various sources (banks or governments) - to develop buildings for a profit. So where and when those companies build is purely a function of economics, and less so of government policy. Chinese government policy definitely has broader effects of either speeding up or slowing down oversees development by Chinese companies based on their policy decisions, but the government of China is not stipulating which lots to build on.

[colemonkee]

Moderator edit: also, deleted a few posts that started to wade into city vs. city territory. Okay with direct comparisons based on current developments, but let's avoid comparisons that can spiral us out of control.

Aside from this, we're doing pretty well, believe it or not.

[craigs]

Eyes on the Street: New Bus Lane on Grand Avenue in Downtown L.A.

By Joe Linton
Streetsblog Los Angeles
November 29, 2021


New Grand Avenue bus lane - photos by Joe Linton/Streetsblog L.A.

Downtown L.A.’s Grand Avenue now has bus lanes. Back in early November, Streetsblog reported on the other half of Grand’s one-way couplet: a northbound bus lane on Olive Street. See that post
for more details on the history of how the L.A. City Transportation Department (LADOT) and Metro came to install the couplet. In the past two years, LADOT and Metro have had a fruitful bus speed
improvements collaboration, resulting in new bus lanes on Flower Street, 5th and 6th Streets, Aliso Street, and Alvarado Street.

The southbound Grand bus lane doesn’t reach quite as far north onto Bunker Hill as the Olive lane does. The new Grand bus lane extends just over one mile – from Hope Place (a half block above 5th
Street) to Pico Boulevard. All of this stretch now has a left-side protected bike lane, and a right-side bus lane.


New bus lane on Grand Avenue



Metro notes that the Grand/Olive bus lane couplet serves 60 buses per hour at peak times – including the J (Silver) Line Bus Rapid Transit