MUG'GED_ f. EC(H)O PARK POTTERY

A few weeks ago we headed over to Echo Park Pottery to color mugs for LA artist Peter Shire and The Ecology Center.  Having missed the mug making session the previous week, we met Mr. Shire for the first time and spent a Sunday hard at work dipping a few hundred mugs in glaze.  Mugs are one of Echo Park Pottery's staple items, and the mugs we dipped are now on sale at the studio of their making and the Eco Center's store.  Nearly a dozen of them made it home with Lori and I!

The mugs are a rolled slab construction with variously pointy and half round handles that are surprisingly comfortable to hold.  They are glazed in stripes of yellow, green, pink, blue, and brown with white rings around the lip.

Click through for some process shots.

Junkyard of Dreams

Care of Pick Your Part, the past dreams of others can fulfill your dreams of now. Pay $2, bring some tools, parts galore!

Golden

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote an interesting piece on the expanding transit network in Los Angeles.  Citing the pessimistic view of most towards Southern California's hopes and objections to building a cohesive transit network, he looks at the pending opening of the Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension (Sunday!) and the transformative nature of projects like it:

The real significance of the stations' debut on Sunday flows from the fact that with every substantial extension of the rail and subway network, another piece of the future Los Angeles comes startlingly into focus. More transit means more pedestrians, more people who pay attention to the shape and design of the city up close. That, in turn, means a growing constituency for shared space in Los Angeles and new interest in our long-neglected streetscapes and public sphere.

To put it another way: Transit and the life of the street are inextricably intertwined, and a boost to one is almost always a boost to the other.
 

California From Above

1. Sidewise view of greater LA/OC showing Palos Verdes in the foreground with (from left) Mt. San Antonio and Mt. Harwood, Anderson Peak, San Gorgonio Mountain, San Jacinto Peak, Modjeska and Santiago Peaks (aka Saddleback mountain).

2. View after takeoff showing the bay and SFO to Pacifica and PCH (lower left).

3. The bay, creeping fog and the Crystal Springs Reservoirs.

4. View over San Luis Obispo to the Sierras.

5. Landing approach showing the Pacific coast from Bolsa Chica to Long Beach.

6. Former Pacific Electric right of way cutting through the sprawl.

7. Saddleback and the Tustin MCAS airship hangars. Landing.

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Mountains to the Sea

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Love Your WaterShed

Of Kings and Barbecues

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Design Room/The Ecology Center

Design Room


We're putting together a timeline/educational/inspirational display in The Ecology Center's design studio. The room itself is an educational space that accommodates a variety of uses including teaching on a blackboard, workshops, luncheons, hanging out and design consulting. The space is intended as a studio where in the future design/construction/landscape/sustainabilty professionals will have office hours to consult local residents on private projects. The room is in a house from the 1870s on one of Orange County's last working farms (South Coast Farms), the house being the domain of The Ecology Center.

Venice apartment


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Relationships

Relationships



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Johnny Five is Alive!

Jalopy



Word of the day: Jalopy

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from city hall


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Ross Racine

Dave first described the work of Ross Racine to me when he saw it at Like the Spice Gallery in Williamsburg. Naturally, descriptions of aerial images of dream suburbs piqued my interest, but the lack of a name and the closing of the show kept me from seeing them. Then one day, browsing the internet (I hate the term browsing for some reason, and I think it may have been on Ben's blog), I found Ross's work!

THIS IS (amazing) CAKETOWN!!

!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

An amazing remix of "this is caketown" inspired by the life affirming 300 trailer pg version. Caketown has since become a term widely used in über hip architecture circles to describe the current state of pop architecture, epitomized by buildings of faux/foam detail freakishness smeared with stucco icing that are often featured on New York Shitty and Curbed, among others.

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The Putting Lot

Well I may be a little late to the game on this one, and a little far away, but the friendly folks of Meat Pallet never cease to delight with their tastefully seasoned offerings. Introducing the Putting Lot, of Bushwick New York. A brooklyn-ized revival of the revered form of childhood recreation commonly known as Miniature Golf. Good job guys! Now if only I can get there and play me a round!



Pachinko Putt Putt by Meat Pallet (image c/o Nummy Nimms)



@ The Putting Lot

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AR(c)TIC in OC?

Design aside, this is one exciting building. HOK's above image for a new regional transit hub in "downtown" Anaheim represents a major step forward for Southern California. Intended to be built by 2013, the building will connect Metrolink, Amtrak, Disney monorail, local transit and high speed rail underneath a vaulted roof inspired by the rail stations of days past. Can this building really be designed for Orange County? (Check out the map below)


View Larger Map

The pedestrian neighborhood this hub will serve is as speculative as pedestrians in Orange County. But who says a parking lot sandwiched between a freeway and a dry drainage ditch today, across the freeway from Angel Stadium and next door to Honda center, can't be the planner's pedestrian paradise of tomorrow? Maybe it's name says it all: ARTIC (Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center). Don't kid yourself, there's no ice in the OC.

BUT, there will be ice in the OC!!

As a not so side note: This hub and it's immediate neighborhood will tie into Anaheim's Platinum Triangle (I know cheesy right?), a partially built, partially under construction, partially stalled by economics project that's attempting to bring some dense, mixed use, walkable urbanism to the area between the 5 and 57 freeways that is Angel Stadium, Honda Center, Convention center and Disneyland adjacent.

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I Am Summer Camp

i am an old lady

june 20 - june 17, 2007

old ladies paint. i think i do too. on the above dates i am participating in paint san clemente, a plein air painting competition focused on painting the city of san clemente, ca. i've participated in this twice, and am usually pretty cool for doing it. i even got an honorable mention once, just don't call me an old lady!

fyi: "plein air" translates literally as "full air" but is used to mean outdoors and has come to represent a whole genre of painting. mostly pretty boring painting if you're not an old lady, but people usually think it's pretty so...



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de-

TROIT

from Curbed: "Starting in the early 90s, photographer Kevin Bauman took photographs of 100 abandoned houses in Detroit, Michigan" (photographs are his)

...

i want to go here. must. see. this. must see before gone. now.

these places fascinate me. they are at once depressing and incredibly beautiful (melancholy?). it strikes me that these neighborhoods that were at once subdivided from larger parcels have been reverse subdivided by the deleting of their neighbors. imagine a new era of urban homesteading where new yorker's sick of their tiny apartments but still desiring the cachet of a big city move to the abandoned blocks of detroit and buffalo to establish farms amidst the street grid of a disappeared city.

the once fertile grounds are consolidated block by block and the streets disappear to rows of crops and windbreaks... the once abandoned apartment houses are reborn as bunkhouses for migrant workers who report to the ruralized townhouse for their daily directions. plowing digs up children's toys and abandoned fragments of heirlooms, sprinkler systems, forgetten fire hydrants, furniture... and a collapsing sewer system inverts itself into marshes and slowly establishing creeks.

the migration west of the last fifty years that continues to develop the farms of the west results in the re-establishment of farms in the east. could this be measured? could the continuing (?) displacement in the west be replaced with an equal amount of new farming in formerly urban neighborhoods like those in detroit? new development across the country could be required to subsidize the urban homesteaders as an act of recompense for the farmland they've erased... the same could be applied to logging!! the detroit of the future: a city amidst farms and forest?

EDIT: lori brought up a good idea... could the ordos 100 project be reworked and implemented in a place like this, a sort of ordos meets 8 mile concept? sounds like a recipe for michigan drug plantations, rapping architects, hmm...




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the only corn i like

From GPC

also i just read on eater that Cafe Habana of SOHO fame is coming to Venice and Malibu! crazy

maybe I won't have to move back to New York! heck, if it keeps movin' out here.... another sign LA is the New York of this century, yay!!!!!

From GPCB

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