Space taken by 60 people

A redesign of a Müenster planning office poster by Aza Ruskin.

Original: makeitgreen.webs.com/img/cbb.jpg

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High science / Low art

Top: Mount Wilson Electronics Reservation towers
Bottom: Simon Rodia's Watts Towers

Nice to meet you Mr. Salk

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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)


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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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this is my take on the hammer museum...

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Schindler

after dropping a friend off at work thursday morning, i turned right to explore LA a bit. i cut through koreatown and the macarthur park area to get to silver lake. i was disappointed by silver lake. i guess i keep thinking these hyped up neighborhoods are going to be more urban than they are and then when i get there they just aren't. not that it seems all bad, it's just so hard as an outsider to the city to find what any of these places are all about. someone want to give me a tour? i did find intelligentsia coffee which is going to be a new pilgrimage point for me with out of town guests, this place is almost everything i want a coffee shop to be!

side note: macarthur park is a great old park in LA that holds the most potential of any ungentrified neighborhood to bring LA into the realm of walkable cities. its location is perfect for tying together important and emerging neoghborhoods and it holds an interesting stock of older buildings waiting for people with the vision to bring them back to life. future project?

onto what this is really about. well, the pictures at least. the schindler house! after driving around silverlake and checking out new development in hollywood, i drove over to west hollywood to see the shindler house. what an amazing place. i havn't felt this inspired by a work of architecture since vals or the kunsthaus bregenz. it is so simple and crudely built yet so human and accessible. the spaces are claustrophobic by todays standards, but the scale is perfectly in tune to the human body. i could have spent the whole day soaking it in or passing time on one of the sleeping decks. sleeping decks!!!

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