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The article discusses the design and construction of a new building in Long Beach, California, called "26 Point 2." The building provides affordable housing to a formerly homeless population and includes 76 studio apartments, a manager's unit, and supportive social services. The architects, Michael Maltzan Architecture, aimed to create a sense of community within the building and its surroundings. The design incorporates natural gathering spaces and integrates with the neighborhood, which consists of both a busy commercial strip and a residential area. The building features a polychromatic design with flashes of color against white elevations, and it includes amenities such as a courtyard, laundry space, and open-air plaza. The project was funded through low-income housing tax credits and is now fully occupied. [Extracted from the article]

The article discusses the transformation of a former supermarket building in North Hollywood, California into the Victory Wellness Center, a multi-component facility that offers a range of medical and holistic services. The architect, Marcelo Spina of Patterns, convinced the developer to preserve the building's original curving roof, resulting in a renovation that integrated complex dynamic geometries and green oases. The renovated structure now includes work "pods," large windows, and a minimalist "minaret" on the front facade. The introduction of deep, shady courtyards and outdoor spaces was essential in creating a public presence for the wellness center and making it an asset to the community. [Extracted from the article]

Finally, through an RFQ process, Los Angeles-based architects John Friedman Alice Kimm (JFAK) won the commission. BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,058 COLLEGES & UNIVERSITIES THE UNIVERSITY of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) claims the heaviest bicycle traffic of any campus in the state system, with 7 miles of Class-1, or dedicated, bike paths, over 20,000 bicycle parking spots, and more than half of its 26,000 students - by some estimates, closer to 70 percent of its undergraduates alone - riding there. JFAK improved on the original with a 12-foot-long counter and tri-panel window that slides open, alongside a roll-up door to receive bikes for servicing. [Extracted from the article]

THE DIXIE WILDFIRE - one of the largest in California history - began in July 2021, blazing through nearly a million acres of forest and, in the rural town of Greenville alone, destroying nearly 600 homes and most of the village center. That atelierjones-designed structure will rise on the site where the Dixie Fire destroyed a building full of irreplaceable tribal artifacts. Meanwhile, the Sierra Institute also had experience with mass timber, having used it in 2018 to construct a modest biomass-fueled power plant, California's first almost entirely CLT building. [Extracted from the article]

By 2004, when Chapman University purchased the former Santiago plant from its second owner, it was Orange County's sole surviving citrus-packing plant. Finally, in early 2021, Los Angeles-based Lorcan O'Herlihy Architects (LOHA) won the commission to transform major sections of the interior (along with seismic, acoustic, and foundation upgrades, plus light exterior restoration). PROJECTS IN APTLY named Orange County, California, the citrus industry boomed between the 1880s and late 1940s. [Extracted from the article]

Most recently, students have been analyzing the sustainability strategies of the new Science and Environmental Center (SEC), completed in 2021 by the San Francisco firm Leddy Maytum Stacy Architects (LMSA). Joining forces since 2004 - on works including a library, classroom structure, revised master plan, and student center/cafeteria - Nueva and LMSA have set increasingly ambitious goals for energy performance and carbon reduction. BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,049 K-12 SCHOOLS AT NUEVA SCHOOL'S pre-K through 8th-grade campus, in Hillsborough, California, even the buildings are fodder for learning. [Extracted from the article]

Nemestudio, a Bay Area architectural firm founded by Neyran Turan and Mete Sönmez, explores the potential of the banal through theoretical discourse and actual buildings. Their work includes projects such as SuperBanal Grid, which interrogates the urban grid, and CS2 House, a small home in Colorado that reimagines elements like the pitched roof. Turan, who teaches at the University of California, Berkeley, focuses on the urgency of the climate crisis and exposes the hidden politics behind built form. Nemestudio's projects include Hempo Longhouse, which explores the possibilities of hempcrete, and the Four Dioramas at the 2021 Venice Biennale, which challenge visitors to see buildings within the context of a climate emergency. [Extracted from the article]

Skin in the Game OCMA's dynamic rainscreen "brings together low- and hightech solutions", says Morphosis partner in charge Brandon Welling, referring to the artisanal craft of glazed terra-cotta and the cuttingedge digital techniques that made possible the precise design and construction of such an irregularly undulant wrapper. BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,048 ARTS & CULTURE IN 2007, Morphosis won the competition for the new home of the Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), in Costa Mesa, California, and, by 2008, the project was officially under way. SCA's freestanding buildings are densely packed and stylistically eclectic - ranging from the mega-scaled masonry geometries of architect Charles Lawrence's Segerstrom Hall to the glassy, wavelike facade of Cesar Pelli's concert venue, next door to OCMA. [Extracted from the article]

"This is the first 100-percent low-income, multifamily housing from the ground up in Venice in over 20 years", says Becky Dennison, executive director of Venice Community Housing (VCH), the nonprofit that commissioned and operates the 35-unit, mixed-use structure for a formerly homeless population. Successfully harnessing legislative changes - which made the project possible - VCH worked closely with Los Angeles - based architects Brooks + Scarpa (B+S) to create a building that embraces its residents' needs while also contributing to the surrounding neighborhood. BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,046 MULTIFAMILY PHOTOGRAPHY BY JEFF DURKIN ROSE APARTMENTS, a building that opened last spring in Los Angeles's Venice neighborhood, is the opposite of bland, monolithic, institutional-looking housing. [Extracted from the article]

Auckland-based architects Fearon Hay, which also has a studio in Los Angeles, wanted the house's massing and position to engage the extraordinary 360-degree views while deferring to the landscape's virgin character and sense of remoteness. The living spaces surround an open-ended courtyard, sheltered beneath an extension of the landscaped roof. DEPARTMENTS SITED on New Zealand's South Island, Matagouri House nestles into the undulant lowlands between Lake Wakatipu to the west and the snow-capped (and aptly named) Remarkables mountain range to the east. [Extracted from the article]

Ray and Finn visited Desert Palisades and eventually began work on the first house there, which the developers built on spec as a model home, setting a high standard for future designs. DEPARTMENTS IN THE mid-20th century, the mountainringed desert landscape of Palm Springs became a mecca for Modernist design, many of those commissions fueled by well-to-do and celebrity clients. The project was a collaborative effort between Ray and his son Finn Kappe, a Santa Monica-based architect. [Extracted from the article]

PROJECTS ICONIC structures that are inseparable from the identities of their cities - such as the Eiffel Tower, the Statue of Liberty, or the St. Louis Arch - "are not just major landmarks", says architect Michael Maltzan, "they're also observation points from which we see those metropolises differently." That vintage overpass, shaped by the City Beautiful movement and completed in time for LA's first Olympic Games, was the longest of 14 bridges that connect east and west parts of town across the Los Angeles River. And, in that spirit, Los Angeles's new Sixth Street Viaduct - by infrastructure engineers/designers HNTB and Michael Maltzan Architecture (MMA) - is already changing readings of its broader urban setting. [Extracted from the article]

Naturally, the company plans to track Bay View's success through user feedback and - Google being Google - by collecting and analyzing data for years to come. That's the look of two office buildings (plus a smaller events structure) by Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG) and Heatherwick Studio (HS) for Google's new Bay View campus. PROJECTS IMAGINE ENORMOUS dome tents with swooping roof swags, skinned in dragon scales. [Extracted from the article]

CONTINUING EDUCATION GREAT CLAIMS have emerged from the field of 3-D-printed architecture, including reports of entire houses, costing barely a few thousand dollars, built robotically, within a day or two, from digital instructions delivered via cellphone app. For a 1,700-square-foot house for Habitat for Humanity, in Tempe, Arizona, built in collaboration with German-based Peri Group construction company, the walls took two to three workers about three weeks. Many companies - such as ICON or Mighty Buildings (in its non-ADU projects) - still use traditional, wood-framed roofs above printed walls, bypassing the conundrum of how to print horizontally overhead without formwork. Although his company generally declines to disclose costs, it has confirmed that, more realistically, it built a 350-square-foot house in 2018 for $10,000 - but that amount only covered the walls. [Extracted from the article]

Meanwhile, adjoining the sleeping loft, an outdoor shower surrounded by tropical foliage evokes both Akumal, Mexico, a favorite family vacation spot, and the free-spirited showering arrangements of previous Alison- Mayne homes. "Then Thom invited two of the loudest voices to the office and presented our plans with a detailed model", recalls Alison-Mayne. BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,040 RECORD HOUSES WHEN ARCHITECT Thom Mayne first tried to design a new house for himself and his wife, Blythe Alison-Mayne, he was stumped. [Extracted from the article]

Selldorf successfully defended preserving VSBA's starburst lobby (known as Axline Court), whose new roles will include that of reception hall for the many visiting school groups. VSBA addressed many issues - including connecting the terraced ocean-facing sculpture garden to the museum, for instance, while giving the entry side, on Prospect, a stronger urban presence - but the architects' planned gallery wing was never built, and fixing such a piecemeal building was probably impossible without significant demolition. PROJECT ON A SLOPE with spectacular ocean views, the Art Center in La Jolla, a neighborhood of San Diego, opened in 1941 in the 1916 villa that architect Irving Gill had designed for newspaper magnate/philanthropist Ellen Browning Scripps. [Extracted from the article]

Antoine Predock, an architect known for his buildings inspired by the American Southwest, has passed away at the age of 87. Throughout his 65-plus-year career, Predock aimed to create structures that were grounded in the earth yet reached for the sky. He had a strong affinity for New Mexico and believed that the high desert had taught him how to be an architect. Predock's notable projects include La Luz, the Nelson Fine Arts Center at Arizona State University, and the Canadian Museum for Human Rights. He leaves behind a legacy of architecture that is deeply connected to its surroundings. [Extracted from the article]

The U defines an open-ended courtyard, laced with overhead walkways and a broad stairway - with a growing green wall behind stadium and regular steps - providing the building with exterior circulation options, as well as socialgathering perches. BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,037 K-12 SCHOOLS ACCORDING TO some predictions, 65 percent of preschoolers today will hold jobs that do not yet exist. Dale was eager to apply OB principles to an educational facility from the ground up - the first in the U.S. - and that opportunity came with the 260,000-squarefoot Discovery building that HED designed, in collaboration with Moore Ruble Yudell (MRY), for Santa Monica High School, the public institution affectionately known as Samohi. [Extracted from the article]

PHOTO (COLOR): The new School of Film and Television building (this page) and Drollinger Family Stage (opposite) are luminous additions to L.A.'s Loyola Marymount campus. LIGHTING SET ON a high creek-side bluff, about two miles from the beach, the main campus of Loyola Marymount University (LMU) is full of unrealized potential. Sited along the mall, the 23,700-squarefoot structure for SFTV - which includes classrooms, outdoor space, tech labs, and directing studios - is primarily a four-story bar-shaped volume with a brise-soleil of pleated white powder-coated aluminum, perforated with 1-inch holes. [Extracted from the article]

Along this broad, skylit passageway, more black-andwhite Lewitt murals, almost kaleidoscopic in their dynamism, animate the flanking walls. DEPARTMENTS THE MALIBU BEACH HOUSE's broad, buff-colored facade is such an understated, unembellished plane that even its garage door is barely discernible. It frames an outdoor vestibule, where black-and-white diagonal-striped murals flank mirror-polished steel doors, replicating the banded patterns deep into imaginary space. [Extracted from the article]

Here AMMP engaged Renzo Piano Building Workshop (RPBW) to adapt the 1930s building, restoring many original features while creating the spherical addition for the state-of-the-art, 1,000-seat David Geffen Theater. With most of its form hovering above a pedestrian plaza, the orb was envisioned, explains RPBW partner Luigi Priano, "almost like a spaceship - levitating above the ground, as if ready to take off as soon as the movie starts." PROJECTS LIKE A SET from a sci-fi movie, a monumental concrete-and-glass sphere - 150 feet in diameter and appearing simultaneously weighty and buoyant - hovers beside the main wing of L.A.'s new Academy Museum of Motion Pictures (AMMP). [Extracted from the article]

The new subway and Regional Connector will be enormously important in increasing the system's efficiency and coverage of L.A.'s vast territory. According to one recent estimate, L.A. County's overall housing supply has a deficit of about a million units. It's all layered: the cart paths among the original ranchos, the oldest streets, the streetcar network, the major boulevards, the freeways, and now this new countywide Metro system, which began in the 1980s under mayor Tom Bradley. Reimagining the City Christopher Hawthorne, former architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times, is the first Chief Design Officer of the City of Los Angeles, appointed by mayor Eric Garcetti in 2018. [Extracted from the article]

BUILDING TYPE STUDY 1,033 MULTIFAMILY HOUSING WHEN VAUDEVILLE singer, dancer, and actress Florence Mills died in New York in 1927, at age 31, nearly 10,000 fans flocked to the funeral home to pay their respects. On that parcel, along with several adjacent ones, the nonprofit Hollywood Community Housing Corporation (HCHC) has recently completed a mixed-use, 74-unit affordable-housing complex, infused with music. The commission went to 31-year-old Los Angeles artist Myisha Arellano for two electric-hued murals that integrate Mills's likeness at billboard scale, along with quotes in her own handwriting. [Extracted from the article]

Reimagining the City SOLUTIONS L.A.: Light-rail leads to lookouts and art display Los Angeles's Crenshaw Boulevard is often considered the premier artery of African-American commerce and culture in the western United States. "It felt like an updated version of the ways freeways and tracks had torn through underprivileged neighborhoods in the '40s, '50s, and '60s", said Jason Foster, who'd worked elsewhere in L.A. to reclaim such infrastructuredamaged communities. Sarah Amelar Pittsburgh: Brownfields and mills become parks This spring, the Seattle-based landscape architecture firm GGN completed the two-acre Hazelwood Green Plaza in Pittsburgh. [Extracted from the article]

HUGE EXPANSES OF GLASS. Exterior walls that roll up and virtually disappear. Almost 2,400 square feet of deck. The Moseley family's home in Montana's Ruby Valley is a Western design [...]

A 27.5-acre roof canopy - featuring translucent, ethylene-tetrafluoroethylene (ETFE) panels, some of them operable - spans over the stadium, theater, and 2.5-acre American Airlines Plaza between them. DEPARTMENTS IN THE OLD DAYS, stadiums often created neighborhood dead zones, disrupting the urban fabric with their monumental scale, fortresslike exteriors, and periods of dormancy. When Rams owner Stanley Kroenke acquired the vast site and hired HKS to design the stadium and linked theater, a critical question was about how to make the building a welcoming neighborhood asset. [Extracted from the article]