Results for “mid-wilshire”

People love to harp on Hudson Yards, but I really want to know what the alternative is. Big glass towers is the architectural style of our age, just like art deco was in the 30s, and bland conformist style was in the mid-20th century.

Do people expect developers to spend a billion dollars to platform over the west side yard and then put up 5-story walkups? Arc deco towers? 80-story brick facades?

It may not be as charming as Rockefeller Center, but I think we can all agree it is still better than what it used to be.

There was nothing particularly historic or aesthetically important about the mid-century industrial buildings.

A quick scan of the pics reminds me why people shouldn’t use high-gloss paint on living room ceilings (see Mid-Wilshire).

Nope not when there are 4 miles of run down commercial to go after on La Brea between the 10 Freeway and Wilshire. Fill that up and then we’ll talk.

I appreciate the inspiration here, and the interior wood beams and soaring ceilings are certainly an improvement over what one would expect from a suburban ranch home, but I think the zen (?) theme here has gone both too far and not far enough. It’s not at all outrageous to want to cross a mid-century ranch house with sampled zen since zen was in the air in the 1950s, and people were creating zen pastiches left and right. It’s part of the overly vaunted "mid century" style. But this house goes a step too far into semi-academic reconstruction. It’s crossed a threshold into serious commitment, but then falls well short of delivering on the theme.

First of all, those "gates" at the front and back are wrong. If they’re going to be built directly into the house as they are, the eaves should extend across the whole structure. They’re also wrongly oriented. They should be parallel in orientation with the front wall, not perpendicularly arranged. A temple gate serves a purely symbolic function. My approach to this would have been not to build the gate into the house as a functional door, but to have built it as a free-standing structure in front of the house, maybe as part of a front garden wall. That would be more accurate. Then maybe knock out some exterior walls on the house itself to open the interior to the garden/woods, and build an "engawa" style veranda around it, accessible maybe through sliding glass doors: zen modern. Temples, and traditional Japanese/Asian houses, involve a strong interplay of interior and exterior.

On that point, soaring ceilings may work in a temple, but I assume this house has central AC. They seem to have taken out the attic and ceiling insulation. This is probably not very energy efficient. I don’t see a tokonoma in the pictures.

I heard there are 93,000 vacant units in LA but they are not available for rent and that’s the point.

In an ask-me-anything segment yesterday with one of LA top realtors on the Westside she said "we see a lot of ‘vacant condos’ in The Wilshire Corridor. I speak to doormen and sometimes they tell me some of the most expensive condos in their buildings are not occupied most of the year. Sometimes the owners are gone for 1-2 years before returning to the condos…"

The YIMBYs and developers say oh that’s not true whenever one of us notices the same thing, like many have in Mid-WIlshire, Hollywood and DTLA.

Transit planning needs to be futures oriented as well.

In contrast to seismic damage prone aerial systems, a properly planned subway under the SM mountains would allow for a certain percentage of trains to transition between the planned route between Sherman Oaks and LAX and the east-west Purple Line. It ain’t hard to see that ridership on the north-south line would be significantly higher if workday commuters are able to rapidly get to their places of employment along the Wilshire corridor or in DTLA – and return home in the evening. The balance of north-south trains would service LAX. If the northern extension of the Crenshaw light rail line were to run northwest along San Vicente to WeHo, Purple Line riders from the Red Line, the Gold Line and from DTLA would NOT be able to transfer to go to the airport (and vice versa), would have to instead rely upon the sordid Green Line. It appears that an extension of the Crenshaw LR Line along LaBrea would be best in this respect and no Puple Line trains running thru Westwood would need be able to transition to run south to the airport. Mass transit thru WeHo should wait for construction of a subway connection between Hollywood Highland and the Purple LIne station at Wilshire/Beverly in the Golden Triangle.

Post 2050, subway infrastructure should allow for trains running from DT Santa Monica to run east thru Westwood/Century City/ Bev Hills and thence northeast to Hollywood Boulevard then east thru the Red Line tunnel and then branch off northeastward towards downtown Glendale. That is IF the planet’s climate crisis has been gotten under control. If not, only the One Percent will survive and be destined to live under glass domes and there will be no more need for mass transit, anywhere.

Problem with the ADU ordinances (AKA modest upzoning) is local municipalities tend to add a lot of cumbersome rules and fees, so that it’s unprofitable (and thus, very few are actually built.) It’s basically a game of cat and mouse between suburbs and Sacramento.

I vote we just allow the next increment of development everywhere, without hassle, but nothing more. That way growth is steady and ubiquitous, but also gradual and scaled to the neighborhood (i.e. single family homes => duplexes; courtyard bungalows => 3 floor mixed use; 8 story brick mid-rise => steel/concrete high-rise.)

I thought the original plan from the 1990s was for there to be two ExpressLanes from the 118 to the 105, as you said…

Measure M appears to only include the pass, but I’m sure the study will identify what you said. Better use would be a bus-only lane along the shoulder or elsewhere for express bus service between Ventura Blvd and Wilshire Blvd.

Perhaps people wish to give them a pass because of their mission, but the worst scaffold offender is the police athletic league building on East 12th Street, which has had scaffolding up since the mid-2000s.