California: The Latest Architecture and News

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Construction is well underway on Disney’s much anticipated Star Wars: Galaxy’s Edge theme parks planned for both Disney World in Florida and Disneyland, California.

A new drone video released by Disney Parks shows that many of the California park’s landscape and architectural elements – including mountains spires, towers and domes – are already in place. Inspired by the real-world land- and cityscapes of Istanbul and Morocco, the park will evoke the Outer Rim planet of Batuu, a remote trade outpost located along old sub-lightspeed trade routes.

In recent years, many ambitious proposals have been brought forward to revitalize and improve the area around the Los Angeles River. The Lower Los Angeles River Revitalization Plan (LLARP), proposed by Perkins + Will Architects in conjunction with various community groups and public institutions, aims to connect residents to the river and improve the environment surrounding it.

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SPF:a has revealed their design for the new Anaheim Performing Arts Center (APAC) to be located adjacent to Angels Stadium in Anaheim’s Platinum Triangle District. The $500 million, 500,000-square-foot cultural campus will contain three theaters and a range of culture and entertainment program elements, housed within striking buildings inspired by the orange tree.

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Apple’s unwavering love for glass and seamless edges is one of the reasons designers flock in masses to purchase their products. But that aesthetic has caused a bit of a snafu at the company’s new Foster+Partners-designed headquarters in Cupertino, where employees are running into the highly transparent glass walls at an alarming rate.

An adaptive reuse project by P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S is currently under construction in North Hollywood, California. The project transforms an existing warehouse into a dynamic medical campus with Urgent Care, Elderly Daycare, Surgical Centre, Physical Therapy, Imaging Centre, Medical offices, café and a small shop.

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New renderings have been revealed of Gehry Partners’ Grand Avenue Project as construction is finally set to begin this fall. Located across from Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, the development now known as The Grand will offer up retail, entertainment and residences within two blocky, terracing towers.

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Studio Gang has revealed concept designs for their campus master plan for the California College of the Arts (CCA) in San Francisco. Currently split between facilities in San Francisco and Oakland, the new unified campus will bring together the school’s various art and design programs into one “vibrant indoor-outdoor environment.”

The design concepts aims to become a “highly sustainable model for the future of creative practices,” arranging programs into upper and lower ground levels to encourage interaction and cross-departmental osmosis. 

New renderings have been revealed showing an updated design for Frank Gehry’s ‘Ocean Avenue Project’ in Santa Monica, California.

Originally conceived as as 22-story hotel and residential tower, the project has now been shortened to 12 stories (130 feet) to meet restrictions imposed by the city’s Downtown Community Plan, which calls for “aggressively slow growth” and a “lower scale downtown” of mainly 4-5 story tall buildings.

“As soon as we were able to get into the space we wrote the entire menu in basically a day. It was being in the building itself that had this creative charge about it,” said chef Jordan Kahn.

At LA chef Jordan Kahn’s new fine dining adventure, it was the architecture which informed the menu.

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New renderings released by developer Palisades have revealed the interiors of MAD Architects’ upcoming Beverly Hills residential village, the Gardenhouse.

With construction on the project well underway, the images show how the interior spaces, designed by Rottet Studio, will interact with the architecture created by MAD. Inspired by close-knit hilltop villages, the development at 8600 Wilshire Boulevard will feature 18 individual villas that look in onto a shared courtyard.

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The Oakland Athletic's have hired four firms to lead the design and urban planning for their new ballpark on the Peralta site, near the heart of Oakland. HOK will be collaborating with Snohetta on the design of the ballpark. Snohetta will also be working on the masterplan along with Sasaki and Oakland-based Studio T-Square.

Coinciding with their 100th anniversary, the Los Angeles Philharmonic (LA Phil) has announced plans to build a new, dedicated space for the Youth Orchestra Los Angeles (YOLA) to be designed by Los Angeles’ own Frank Gehry. Architect of Los Angeles’ and one of the world’s most famous performance spaces, the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Gehry has been called upon to transform a 17,000-square-foot facility in the LA neighborhood of Inglewood that will allow LA Phil to reach its goal of doubling the number of students involved in its programs by 2022.

New renderings have been revealed of the Renzo Piano Building Workshop-designed Academy of Motion Pictures as the project races toward its 2019 completion date. Located along LA’s Miracle Mile, the museum is striving to become “the world’s premier institution dedicated to the art and science of movies.”

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Blossoming from the rugged terrain of the California desert, Whitaker Studio’s Joshua Tree Residence is taking shipping container architecture to the next level. Set to begin construction in 2018, the home is laid out in a starburst of containers, each oriented to maximize views, provide abundant natural light or to create privacy dependent on their location and use.

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Already having tackled electric vehicles, space flight, and high-speed vacuum tubes, benevolent mad scientist Elon Musk’s latest foray into transportation infrastructure is ready to get off the ground, or rather, under it.

The tech mogul’s newest startup, the Boring Company, focuses on designing a subterranean network of tunnels beneath the streets of Los Angeles that could shuttle pedestrians and vehicles on electric sleds connected to a system of rails at speeds of up to 125 mph.

Now, the company has announced approval by the LA County city of Hawthorne to construct a 1.6-mile-long tunnel that will allow the technology to be tested in-full for the first time.