Tag: Architizer

Van Nuys: 2030

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  • archi5
  • archi5

In 2030, Van Nuys is expected to complete perhaps as much as $3 billion dollars in new construction. Offices, apartments, multi-family dwellings, parks, schools, health care facilities, all of it is going into that area between Oxnard and Sherman Way along Van Nuys Boulevard.

A light rail line, carrying 50,000 passengers a day, travels down Van Nuys Boulevard, and a unique partnership of politicians, multi-national industries, local artisans, architects, planners and residents has come together to upgrade and invest in the area.

The Republican Mayor, Juanita Sanchez Garbanzo (b.1988), elected in 2028, is the daughter of immigrants, and is a strong, well-educated, imaginative leader who lived in Los Angeles during its worst period from 2010-2025, when trash camping by tens of thousands of derelicts was promoted by city government, and astonishingly, all types of illegalities were turned into law among them health care benefits for non-citizens, and voting privileges and drivers licenses for unlawful residents.

Sanchez-Garbanzo, and her wife, Alexa Siri O’Really are the proud parents of two self-described young boys, Martian, 3 and Vendo, 5, and live in one of the new developments along Van Nuys Boulevard near Kittridge. “We don’t think being a gay couple means supporting policies that make the city a slum. In fact we believe that being progressive means encouraging small business, and plenty of new housing for all people,” Alexa said. “We believe that law abiding citizens who respect each other and the city are the foundation of a civilized nation.”

  • FIRM Horton Harper Architects
  • FIRM Horton Harper Architects
  • FIRM Horton Harper Architects

Crime has dropped significantly since the the LAPD added 25 new officers in Van Nuys and boosted the Los Angeles police force by 5,000. Security cameras monitor people who walk and drive in the area, and there has been a drop of 75% in felonies and misdemeanors since traffic enforcement raised moving violations fines to $4,000 for red-light running and $2,500 for speeding. Van Nuys Boulevard has also benefited from bike lanes, and traffic modifications that put walking, biking and light rail in the same category as private vehicles.

  • Archi 5: new homes along Orange Line
  • Van Nuys Blvd near Civic Center, new housing by Architecture 5.
  • Grass cooled school near Vanowen by Archi5

One of the interesting multi-cultural additions to the area are Koban stations which are LAPD booths modeled on Japanese style law enforcement. They are inserted into the street life, rather than the old LAPD station in Van Nuys which stood half a mile back from Van Nuys Boulevard in a forbidding building. The idea for the Koban stations came from Lisa Kinoshita-Horowitz, an architect from Reseda who studied law and architecture in Kyoto in the 2020s. She brought the idea home to LA and proposed it to her good friends, the Mayor and her wife.

  • Koban at the Orange Line, a reassuring place for people who ride mass transit.
  • New Koban near Gilmore and Van Nuys Bl.

With investment strong in Van Nuys, and the whole area coming along as an experiment in density, bike/train/walkability, real estate values are booming. Houses that sold for only $4 million last year, are now going for $6.5 or even $7 million. But there are also some 11,000 new housing units for rent in the area, and landlords are offering three months free rent to new tenants.

  • Handel Architects: New Swim Club/Apartments Near Calvert and VNB
  • Handel Architects: New Swim Club/Apartments Near Calvert and VNB
  • Handel Architects: New Swim Club/Apartments Near Calvert and VNB

23-year-old writer and cyber security actor Gretchen Dynamanski grew up in rural Nebraska but always dreamed of living in LA. She was thrilled to find a community of young, creative people in Van Nuys and the fact that she can get around the city without a car, and even ride to LAX by light rail and monorail convinced her to move to Van Nuys. “I think Van Nuys is probably the most gorgeous section of LA and I love what they are doing here,” she said.

Mayor Sanchez-Garbanzo says part of the reason Van Nuys is thriving is because the mayor herself lives right here. “When you are in power, frankly, it’s important to put yourself right in the area where you can make a difference. Someone offered me a mansion in Hancock Park, and I turned it down. I want to be where I can help my constituents and live with them on a day to day basis and know what struggles and what triumphs they are experiencing. As a mother and a wife and a professional, I share those stresses and hopes and dreams with all my beloved people in Van Nuys. And I am thrilled that our work has really paid off!”

(All photos in this essay come from the website Architizer.)

    Our Lost Vitality

    Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 2 Comments

    Sepulveda and Erwin, Van Nuys, CA.

    Housing, it seems, is everything these days, the foremost topic on the minds of Angelenos. 

    Those who can afford it fear those who cannot.

    Fearsome, it seems, is our ragtag army of many thousands of un-housed vagrants who have established anti-communities out of shopping carts and tents, and made bedrooms, bathrooms and living rooms out of bus benches, trains, bridge underpasses and alongside our freeways. Covered in dirt and tortured by circumstance, pulling three bikes with two legs, they remind our fortunate ones that life often goes bad even for the good.

    3/5/18 Bessemer at Cedros.

    SB50, the state proposed override of single family zoning, struck terror into the hearts of many in Los Angeles who feared that the single family home, housing twelve unrelated people, might soon be replaced by twelve unrelated people in four houses on one lot.   

    “Leave it to Beaver” (circa 1959) the imaginary ideal of Los Angeles.

    “Leave it to Beaver”, “Dennis the Menace”, “Hazel” and the rest of the 1950s and 60s back lots of Columbia and Warner Brothers are how many, now aging, but still ruling this city, think of Los Angeles, and how it should look. 

    When Dennis the Menance came home he didn’t enter into a lobby with an elevator. When Dr. Bellows drove up Major Nelson’s street, it was clean, tidy and sunny. 

    Home of Major Anthony Nelson, “I Dream of Jeannie” (1965-70)
    The cast and crew of the remodeled “Brady Bunch” home in Studio City, CA. (HGTV)

    HGTV is now remodeling the real life home in Studio City that was used as the location for Mike and Carol Brady and their bunch, recreating in reality a 1970s home, inside and out, following an architectural blueprint from the set pieces of an inane, 50-year-old television show that seemed saccharine the night it premiered in 1969.

    It is heartwarmingly creepy to see the now white-haired kids throw a football in an astroturf backyard, retirees feigning juvenile excitement as a synthetic reality show impersonates their old sit-com and pumps new advertising blood out of Geritolized veins.

    ____________________________________________________________________________

    Woodley Park, 2018.

    But life is not a syndicated sitcom. What’s on TV is not what’s beyond our windshield.

    We live in Los Angeles, and die a bit here, day by day. The city is getting worse in every imaginable way: housing, health, transportation, taxes and education.

    Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016

    On the roads, in real life, in 2019, cars are now parked and packed alongside every obscure street because it takes four working, driving adults to afford one $3,200 a month apartment.

    Building more apartments doesn’t mean more cars, it simply means less apartments. And less apartments means more rent, so Los Angeles keeps eating itself up in contradictions of cowardice and myopia.

    __________________________________

    Japan

    As I travel around Los Angeles and see all the enormous parking lots and one-story buildings alongside eight lane wide roads, I wonder why we are so unable to build enough houses to house everyone.

    California is not nearly as crowded as Japan, yet that country ingeniously designs small dwellings that artistically and creatively provide homes for every type of person.

    On the website Architizer, I found the work of a firm called Atelier TEKUTO.

    Homes shown on Architizer by Atelier Tekuto are really tiny, but they are built solid, with each dwelling quite individual in style and form, an irony in a country where every black haired man coming from work is dressed in a white shirt and dark suit.

    But Japan somehow pulls together the artistic and the structural to provide enviable and well-designed homes in well-protected, spotless communities. Violence is rare, except yesterday, but nobody goes out at night fearing random mass shootings, it is safe to say.

    We can’t, or should not, want to remake the depravity of our dirty, violent LA into clean, peaceful, obedient Japan, with its fast trains and scrubbed sidewalks, but we might borrow some of their ideas. After all, we conquered them in 1945, can’t we take home some intellectual souvenirs?

    Imagine if Van Nuys took the courageous and innovative step to redo the large, unused parking lots behind all the abandoned shops on Van Nuys Boulevard with a mix of little houses like these and perhaps some larger structures several stories high?

    What we have now is this:

    • Near Cedros and Delano.
    • P
    • Bessemer St.
    • Van Nuys, CA 90401 Built: 1929 Owners: Shraga Agam, Shulamit Agam
    • Van Nuys, CA

    Don’t we have a Christopher Hawthorne now, Chief Design Officer, working under Mayor Gar[BAGE]cetti? Former architecture critic at the LA Times, he may know one or two architects from his old job. Perhaps Mr. Hawthorne can take action?

    What have we got to lose? 

    We are so far down in quality of life that we must engage our energies to pursue a remade Los Angeles.

    A city that does not harm us but lifts us up.

    As Japan shows, you can have enlightened ideas without living alongside mounds of trash and outdoor vagrancy.

    There is no logical connection between toleration of outdoor garbage dumps and political tolerance in general. In fact the worse our surroundings get, the more people will turn right and maybe even hard right.

    Not Van Nuys Blvd at Oxnard

    Posted in Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , 5 Comments

    Why not Van Nuys Bl. at Oxnard?

    On Architizer, an architectural website, I found a photo and description of a residential/commercial development built in Mountain Brook, AL in 2014.

    Pleasant, as all ideal architectural plans and photos are.

    But it also fired up an idea…

    Why couldn’t buildings like this go on the NW corner of Van Nuys Bl. and Oxnard St.?

    Where currently there is a large, unoccupied glass building that once housed a car dealer (what else?) it is now a yawningly empty welcome to the alleged business and government district of old Van Nuys.

    The Mountain Brook, AL buildings (architects: Wakefield Beasley & Associates) anchor the street with ground floor shops, landscaping, sidewalks, trees and diagonal parking. They invite people to walk and to park in front.

    276 apartments are built above the stores, with one, two and three-bedroom plans, and are spread between the structures. Various modern amenities, including fitness centers, parks, yoga and meditation areas, wifi, are added to entice renters.

    What is it that makes this type of building a dream and not a reality on the main street of Van Nuys? Why, in a city starved for housing, is there not a furious effort by Councilwoman Nury Martinez and the City of Los Angeles to rev up the pace and quality of apartment construction?

    Stylistically, the traditional look of this building would probably elicit snickers from the Christopher Hawthorne/Frances Anderson crowd. It is much too literal and polite and pseudo-historic for a cult which takes its abstract, contorted meals at Frank Gehry’s feet.

    Frank Gehryism

    But Van Nuys is starved for anything that can bring us up from the homeless, trashy, neglected place we are today. An above-average, but suitable design such as the one from Mountain Brook, AL is better than shopping carts full of garbage and people sleeping in cars.

    It would work because it cares about the urban context around it.

    Sepulveda Fantasy

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    It’s a futile fantasy exercise to go the website Architizer and see what they are building in other wealthy cities around the world where 100,000 homeless people do not sleep on the street and it is isn’t considered normal to have shopping baskets full of trash polluting parks alongside $2.5 million dollar homes.

    Here is a new apartment in Nantes, France designed by Hamonic + Masson & Associates. I think it’s rather pleasing, sleek, uplifting and progressive. It must be nice to live in such a bright, spaciousness, well-thought out structure. 

    Imagine this apartment house along Sepulveda Boulevard between the Orange Line and Victory in Van Nuys, presently a junky, one-story collection of car washes, Pep Boys Auto, Wendy’s, Fatburger, a mini-mall with a mattress store, a paint store, Jiffy Lube, etc. Can you picture the day The Barn is gone and there is nowhere to buy an Amish Shaker Dark Mahogany stained dresser with metal pulls for $953 that even your Aunt Irma in Cerritos would hide in her garage.

    How we would mourn if Pep Buys Auto and its grease, graffiti and garage doors full of axles on hydraulic lifts were banished forever and replaced by something modern and residential befitting a city in the third decade of the 21st Century.

    What would it look like if all that were replaced by a 15- story-tall apartment with curving balconies and pleasing design within walking distance of public transportation, and convenient access to Costco, LA Fitness, Target, CVS and a Chinese market?

    A building like that one replacing all the decrepit garbagetecture that lines Sepulveda between the Orange Line and Victory……imagine that?

    Chief Design Officer?

    Los Angeles should consider creating a position in city government to promote projects like this. I’m thinking a “Chief Design Officer”, perhaps someone with architectural knowledge and connections, to fire up a redesign and redevelopment of Van Nuys.

    I’m surprised they haven’t invented this title yet, since this is such an architecturally minded city. 

    It reminds me of a coincidence……

    I had lunch with a city government man, last summer in Van Nuys. It was July 11, 2018. He rode the bus out to Van Nuys, perhaps for novelty or amusement. I met him on Aetna near the Orange Line. He claimed an important title, one that might be able to bring good things to Van Nuys. I was eager to meet him and see what might get started here.

    We were scheduled to walk around the area and really explore how to improve it. I imagined we might go for a few hours along the boulevard, or the Orange Line, and see what kind of housing, lofts, beer gardens, cafes, tech companies could be built here. But the man was interested, obsessed mostly, in watching the semi-finals of the World Cup when England played Croatia.

    We walked into the dismal State Office Building in Van Nuys, an awful mid-1980s strip windowed government place, and he was transfixed with it. But he still was eager to get somewhere, anywhere, and watch that game.

    Every place we walked past he peered into the windows to see if they had a large screen TV, but alas, none did.

    I suggested the Robin Hood tavern so we took an Uber there and sat amidst the packed crowds and watched the World Cup.

    He had worked as an architecture critic at the LA Times and was coming to our district to see it for the first time, but first he had to watch that soccer match at The Robin Hood. We spent two hours in The Robin Hood, drinking beer and eating BLTs.

    We parted and he promised to follow up and have “my intern” call you. But nobody ever did.

    That was over six months ago.

    The other night he was attending The Golden Mike awards ceremony where KPCC’s Larry Mantle took a lifetime achievement award. So I read on Twitter.

    I’m going to write Mayor Garcetti and Councilwoman Nury Martinez and suggest they create a new government position for someone qualified who can get Van Nuys some top designs and bring up the depressing level of listlessness that infects our forgotten section of Los Angeles.  Needed is a person without pretense who doesn’t just kiss the ass of the fashionable, the powerful, the media stars who blow words and wishes over the suffering people of this city.

    Maybe I should even be the Chief Design Officer since I actually have a track record of preservation, clean-up, and heightening community awareness in Van Nuys and vicinity.  “Option A” which would have obliterated industrial, small shop Van Nuys with a 33-acre Metro light rail repair yard was defeated after this blog united community members to fight for the preservation of local, productive, creative, skilled industries near Kester and Oxnard.

    But back to the CDO position…….

    I don’t think they would hire me.

    Frances Anderton has never heard of me. And I didn’t graduate from Berkeley and I don’t live in Silver Lake. And I have never given a graduation speech to the students at SCI-Arc.

    I’m pretty sure those are the qualifications one needs to get hired for being a $200,000-$300,000 (?) a year Chief Design Officer.

    Glamorous Granny Flat.

    Posted in ArchitectureTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

    All photos: Eric Staudenmaier

    The Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) is a second house built in the backyard of a first house to provide additional income for a “single family” homeowner.

    Los Angeles has now legally liberalized the lawto allow these types of dwellings to go up all over the city. The moral reasoning: this will increase the supply of housing in a city where rents, not to mention costs, are skyrocketingly expensive. 

    The so-called maximum square footage of the ADU is 1,200 SF but the one on this page is 1,600 SF.

    One can imagine less beautiful and less artful types of ADU’s going up all over this city. 

    The $99,000 vinyl and stucco ones that will go up in Van Nuys will be built without architects. Hector and his crew will dig, hammer and nail and the Home Depot and Ikea will supply. Four recent college grads from film, acting, and comedy schools will move in and split the $4600 a month rent with parental assistance.  

    So the tenants will not be someone’s granny.

    What will likely occur is a kind of typical Los Angeles situation. Property owners will build in the backyard and in a slapdash way shove driveways in front, destroying trees and lawns to create more parking. Security gates and cinderblock fences and concrete will serve as front yard landscaping.

    More renters will mean more cars, so almost every street that once was clean of vehicles, will have bumper-to-bumper cars belonging to renters who live in the backyard house. Curbs will be full of McDonalds wrappers and discarded beer bottles.

    That’s the Van Nuys way.

    I don’t, ironically, object to ADU’s. If every ADU looked like the one on this page, it would be wonderful for architecture in Los Angeles to see a proliferation of fine design.

    But the bottom of the barrel ugliness that is the norm, not to mention the cost of construction, ensures that the homely, crowded, poorly thought out ADU will prevail. 

    And the ADU on this page will never become the home of a working family. It is, most likely, a guest house for an affluent owner, or perhaps an $8,000 a month rental. So increasing the ADU supply will hardly affect the supply of normal, affordable rentals in Los Angeles.

    Credits: Architizer

    FIRM

    FreelandBuck

    TYPE

    Residential › Private House 

    STATUS

    Built

    YEAR

    2019

    PHOTOS

    Eric Staudenmaier

    One Day, Soon.

    Posted in Architecture, Links, Van Nuys and the ValleyTagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

     

    One day, soon, there will be a revitalization of Van Nuys Boulevard.

    Gone forever will be the hopeless days when people laughed to mock it, or ran away in revulsion.

    All the central gathering places that should be occupied by civilized things, all the lots that hold parking, all the empty buildings along Van Nuys Boulevard, will be replaced with vibrant, happy, upbeat, successful businesses and residents.

    It will take nothing more than $5 billion dollars to invest in new transit, new apartments, new multi-family housing, new police officers, a new police station, an army of street cleaners, and law enforcement people who will ticket illegally parked cars, handicap placard abusers, unregulated street sellers, unlicensed signs, and unpermitted businesses.

    The narrowing of Victory Boulevard, the planting of 200 oak trees from Kester to Van Nuys Boulevard, will bring about a revitalization of the formerly crappy strip of low rent mini-malls, slum apartments and empty stores. The LAPD Victory Precinct at the corner of Van Nuys Boulevard and Victory, and its drop-in center there will be open 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

    150 new LAPD officers, out of a police force of some 10,000 will be specifially assigned to the area.

    Some 50 new apartment buildings, from Sherman Way to Oxnard, with 10,000 new apartments, will be built and 20% of them will rent for under market value.

    Security cameras will enforce the law to prevent speeding, red light running, assault, vandalism, burglaries of properties and hold-ups on the street.

    There will be decorative streetlights, three new parks, new benches, and thousands of shade trees planted along the boulevard to protect against temperatures that get hotter every year.

    Bike lanes, light rail, automobiles and pedestrians will share a new Van Nuys Boulevard divided between all types of transport, from foot to motor to public.

    And the architecture will be inventive, modern, and integrate environmentally such necessities as solar energy and district wide free wi-fi.

    In a nod to the old Van Nuys, the first orange grove planted in the Valley in 90 years will be manned by formerly homeless men and women who will guard the orchards as they would their own children. There will be 10 houses planted around the grove to ensure the safety and security of the new urban agriculturalists.

    The low industrial buildings in the neighborhood around Kester and Oxnard, all 33 acres, were preserved in 2018, and later became an incubator for creatives who settled in the area and built narrow houses near the Orange Line, and worked and lived next to artisans, musicians, brewers, car restorers and craftspeople of every skill.

    All of this is possible.

    The people who will decide whether this is fantasy or reality are reading this post.

    All photos courtesy of Architizer.

    Architecture by Graham Baba.

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