Every new house around me, nearly every one, is ugly. They either have no architecture or they are builder’s standard stucco with vinyl windows and gargantuan garages. These garages will store junk (not vehicles) and the house will cost $700,000 to build and sell for 1.5 million or 2.5 million and still be the homeliest thing you ever laid eyes on.
These new houses never have symmetry. The windows are too small or there are two many. Random shapes and designs are slapped together and ignorantly mashed up to produce cheap and gaudy eyesores. The most common thing is the all concrete garden with gates, a dozen security lights, cameras, large vehicles on a circular driveway. And a double width, double height iron doorway.
I wonder why there is not a single builder who can just observe and copy classical architecture and create a pleasant, well-proportioned and elegant little house?
Like you see in Denmark.
As an experiment I instructed an AI program to create: “A two story tall Danish house with pitched tile roof and casement windows.”
These are some of the designs it produced. Tell me these aren’t better than 99% of all new houses built in North America.
It’s an impressive structure that leaps and struts and flies over rail tracks and factories, electric yards and the river. It is startlingly plain, almost crude in its sculpted mass and bending arches. There are raw bolts attaching the cables to the concrete. Steel fences stretch along the pedestrian walkway. Dark shadows and blinding sun mark the bridge from beginning to end.
Unyielding in substance, rigid, unforgiving, brutal; it is a stage for fast cars, reckless driving and unintentional suicide. But also a balletic performance of geometric shapes and unexpected revelations along the way.
Mute yet expressive, untested in the long term, it is a baby of this metropolis. And born to a city that abandoned it to a wasteland which one day may be remade with trees, parks and apartments; or left behind to become yet another great, unfulfilled California promise.
I don’t have his exact words, but in that book he described an architecture of barbed wire, steel gates, security cameras, the way this city is set up like a penitentiary with hostile inmates surrounded by deterrents, police and threatening lethality.
The 6th Street Bridge, ironically, has earned a reputation for criminal mayhem: daredevil driving and people who climb upon the arches to show off. I saw no rowdiness, in fact the road was remarkably empty and we only passed a few pedestrians. But in all directions artificial and man made structures are the entirety. Absolutely nothing is natural. The lone exception I saw was a cellphone tower who identified as a palm tree.
From Dwell Magazine, an example of a tight, urban house in a densely populated area of Osaka.
As I have asked many, many times: why can’t this type of housing be constructed in the commercially zoned areas of Van Nuys? Near the Orange Line? Near the Civic Center?
Imagine this fitted behind an alley in Van Nuys? As a modern, clean, civilized upgrade for the slum housing one sees along Bessemer, Calvert, Delano, Cedros, Erwin, Friar.
Photo by Kwasi Boyd-Bouldin.Imagine a grouping of twelve of these around a garden on a former parking lot? On a lot that was once a gas station.Slum Housing on Cedros.
“At first glance, it can be hard to spot the Toolbox House. Tucked away on a long, narrow lot in the downtown area of Osaka, Japan, the silvery home sits much lower than its high-rise neighbors. Yoshihiro Yamamoto of the local firm YYAA designed the dwelling for a couple and one of their mothers, who sought a single-story house that is “compact and easy to use, like a toolbox.”-Dwell Magazine.
“The Los Angeles Department of Building and Safety (LADBS) implemented the Standard Plan Program to provide LADBS customers a simplified permitting process for the design and construction of ADUs that are built repeatedly. The use of standard plans reduces the time required for plan check resulting in faster permit issuance.
Under the Standard Plan Program, plans are designed by private licensed architects, and engineers to accommodate various site conditions. Plans are then reviewed and pre-approved by LADBS for compliance with the Building, Residential, and Green Codes. When the applicant selects an approved Standard Plan, LADBS staff will review site-specific factors for your property, including compliance with the Zoning Code and foundation requirements.” -LADBS
Mayor Eric Garcetti and Christopher Hawthorne, Chief Design Officer.
Under the authority of Mayor Garcetti’s Chief Design Officer Chris Hawthorne, a whimsical man, a new menu of backyard house designs, produced by various local architects, has appeared like magic. Mr. Hawthorne was previously involved in architecture writing at the Los Angeles Times and in the re-design of our civic lampposts. He is a frequent guest speaker at international architectural events from New Zealand to Miami and a recurring guest on KCRW Frances Anderton’s radio show on design.
Rather than concentrate on coming up with emergency housing for 100,000 unhoused Angelenos who live in trash piles and tents inside parks and along freeways, mayoral efforts were waged to come up with ironic design concepts in lighting.
The International House of ADU Menu seems to be an attempt to inject some fashionable urgency, flavored with irony, into the critical need of providing housing for a city where it is expensive and rare.
Pre-designed and pre-approved, these ADU (Accessory Dwelling Units) are intended to hurry up the construction of the second house in back of the first house transformation of Los Angeles.
Let’s look at what the architects have come up with.
Welcome Projects “The Breadbox”
Is a play on the traditional mission house with an oversized arched roof. Perhaps the closest to classic of all the designs, it has a cute appeal for those who are tired of the box.
Abou
A 1967 Laurel Canyon type intoxicated with rough wood siding and a slanted roof, not especially pretty to look at, but outfitted in white interior with blond wood floors. Picture Janis Joplin in a hot tub drinking whisky out of the bottle with Abby Hoffman and Jimi Hendrix.
Taalman Architects’ IT House
Perhaps the most Bauhausian of the group, this glass and steel box will allow its inhabitants full exposure to sunshine during the day and illuminate inside activities for outside spectators and neighbors at night.
Amunátegui Valdés ADU
Los Angeles zoning allows ADU’s to be built four feet from the back of property line.
So imagine how delightful it will be for neighbors who encounter a 15’ foot high building with an outdoor roof deck allowing partygoers and drunk revelers to float above all adjoining backyards like devilish angels? Here the architect has abandoned all pretense to privacy by designing a house where dozens of people can look down other people’s backyards from the top of a badly conceived back house. Imagine a house of YouTube influencers living here. What fun!
LA Más
“is a non-profit based in Northeast Los Angeles that designs and builds initiatives that promote neighborhood resilience and elevate the agency of working-class communities of color.”
Here virtue signaling meets up with 1980s post-modernism in gaily painted houses whose designs look like fast food outlets along the boulevard. The golden arches, the multi-colored column (kids eat free?), the decorative woodwork, these are FUN places with bright colors. And even if they are not especially attractive, and look like Walmart brand doll houses, they are immune from criticism by a vaccine of political correctness.
When Los Angeles is done bulldozing every backyard to “produce more housing” will the net effect be to put more cash in the pockets of those who already own houses?
Why not up-zone the miles and miles of one-story commercial buildings and huge parking lots that blight our city?
Why not leave in place the gardens, which are the only park system we have, and really ramp up the production of moderately priced residential units near public transportation?
Something to think about.
Below, in B&W, are current aerial photos of “downtown” Van Nuys.
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.
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.
Here in Van Nuys 
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