Tag: design

Glamorous Granny Flat.

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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

Populating Van Nuys with Fine Architecture

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VNB: 1952, photo by Alan Weeks.

DWP Collection

Van Nuys (b. 1911) began as a town, centered around a main street, connected to Los Angeles by streetcar and rail.

It built its fire station, library, city hall,  police station, and its churches, schools, shops and post office steps apart. On foot, a person could buy a suit, take out a library book, mail a letter, and walk to school.

Come to think of it they still can. But it was all there in downtown Van Nuys.

Today you might stand outside the LAPD Van Nuys Station and smoke a joint, drink a can of beer,  pee against a wall and nobody would raise an eyebrow.

The librarian, the cop, the priest, the attorney, they would walk past you and shrug their shoulders and mutter, “What can I do?”

We are so tolerant these days. Everything degrading is welcomed, while everything worthwhile is rare, expensive  or extinct.

Posture Contest, Van Nuys, 1958. Impossible to imagine these days with all the cell phone spines.

Surrounded by orange and walnut groves, the growing town nonetheless managed to provide safe, civilized and opportune situations for its newly arrived residents with affordable housing, subsidized by low interest government backed loans after WWII.

And plentiful, well-paying jobs. Imagine that!

Van Nuys, circa 1938.

Widening of Victory Boulevard: 1954.

Van Nuys Blvd. at Friar (circa 1950). Notice diagonal parking and streetcar wiring.

Van Nuys Bl. 2013

Somehow it was lost after 1945. The enormous shopping centers robbed Van Nuys of its clientele. The street widenings turned boulevards into raceways and the village feel was destroyed. Factories closed, banks shrunk, stores fled, and crime settled here to afflict, rob, disable and kill.

Why does Van Nuys flounder, while all around it other cities like Burbank, Glendale, Pasadena, and sections of Los Angeles, like North Hollywood, Studio City, Mid-City and Highland Park flourish?

Delano St. July 2017

Delano St. July 2017

 

Raymer St. March 2017

A journalist from Curbed LA called me yesterday. He is writing an article about Van Nuys and wanted to talk.

I mentioned many things that I wish were changed here, from road diets to better housing, from cleaner streets to more law enforcement for illegal dumping.

But I also told him that so much of our political leadership is devoted to working on problems like prostitution, rather than building a coalition of architects, designers, investors, and planners who could build up Van Nuys and make it, once again, a coherent, safe, stimulating, and pleasant place to live and work.

I know what’s bad here. But what about making it good? Where are our dreams? Why can’t we be as artistic as our studios, as wild in our imaginations as our writers, directors, cinematographers, animators, and designers?

Why isn’t the whole energy of creative Los Angeles devoted to overcoming our civic afflictions?

Near Cedros and Delano.

Van Nuys Bl. Nov. 2016

 

The deadest and more depressing areas of Van Nuys are closest to the Orange Line, which is also a good thing. Because this is where Van Nuys should work to build new, experimental, and innovative housing and commercial buildings.

Van Nuys Bl. Oct 2016 A dead place for street life.

The Empty Post Office/ Van Nuys Bl. Oct. 2016

Dystopian Van Nuys Oct. 2016. No people, no chairs, no trees. Just concrete.

Homeless on Aetna St. Feb. 2016

 

From Kester to Hazeltine, north of Oxnard, the “Civic Center” district contains an empty post office, vacated stores, underutilized buildings, and dystopian spaces of concrete, homelessness, garbage, and withering neglect.

The pedestrian mall on Erwin, south of the Valley Municipal Building and surrounded by the Superior Court, the library and police station, is a civic disgrace.

Ironically, all the law enforcement, all the government agencies, all the power that resides in Van Nuys….. presides over the ruins of it.

Meanwhile up in Portland, OR.

Holst Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)

Works Progress Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)

Works Architecture, Portland, OR (Dezeen)

Fujiwaramuro Architects, Kobe, Japan (Dezeen)

Van Nuys Alley near Delano and VNB

On Dezeen, there are posts about new, infill buildings in Portland, OR and Japan where the general level of architecture and design far outpaces Van Nuys. These are sophisticated, modern, but humble structures with ideas for living.

Look at these and imagine how, perhaps 25 new ones, could transform Van Nuys.

In the midst of our wasteland, we need to go back to working to demanding the best for Van Nuys, rather than accepting squalor and mediocrity.

 

 

Letter from an Old, Practicing Architect in Los Angeles

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12602 Moorpark St. Studio City, CA. 91604
12602 Moorpark St. Studio City, CA. 91604

Driving down Moorpark St. in Studio City last week, I passed a notably austere and well-designed apartment under construction. I stopped and walked around and shot some photos of the building which had precise lines, solid forms and possessed an architectural sensibility of the 1930s.

I later looked up the architect online and wrote him an email. To my surprise, he responded in detail. Even more surprisingly, he is a man who has been practicing architecture for over 50 years.

Here is what he had to say about the state of planning and architecture in Los Angeles, especially as it relates to the San Fernando Valley.

I have not disclosed his name to protect his privacy.

Dear Andrew:

Thank you for the complimentary words regarding my apartment project. They are truly appreciated. I looked at your excellent blog.

Your involvement in trying to better the quality of life in Los Angeles is noble. I suspect, however that you are constantly faced with the frustration and anger of dealing with a Los Angeles bureaucracy that has become stifling and counterproductive.

The planning department has been a dismal failure as long as I can remember and has continually failed to address the real and important problems that have faced our city.

Old Montgomery Ward. Panorama City, CA.
Old Montgomery Ward. Panorama City, CA.

I am sure you know the recent history of the Valley better than I do. I came to Los Angeles as a child in 1948, just after WW2 ended and lived in West LA.

A trip to the Valley was a bit of an adventure. Mostly open space. And it was hard to find a restaurant or much of anything. I did not realize then what we were soon going to lose. Tough-minded, enthusiastic, returning soldiers were coming to LA during this period wanting only to work and raise families in peace.

I was fortunate to have a few of these men as instructors at the U.S.C. School of Architecture. The Valley provided an abundance of cheap land on which to develop housing. And with the coming of these returning soldiers, a major Valley building boom began. Housing tracts and apartments were built as quickly and cheaply as possible. It was an exciting event to see a searchlight in the sky and drive towards it to find what new business opening it heralded.

Macy's, North Hollywood, CA.
Macy’s, North Hollywood, CA.

All of this was happening with virtually no master planning. One bland community rolled into another. As I drive the Valley today, I find it kind of fun to try to identify the architectural styles, if you can call them that, of each of the building booms in the 60 plus years since the end of the War. Thank God for the mature landscaping that is making the Valley environment somewhat more pleasant. I find myself, grudgingly, seeing a kind of quirky nostalgic beauty in whole thing. But enough rambling. No easy answers.

15300 Valerio St. Van Nuys, CA 91405
15300 Valerio St. Van Nuys, CA 91405

The specific problem you face in trying to elevate the quality of Architecture in LA is a tough one. It entails getting greedy bottom line developers to take an interest in the environments that they are building. They only ‘design’ that these developers relate to is that which they feel is necessary to rent or sale their product. This design is too often provided by their spouses or a friend with “good taste.”

A developer buddy of mine once exclaimed with the excitement of discovery that he had figured out how to build a modern building. It is simple he said – no details, white paint and a flat roof. He unfortunately built a number of large apartments in the Valley with his newly discovered understanding of modern architecture.

The developers must be taught that they have a moral responsibility to the community to provide good environment. Good luck on this one. Developers must also be taught that over time a well-designed building will make them more money.

Archwood St. near Van Nuys Blvd. Van Nuys, CA 91405
Archwood St. near Van Nuys Blvd. Van Nuys, CA 91405

The bureaucracy must be scaled down and restricted on the number of code provisions and roles that they can enact without public input and approval.

I have acted as an Architect, owner builder, and small time residential developer in LA for over a half a century. In the early 1960s, both the California State Board of Architectural Examiners and the A.I.A. for being an “Architect-Developer” chastised me.

There was a conflict of interest they said, not understanding the value of having the Architect as the developer as to opposed to a bottom line businessman. I chuckled when some years latter I ran across an ad for a course called the ‘Architect as a Developer’ sponsored by the A.I.A.

Studio City, CA.
Studio City, CA.

Yours is not an easy road to travel, but please keep it up.

If things are ever going to get better, and I am a pessimistic about this happening, it will take a rising up of the community, under leadership like yourself, to demand the changes you that you are seeking. Thank you for your efforts and good luck.

Van Nuys Bl. 2016
Van Nuys Bl. 2016

Anti-Family Planning.

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On the corner of Van Nuys and Burbank Boulevards, two large commercial buildings are going up simultaneously.

Chipolte (2011 net income was $214.9 million, an increase of 20.1%) is erecting a restaurant on the NE side, with the requisite peel-on bricks and pointy top roof, but commendably, its building comes right up to the sidewalk and will enliven the street with its presence.

But on the NW corner, the CVS Corporation ($7.2 b in net income, 2010) is constructing one of its signature cheapy drug stores, entirely of cinderblock, set back some 30 feet from the sidewalk, without windows and seemingly without any concern or regard for the urban possibilities and architectural imagination which it can surely afford.

It is a small point to discuss this one small drugstore, but one that has larger implications into how Angelenos and our city fail to plan and design commercial architecture to improve our neighborhoods through pedestrian-oriented design.

This area of Van Nuys is full of pleasant apartments and small houses, though much of it recently has seceded and renamed itself “Sherman Oaks”. It’s confusing, but the car dealerships are allowed to call themselves “Van Nuys” but the homes behind them are now in “Sherman Oaks”.

During the day, the street is a blindingly boring stretch of car dealerships that are slowly climbing back to sell us more of what is bankrupting us. Fill ‘er up!

And at night, the whole area is floodlit with acre upon acre of parking lots full of cars, watched over by security guards and security cameras.  Dog walkers with plastic bags full of warm shit stroll by quickly. There is nothing to do here other than get out fast.

So the corner of Van Nuys and Burbank cries out for some lively alternative, such as one of those Owl Drugstores that were all over Los Angeles in the 1940s, the ones that had plate glass windows and soda counters. Those are still the best example of what a drug store can aspire to.

And who would not prefer Owl with its old, artful, graceful pharmacy lamps and glass counters, corner awnings and decorative script lettering; against the modern, plastic CVS- a windowless box in a parking lot- which has aisles filled with disposable umbrellas, generic whisky, Halloween costumes and XXL t-shirts, which are stuffed into their ugly, fluorescent-lit emporiums?

In a few months, the new CVS will open and the parking lot will be filled with cars and litter, loud music and asphalt baking in the sun.  It will do a certain amount of business, and its numbers will be verified and approved by accountants, lawyers, and the CEOs of CVS.

But Van Nuys will gain nothing.

Architects in Mexico Design Homes that Help Women and Families.

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While America enters what seems like a permanent decline, Mexico, long poor and often derided, is moving ahead with progressive architecture and social innovations.

Adobe for Women is constructing twenty sustainable houses in  San Juan Mixtepec, in the south Mexican state of Oaxaca.

Read more about the project here.

“Walkville” Opens in North Hollywood

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One of the most exciting developments in San Fernando Valley urban planning is nearing completion in North Hollywood near the Red Line Terminus. Walkville is a 5,000 unit housing development which is entirely green. Landscaped bike and walking trails wend their way alongside apartment buildings where children, seniors and families live.  The goal is to encourage walking, which explains the wonderful name:  evocative of health, fresh air and friendliness.

Locally-produced and sustainable materials, from Burbank, Sylmar and Pasadena were given priority during sustainable housing construction; roofs are commonly equipped with solar and photovoltaic panels, and make Walkville one of the largest home solar energy districts in Southern California. To encourage carbon reduction, a program supports tree conversation and planting. As far as water is concerned, a system for rainwater infiltration into the ground covers 80% of the residential area. A new ecological sewage system has been invented too, that reuses organic household waste and generates energy.  The LADWP offers Walkville residents a 35% discount on their water and electric rates.

Councilman Tony Cardenas, builder Eli Broad, architect Frank Gehry as well as architecture supporters Brad Pitt, Robert Redford (who grew up in Van Nuys and feels a strong connection to the town), Nancy Reagan, Michael Eisner, Barbra Streisand, Jennifer Anniston (who grew up in Sherman Oaks), Comedian Jay Leno (“If it’s made in Burbank I’m for it!”) and Maria Shriver all contributed both financial and public support to the $250 million dollar undertaking.

A five-acre orange grove, the first such agricultural planting in the San Fernando Valley since 1939, will produce over 500,000 oranges a year. Herbs, walnuts, organic milk and free-range chickens may be introduced to produce locally grown foods for consumption and sale. 1300 Valley Oak trees, native to Southern California, will shade the development. Small stores, selling everything from coffee to groceries to housewares, are planned on the Vineland Avenue side. The best news is that 70% of the people who have moved to Walkville have given up their cars. They will ride the Red Line train to Hollywood, downtown LA and Pasadena and take the Orange Line bus to Woodland Hills.

The article you have just read is a satire. None of it is true, at least for the City of Angels.

Minus the celebrities, it actually and accurately describes a real town, called Vauban,  in Southern Germany.

Here is the way things really are in LA, a city where the NIMBY needs of Brentwood and Beverly Hills outweigh the greater good for all.