LA Times Coverage of Frank Gehry Redesign of Grand Avenue Project

photo courtesy of Related & LA Times

In this morning's LA Times Christopher Hawthorne has full coverage of the revised plans for the second phase of the Grand Avenue project - just re-designed by re-hired architect Frank Gehry - as reported here first last week.   And Hawthorne does a superb job of evaluating the politics and the design of the project.

Architect Frank Gehry's design for Grand Avenue retail, hotel & residential complex across from Walt Disney Concert Hall to be submitted Monday.
By Christopher Hawthorne, Los Angeles Times Architecture Critic

Frank Gehry and Related Cos. have kissed and made up. Now we'll see if city and county officials bless the reconciliation.

After soliciting plans from other architects in recent months, Related has put Gehry back in charge of the design team for a $650-million retail, hotel and residential complex on Grand Avenue in downtown Los Angeles. On Monday the New York-based developer will submit a new proposal by Gehry's firm to the committee overseeing the project. Gehry's design is significantly more exuberant and suggestive of L.A. culture than designs for the site by the firms Gensler and Robert A.M. Stern Architects, which Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina, chair of the committee, blasted in September as bland and uninspired. It calls for a stacked collection of shops and restaurants forming a U-shaped plaza directly across from Walt Disney Concert Hall.

The development will be crowned by a pair of towers, one holding a 300-room SLS Hotel and the other filled with condominiums and rental apartments. A series of terraces, restaurant patios and pool decks, many of them generously landscaped, cascades down along Grand facing the concert hall. Related now hopes to build the project in a single phase rather than constructing the residential tower first. Construction is pegged to begin in 2015 and finish by 2019.

What Hawthorne does not mention is the SLS Hotel will be built and run by Westside hospitality and hotel kind - Sam Nazarian.

The new version is simpler and more efficient than Gehry's original scheme for the site, which first surfaced in 2006. Boxy towers step up from a jumble of forms at ground level, replacing the wavier, more fluid forms of the earlier design. The residential building, the taller of the two towers, includes an open-air garden serving as a sky lobby for the condos on its top floors.

Gehry's willingness to rethink his original design to meet the financial reality of the LA real estate market is what made his return to Grand Avenue possible.  No developer can build a project without financing and no bank will finance a project that can not cover its costs.

Though the towers remain works in progress, the proposal is better developed at street level than in any of the previous designs. The plaza facing Disney Hall is more open and confidently resolved in its design than before.
A generous connection through the project down to Olive Street — a crucial element in the project's links to the base of Bunker Hill and the rest of a revived downtown — would allow pedestrians along Olive to look up through the complex, as if through a picture window, and see Disney Hall.

Gehry's buildings since Disney Hall have progressively gotten better and better at meeting the ground and relating to the environment around them.  He acknowledges this by proposing to redesign the streetscape on both sides of Grand and by also re-imagining Disney Hall's lobby and ground floor spaces to make them more welcoming to pedestrians.

Gehry has toyed with the idea of a narrow pedestrian bridge leading from the apartment tower, near 2nd Street and Grand, across to Disney Hall's upper-level garden.In addition, he is in the early stages of work with the Los Angeles Philharmonic to redesign the concert hall's lobby and ground-level spaces along Grand Avenue.

The result may be to move the Disney Hall gift shop inside the hall and bring its cafe, now buried deep inside the building, out to Grand.In a new twist, Gehry says he hopes to redesign the paving pattern of Grand Avenue itself between 1st and 2nd streets and string lights above the street between the concert hall and the new complex.

The extra attention to the Grand Avenue streetscape in the new plan is welcome but also carries a few risks. The last thing pedestrians on Grand or concertgoers coming out of Disney Hall want is a sense that the street design itself is funneling them straight into an open-air shopping mall.

This last point is my only real disagreement with Hawthorne's review.   Right now, Grand Avenue's biggest problem is none of the current projects reach out and invite the public inside them.   Even more confusingly, what he calls an 'open-air shopping mall', looks to be one of the great public spaces in Downtown Los Angeles. That plaza/shopping mall is also project's  - and Grand Avenue's - connection with Olive Street and last phase of the Grand Avenue Project between Olive and Hill  - and it will one day become Bunker Hill's long needed connection to all of  Historic Downtown.

In general, however, the new design is more open to Bunker Hill and downtown than earlier versions. It relates more subtly not just to Disney Hall but also to Eli Broad's forthcoming art museum, the Broad, at 2nd and Grand.

To a fascinating degree it is precisely Gehry's energetic and unfussy aesthetic, which can appear chaotic at first glance, that makes these new urban connections possible. The jumble of patios, restaurant terraces and pool decks along Grand pivots slightly but strategically at each level, allowing some portions of the development to face the Broad while others offer direct views of Dorothy Chandler Pavilion or Disney Hall itself.

And you can read the rest of the article (which has a lot more information) - here.