Little swagger in plans for Bush presidential library

 

George W. Bush was a lightning rod of a politician. His presidential library is meant to be anything but.

Architectural plans released today for the $250-million, 225,000-square-foot George W. Bush Presidential Center, to be built at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, carry no hint of the swagger, bravado or taste for confrontation that Bush was known for as president.

Designed by New York's Robert A.M. Stern, arguably the country's leading historicist architect, the library is a handsome, contextual piece of architecture wrapped in Texas limestone (which may sound like a euphemism, like "Texas tea," but isn't) and red brick. Though on its main facades it uses classical themes in a mostly abstract way, rather than literally, it is very much meant to complement SMU's predominantly Georgian-style landmarks.

For Eli Broad, a tale of two sites

As my colleague Mike Boehm reported Monday, Eli Broad is considering at least two sites -- and potentially a third -- for a planned museum to hold the collection of his Broad Art Foundation, which is mostly dedicated to post-war and contemporary art and was once assumed to be headed for the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Tonight, the Santa Monica City Council will consider a plan for one of those sites, in the heart of the city’s civic center. Meanwhile, talks continue between the Broad Foundation and officials in Beverly Hills about a location at the intersection of Wilshire and Santa Monica boulevards.

How do those sites compare in urban and architectural terms as potential locations for the museum building Broad is planning, for which he is likely to enlist a prominent architect? I visited both spots Monday to produce this brief comparative sketch.

The Beverly Hills site is one that Broad has had his eye on for some time. It is a narrow, arrow-shaped parcel of land squeezed between Santa Monica and Little Santa Monica boulevards, and stretching from Wilshire southwest to Charleville Boulevard. It is across the street from the old CAA headquarters, designed by I.M. Pei, and directly between the Peninsula Hotel to the east and the Beverly Hilton to the west. The site is now occupied by a collection of two-story retail buildings opening onto Little Santa Monica, including a Starbucks at the northeastern end.

Architect Frederick Fisher: The anti-Thom Mayne?

The recent work of Frederick Fisher and Partners is deceptively simple. At the Annenberg Community Beach House in Santa Monica and a new academic building at Caltech, among other projects, Fisher has used a spare, restrained, formal approach to deal with a wide range of constraints and design pressures -- and carve out space for the consideration of history and memory.

In other words, Fisher has lately produced buildings that look precise and modern but suggest a respect for and understanding of the past more closely associated with postmodernist architects like Aldo Rossi and Robert Venturi. That combination is rare indeed.

Find out more about Fisher's recent architecture -- and why he might just qualify as the anti-Thom Mayne -- in a Sunday Arts & Music piece here.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photos, from top: Annenberg Community Beach House; Frederick Fisher. Credits, from top: Grant Mudford; Spencer Weiner / Los Angeles Times

What the new Julius Shulman documentary leaves out

It would be easy to think that we've heard all there is to hear -- or said all there is to say -- about Julius Shulman, at least for the time being. Dozens of obituaries, remembrances and eulogies followed the architectural photographer's death in July at age 98. And now, as if to top it all off, a documentary, "Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman," has arrived in theaters.

Directed by Eric Bricker in a fizzily honorific style, it features appearances by fashion designer Tom Ford, curator Joseph Rosa, architect Frank Gehry and actress Kelly Lynch, among many others.

And yet the movie does anything but neatly wrap up the photographer's place in history, or add a simple coda to the recent flurry of Shulmania. In fact, it suggests -- unwittingly, for the most part, and often in spite of its own straightforward, upbeat ambitions -- just how complicated and unresolved Shulman's legacy remains.

"Visual Acoustics" thoroughly and often playfully charts the progress of Shulman's career; the shades of his generally optimistic personality; his dislike, shading into hatred, for Postmodern architecture; and his late-in-life resurgence as a modernist revival began to gain momentum a decade or so ago. But it is decidedly less enthusiastic about exploring the wide, sometimes contradictory sweep of his influence, which in certain respects is a richer and more meaningful story. It steps back from confronting the ways in which the modernist architecture he championed and promoted helped push American cities -- Los Angeles in particular -- in directions the photographer himself either distrusted or actively tried to fight.

Preserving 1960s L.A. architecture: a minefield

The idea that Los Angeles should protect the best examples of its 1960s architecture seems unassailable, doesn't it? Who doesn't love the finest designs by John Lautner, Welton Becket or A.C. Martin and Partners? Who would argue with the importance of Dodger Stadium or the Theme building at LAX?

Not so fast. As a newly launched campaign from the L.A. Conservancy makes clear, the relationship between the late-modern architecture of 1960s and a healthy preservation movement is in fact something of a minefield, laden with contradiction, irony and even paradox. 

Find out why -- and how preserving the best of the 1970s promises to be even tougher -- here.

--Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: Architect Paul Williams and his Theme Building at LAX

Credit: Julius Shulman

In Dallas, an arts district rounds into shape

Though the arts district on the edge of downtown Dallas has a long and bumpy history, it is rounding into something at least resembling final form. Two much anticipated new buildings -- an opera house by Foster + Partners and a theater by Joshua Prince-Ramus and Rem Koolhaas -- will open next week, complemented by some new landscape design meant to knit the various parts of the district more effectively together.

As a group, the new elements are known as the AT&T Performing Arts Center, and they join existing venues in and around the arts district by an all-star lineup of architects including I.M. Pei, Renzo Piano, Edward Larrabee Barnes and Brad Cloepfil.

Still, the district remains decidedly less, as an urban whole, than the sum of its pedigreed architectural parts. Why is that? Is it a problem with the arts district model? Or with the specific planning in this case? Or with the particular architects enlisted in Dallas over the decades, and their desire to produce singular, stand-alone icons?

Find out in my review.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Photo: Dallas' new Wyly Theater, right, and Winspear Opera House, rear. Credit: Timothy Hursley

At the Julius Shulman memorial

On Sunday afternoon, the Getty Research Institute held a memorial service for architectural photographer Julius Shulman, who died in July at the age of 98.

The Getty Center's Harold Williams Auditorium was packed with architects, photographers, curators, historians, family members and a small smattering of celebrities. The program mixed personal reminiscences from architect William Krisel and architectural historian Thomas Hines, among many others, with a short panel discussion and a number of filmed snippets of the photographer at work and in conversation at his house and studio above Laurel Canyon.

Assuredly paced, and for the most part funnier than sad, the memorial reflected something fundamental about Shulman’s relentlessly upbeat if occasionally irascible personality.

It also offered reassurance that the Shulman archive, which includes a staggering 260,000 photographs and other items, is so far being well tended. In particular, the GRI deserves credit for seeing the archive not just as a resource for scholars but also as a means of outreach: a mechanism for conversation and debate about the city and its architectural heritage.

Fall architecture preview: In recession's shadow

There is no shortage of new projects by big-name architects readying to open this fall. In Dallas, Las Vegas and the Belgian city of Liege, to name just a few locations, buildings by Rem Koolhaas (and his former partner Joshua Ramus), Norman Foster and Santiago Caltrava, respectively, will draw curious fans of contemporary architecture. In downtown Los Angeles, the new Los Angeles Police Department Headquarters and another chunk of the L.A. Live complex will throw off their yards of construction fencing.

Each of these debuts, though, will be shadowed by the knowledge that the deepest recession since at least the early 1980s, and perhaps since the Great Depression, has at least for the time entirely sucked the air out of the profession. For nearly a decade, buildings by talented architects seemed to roll off some thrilling assembly line: Whatever one thought of a new batch, there was always another one waiting just behind it.

With that process now brought to a halt by tight credit markets and general economic wariness, the looming question is not really how successful this fall's group of new buildings turns out to be but rather what the next few years hold. Five or 10 years on, will we look back at this year as the time when architecture sputtered to a halt or merely paused to catch its breath?

See the season’s most-anticipated architecture by clicking on the photo gallery above.

-- Christopher Hawthorne

Ghost of Gehry: Third try for Brooklyn arena design

If there's one part of developer Forest City Ratner's giant plan for the Atlantic Yards site in Brooklyn that might actually get built, it's the proposed 18,000-seat Barclays Arena for pro basketball's Nets, who now play at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. Originally the arena, like the entire Atlantic Yards complex, was to be designed by Frank Gehry, but earlier this summer Forest City fired F.O.G. and replaced him with the Kansas City firm Ellerbe Becket, whose preliminary designs elicited both yawns and howls of protest.

This morning, the developer released yet another batch of arena renderings, produced by Ellerbe Becket in collaboration with the young, talented New York firm SHoP. Here are some quick thoughts on the third version of the arena, which rather than banish the ghosts of Gehry's design seems in part to revive them:

At Ambassador site, a Creamsicle-colored fresh start

Opening tomorrow is the first of three schools planned for the former site of Myron Hunt's 1921 Ambassador Hotel. The K-5 school, designed by the Pasadena firm Gonzalez Goodale Architects, turns a friendly and upbeat face to the mid-Wilshire district.

It also ups the gregarious quotient by pairing zinc panels and expanses of glass with walls, ceilings and floors in Creamsicle orange.

But will it erase the bitterness of the preservation fight that preceded it? Will it help redeem the mostly mediocre architectural track record of the LAUSD's huge building campaign?

And what does its design say about prospects for the middle school and high school -- both also by Gonzalez Goodale -- scheduled to open on the site a year from now?

Find out in my review.

More photographs of the school after the jump.

--Christopher Hawthorne