Articles from June 2012

By Javier Cabral
KCRW generated quite the design buzz this last weekend at the Dwell on Design exhibition. Sonic Trace, a project of KCRW & AIR (Association of Independents in Radio), was there to personally showcase the 30 submissions received for the sound booth design challenge, with a focus on the winning design submitted by Hugo Martinez and Christin To of Mat-ter: La Burbuja or …

Click to view FULL SCREEN, then SHOW INFO, this way you can view information about the submissions and the architects and designers!
Last month we launched a competition to find a design for a soundbooth for KCRW’s new series of stories called Sonic Trace, a new show of stories from Mexican and Central American immigrants being created by Anayansi Diaz-Cortes and Eric Pearse-Chavez (in partnership …

Last month we launched a competition to find a designer for a portable Sound Booth for KCRW’s new radio project, Sonic Trace. Hear about the winning design from Anayansi Diaz-Cortes, Eric Pearce-Chavez, David Greene and Hugo Martinez. Also, a look at infrastructure, both solid and air. Sam Lubell will talk about Metro’s choice of Gruen and Grimshaw to master-plan Union Station; and Andrew Blum takes us on a tour to the center of …

For a long time designers have wondered why LA doesn’t have its own Milan Furniture Fair or ICFF or 100% Design. Well, just as LA is evolving in its own sweet time and way (Joan Didion might say “slouching”) towards a public transit network and other hallmarks of older, denser cultural capitals, so its large, but disparate, Modern and contemporary design community is evolving …

Hollywood, June 5, 2012 – The Good4Nothing Connoisseur (aka Bennett Stein)
Auto-destruction adherents are on high alert as authorities canvass witnesses, chase down leads and sift through clues to solve an unspeakable act of violence in a city turned upside down. Evidence indicates that early Sunday morning armed assailants broke in and took axes, sex toy prosthetics and barbed epithets to Joel Chen’s Hollywood showroom that …

If it seems unusual for a deceased California architecture journalist to be in a titanic confrontation with some  Orange County pinball players, well, it is. But journalism has changed a great deal since the  days when Esther McCoy carved out a calm and clear voice, and a lifelong career, writing books and journals about Socal Modernism, without worrying if her articles got thousands of “Likes.”  
Now …

Several weeks ago I went to Frank Gehry’s office and he showed me a sketch model of his set for Don Giovanni, a seeming cluster of scrunched-up paper balls. He said, jokingly, something along the lines of, “critics have said my buildings are like crumpled paper; well, this set will be crumpled paper.” As it turns out, he wasn’t joking. His set was that …