oneshotexhibition.org blog

East of Downtown Los Angeles, across the LA River, Boyle Heights is probably the most understood communities and the most culturally vibrant areas in LA where the next couple of years there is going to be a resurgence of redevelopment.

With the extended Gold Line going through the neighborhood, the Wyvernwood Garden Apartments will be redevelop at a tune of 2 billion dollars, which will quadruple the size of the current site. Even though some people will say gentrification will transform itself into a another Venice in the eastside, where prices will increase and will start to remove small business in the area, but the possibility of it won’t occur until LA become more dense and corporate business start plotting their shops and headquarters next to local gangs territory.

We’ll see what happens when good urban planning and design will prevail in a otherwise historical suburban neighborhood.

Mariachi Plaza @ Boyle Heights (by Scheer Images)

Breed Street Shul Synagogue on 247 North Breed Street. One of the oldest Synagogues in Los Angeles. (Scheer Images)

Front doors of Breed Street Shul Synagogue (Scheer Images)

Torres Closeout @ 2005 E. 1st Street, Los Angeles, CA 90033 (sells CAB Streetwear)

Song of the Blog: Estoy Sentado Aqui (“I am seated here”) by Los Lobos on the Album La Pistola y El Corazon

The Disney Hall alongside with the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion

One of the things that make cities successful is the dispersement of public programs or venues serving the community throughout the city. It seems to be Los Angeles is still lacking a good urban design format in which make sense in creating a multiple centers of interest surrounding Los Angeles, especially downtown.

Back in the eighties and early nineties, like most cites, Downtown Los Angeles was a big sewer rat hole with all its pimps, prostitutes, homelessness, drug addicts and derelicts. No one in their right mind would enter downtown at night unless you were adventurous or be able to bring their own clean needles and do that stuff.

Now, there is a resurgence of new development of residence, institutional headquarters, performance and entertainment centers that is catapulting Los Angeles into a world-class city. Downtown Los Angeles has seen this much attention in reshaping civic

But one problem is the imperceptive placement of the Disney Hall next to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion. Why is it that the case when they serve the same purpose? Is there a rhyme or reason? Where they’re any consideration in other areas besides to build it right next to the Music Center?

This calamity could only be force by capitalizing on saving the Music Center viability or government/Disney Company insistence in having it on that site. The streetscape surrounding Disney Hall is not compelling as compare to the Paris Opera House by Charles Garnier or the situation the Music Center has with the Civic Corridor, which integrates with the direct axis from City Hall to the Department of Water and Power Building.

Paris Opera House by Charles Garnier

It would have been well served if Disney Hall were place in a decentralize zone of downtown, somewhere within the boundaries of downtown where it could be strategically place of urban conditions and connectedness. Sometimes history plays a role for newer cities (ie. Los Angeles) but not necessarily model from well established cites in Europe, but to gain knowledge and to implement a thoughtful and resourceful urban design. Buildings need to be in a macroscopic level, rather than microscopic level in regards of urban design and territory, and the program of the building itself plays part of it.

Song of the Blog: All a Dem a Do by Noiseshaper and Juggla from the CD The Signal

The eastern part of the Los Angeles region, the City of Downey, home of the Carpenters, the Blasters, Weird Al Yankovic and James Hetfield of Metallica, is a blue-collar suburban neighborhood where the major industry was the Rockwell Rocketdyne division (aerospace industry) and Coca-Cola distribution factory. Mostly a flatland territory, dominated by your usual suspects of strip malls, ginger bread ranch homes and car-dealership lots.

A great deal of the area has not transform itself a situation what is happening in the Westside of Los Angeles with gentrification, high property values, old mom and pop establishment disappearing and at times snobbery of its residences, usually they are transplants. You could still find Chris’ and Pitts Restaurant on 9243 Lakewood Blvd. and one of the original MacDonald’s hamburger stands (3rd oldest), which also has a mini museum on location. These are landmarks that define our culture and the city of Downey.

Like most suburban territories, McMansions has become more prevalent in the neighborhoods, and even the destruction of cultural and historical landmarks like Johnies Broiler on Firestone Boulevard and Old River School Road.

Johnies Broiler has been embroiled in a discussion whether it is salvageable since part of the structure has been torn down. There has been a grass-roots initiative to save Johnies and a article in the LA Times showing the importance preserving what is left in a ever changing landscape that loses a bit of history.

What are the possibilities in reforming and reconstituting Johnies Broiler into a different use where elements of a bygone era can be integrated into a new form of development and revitalization? Can that marriage last under the cloud of progress where history, redevelopment and rezoning plays a part in suburban neighborhoods becoming more urban?

These are the challenges in which urban designers and architects must tackle in the ever-changing suburban landscape.

The oldest Mcdonalds w/ Speedee on top of the sign @ the corner of Lakewood Blvd. and Florence Ave. in Downey.

The original golden arches.

The old town center in the City of Downey @ Downey Ave.

One of the oldest homes in Downey @ the corner of Paramount Blvd. and 3rd Street.

The oldest house in Downey with its water tower.

Johnies Broiler on Firestone Blvd. near the corner of Old Rivers School Road in Downey.
Signage view of Johnies Broiler looking west on Firestone Blvd.

Destructive view of the car canopy @ Johnies Broiler

A closer look of Johnies Broiler

Song of the Blog: We Only Just Begun by the Carpenters on the album Close to You

One of the sticking points in the upcoming February primary elections are Proposition 94, 95, 96 and 97 which will increase the gaming operations for the Pechanga, Morongo, Agua Caliente and Sycuan Gaming Tribes and will bring needed money for the fiscal strap state budget programs, but is OK to allow this type of gaming where the tribes themselves are prospering to be sustainable away financial hardship from the past injustice? Are they greedy to increase the amount of gaming in their own reservations? What happens when our state vote yes for the four propositions? Will they build more casinos on their own reservations and look like a mini-Las Vegas that will destroy the natural landscape that we as Californians and the beliefs of Native Americans philosophy of preserving and protecting our native heritage? It is not very clear-cut on what is at stake.

In the article on the LA Weekly “Tribal Flush” by Marc Cooper, there has been a lost of integrity amongst gaming in reservations when it was first approved by California citizens and started operation in 2002. It is sad on what Indian gaming has become when money is the root of all evil. They start to disenroll their own tribal members, even though they has direct genetic lineage to their ancestry.

The concern I have is the cultural legacy they are leaving behind. Their success are not best representative on who they are and what they stand for. They seem to build and present themselves as typical white-blooded cooperate Americans with their boxy, Las Vegas style Casinos and typical suburban homes with their SUV’s. Most of the tribal centers are uncharacteristic to the natural scenery and has no relation Native American ideology. They have become institutionalized.

A boxy display of Native American Casinos (Chumash Casino and Resort in Santa Yanez, CA)

Song of the Blog: Pyramid Song by Radiohead on the CD Amnesiac

Thank you for keeping up your attention span on the upcoming exhibition. 2008 is going to be an exciting and memorial year, with One Shot Exhibition finding a venue, recruiting designers and architects to present their ideas and talent for Los Angeles and the upcoming presidential elections.

To reiterate the intention of One Shot Exhibition, it is an opportunity for young designers and architects to present theirs ideas to the public in a more thoughtful and meaningful way to give communities in LA an act of semblance, identity and cultural/civic awareness. It tends to be more about people, crowds, historical context and sustainability than images that architects want to display their work as manifestos or to legitimatize their genius, which is being a singular afterthought.

In the coming months, this blog will inform any notices or changes that might effect in reaching close to the approximate date of the exhibition. Most of the posts (blogs) will somehow detect or influence towards the works that will be presented at the exhibition. It will have binding effect.

Anyone who like to participate and present their ideas to the public and engage their interest into neighborhoods as cultural centers to improve and educate the community on who we are as a modern, civilized world. You will not only become designers but developers in order to create programs, services and space, which will become urban projects in suburban territories, and will educate the importance of good design and civic responsibility. You are very much of the decision maker on the issues you are familiar with or compel to address the important subjects that are close to your heart (such as sustainability, gender, politics, urban planning and etc.).

The goal is to use a wide variety of ideas for the public use to gain some kind of identity which they could relate and see it as a positive form for urban renewal in areas that are not focus on redevelopment around Los Angeles and parts of Southern California, using architecture and design as a vehicle in promoting insightful and human aspects and symbols of our society, true characteristics of our natural existence.

In the book “Production of Space” by Henri Lefebvre, he served legitimate questions on how space and time is created as a view of self-actualization:

1. Do the spaces formed by practico-social activity, whether landscapes, monuments or buildings, have meaning?

2. Can the space occupied by a social group or several such groups be treated as a message?

3. Ought we to look upon architectural or urbanistic works as a type of mass medium, albeit an unusual one?

4. May a social space viably be conceived of as a language or discourse, dependent upon a determinate practice (reading/writing)?

If you are interested in presenting your work as buildings, not as installations, leave your email in the comments below or leave it on the contact page of One Shot Exhibition. Not only it is an exciting time to be in situation where Los Angeles is evolving into an urbanized city but also we are heading to a critical stage where ideas can form a new wave of responsibility and design for the future.

Song of the Blog: Step On by Happy Mondays on the CD album Pills ‘n; Thrills And Bellyaches