Month: December 2002

In another symptom that the Bilbao-Effect cannot be easily reproduced (if at all), the Guggenheim proposal for the Gehry structure on the East River was cancelled yesterday, according to the New York Times. See Guggenheim Drops Plans for East River Museum

The Washington Post reports that the number of pay phones in the US has dwindled from 2.7 million to 1.9 million. Does the cell phone’s rise mean the end of the pay phone? See Requiem for the Pay Phone

Christopher Reynolds reports on demolition in Los Angeles in today’s Los Angeles Times: Out with the old

The NYT reports more bad news for Rem Koolhaas in the ongoing story of OMA’s troubled attempts to re-create the supposed “Bilbao-Effect” See Retrenching Guggenheim Closes Hall in Las Vegas

Broadband is spreading to the countryside says the Boston Globe

The LA Times dissects the decision to give up on OMA’s planned reconstruction of LACMA. Go to the article.

According to the LA Times, the More Pieces Fall Into Place for Downtown L.A. Revitalization. The LA Times seems particularly excited about Ralph’s Supermarkets’ announcement that it will open a store in the neighborhood.

If wireless is the wave of the future, why is Hughes Electronics Corporation shutting down DirecTV DSL? See the Reuters piece: Yahoo! Hughes to Shut Down High-Speed Internet Service

LA Times architecture critique Nicolai Ouroussoff laments LACMA’s decision to put on hold the Koolhaas project. We’re puzzled as to why. Destroy one of the few successful urban spaces in Los Angeles? Tear down buildings that are part of LA’s history (think of Ed Ruscha’s “LACMA on Fire”)? Replace it with a big top (we all know what that did to SCI-Arc…which was clearly Koolhaas’s inspiration)? Ouroussoff also seems to miss the point that OMA’s star is in rapid decline since the NY Prada store opened. See Prudent decision for LACMA is a setback for the city. For a radically different perspective, see my article on LACMA and our obsession with museum-cities: Cathedras of the Culture Industry

The 11 December issue of the LA Times carries Reassembling a Sad Chapter of History, on the National Park Service’s restoration of Manzanar, an internment site of Japanese-Americans during World War II located in the Owens Valley. During 2003, I will be undertaking a collaborative project on the Owens Valley with the Center for Land Use Interpretation