For many cities, the grid of the streets and transit systems were likely laid down long before the buildings grew up around them, thanks to the rigor of planners and engineers who knew best. But as cities transition in ways that challenge the century-old plan, they need new and quick ways to improvise connections between areas of growth. These are known as "desire lines."
When Dallas Raines or the Times‘ weather page reports that it was 92 degrees in Los Angeles yesterday, their data likely come from one source: the National Weather Service’s downtown Los Angeles station on the University of Southern California (USC) campus.
In 1970, George Lucas needed dozens of actors with shaved heads for his sci-fi dystopian movie THX 1138. He had trouble filling the roles at first, since so few actresses wanted to cut their locks, but Lucas eventually found the extras he needed in a strange utopian community where everyone worshipped sobriety and expressed solidarity by shaving their heads. It was called Synanon, and over the course of three decades it would become one of the weirdest and most vindictive cults of the 20th century.
Someone’s doing dumb stuff with Smart cars in the Bay Area. A report says Los Angeles is beyond help. And did architect Thom Mayne’s new building damage a school’s legacy and the neighborhood it calls home? It’s all this week in What’s Ruining Our Cities.
300 empty desks were placed in the street outside Los Angeles Unified School District headquarters earlier today as part of a protest demanding extra funding for disadvantaged youth. The 300 desks are meant to represent the approximate number of students who drop out of LAUSD every week. [Photo by Alicia M. Banks]
A new television series set in Los Angeles just got the green light—but don’t look for it on NBC, AMC, or even HBO. No, Bosch—an hourlong drama about a Los Angeles homicide detective—will stream to TV sets, laptops, and mobile devices via Amazon Prime.
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Paris is a bloodshot eyeball, São Paulo spreads out like a watercolor, and L.A. is a glorious mess. You can see how three very different metropolises expand and sprawl in these gorgeous animations produced as part of NYU’s Stern Urbanization Project, examining the growth of cities.
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The vast and looping knots of L.A.’s elaborate freeway system have long inspired an unlikely stew made from equal parts road rage, suffocating air pollution, and an unexpected aesthetic appreciation for their stacked coils and crisp lines. A drivable geometry textbook, the freeways are perhaps the city’s real monuments, Stonehenge-like megastructures that novelist J.G. Ballard would call "motion sculptures in space," abstract works of automotive art too easy to miss for all the oil stains and honking.
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When Los Angeles’s most expensive house went up for sale at $125 million, no one expected it to go for that price in a million years. Well, someone, identified only as a "French billionaire," has bought said house for only slightly less that that figure: $102 million. And just to rub it in, the dude paid cash.
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You probably don’t realize it, but hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of goods pass through airports every day inside of passengers’ baggage. Well, a ring of baggage handlers at LAX certainly realized it. Police say they’ve been stealing thousands of dollars worth of goods right out of people’s suitcases for months.
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