The City of Los Angeles is proposing to change the City’s Zoning Code to modify the existing Residential Planned Development (RPD) supplemental use district definition and process. If adopted as being presented by the Planning Department, the singular RPD would evolve to become the more plural Planned Developments or PDs. PDs, as described in the [...]

At this Forum Fest 2011, I have been asked to speak about John Chase. So many have written wonderfully of his personality, his sartorial predilections, his loves and greatest love, and even his sometimes difficulties, both professional and personal. John clearly was a captivating presence in our lives and we miss him. But rather [...]

Christopher Hawthorne has a point to make when he states in his December 30, 2010 review of planning in Los Angeles that, “…the extra-large deals always seem to get hammered out…while a more thoughtful, forward-looking and comprehensive brand of planning continues to lag behind, underfunded and undervalued.” He is also not wrong to note in [...]

I must confess I was not sad when I noticed that the Pinkberry on Larchmont Boulevard had vaporized over the holiday, vacated, gone, cute metal facade dismantled and shipped off for scrap, only a forlorn 25′ wide yellow stucco facade with show window and Herculite glass door covered with brown paper and awaiting the next [...]

For about fifteen years now there has been a focused discourse in the design professions about infrastructure. Infrastructure, that dimension of urbanism that for more that half a century has been the almost exclusive domain of engineers.  Infrastructure, the stuff of highways, sewers, high-tension electrical grids, fiber optic networks, etc. Infrastructure has become a fashionable [...]

I love our community newspaper, the Larchmont Chronicle. Even though I live in the second largest city in the United States, Los Angeles, and am a daily and faithful reader of the Los Angeles Times,  if one wants to know what’s happening in this city’s Mid-Wilshire, Miracle Mile, Hancock Park, and my neighborhood Brookside, communities, [...]

Today I was not so much a traveler as a listener (and sometimes contributor). For close to twelve hours I was immersed in the first of two days of discussions regarding development, redevelopment, urban design, planning, financing, branding, transit and traffic planning, affordable housing, and the politics of city design – in Israel. While I [...]

I am lucky enough to be attending, as a “resource team” member, the second Israeli Mayor’s Institute on City Revitalization. Based upon a similar program developed two decades ago in the United States by the National Endowment for the Arts, the program brings together Mayors who have a design, development, or environmental design challenge, with [...]

In my very first (and as it turned out only) job interview upon graduating from architecture school, the Associate Dean of a college of architecture asked me what I thought of my possible future home, Houston, Texas. This was a trap of a question on many counts. How can one answer it correctly when I [...]

John Chase, best known to many as urban designer for the City of West Hollywood for the past 14 years – even as he was recorder of all things architectural throughout Los Angeles – passed away suddenly and unexpectedly on Friday, Aug. 13. Over the next few weeks and months I will be re-reading his [...]