However, according to this most recent Los Angeles Times article, Gehry and team may not, in fact, simply decorate the river with the stand-alone monuments well attached to the name, such as the Walt Disney Concert Hall or the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in Spain, but will focus exclusively on the water-reclamation and hydrology potential for the project.
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The 1929 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for Los Angeles.
The information that the mayor is handing off planning to Gehry’s workplace is already upsetting longtime river advocates, together with Lewis MacAdams, co-founder of Buddies of the Los Angeles River.
Romero said Gehry had been studying the river in conjunction with the Revitalization Corp. since at least last November.
Gehry has designed some of the world’s most recognizable buildings. “We’re honored and excited to have Frank Gehry, a true genius, bringing his creativity and expertise into this vital project, and the River Link plan should reflect this profoundly positive development, as well as all the other great work that’s been done over the last [eight] years”.
Gehry has been assembling a gaggle of engineers and designers for conferences at his workplace.
Gehry told Garcetti he gets “hundreds” of queries to do projects from around the world, “but Los Angeles is my home” and he was approached by a nonprofit, the Los Angles River Revitalization Corp., to work on expanding an existing plan that applies only to the 32-miles flowing through Los Angeles to outside the city limits.
Omar Brownson, government director of the Revitalization Corp., calls this the “Gordian knot” of L.A. River planning.
Some were elated at the news of his role in the river overhaul.
Summed up by Christopher Hawthorne, the LA Times’ architecture critic, the plan is: “Gehry thinks [the LA River] could be turned into an entirely different kind of machine, one that could store and even treat storm water”.
Gehry insists that his effort can be complementary with earlier and ongoing ones, together with so-called Various 20, a federal plan that requires dramatically redesigning an 11-mile stretch of the river close to downtown. Architect Kevin Mulcahy of RAC Design Build, which opened four years ago in a warehouse in the riverside Elysian Valley neighborhood, said it was an exciting resolution to the question of who would ensure that the restoration project would have a unified design as it winds through a patchwork of cities and unincorporated county land.
“It ends a yearslong street fight over who might have the world-class vision and world-class capital to develop a comprehensive plan for transforming the entire river into a 51-mile-long public space”, he said. In his view, the concrete, perhaps the most maligned visual feature of the river, is “an architectural feature…” “Some have had more success than others”.
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“I do not see tearing out the concrete”, Gehry stated. “Frank Gehry might be able to do that”.
