Latest news with #LaBreaTarPits
Los Angeles Times
9 hours ago
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
Surprising ADU with tricked-out garage, rooftop deck matches family's playfulness
Barefoot, in shorts and a tropical-themed short-sleeved shirt, Will Burroughs walks through the narrow backyard of his Venice home and passes a football to his 7-year-old son Jack. It's a playful moment that instantly sparks the curiosity of the family's Australian cattle dog, Banjo, who comes running from the first floor of the newly added accessory dwelling unit, or ADU, at the rear of the property. Even though it's a small gesture, it encapsulates what Burroughs and his wife, Frith Dabkowski, hoped for when they added the ADU to their backyard. 'They're fun,' architect Aejie Rhyu said of the creative couple as she walked by the undulating two-story ADU she helped them realize. Rhyu's assessment helps to explain the joy that permeates the family compound, from the pink Los Angeles Toile wallpaper in the bedroom (humorously adorned with illustrations of L.A.'s beloved mountain lion P-22, the La Brea Tar Pits and Grauman's Chinese Theatre) to the tricked-out garage on the first floor, which includes overhead bike storage, an espresso maker, a mini-fridge and a large flat screen TV that allows Sydney-born Burroughs to watch Formula 1 car races and cricket games at 4 a.m. when his family is asleep. Like so many ADUs in Los Angeles, the couple's addition was driven by a need for more space to accommodate work and family life. At a time when California ADU laws continue to evolve to encourage more housing, the couple saw it as an opportunity to demolish their garage and build a new multipurpose flexible space that includes an office, garage and housing for family members from Australia who stay for weeks at a time. To help them create an ADU that was fun and ambitious, Burroughs reached out to his childhood friend, Australian architect James Garvan, whom he has known since kindergarten. Garvan said that when he first received a call from Burroughs about designing an ADU, he was impressed by the American concept of adding a second home on the same property as a larger one. 'It's an elegant way to activate parts of the city that are otherwise unused,' he said. The couple collaborated with Garvan on the design plans, but because he was in Australia, they subsequently engaged local architect Rhyu to deliver the project. Despite his location on the other side of the world, Garvan worked with the team during FaceTime and Zoom meetings. 'We wanted to contribute to the street and not just to the backyard,' Garvan said of a neighborhood tour he took on FaceTime with Burroughs. 'It was crucial that the ADU referenced the neighborhood. That's why we have the lovely tapered geometry and white fence paneling as cladding — it continues the fence and ties the house to the neighborhood.' The couple, 41-year-old marketing executives who met while working at an advertising agency in San Francisco, may have wanted a showstopper. But they also wanted to respect their neighborhood, where small bungalows coexist alongside enormous, newly built homes in a Brutalist style. 'We were adamant about not having a monolithic structure,' Burroughs said, emphasizing the neighborhood's diverse architectural styles where noted Los Angeles architects such as Frank Gehry, Ray Kappe and Barbara Bestor have all practiced their craft. Dabkowski, who was born in England and moved to Dallas when she was 11, shared a similar perspective in not wanting the ADU to stand out too much. 'I grew up in the suburbs where homes were built in a development and all looked the same,' she said. 'I love the array of different houses in Venice, but it is jarring when people build something out of scale with the neighborhood.' Situated on a corner lot, the two-story ADU appears simple and square from the street and curvaceous and soft from the backyard. While the traditional 1949 bungalow out front is one level, the ADU out back is tall but doesn't overwhelm the atmosphere of the street. Once inside the compound, the ADU, which cost approximately $450,000 after several increases due to the custom millwork and spiral staircase, is not what you would expect. And that's precisely the point. 'We told James from the beginning that the ADU is separate from the house and is supposed to be different,' Burroughs said. Clad in stained cedar siding with shutters that open and close like a music box, the ADU is composed of a 460-square-foot garage on the ground floor and a 560-square-foot one-bedroom unit one flight up. A custom steel spiral staircase connects the two floors on the outside of the building, as it would have eaten up too much space if placed inside. Above it all is a rooftop terrace with views of Santa Monica, the Marina and Penmar Park, with Burroughs affectionately comparing it to 'being up in the trees.' Inside, the open-plan kitchen, living room and dining area are flooded with natural light from two large circular skylights. A waterfall island, equipped with storage on either side, dips to form a dining room table. Floor-to-ceiling custom cabinets in the kitchen continue into the living room, where they create a media center. Adjacent to a queen-sized Murphy bed, there's a stackable washer and dryer, as well as a linen closet. Cork tile flooring adds warmth and serves as an acoustic buffer to help separate the unit from the office space below. Working with interior designer Danielle Lanee, Dabkowksi added colorful accents to the living spaces to make the interiors 'warm, inviting and fresh.' 'They wanted the ADU to be a fun experience for their guests,' noted Rhyu. 'There's an outdoor shower. Colorful lighting. It's quite different from the main house, but it works because it's situated on a corner lot. When you are in the backyard, you note that, but from the street, it almost feels like its own separate structure.' At one point, Burroughs worried they were having too much fun with the colorful interiors, which include pink and red clé tile in the bathroom, pale green custom cabinets in the kitchen and pink Flavor Paper wallpaper in the bedroom. 'I was worried it would feel like you were living in a Mondrian painting,' he said. Now that it's complete, however, Burroughs is thrilled with the way it turned out. 'Frith added a lot of whimsy to the ADU,' he said. 'I love that it feels homey and functional, and I love the balance with the architecture. Once you walk inside, you don't feel like you've sacrificed form or function.' In Sydney, where he grew up, Burroughs said architecture is often designed in harmony with the landscape. Here, his childhood friend was assigned the same task. 'I was impressed that James was able to take a rectangular block ... and make it sit beautifully with the trees and fence line,' he said. 'And Aejie took drawings from afar, accomplishing them by walking around with a camera and reviewing drone footage. Aejie was able to take his high-order thing and make it work.' Looking ahead, the couple envisions the unit could work as a rental, but for now, it has been booked by family and friends, including those who were displaced by the Pacific Palisades fires in January. The couple have hosted Burroughs' parents for six weeks at a time, and friends with three kids — who shared the Murphy bed — stayed for 10 days. 'It's nice to have enough space where family can come and stay comfortably for a decent amount of time,' Dabkowski said. 'Staying in an Airbnb is expensive.' The ADU impressed Burroughs' parents so much that they hired Gavan to design a home for them in Sydney now that they are downsizing. 'They were so impressed with the skylights, the airflow of the unit, which improves our quality of life tremendously,' Burroughs said. 'Our mothers are best friends. He's [Gavan] going to be a part of the family even more now.' 'I am happy that my friends like their home, but I hope the community likes it too,' Gavan added. 'I hope it contributes positively to the streetscape.'
The Guardian
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Modern marvel or concrete ‘blob'? Inside LA's divisive $700m art gallery
As Los Angeles county's new $720m art museum building nears completion, it's still haunted by a single, vexing question: how do you hang art in a gallery where every single wall is made of massive slabs of concrete? Designed by Peter Zumthor, a prizewinning Swiss architect, the new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has sparked controversy in the art world since its initial designs were made public in 2013. The monolithic concrete structure, which has been compared with a freeway overpass and an 'amoebic pancake', was built to replace four older Lacma buildings, which were torn down to make room for the stylish newcomer. The building will hold a rotating selection from Lacma's permanent collection of more than 150,000 art objects from around the globe. The creation of the new gallery space has been marked by unusual drama and contention. One of Lacma's major donors publicly broke with the museum as a result of conflict over how the permanent collection would be displayed. The construction site, which borders the LaBrea Tar Pits, is famous for the ancient fossils preserved in bubbling tar. Building a gigantic concrete building on tar-filled land in an earthquake-prone region caused additional costs and delays: thirteen sabre tooth tiger skulls were uncovered during construction. As the estimated cost of the project rose by nearly $100m, Zumthor, the star architect, publicly distanced himself from the results, saying he had repeatedly been forced to 'reduce' his design, and that the experience had convinced him to never again work in the US. The building, which was initially conceived as an all-black structure evoking a tar pit or an oil spill, will now remain the raw gray of unadorned concrete. On Thursday, Lacma's CEO, Michael Govan, who has championed the divisive project for nearly two decades, gave an early tour of the new space to a group of journalists, including some who have publicly criticized the building's design. The building, named the David Geffen Galleries after its largest donor, will officially open in 2026. Outside, the structure resembles a gleaming dinosaur egg on squat concrete legs, with a long tail of a gallery that curves over Wilshire Boulevard, allowing visitors to enter on both sides of the street. Inside, the building is all hulking concrete surfaces and curving walls of windows that let in the southern California sun – a striking but controversial choice for a museum, since paintings and drawings are typically kept out of direct sunlight. Govan defended the wraparound windows as essential for giving the museum a sense of place; he wanted visitors to 'know you're in Los Angeles – these collections are in Los Angeles'. The CEO led a crowd of journalists into one of the gallery's multiple entrances, which is at the top of a daunting flight of concrete steps. The museum CEO loves stairs, he explained: the only exercise he gets is climbing Lacma building stairs and pacing while talking on the phone. As Govan walked the journalists through the sinuous galleries, he was energetic, full of quotations and anecdotes about Zumthor, his star architect. Zumthor was not there. Govan noted that the sleek leather benches in the sunlit galleries were only there as temporary place-holders: Zumthor had requested red-brown leather benches stuffed with duck feathers, which had yet to be installed. When asked to respond to the many criticisms of the project, the CEO was defensive. The 'whole idea' of the space 'was a new idea, right, so you can't – no one's ever experienced this before', he said. 'That is the spirit of experimentation. That proof will be in the final results – of whether it works, and how the public responds to it.' Opposition to Zumthor's evolving design had been fierce. Some of the most dedicated critics of 'the blob' hated it so much they held an alternative design competition and bought full-page newspaper ads in protest. But to Govan, his building is not just a new gallery: it's a fundamentally new way of experiencing art, an attempt 'to reinvent art history for the 21st century'. The space was designed to be 'non-hierarchical', Govan said. He did not want to organize the museum's permanent collection by time period or geography or type of art: he recalled telling Zumthor that 'I don't want anyone in the front.' In practice, this means that all of the gallery space is on a single floor, and the layout of the rooms is unpredictable and confusing to navigate. 'The building itself really avoids linear histories or linear paths,' Govan said. 'The remit was to make something that was more like wandering in a park, where you curate your own journey.' When the gallery opens in 2026, Govan said, the first show will be organized around the 'muse' of four different oceans, including a mix of Mediterranean art, and a Pacific collection that brings together California artists with those from Japan. Zumthor and Govan's vision has its prominent defenders. Brad Pitt showed up to a public meeting in 2019 to praise Zumthor's 'mastery of light and shadow', and spoke in favor of the new Lacma building for so long that an elected official told him to 'wrap it up'. Architectural Digest, in a preview piece in June, hailed the new building's 'curatorial provocations and challenges to the shibboleths of the art world'. But while the journalists on Friday's preview tour were polite, their questions made clear that the criticisms of Lacma's new building were not going away. The practicality of the concrete walls has remained front and center in the debates, including in a series of eviscerating columns by Los Angeles Times' art critic Christopher Knight, who won a 2020 Pulitzer prize for his critiques of a building plan funded in part by $125m in taxpayer dollars. 'How do you hang paintings on concrete walls?' Knight asked in 2019, calling the idea 'nutty'. He nicknamed Zumthor's building 'the Incredible Shrinking Museum', noting that the amount of planned gallery space in the new structure had shrunk throughout the planning process, resulting in a smaller amount of total display space than in the razed buildings it replaced. Asked again on Friday about how curators would hang art on the minimalist concrete, Govan was breezy: 'You can just drill right into the walls,' he said. 'It's very sturdy–you can hang Assyrian relief.' When they needed to change the exhibit, Govan said, they would simply fill up those holes and drill new ones. He noted that there were several patches on the walls already. Someone asked if constantly drilling and patching the walls would destroy the beautiful minimalist surface of the concrete. 'It's supposed to be like a good pair of old blue jeans that gets better with time,' the CEO said. And he believed in the new gallery's longevity. Earlier, he had said, buoyantly, 'This building could last 500 years.'
The Guardian
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Modern marvel or concrete ‘blob'? Inside LA's divisive $700m art gallery
As Los Angeles county's new $720m art museum building nears completion, it's still haunted by a single, vexing question: how do you hang art in a gallery where every single wall is made of massive slabs of concrete? Designed by Peter Zumthor, a prizewinning Swiss architect, the new building at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Lacma) has sparked controversy in the art world since its initial designs were made public in 2013. The monolithic concrete structure, which has been compared with a freeway overpass and an 'amoebic pancake', was built to replace four older Lacma buildings, which were torn down to make room for the stylish newcomer. The building will hold a rotating selection from Lacma's permanent collection of more than 150,000 art objects from around the globe. The creation of the new gallery space has been marked by unusual drama and contention. One of Lacma's major donors publicly broke with the museum as a result of conflict over how the permanent collection would be displayed. The construction site, which borders the LaBrea Tar Pits, is famous for the ancient fossils preserved in bubbling tar. Building a gigantic concrete building on tar-filled land in an earthquake-prone region caused additional costs and delays: thirteen sabre tooth tiger skulls were uncovered during construction. As the estimated cost of the project rose by nearly $100m, Zumthor, the star architect, publicly distanced himself from the results, saying he had repeatedly been forced to 'reduce' his design, and that the experience had convinced him to never again work in the US. The building, which was initially conceived as an all-black structure evoking a tar pit or an oil spill, will now remain the raw gray of unadorned concrete. On Thursday, Lacma's CEO, Michael Govan, who has championed the divisive project for nearly two decades, gave an early tour of the new space to a group of journalists, including some who have publicly criticized the building's design. The building, named the David Geffen Galleries after its largest donor, will officially open in 2026. Outside, the structure resembles a gleaming dinosaur egg on squat concrete legs, with a long tail of a gallery that curves over Wilshire Boulevard, allowing visitors to enter on both sides of the street. Inside, the building is all hulking concrete surfaces and curving walls of windows that let in the southern California sun – a striking but controversial choice for a museum, since paintings and drawings are typically kept out of direct sunlight. Govan defended the wraparound windows as essential for giving the museum a sense of place; he wanted visitors to 'know you're in Los Angeles – these collections are in Los Angeles'. The CEO led a crowd of journalists into one of the gallery's multiple entrances, which is at the top of a daunting flight of concrete steps. The museum CEO loves stairs, he explained: the only exercise he gets is climbing Lacma building stairs and pacing while talking on the phone. As Govan walked the journalists through the sinuous galleries, he was energetic, full of quotations and anecdotes about Zumthor, his star architect. Zumthor was not there. Govan noted that the sleek leather benches in the sunlit galleries were only there as temporary place-holders: Zumthor had requested red-brown leather benches stuffed with duck feathers, which had yet to be installed. When asked to respond to the many criticisms of the project, the CEO was defensive. The 'whole idea' of the space 'was a new idea, right, so you can't – no one's ever experienced this before', he said. 'That is the spirit of experimentation. That proof will be in the final results – of whether it works, and how the public responds to it.' Opposition to Zumthor's evolving design had been fierce. Some of the most dedicated critics of 'the blob' hated it so much they held an alternative design competition and bought full-page newspaper ads in protest. But to Govan, his building is not just a new gallery: it's a fundamentally new way of experiencing art, an attempt 'to reinvent art history for the 21st century'. The space was designed to be 'non-hierarchical', Govan said. He did not want to organize the museum's permanent collection by time period or geography or type of art: he recalled telling Zumthor that 'I don't want anyone in the front.' In practice, this means that all of the gallery space is on a single floor, and the layout of the rooms is unpredictable and confusing to navigate. 'The building itself really avoids linear histories or linear paths,' Govan said. 'The remit was to make something that was more like wandering in a park, where you curate your own journey.' When the gallery opens in 2026, Govan said, the first show will be organized around the 'muse' of four different oceans, including a mix of Mediterranean art, and a Pacific collection that brings together California artists with those from Japan. Zumthor and Govan's vision has its prominent defenders. Brad Pitt showed up to a public meeting in 2019 to praise Zumthor's 'mastery of light and shadow', and spoke in favor of the new Lacma building for so long that an elected official told him to 'wrap it up'. Architectural Digest, in a preview piece in June, hailed the new building's 'curatorial provocations and challenges to the shibboleths of the art world'. But while the journalists on Friday's preview tour were polite, their questions made clear that the criticisms of Lacma's new building were not going away. The practicality of the concrete walls has remained front and center in the debates, including in a series of eviscerating columns by Los Angeles Times' art critic Christopher Knight, who won a 2020 Pulitzer prize for his critiques of a building plan funded in part by $125m in taxpayer dollars. 'How do you hang paintings on concrete walls?' Knight asked in 2019, calling the idea 'nutty'. He nicknamed Zumthor's building 'the Incredible Shrinking Museum', noting that the amount of planned gallery space in the new structure had shrunk throughout the planning process, resulting in a smaller amount of total display space than in the razed buildings it replaced. Asked again on Friday about how curators would hang art on the minimalist concrete, Govan was breezy: 'You can just drill right into the walls,' he said. 'It's very sturdy–you can hang Assyrian relief.' When they needed to change the exhibit, Govan said, they would simply fill up those holes and drill new ones. He noted that there were several patches on the walls already. Someone asked if constantly drilling and patching the walls would destroy the beautiful minimalist surface of the concrete. 'It's supposed to be like a good pair of old blue jeans that gets better with time,' the CEO said. And he believed in the new gallery's longevity. Earlier, he had said, buoyantly, 'This building could last 500 years.'
