Architect

Will the Academy's big bubble pop before it has a chance to be built? Italian architect Renzo Piano, Los Angeles architect Zoltan Pali and officials from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled preliminary designs Thursday for a $300-million film museum at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The architectural centerpiece of the 290,000-square-foot complex, just west of the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, would be a giant glass-enclosed dome, which Piano refers to as the "sphere" and the "soap bubble.

Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, an architect who changed the face of Mexico City by designing a number of landmark modernist structures, died on Tuesday, his 94th birthday. The cause was pneumonia, according to Mexico's National Council for Culture and the Arts. Ramirez Vazquez was known for stunningly original designs that blended a European modernist sensibility with pre-Columbia aesthetics. His most famous modernist buildings, all in Mexico City, include the Basilica of Guadalupe, one of the country's holiest shrines; the National Museum of Anthropology, distinguished by a vast, square concrete umbrella; and Azteca Stadium, open since the mid-1960s and home to Mexico's national soccer team.

Takashi Kobayashi is out of his tree. The self-taught Japanese designer, carpenter and architect of 120 jaw-dropping tree houses - some sleek modernist cubes, some gnarly fairy-tale cottages - recently unveiled his first Los Angeles work, a small-scale installation of found wood and live plants at In Aqua Veritas, the vintage goods outpost of the Silver Lake home décor store Feal Mor. “There's a whole modern-hippie, tree-hugger vibe,” store...

Will the Academy's big bubble pop before it has a chance to be built? Italian architect Renzo Piano, Los Angeles architect Zoltan Pali and officials from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled preliminary designs Thursday for a $300-million film museum at Wilshire Boulevard and Fairfax Avenue. The architectural centerpiece of the 290,000-square-foot complex, just west of the campus of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, would be a giant glass-enclosed dome, which Piano refers to as the "sphere" and the "soap bubble.

In a return to form for the most prestigious award in architecture, Japan's Toyo Ito has won this year's Pritzker Prize. After honoring younger and lesser-known figures in recent years -- including 49-year-old Chinese architect Wang Shu in 2012 -- the Pritzker jury this year chose a well-established architect with 40 years of built work to his credit. For at least a decade Ito has been a presumed Pritzker front-runner. Along with Tadao Ando, the 1995 Pritzker laureate, the 71-year-old Ito is the dean of Japanese architecture, though with his mop of black hair he looks many years younger.

'Eames: The Architect and the Painter' No MPAA rating Running time: 1 hour, 24 minutes Playing: Laemmle's Music Hall 3, Beverly Hills

When it comes to uses of bamboo, many think of chopsticks, panda food or patio furniture. Simon Velez, on the other hand, envisions bus stations, churches or bridges. The Bogota, Colombia-based architect is leading a global crusade for new uses of the plant, a giant member of the grass family, as a strong, eco-sustainable, aesthetically pleasing material that can substitute for wood and concrete in many projects. Velez was long a lonely advocate, with most of his colleagues viewing bamboo as fit only for use as a finishing material in matting or plywood.

Anne Tyng, a pioneering female architect whose ideas about geometry influenced Louis Kahn's modernist buildings and who later had a child with him, has died. She was 91. Tyng died Dec. 27 in Greenbrae, Calif., where she lived, said her daughter, Alexandra Tyng. Although Tyng was among the first group of women to graduate from Harvard University's architecture school in 1944, she struggled her entire career to be taken seriously. Firms would not hire her because she was a woman.

Charles Gwathmey, an architect known for his influential modernist home designs and famous clients, has died. He was 71. Gwathmey died of cancer Monday in Manhattan, said his stepson, Eric Steel. The architect formed the firm of Gwathmey Siegel & Associates with Robert Siegel in 1968. Along with homes, their projects included a controversial overhaul and addition to New York's Guggenheim Museum.

Eldon Davis, an influential architect known as the father of the California coffee shop for midcentury designs inspired by the Space Age and the region's car culture, has died. He was 94. Davis died Friday at a West Hills hospital of complications from spinal meningitis, said his wife, Luana. When America was in love with aerodynamic design, Davis devised a concept for Norms restaurant that made it appear poised for liftoff. Built on La Cienega Boulevard in 1957, Norms had many features that came to typify the whimsical style of architecture known as Googie — a vaulted roof that resembles a flying wing, a room-length dining counter and an attention-grabbing vertical neon sign with roots in Las Vegas kitsch.

Paolo Soleri, an Italian-born architect who created a visionary prototype for a new kind of ecologically sensitive city in the remote Arizona desert four decades ago, only to watch the suburban sprawl he detested begin to creep near it in recent years, has died. He was 93. Soleri died of natural causes Tuesday at his home in Paradise Valley, Ariz., according to an official with the architect's foundation . PHOTOS: Paolo Soleri | 1919-2013 A onetime apprentice at Frank Lloyd Wright's Taliesin West compound on the edge of Scottsdale, Ariz., Soleri founded his own desert settlement, called Arcosanti, in 1970 at a site roughly 70 miles north of downtown Phoenix.

Over in one corner is a replica of the Wright Brothers' 1903 Flyer, the world's first piloted powered aircraft. Elsewhere in the former Santa Monica Airport hangar are a 1929 Lockheed Vega and a 1939 Howard DGA-15. But the newest feature at Santa Monica's Museum of Flying takes aim at the future of airline service - what is coming in the next few months to nearby Los Angeles International Airport, and also what airports everywhere could look like 150 years from now. A detailed, 24-foot scale model of the $1.5-billion makeover of LAX's Tom Bradley International Terminal will be displayed at the museum through Aug. 25 as part of an exhibition called Now Boarding: Fentress Airports + The Architecture of Flight.

SAN FRANCISCO - On the morning of Oct. 30, as New York surveyed the damage left by Hurricane Sandy, word began to spread that Lebbeus Woods, the experimental architect known for his dystopian and densely layered drawings, had died in Lower Manhattan at the age of 72. Woods' death, it turned out, was wedged into the watery and windblown space on the calendar between the arrival of the hurricane and Halloween. It was almost as if he'd drawn it up himself. As a new exhibition at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art makes clear, Woods was most at home in precisely that kind of shadowy and forbidding landscape.

In a return to form for the most prestigious award in architecture, Japan's Toyo Ito has won this year's Pritzker Prize. After honoring younger and lesser-known figures in recent years -- including 49-year-old Chinese architect Wang Shu in 2012 -- the Pritzker jury this year chose a well-established architect with 40 years of built work to his credit. For at least a decade Ito has been a presumed Pritzker front-runner. Along with Tadao Ando, the 1995 Pritzker laureate, the 71-year-old Ito is the dean of Japanese architecture, though with his mop of black hair he looks many years younger.

There's sure to be much to pore over in "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990," the ambitious anchor show of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time series on modern architecture in and around Los Angeles. But it's on the periphery of this giant undertaking, which is funding nine major exhibitions and will sprawl across the calendar from early spring to midsummer, where the real surprises are most likely to be found. That's especially true of the shows aiming to look beyond well-known midcentury landmarks and reassess the work of the L.A. architects who emerged in the 1960s and '70s and challenged orthodox modernism in a range of ways.

Takashi Kobayashi is out of his tree. The self-taught Japanese designer, carpenter and architect of 120 jaw-dropping tree houses - some sleek modernist cubes, some gnarly fairy-tale cottages - recently unveiled his first Los Angeles work, a small-scale installation of found wood and live plants at In Aqua Veritas, the vintage goods outpost of the Silver Lake home décor store Feal Mor. “There's a whole modern-hippie, tree-hugger vibe,” store...

Anthony J. Lumsden, a prolific Southern California architect who helped develop new ways of wrapping buildings in smooth glass skins, accelerating a shift that reshaped skylines around the world, died Sept. 22 in Los Angeles. He was 83. The cause was pancreatic cancer, said his son, John, a Hong Kong-based architect who had worked with his father in recent years. Anthony Lumsden, known as Tony, served as design director at Daniel, Mann, Johnson and Mendenhall, the large architecture and engineering firm, from 1968 to 1993.

Modernist architect Eugene Weston III was in his early 30s when he declared that "the house is the last of the handcrafted objects" in an industrial age. The year was 1956, and he argued in The Times that even a modest house could be "more beautiful and meaningful" if it was built with post-and-beam construction that opens up interiors and invites the outdoors in through walls of glass. A third-generation Los Angeles architect, Weston built a string of midcentury homes here before spending three decades with a San Diego firm known for such large-scale commissions as the Old Globe Theatre, San Diego Wild Animal Park and several major buildings at UC San Diego.

Imagine the cost of getting a world famous architect - say, Frank Gehry or Zaha Hadid - to design a rug for your home. How much would that cost? For an answer that might surprise you, look to Arzu Studio Hope, a U.S. nonprofit organization that has launched 10 hand-knotted wool rugs designed by Gehry, Hadid, Michael Graves, Robert A.M. Stern and others. The Masters Collection is produced by highly skilled female weavers in the remote, poverty-stricken province of Bamyan, Afghanistan.

Balthazar Korab, an architect-turned-photographer with a wide-ranging eye whose moody, polished images captured the spirit of midcentury modern architecture and celebrated its masters, including Eero Saarinen and Mies van der Rohe, died Jan. 15 in Royal Oak, Mich. He was 86. Korab, who lived in Troy, Mich., died after a long period of decline caused by Parkinson's disease and a stroke, said his son, Christian Korab. A refugee from Communist-controlled Hungary, Korab came to the United States in 1955 and found work as a designer in Saarinen's Bloomfield, Mich., office.