Architects

Some of L.A.'s best known architecture firms and artists have designed one-of-a-kind lamps to be auctioned Nov. 2 at a fund-raiser for the MAK Center in West Hollywood. Among those who designed, produced and donated their work for the event, dubbed “Light My Way, Stranger” : Ball-Nogues Studio, Cory Buckner, Ehrlich Architects, Hodgetts & Fung, Eric Owen Moss, Barbara Bestor, Dewey Ambrosino, Liz Larner and Sam Durant. All proceeds will support the nonprofit MAK Center for Art and Architecture's programming and stewardship of three dwellings by architect R.M. Schindler: the landmark 1922 Schindler House in West Hollywood, the 1939 Mackey Apartments in the Mid-Wilshire district of L.A., and the 1936 Fitzpatrick-Leland House, the Hollywood Hills West residence where the auction will be held.

Raymond Watson, the architect and community planner who steered the development of Orange County's signature master-planned city of Irvine and briefly ran Walt Disney Productions during one of its most tumultuous periods, has died. He was 86. Watson died Saturday at his longtime home in Newport Beach from complications of Parkinson's disease, his family said. A carpenter's son, Watson was born in Seattle in 1926 and raised by his grandmother in what he described as a rootless childhood in Oakland, sometimes in boardinghouses.

The long-awaited movie museum in Hollywood moves another step closer to fruition with the announcement today by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences that it has raised its first $100 million in its goal to generate $250 million toward the new institution. The academy also announced its vision for the museum, slated to open in 2016, by architects Renzo Piano and Zoltan Pali, which will include the complete restoration of the old May Co. building -- a 1938 Streamline Moderne structure -- located on Wilshire and Fairfax.

Rep. Paul D. Ryan was booed at the annual AARP convention Friday after saying that, if elected, their Republican administration would repeal the nation's healthcare law as the best way to save Medicare. Just five minutes into his talk at the gathering of the powerful 50-and-older lobby, Mitt Romney's running mate - the architect of the Republican proposal to change Medicare for the next generation of seniors - was repeatedly interrupted as he criticized President Obama's healthcare law. "The first step to a stronger Medicare is to repeal Obamacare, because it represents the worst of both worlds," Ryan said as the crowd in New Orleans booed audibly.

Pedro E. Guerrero, a photographer whose early work with architect Frank Lloyd Wright sparked a long, distinguished career in the worlds of fine art and glossy magazines, died Thursday. He was 95. Guerrero died at his home in Florence, Ariz., said his daughter Susan Guerrero. He had battled cancer for several years. Unlike his more famous contemporary, Julius Shulman, whose photographs of Southern California's modern architecture have formed an indelible, collective image of Los Angeles' progressive mid-20th-century lifestyle, Guerrero became known for interpreting a single architect's vision.

When solar panel manufacturer Solyndra Inc. filed for bankruptcy last year, thousands of employees were let go, dozens of vendors were left high and dry, hundreds of millions of dollars were lost -- and millions of glass tubes were abandoned in a San Jose warehouse. Now some of those tubes, a signature design element of the company's cylindrical-shaped solar panels, have found a second life as modern art. Yet like so much about Solyndra, they've become another flash point in the controversy surrounding the Fremont, Calif., company.

VENICE, Italy - "Common Ground," the title British architect David Chipperfield chose for the 13th edition of the Venice Architecture Biennale, suggests a generous and expansive, if somewhat tame, strategy for organizing what still ranks as the most important architecture exhibition in the world. And in fact that feel-good two-word phrase, defined in endlessly elastic terms by Chipperfield and his curatorial team, has allowed him to use this biennale to bind together a number of themes that have dramatically reemerged in architecture in the last three or four years.

While designing what is now the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena in the late 1960s, architects John Kelsey and Thornton Ladd expressed a belief: Space that houses art "can be part of the event and experience. " When it opened in 1969 as the Pasadena Art Museum, observers saw art in the striking curvilinear exterior, which was clad in mottled tiles that appeared to change color with the sun, and in the curved interior walls conceived to showcase modern art. An early review by The Times pronounced the structure "eye-catching" and "undoubtedly superior to its only local competition, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. " After forming the firm Ladd & Kelsey in 1958, the two USC graduates built a number of major projects over the next quarter-century, including main buildings at CalArts in Valencia and Busch Gardens, a theme park in Van Nuys.

Barack Obama had his Greek columns. Mitt Romney is turning to Frank Lloyd Wright. When the Republican National Convention begins Monday inside the Tampa Bay Times Forum, a 19,500-seat arena in Tampa, Fla., that's home during hockey season to the NHL's Lightning, the stage will be crowded with large video screens framed in wood. Actually the "wood" will be made of vinyl and various laminates, but it'll read on television as cherry, mahogany and walnut. The inspiration for the set, said Jim Fenhagen, lead production designer for the convention, is Wright's residential architecture, which often featured long horizontal bands of wood-framed windows.

The scene could come from a Sofia Coppola movie: Coolly casual Parisian artist, hanging artwork in a stunning Modernist house overlooking the Silver Lake Reservoir, while a clutch of young, European-accented hipsters with cameras and video recorders swarm around him to capture his every utterance. Before long, new music composed by a member of the electronica band Air drifts across the place. But unlike in "Lost in Translation" or "Somewhere,"this is a set on which it's possible to trip over a large aluminum sculpture of California.