Architecture

The Coachella Valley Music & Arts Festival has drawn some fire in recent years, mostly from indie-rock purists, for booking world-famous baby boomer headliners, including an opening night set this time around from Paul McCartney. But in other ways its organizers continue to make room for experimental culture's sometimes ragged fringe. The curator of Coachella's art programs, Philip Blaine, commissioned a number of pavilions this year that straddled the line between architecture and installation art. They also took advantage of the growing prominence of temporary structures in a world suddenly drained of capital.

Frank Lloyd Wright's Ennis House, a Los Feliz hilltop masterpiece composed of patterned and smooth concrete blocks that has been mightily threatened by man and Mother Nature, is being offered for sale at $15 million by the private foundation that has been restoring it. Eric Lloyd Wright, the architect's grandson and a member of the nonprofit Ennis House Foundation's board, said that, given harsh economic realities, private ownership would be the...

LOCAL 'Against Sustainability' The contrarian title alone will likely draw a crowd to this talk by John May, a lecturer at UCLA in architecture and geography, at the L.A. Forum space on Hollywood Boulevard. It's the first of three lectures May is scheduled to give in a series called "Architecture After Nature," with the others following on Oct. 1 and 15. In "Against Sustainability," May reports, he'll ask whether sustainability in architecture is "a coherent set of ideas and practices, or an increasingly empty slogan."

Preservationists in Pasadena, a city that prides itself on its history and architectural grandeur, suffered a rare defeat Monday night at the hands of the City Council. The council voted unanimously to override the city's zoning board and allow a developer to demolish an abandoned vintage auto dealership to build two five-story office towers, despite protests from its own cultural heritage commission which claimed that the structure is historic.

Nicolai Ouroussoff, a New York-based architecture writer, has been named architecture critic of the Los Angeles Times. Ouroussoff has written architecture criticism, features and news columns extensively for the New York Times, Architectural Record, the New York Observer and Artforum magazine. He has a master's of architecture degree from Columbia University and a bachelor's degree in Russian studies from Georgetown University. Ouroussoff will join the staff in mid-September.

Architecturally, this is not Barcelona. At the risk of belaboring the obvious, sponsors of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games here repeat this refrain when talking about Atlanta's efforts to make the city look good in the global media spotlight. Barcelona is a hard act to follow. In preparing for the '92 Olympics, the Catalonian capital commissioned many of Spain's and the world's best architects to design Olympic venues and related facilities. Atlanta did not aim so high.

As the 20th century draws to a close, we seem to have entered a more forgiving period, aesthetically speaking. The heated conflict between those who believe that ornament is, as Viennese architect Adolf Loos once put it, "crime" and those who hunger for floral motifs and cornices has lapsed into a state of deetente. A case in point: the Getty Center, which perches the ridge line of the Santa Monica Mountains like an over-nourished Italian hill town.

Spanish architect Jose Rafael Moneo has created banks, an airport terminal, museums and apartment buildings. As he takes on his latest project--the new St. Vibiana's Cathedral--critics cite his gift for capturing history within a contemporary design. And the best example of that may be the National Museum of Roman Art in Merida, Spain, built over the site of archeological excavations.

In the year since the Raiders departed for Oakland, football fans have been itching to know how a new NFL team might be attracted to Los Angeles. There's been tons of talk and debate and posturing about the best possible site--Chavez Ravine? Hollywood Park in Ingelwood? Anaheim? Now, for the first time, an actual design for a modern football stadium in L.A. has been put on the table.

It was supposed to be called "Harmony," but the pedestrian bridge proposed for the heart of Little Saigon has brought anything but. In a community not often known for its unanimity or consensus, the latest sounds of discord involve a developer who wants to erect the bridge as a landmark for Little Saigon and those who fear such a symbol could obliterate the community's identity.