Buildings

Bob Kahl slips in through a side door of the vast, abandoned hangar and looks at what's left of the assembly plant where he worked for nearly 40 years. He remembers the hum of power tools, the biting aroma of cutting oil, swarms of workers plugging away on a labyrinth of yellow scaffolding. All that's left is a few piles of broken concrete and a sea of colorless dust that coats a Palmdale factory floor the size of two football fields. "Welcome to the birthplace of America's space shuttle fleet," said Kahl, 60, smiling.

The Natural Resources Defense Council, which has supported the construction of a 72,000-seat football stadium in downtown Los Angeles, now has raised a series of criticisms about the project's potential impact on the environment. Many of its concerns are well founded; rather than fight them in court, the project's developer, Anschutz Entertainment Group, ought to take them into account and use them to improve the proposal. In a letter to the Los Angeles City Planning Department, the NRDC warned that although AEG's voluminous environmental impact report promises a number of measures to limit the negative effects of the stadium on the environment, it lacks details about how those measures will work and how they will be enforced.

From his converted workshop garage, Anthony Tremblay has a terrific view of Los Angeles City Hall--not to mention Iraq's Great Mosque of Samara and the Mayan Pyramid of Quetzalcoatl. He also can see the ornamental windows on New York's Flatiron building, and the weathered limestone of the Great Pyramid of Khafre. No, he's not operating spy satellites.

Resolving a key issue in a $890-million transit contract, federal officials announced Wednesday that a Japanese firm's plan to build up to 235 cars for Los Angeles-area light-rail lines complies with requirements that American workers be used for final assembly. In its decision, the Federal Transit Administration rejected assertions by local labor organizations, community activists and two competing companies that Kinkisharyo International's production plan would violate "Buy America" requirements by climate-testing a few rail cars in Japan and not the United States.

Long gone are the soldiers who kept guard at this former Army facility, searching the skies for Soviet planes that might soar in from the Pacific to bomb the city. Their weather-battered guard shack off a gravelly road in the steep hills behind Encino now has rusted window frames and a hole in one wall. But the radar tower still stands tall, overlooking the San Fernando Valley to the north and the central city to the southeast.

CORONADO, Calif. -- The U.S. Navy has decided to spend as much as $600,000 for landscaping and architectural modifications to obscure the fact that one its building complexes looks like a swastika from the air. The four L-shaped buildings, constructed in the late 1960s, are part of the amphibious base at Coronado and serve as barracks for Seabees. From the ground and from inside nearby buildings, the controversial shape cannot be seen.

Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks worked there. So did Charlie Chaplin, Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Clark Gable, Marlon Brando and practically everyone else. Soon, though, wrecking crews will be at work at the storied West Hollywood movie lot at the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard and Formosa Avenue. Once known as the Warner Hollywood Studio, it's now called "The Lot. " Its new owner, CIM Group, intends to raze its aging wooden office buildings and sound-dubbing stages and replace them with glass-and-steel structures.

Bargain land and wide-open spaces drew Alan Kimble Fahey to Acton. A modest ranch house on a desert lot offered the outpost he sought. But then Fahey wanted to expand. So he began to build. And build. And build. Fahey built a barn and moved in. He traded his motorcycle for a trailer and painted it to look like a rail car. He bartered other possessions for a dump-truck load of rocks and a 60-foot workers' lift. Then he sank 108 utility poles a dozen feet into the hard-packed Antelope Valley ground.

Google Inc., the ever-expanding Internet search giant, is establishing a beachhead in Venice. In a rare bright spot for the region's sluggish economy, Google is leasing more than 100,000 square feet of office space in three buildings, including the famed Binoculars Building designed by Frank Gehry. Sitting in front of the building is a huge binocular sculpture created by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, perhaps befitting of the company's search theme. The move is part of a major expansion by Google in Southern California and could set up a new center of operation in the region.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever Will Hermes Faber and Faber: 369 pp., $30

You can draw a straight line, in terms of architectural history, from William Randolph Hearst'ssprawling estate in San Simeon to the corner of Broadway and 11th Street in downtown Los Angeles. It was at that downtown site in 1913 that Hearst commissioned architect Julia Morgan to design a headquarters for his Los Angeles Examiner newspaper, which he'd founded in 1903. Morgan produced one of the most remarkable designs of her prolific career, a 103,500-square-foot Mission Revival building draped with Italian and Moorish touches, including domes covered in yellow and blue tile.

WASHINGTON — Thousands of condominium owners and buyers around the country could soon be in line for some welcome news on mortgage financing: Though officials are mum on specifics, the Federal Housing Administration is readying changes to its controversial condominium rules that have rendered large numbers of units ineligible for the agency's low-down-payment insured mortgages. The revisions could remove at least some of the obstacles that have dissuaded condominium homeowner association boards from seeking FHA approval or recertification of their buildings for FHA loans in the last 18 months.

It takes a while for first-time writer-director Brian Crano to show the caring storyteller behind the glib jokester in "A Bag of Hammers. " At first his thin, neatly folded, paper-airplane of a movie threatens to nose dive into tweeville as it depicts the carefree lives of best-bud scam artists Alan (Jake Sandvig, who co-wrote the screenplay) and Ben (Jason Ritter), who steal cars at funerals by operating as fake valets. The forced charm grates - cutesy valet outfits, jerky banter, teasing Alan's waitress sister (Rebecca Hall)

Architect Thom Mayne has been chosen to design a new Cornell University building that is to rise on Roosevelt Island in New York. Mayne, head of the Los Angeles architecture firm Morphosis, won a competition to design the first building for the CornellNYC Tech campus. The proposed building is to be approximately 150,000 square feet in size and will feature classrooms, lab space and offices for Cornell's high-tech graduate school campus. The $150-million building is scheduled to be completed by the start of the 2017 academic year.

PHILADELPHIA - Copies of famous paintings are everywhere: on dorm-room walls, on computer screens and lately pouring forth from Chinese art factories, which can churn out a hundred passable Rembrandts in a week. Architectural copies, on the other hand, remain rare, especially at full scale. Las Vegas and the original Getty Museum aside, it's not often you see an important building, in whole or in part, rebuilt in one location to match the original in another. The Barnes Foundation, in moving its spectacularly deep collection of postimpressionist and early Modern art from suburban Merion, Pa., to the center of Philadelphia, will on May 19 open a high-culture, high-stakes experiment in the second kind of duplication.

Noooooooooooooo. Not back to Memphis again. The Clippers have been eliminated, so why are we going back to that sewer? It's over. The Clippers were physically spent Friday night; they probably will be emotionally empty Sunday. The big moment has eluded this team all season long. The Clippers could not beat the Lakers with the tiebreaker on the line, couldn't win the home-court advantage down the stretch and failed to take advantage of 3-1 edge against the Grizzlies.

Forty years ago, an enormous, decrepit, crime-ridden St. Louis public housing project was destroyed with dynamite. Television and still pictures of the imploding buildings went viral, so to speak, though that wasn't a term yet. The death of the complex known as Pruitt-Igoe was seized on by any number of groups as validation of their viewpoints. Enemies of modern architecture said the soullessness of the design caused the problem. (Minoru Yamasaki, who went on to design the World Trade Center towers in New York, was the architect.)

Southwestern Law School, which occupies one of Los Angeles' most famous buildings, has announced plans to expand its quarters with construction of student housing. The move marks a breakthrough in the evolution of the century-old institution into a law school with an authentic 24-hour campus, officials said. Southwestern expects to start work in December on a $20-million project to create 133 apartments, an outdoor courtyard and underground parking next to the school's two main buildings.

Having cast a spell in Orlando and planted his flag in Los Angeles, Harry Potter is now taking his theme park magic across the Pacific. Universal Studios Japan on Thursday will unveil plans to build the first international version of the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, the blockbuster attraction that has drawn millions of fans to Universal's Orlando resort and is expected to do the same at a planned Hollywood location. The Osaka destination, which will begin construction in the next few weeks with a planned opening in late 2014, is the latest in a series of expansions underway at major parks around the world that has followed an uptick in attendance, particularly in Asia.

The Minnesota Vikings moved to within a governor's signature of getting a new $975-million stadium on Thursday after the state Senate approved a plan that relies heavily on public financing. Gov. Mark Dayton has said he'll sign the measure, meaning the Senate's 36-30 vote was effectively the final barrier for the stadium. The House had passed it overnight. The team chased a new stadium for more than a decade but had little leverage until its lease expired last year on the 30-year-old Metrodome.