Text editor | smith-clementi

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Uncanny Valleys

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Plaza de Cultura

La Plaza

The LA Plaza de Cultural y Artes Los Angeles, California The LA Plaza de Cultural y Artes project consists of the historic Vickrey-Brunswig building, the Plaza House, and adjoining two and a quarter acre garden, all of which are located with the El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Monument, which is listed on the National Register of Historic Places. The work completed as Rios Clementi Hale Studios and the use of these buildings and gardens for a cultural center was championed by Los Angeles County Supervisor Gloria Molina.  The project consisted of designing a series of garden spaces to enable LA Plaza to meet its goal of celebrating and educating visitors on the Mexican-American influence in Southern California. The Campo Santo Memorial Garden provides both passive and active environments and includes a vegetable and fruit tree garden. Two brightly colored canopy structures provide shade above a stage for outdoor performances and over a patio area. The vibrant colors bring a festive atmosphere to the gardens and also provide a platform for event infrastructure – such as lights, speakers and video screens – to be mounted on for use during events. California Pepper trees are planted throughout to integrate the site with the existing El Pueblo District. The project planting palette consists of drought tolerant plant material and native species commonly found in the Southern California region. In addition to the gardens, an open lawn area was planted to provide a seating area in front of the event stage. Decomposed granite pathways and concrete pavers surround its perimeter to encourage site circulation.

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Totems

Chess Park

Chess Park
Glendale, California
 
The Chess Park is a 4,500 square foot multi-purpose urban pocket park accommodating Glendale’s sizable chess playing constituency which also acknowledged its context through the creation of spaces catering to local theatre and literary groups and to the community at large.  Five large ‘Chess Towers’ dot the park, providing an iconic presence along busy Brand Boulevard, enticing pedestrians and passing drivers to discover the park.  
 
Located along the Brand Boulevard corridor in the heart of the downtown Glendale business district, the Chess Park connects itself to a series of civic, cultural and business related programs throughout the area. The site’s specific location makes it an important link between the Orange Street Garage and shopping and entertainment venues located along Brand Boulevard. The design of the Chess Park incorporates the input of various members of the Glendale community.  Working with multiple City agencies and departments and incorporating the thoughts, needs and concerns of the Glendale Chess Club, the design reflects the various goals and agendas of all parties involved. A series of meetings with the Glendale Chess Club generated discussions about the layout of the tables and the various needs of those both playing and watching. Sun protection, seating comfort and iconography became the essential needs of Chess Club to attain their goal of educating the public about Chess.
 
Aside from providing a pleasant public space for the enjoyment of the Glendale community, the Chess Park provides a story of the game itself - its lore, lexicon and formal language. Working as Rios Clementi Hale Studios, the design process began with extensive research into the game of chess, its history and multicultural roots, its connections to art and literature, as well as the specific rules and strategies of the game itself.  Ideas about form, function and meaning became tools in the making of the park elements that would best describe the game as an instrument of culture.
 
The five abstracted chess piece light towers are a sculptural presence which establishes a signature vision for the space and house the park’s various functional needs. The function and location for each of the towers is derived from both the conceptual nature of the piece and the anticipated programs of the Chess Park. Each of the towers is constructed of a steel frame supported by a central steel column. The base of each tower is clad in recycled wood polymer siding and incorporates graphics related to the piece. The upper portion of each tower is clad with durable white canvas that allows these sculptural towers to glow like a series of Noguchi lamps.

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Centered Cathedral

Christ Catholic Cathedral

Christ Catholic  Cathedral
Garden Grove, CA
The Roman Catholic Diocese of Orange’s acquisition of the legendary Crystal Cathedral is an opportunity to re-imagine the entire 34-acre campus as the focal point for Orange County’s Catholics and a global center for Catholic life, with Philip Johnson's iconic cathedral at its center. After a competition in 2013, Rios Clementi Hale Studios was hired to design both a campus master plan and a series of large public plazas, and Johnson Fain was hired the renovate the cathedral's interior. Both firms are working in parallel as part of the Cathedral’s rechristening as Christ Cathedral. The masterplan for Christ Cathedral re-imagines the 34-acre campus that includes several iconic pieces of architecture, including Philip Johnson’s 1981 Crystal Cathedral at its center and Richard Neutra’s 1961 Arboretum and Tower of Hope. The initial design process helped to identify six guiding principles for the site that encompass the overarching goals for the entire project:    The Cathedral is the center of the campus  Elevate the campus to be a global center for Catholic life  Welcome and serve all in the local community  Prioritize people over cars  Promote design excellence for site  Preserve flexibility for the future    These principles are inclusive enough to encompass the entire design concept, but they are critical in defining a framework for a landscape design that honors the history of the site, its architecture, its worshippers, and its renewed life as a Cathedral.      The liturgical space of the Cathedral is the core of both the Diocesan mission and the campus itself. A new plaza rings that sacred heart of the campus with four overlapping courtyards to welcome the entire community—Catholic & non-Catholic alike—for liturgical and non-liturgical programming. A continuous paving pattern inspired by the labyrinth paving within traditional cathedrals ties the four courts together into a single plaza at Christ Cathedral. Labyrinth was originally described by the phrase “chemin de Jerusalem” (path to Jerusalem), which also retains their connections with death and a triumphant return.    Around the edge of the plaza, a canopy of trees shades the perimeter and creates a transitional margin that allows for more varied uses of the space, while also separating the more profane, everyday world from the sacred space of the cathedral and the surrounding plaza.

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Skinned Box

Larchmont

Larchmont Blvd Mixed Use

The abstracted water pattern cut into the building’s aluminum panels honors the site’s history, which was once the Hollywood Swim Arts School. 
In 2006, our office outgrew its existing office space. As partners of Rios Clementi Hale Studios we purchased a building in Larchmont Village and transformed the once pink stucco building into a modern mixed-use building that houses their office and store, a busy café and a local salon. 
This story starts with the decision to completely remove the exterior skin. Key existing assets were kept and enhanced, including skylights, generous floor to ceiling heights and an east-west building orientation, while walls and roof tiles were replaced with a sleek glass and metal exterior skin. The abstracted water pattern cut into the building’s aluminum panels honors the site’s history which was once the Hollywood Swim Arts School. 
The unit organization was radically transformed from 16 spaces to 4. A ground floor courtyard was enclosed and a central stair inserted to create an atrium that connects the two levels. The second floor retains the double-loaded organization with work studios on each side but the effect is new with walls and ceilings opened up to the main corridor and exposed framing and beams overhead. 
The individual exterior balconies on the second floor were unified and extended to create a “screen-porch” effect that blurs the interior and exterior when the sliding glass doors are open. The first floor shops and café activate the building and northern edge of Larchmont Boulevard and extends the building’s use into the evening.

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Polka Dot Plaza

Sunset Triangle Plaza

Sunset Triangle Plaza
Los Angeles, California
 
Cities like Los Angeles are in need of more active and vibrant public space. But in land-strapped cities with limited public space, what if you could convert underutilized streets into just that? Enter People St, an initiative of the City of Los Angeles Department of Transportation (LADOT) in collaboration with the City of Los Angeles Departments of Public Works and City Planning, the Office of Councilperson Garcetti, and the Los Angeles Metropolitan Transit Authority (Metro). In March 2012, Sunset Triangle Plaza debuted as the program’s first pilot project, taking an underutilized public right of way located at the intersection of Griffith Park Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard. The one block stretch of street has been transformed from a car-centric artery into a safe, pleasant, and vibrant public space for pedestrians and cyclists alike.
 
A key concept of the People St program is to quickly and inexpensively reclaim under-used street space and involve local residents and businesses in the design and maintenance. The use of simple materials – in this case paint and planters – allowed the program to recapture streets for people in months rather than decades, and for thousands rather than millions of dollars.  As a pilot project guidelines and methods for expansion throughout the city were established, which immediately allowed four other pilot Parklets to crop up around the city.
 
Literally a “green space,” the 11,000 square foot Sunset Triangle Plaza surface is painted in two tones of green in an enlarged polka-dot pattern.  The playful dots are open to interpretation, but our concept was inspired by the pre-digital printing process. In that process, dot patterns are created called halftones, and Sunset Triangle Plaza represents a site in transition—a halfway point—from street to plaza. 
 
The People St Initiative is working with local community and business interests to provide oversight, programming, and maintenance. At this location, the twice-weekly farmer’s market continues to operate uninterrupted and all street furniture is brought inside each evening to maintain its quality and cleanliness. The pilot project evolved while we were Rios Clementi Hale Studios, and was meant to last for one year, but remains in place today and the neighborhood has even added programming such as a movie night and other events — a testament to the success of reclaimed public spaces.

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TreeHouse

Nowita Place

"It ain't no sin, to take off your skin and dance around in your bones”
                           -Tom Waits
Located on a pedestrian access “walk-street”, the original house was a 1920's Venice Beach bungalow of 600 square feet. In 1996 the owner architects added two second floor bedrooms and bath, preserving the original ground floor footprint and massing relative to the neighborhood. With this change the house doubled in size grew to 1245 sq. ft. View and shade orientation was coordinated with the large 80 year old Magnolia Grandiflora on the adjacent property. In 2002 this adjacent properly and its single story bungalow was acquired by the grandmother allowing for communal use of the yards. Both houses in effect pinwheel off the massive magnolia.  The house grew an additional 790 sq. ft. in 2012 with the addition of the second lot, reconfiguration of public and private areas, and new garage and master suite.  The resulting home now revolves around indoor/outdoor connections to the vast patio space with decorative and edible gardens.  The front volume maintains a local vernacular lap siding as a signal to the house’s bungalow origins with a scale appropriate for the walk street, while the expressive back volume sports exaggerated vertical framing as sunshades to the glass master bedroom volume.  “A house and its antithesis,” is how the architects/homeowners describe the relationship between the two elements.     The structural system of the new second floor addition is made of 34 wood columns that cantilever out of the garage masonry shear walls to hold up and stabilize the roof. Each member is necessary and is calculated. Their repetition is not just visual, but results from the safety redundancies prescribed by the structural code. This iteration can be exploited to provide shade, pattern, and views from the interior.     For almost 100 years this house has evolved with the neighborhood, and this time it seemed important to be sincere about just what holds things up. Architecture often incorporates sleight of hand to showcase its virtuosity. After 2008 this just seems flamboyant. Architecture once looked for transparency of means, a generation later it asked for relationships. Both just wanted the truth.

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Play, Care, Science

CalTech Child Care Center

CalTech Childrens Center
Pasadena, California

Caltech's LEED-Gold-certified childcare center cultivates qualities of curiosity and inquiry through the integration of S.T.E.A.M. (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Mathematics) into the daily life of each age group. At the heart of the center lies the arroyo, a dry streambed carved into the site’s sloping contours. The arroyo is designed to support and expand the school's educational mission of encouraging children to play, explore, discover, and engage with the world. Filled with local granite, native grasses, bugs, birds, and lizards, the arroyo acts as a bio-swale, filtering and dispersing rainwater collected onsite and stored in large cisterns. Through observation and play, the children learn about the preciousness of water in California’s arid climate.  The arroyo links the discrete play yards for children of each age group.
 
Three separate buildings distributed around the play yard contain the classrooms and administrative programs. Infant rooms are located in the quiet and lowest, southern end of the site, far from the adjacent tennis courts and buffered from parking lots by administrative and service wings. Toddlers congregate in the center of the campus between the youngest and oldest residents. Pre-schoolers occupy the highest point, at the northern end of campus.
 
From the colorful furniture to the whimsical animal graphics to the low toilets in the bathrooms, everything about the facilities and landscape is scaled for kids aged 6 months to 6 years.  Dutch doors open at the top and the bottom; windows set at a knee-high eye level allow children to look in, out and discover.
 
This project was a National Design-Build Project Team Award winner with MATT Construction and Rios Clementi Hale Studios.

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Cloud Chamber

Magnolia Place

Magnolia Place
Los Angeles, California
 
Children’s Bureau of Southern California is a 100-year-old non-profit leader in the treatment and prevention of child abuse and neglect. With the desire to add a pre-school, playground, community meeting rooms, a medical clinic, legal services and financial counseling to the existing family counseling services and administrative support, CBSC purchased a vacated tilt-up warehouse to house their new prototype facility. Straddled between multi-cultural neighborhoods just west of Downtown, the project is meant to be a welcoming destination for the surrounding community to make their own, as well as a catalyst for further economic investment in the area.
 
While at Rios Clementi Hale Studios, our design challenge was to break down the existing concrete volume to the human scale in a humble and economical way. Saw-cut patterns in the facades both punched out windows, bringing light into the pre-school and tenant areas, and provided a grid for the striping pattern which alternates blue, orange and taupe paint with the exposed natural concrete. Visible from the street, the pre-school’s eight classrooms are organized alongside the building’s western side, spilling out to the adjacent courtyard and playground.
 
Within the warehouse interior, the 60,000-square-foot center was built out with an industrial-pragmatic approach combined with domestic touches using off-the-shelf interior finishes and custom designed graphics. A central “cloud chamber” conducts natural light from a series of skylights into the main lobby, conference rooms and office area. Since the office area was also not able to have views to the outside, a perimeter storefront system was finished out with custom leaf and flower patterned wallpaper and natural woods, to bring warmth to the space.

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Sticks & Stones

Woodbury

Woodbury University Studio Building
Burbank, CA
Woodbury University required a new architectural studio building to complete the existing architecture department. A new 19,000 sq ft. two-story building houses architectural studios, critique spaces, support spaces, and a double-height multi-purpose room. 
 
As the most visible building on the campus’ perimeter, the building mediates the public view and private use of the campus. The south façade is a large-scale gesture to passing motorists that curves and wraps the building. Varying patterns of concrete masonry units compose the wall and the stacked blocks create a large-scale, changing pattern of subtle shadings as the sunlight moves across the south façade during the day.
 
The north façade opens the building to the existing department and provides a porous edge to a new courtyard formed by the existing studio building to the north. To connect the new structure to the existing complex, the north façade employs smaller-scale layering of vertical elements.
 
In the bulk of the building, programmatic space for architecture students extends across two floors. Insulated walls with gypsum drywall provide pin-up surfaces and interior finish stops short of the structural ceiling to expose the structural concrete masonry unit walls on the inside of the building. Exposed construction and mechanical components of the building serve as teaching tools for the architecture students and include structural steel beams that extend from the studios to hold the cantilevered balcony and roof, metal decking that forms the structural floor and roof, hanging wire management ladders for electrical and data cable routing, roof drain pipes, metal ducting and DuctSox for the HVAC system, sprinkler pipes, and pendant lighting. as Rios Clementi Hale Studios.

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Music Box

Austin City Limits

Austin City Limits
Austin, Texas

Austin City Limits has been recording and cataloguing traditional and emerging American, international, and multicultural music in a live format for over 30 years in a format characterized by the intimate approach to the artist and attention to the music and technical artistry. With its unique delivery, the vehicle of television coupled with the energy of a live audience, Austin City Limits has continued to improve its’ technical facility to match or exceed the capabilities of what the television viewer has available, even delivering a technically perfect “amplification” to the live audience.
 
As the single most inquired about tourist location in Austin, ACL was previously almost invisible. Operating out of an anonymous university building, ACL had an interior identity and a stage set, with no real external expression. Austin City Limits Live at the Moody Theater, now lives in the center of the city within walking distance of more live music than you might find anywhere in the rest of the nation. The new facility addresses both technical and capacity limitations of the former location and embraces emerging technology.
 
The initial design concept for the venue was the embodiment of a traveling case the artists carries with them: a simple practical exterior shape, a box, in which an irregularly shaped instrument is placed with neatly packed supporting components placed around it. The lobby and the back of house functions fill in the space around the inner box, or performance space. The grand stair connects all the floors of the lobby and is the most radically affected element from the performance space’s expansion. The stair wraps around itself and emerges through openings in the exterior of the building. These contact points are openings in the building and the landings are revolving vantage points into the space and out into the city.
 
The Austin City Limits Venue is unique in that it is one of a handful of venues designed specifically to support live performances and broadcast simultaneously. This integrated design manifests itself in a facility designed to be intimate, flexible in its configuration, dynamic in its seating capacities, accommodating of temporary cabling, and designed to support video equipment. The venue is flexible enough to give an upcoming artist with a small draw an environment that is “full,” but can also accommodate a well-known band. Essentially, the venue works for 300 or 2,300 live audience members and remains recognizable to the television viewer. It can also operate on many of the other 300 days of the year in which ACL does not record, quickly transforming into a live music venue, television studio, speaking auditorium, music studio, catered special event venue, and convention assembly. Responding to all of these varied and dynamic needs, the ACL multi-purpose venue allows more fans than ever to participate in this unique music experience. ACL was completed when we were Rios Clementi Hale Studios, with the Austin office of Anderson Wise, and Dallas based BOKA Powell.

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Urban Media

LAlive

Microsoft Square Plaza
Los Angeles, California 
 
For the vast entertainment, retail, and residential complex known as L.A. Live to succeed as a center for the surrounding community, it needed a flexible event space that could serve as a contemporary town square. With Rios Clementi Hale Studios we delivered a plaza that can host occasions of any size, from everyday use by local residents to globally televised media events.
 
The one-acre plaza has already woven itself into the fabric of downtown L.A., turning a formerly car-centric area into a mixed-use urban center. It's where people congregate before performances at Microsoft Theatre, and where they celebrate after a game at Staples Center. It's the dynamic linchpin among a host of venues that includes the Grammy Museum, the J.W. Marriott hotel, and the Ritz-Carlton hotel and residences.  
 
Infrastructure is placemaking, through a set of six custom-designed 75-foot steel towers that lend the plaza their presence, even when no events are scheduled. They artfully conceal audio-visual cabling, while their sturdy steel crossbars support lighting, sound equipment, banners, and LED screens. These systems support a multitude of events, from rock concerts to festivals to simulcasts of presidential inaugurations. 
 
A unique granite paving pattern softens the 40,000 square feet of hardscape and creates an iconic look that's instantly recognizable from overhead blimp shots. Planters of poppies and drought-tolerant Westringia, and Platanus occidentalis shade trees introduce restful, elements to this highly urban site.