LA’s Red Building

After 30 years, Cesar Pelli is completing the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood with his Red Building - an office complex aimed at entertainment and new media companies. The building is due in 2008 and the LA Times argues that it represents a shift in the architectural theme of Los Angeles:

The progress of the Red Building is worth paying attention to, though, for another reason. The project suggests an acceleration in L.A.’s shift from a city of scattered landmarks to a place where ensemble architecture — several prominent buildings designed in concert on the same or adjacent sites — will become more common, more noticeable and more important. This year has already brought the opening of an expanded Getty Villa, where the Boston firm Machado and Silvetti Associates brought the famously independent villa building into an architectural dialogue by slipping a half-moon of new buildings along one edge of the museum site. Next month we’ll see preliminary designs by Frank Gehry for the parcel of land across Grand Avenue from his Walt Disney Concert Hall, which will include two towers and a plaza dotted with retail pavilions. Renzo Piano is still tinkering with the relationship between new and old buildings at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

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LA Times