A competition by the LAFORUM
6520 Hollywood Blvd.
Hollywood Boulevard is the last unretouched Main Street in Los Angeles. By day and by night, the sidewalks host a constant parade of pedestrians – lingerers, tourists, hipsters, small shopkeepers, clerks, high school students, and Scientologists. Buildings that were lovingly detailed from the parapet down are largely intact, although many are hidden behind shoddy stucco updates or plywood board-up. The street is, in a way, an oasis for those who prefer to ply the margins and reject the phenomenon of predigested city life – the type of urbanism embodied by the likes of Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena and 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica. This quality, indeed, is what developers are trading on as they race to retool 1920s and 30s office buildings and department stores in Hollywood into chic lofts for flush denizens who fancy themselves as taking a walk on the wild side.
The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture & Urban Design is hosting a competition to take a 15-foot wide storefront on Hollywood Boulevard and give the façade and first floor interior an identity. This is the first permanent home for the Forum in its 20-year history. The space will become a revolving gallery, Chautauqua, stage, and hang-out where the Forum will present exhibits, talks, and occasional competitions.
The notion of Liner is to find a compelling set of useable forms that express the Forum’s commitment to subvert accepted beliefs and foment an incendiary conversation about the built environment. The Forum insists upon being provocative, and favors the unresolved and experimental over the conventional. The Forum is not a society for professional advancement. The Forum is an on-going meditation on the give-and-take between design and the irrepressible, often inscrutable life of the city.
As it now exists, the room is little more than walls, ceiling, and floor. It is, in other words, empty. Two storefront windows flank the front entrance, and these spaces are, as well, up for grabs. There are very few limits to the competition, except that whatever the Forum installs must be moveable. The space is shared with the Woodbury School of Architecture, and thus the Liner project must have something of a chameleon quality. A dais, bleachers, gallery boards – all of these are possible objects that the Forum will require for its occasional use. But when not in use, the items must transform and either become something else or be easily removed from the space for storage on site.
