LA's new proposed "objective design standards" for historic districts are horrific.
They're going to result in it essentially being illegal for new buildings to match the historic character of these districts.
Post
Conversation
Post your reply
You can give feedback on LA's proposed "Objective Design Standards" for HPOZs here:
Isn’t that the point of historic preservation efforts? Not allow new construction? Seems to be an effective proposal.
No. These will make it easier to build projects, because you only have to follow the objective design standards. It's just that the standards they are choosing suck and are going to result in ugly buildings.
A lot of preservationists HATE new traditional Architecture, including the feds who wrote the leading regulatory Preservation standards known as “the Secretary of the Interior’s Standards for Rehabilitation.”
The followers of this dogma will:
1) seek to calcify traditional
We’re avoiding monotonous block buildings… to get buildings made of smaller monotonous blocks? So ugly
I don't even understand how design standards like this are legal
Like what is the legal rationale here
This "change in material" stuff is the worst. This is how we end up with buildings with random cladding every 5 feet.
I'm pretty black-pilled about the ability of "objective" standards to lead to good aesthetics and I dislike the arbitrariness and NIMBY capture of subjective government design review.
Developer-led "land readjustment" is best path IMO.
I disagree that they are horrific. I think completely flat buildings are not attractive nor psychologically welcoming.
The balcony requirement is dumb. I'd rather have a bigger unit than a teeny balcony that's barely functional.
By and large public architecture in Los Angeles is militantly undistinguished, and the planners planning this are true traditionalists in that sense.
Was looking at apartments in the area recently and a lot of them seemed to me to be modeled on prisons lol (425 Broadway in Santa Monica an honorable exception; Persians?).
What’s the steel man for why there are requirements for breaking up the plane?
This reminds me of all the very awful apartment buildings that have appeared in downtown Santa Cruz in the last couple years
as a CD4 HPOZ resident I am horrified. What’s your office doing to fight this?
man fuck all these rules. What if we did this with other industries. What id the la government was like "hamburgers sold must be no more than 1/4 inch thick and no wider than 4 inches in diameter":
Jesus, that has to add a ton of cost too. Why do they write these rules? Who does this?
Who is in charge of coming up with these? Certainly LA has name brand architects who could develop something interesting?
Why would they do this? Couldn’t they just say match the style of existing builds? wtf
This post is incredibly misleading as I do not see a gigantic, green electrical box surrounded by yellow bollards in front of the building.
Every step of the way Los Angeles has FOUGHT NEW HOUSING and has faced no consequences for doing so. I hate this City Council, I hate this mayor, and I hate the people they have hired to hold our city back.
Can it be built by robots?
Why are they mandating it looks like it comes off of a conveyor belt of factory produced non-offensiveness that is in itself offensive and anything but character and placemaking friendly.
There is no right to like all of the buildings around you.
