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As a move to counter the miasma of gentrification and celebrate the street’s blended heritage–incorporating waves of migration and development, pop culture pilgrimage with lived urban experience–the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is sponsoring a competition to save one Hollywood Boulevard storefront by reimagining it as a public forum that celebrates the avenue’s history and culture while inviting critical examination of changes in the urban environment. The Liner competition will define the appearance of a fifteen-foot facade and building interior that will serve as the permanent home of the LA Forum, projecting a community presence that reflects the organization’s core ideals:
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 site will also serve as an ever-changing participatory community center, housing gallery space and a stage, and hosting lectures and discussions on art, architecture, and urban geography. The competition encourages participants to view the space–particularly the interior–in a very fluid way. Due to the multiple purposes envisioned for the space and its use by other organizations, the ideal project will have “something of a chameleon quality”–reflecting in some ways the tensions between design and the organic life of Los Angeles itself.
Registration ends 2 May and submissions are due by 16 May 2008.
. Historian Shae Davidson's research interests include public policy and the relationship between culture and civil society. His publications range from articles on industrial history to absurdist poetry.
