New Project: Bottega Louie

Shubin + Donaldson acted as construction facilitators on this new restaurant and gourmet market located in downtown Los Angeles on the corner of 7th and Grand.

http://www.bottegalouie.com/index.html

FLATNESS

I love looking out the airplane window. The forms and patterns on land generated by development and human culture interacting with the natural terrain are a great source of fascination for me. James Corner’s work evokes a new reading of landscape, site planning and the interaction between man and terrain. A close study of maps, surveys and aerial photos can render formal architectural strategies that integrate and respond to the land far beyond the property lines of any given project. Every project should include a study of the context via aerial photos, maps, surveys, and Nolli maps of development patterns. Our projects can respond by developing various strategies that include references to these contexts.
The Shaker map and the Thiebaud painting illustrate a region and culturally specific representation of built form. I have always appreciated Thiebaud’s pop sensibility that is perfect for California. Obviously the Shakers no nonsense approach to life is reflected in the map. Project by project we should look for ways of representing and presenting our architecture that is consistent with the concept of the project.

... Robin Donaldson, AIA

MODERN AND PRE-MODERN

I have become more and more interested in pre-industrial buildings, developments, and forms. Particularly in the warmer regions of the planet where the climate is similar to the Southern California and Baja California areas for which we design most of our buildings. North Africa, the Mediterranean and the Middle East are places where ancient cultures learned to build in a way that made these hot and dry climates livable. Courtyards, heavy thick clay walls, and densely congregated structures were the forms that evolved in response to the climate and the materials available to the indigenous cultures. In these areas, cultures were forced to build in a very resource-efficient manner due to the limitations of technology and labor. My fascination with pre-industrial forms may be a bit of a knee jerk reaction to American industrialized society’s reverence for “technology and progress”, but pre-industrial cultures provide great lessons in timeless resource efficient design.

... Robin Donaldson, AIA

SO CAL: LATE 1970's AND EARLY 1980's

While Thom Mayne shot this image of the 2-4-6-8 house, several blocks away Richard Diebenkorn labored on his Ocean Park series. In the garage below a shaper built a surfboard while in Malibu Ron Davis cast his resin paintings. This was all going on while I finished my undergraduate studies at UCSB. I thought it was so cool that Thom did his own photography of his project and shot the house from the alley, power lines and all. He did it himself, with his own hands. Like an artist, or a surfboard builder he controlled the design and how the project would be represented to the world. He created his own version of reality. Diebenkorn abstracted a sunny Ocean Park afternoon into flat planes of color and he got to build his painting to communicate his view of the world.

As architects, we should fight for keeping our hands in our projects and how our projects are communicated to the world. If we could, we would pick up the plane and cut our own foam. Obviously constructing buildings is a completely different process than an artist making a painting. However, we need to learn to manipulate the standardization and industrialization of the construction industry to our unique voice. It is a fight, and most of our architectural heroes have done it.

...Robin Donaldson, AIA