Briefed 8.28

City Harvest Church will be at the center of a $50 million mixed-use retail, residential, office and restaurant complex planned for Orchards, the Columbian reports.

The Thomas Hacker Architects-designed William W. Philip Hall at the University of Washington-Tacoma broke ground today.

The renovation of two Medford historic schools (Opsis Architecture is doing the project) is taking some heat as opponents wonder a. whether the schools were really all that dangerous in the first place and b. whether the schools are so dangerous they should just be razed and built new. Good luck, Medford School Board.

Minus Andy Warhol

Eyes on the street: It's one of the most useful phrases a developer has. Instead of saying, "this project will add 100 people to your neighborhood, all of whom have a car, a silence-shattering stereo system, and a dog that will definitely shit on your lawn," developers point out that each of those 100 people has two eyes, and those two eyes will detect wrongdoing with laserlike efficiency.

This is good spin. I wonder if it's true. I hope it is, especially in the case of the Couch Park Apartments, which Opus Northwest is planning (and SERA's designing) for NW 19th Ave. directly across from the eastern edge of Couch Park.

I'm completely selfish with this. (I live in Northwest.) Couch Park has always seemed like a decent place to booze, score drugs, or get called a foxy mama, but I like a little less Studio 54 in my green spaces. Basically, I'm a drag.

It'd be cool, though, if the eyes on the street thing really works. Optometrists, unite. And rent from Opus.

Briefed 8.9

Bloggers doing the work for me:

Jetson Green calls Holst's 12.5 "extremely good looking"; 12.5 blushes, drops the lashes, and murmers, "you're not so bad yourself." As a side note, I recently noticed an ad for 12.5 in the back of Dwell.

Port's Jeff Jahn suggests an incentive program for developers who make space for cultural institutions in their projects, which seems like an idea that deserves a task force.

TVA and Wieden + Kennedy teamed up on sand building.

The street outside SERA's Old Town offices is, apparently, an attractive place to do drugs. SERA's offices, meanwhile, remain an attractive place to do architecture.

Walk like a duck

L.A. and Portland don't have a whole lot in common -- if the two cities were people, there'd be a LOT of awkward silence at cocktail parties -- but efforts by a couple local developers could put a Portland feel on downtown Los Angeles streets.

The South Group's (the Williams & Dame and Gerding Edlen collaboration) creation of wider, walker-savvy sidewalks for its projects are exactly what L.A. planners have in mind in their quest for a strollable city, Los Angeles Downtown News is reporting.

Pedestrian-friendly sidewalks aren't just a Portland thing. Lovin' the automobile isn't just a L.A. thing. But every single Portland project I've heard discussed -- in design commission meetings, among architects, in studios -- has put the pedestrian experience far above the auto experience. You can't talk about building in this city without talking about what it'll do for the level at which people live. And it's very cool to see that L.A.'s starting to do the same. And that Portland developers have their mitts in it.