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The day shot reminds me of U City looking back to Philly
I actually find DT LA and DT Philly to resemble each other from composition for many vantage points (blur the look of the buildings but only view the cluster so to speak)
The city would never try to upzone the residential streets, and most of them are already cleared for reasonably dense 4-5 story apartment buildings anyway so it would be unnecessary. But they definitely will upzone the commercial boulevards that crisscross LA, and they'll most likely succeed. NIMBY battles in Los Angeles are typically fought on a per-project basis when permits are pulled, not when the planning department updates the general plan or neighborhood plans.
Case in point: The Hollywood neighborhood plan update that passed a couple years back allows for significantly more height on Hollywood Blvd, Sunset Blvd, and Vine St. It wasn't until the Millenium Partners unveiled their plans for two 50-ish story towers flanking the Capitol Records building that the NIMBYs came out of the woodwork en masse. But the developer is already allowed to build to that height by right, so its probably too late for them. The NIMBYs are falling back to their typical arguments: it will generate too much traffic, it will ruin the views from the hills (boo hoo, 1-percenters), it's too close to a fault line (what in LA isn't close to a fault line?), etc. In the end, the project will likely happen, probably reduced to 35 or 40 stories.
But anyway, yeah- the city is undergoing a zoning rewrite that will be finished in a few years, so we won't have to wait too long to see what LA's destiny is going to be:
I used to volunteer as a walking tour guide for the Los Angles Conservancy. And I remember when I would do the Art Deco tour downtown I quickly realized how much denser SF's skyline is than LA's. The towers of the financial district along Grand Ave on top of Bunker Hill are actually pretty spaced apart.
The bases of each of these towers have large landscaped plazas with fountains and sculpture, etc. And the number of people walking between the skyscrapers (while denser than most other neighborhoods of Los Angeles) was not as crowded as downtown San Francisco.
I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that Los Angeles' tallest skyscrapers were constructed with the automobile in mind. The downtown workers experience in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and even the 90's was driving into downtown from a suburb - exiting the freeway and driving down into an underground parking area beneath an office building - then taking the elevator up to the office. Basically never leaving the building or the close vicinity of your building.
While this has been changing a whole bunch for the past 15 years - we're still only in the midst of a process of breaking down that auto-centric urban layout that has held sway for the better part of 60 years.
On the other hand, while SF's tallest skyscrapers were also built in the 60's, 70's, 80's, these buildings were not built with the same auto-centric concept in mind. San Francisco's downtown already had a much older and compact context to build within and may have had tighter plots of land to develop as a result. In addition, the Bay Area was already developing the mass transit Bart system into downtown SF with the idea of bringing commuters into the financial district without an automobile. In the post war era, San Francisco was already developing it's downtown with pedestrians at the focus - many decades before Los Angeles would consider this for their own downtown.
I like them both but I like LA's more. More height. More color. More interesting individual buildings. When I hear people talk autocentric, do they mean the downtown is autocentric? Because to me it's quite a traditional looking and feeling dt. But anyway I find San Francisco's skyline has a rather flat top appearance in some angles, except for Transamerica and BoA sticking out the top and rather bland in color and look.
I used to volunteer as a walking tour guide for the Los Angles Conservancy. And I remember when I would do the Art Deco tour downtown I quickly realized how much denser SF's skyline is than LA's. The towers of the financial district along Grand Ave on top of Bunker Hill are actually pretty spaced apart.
The bases of each of these towers have large landscaped plazas with fountains and sculpture, etc. And the number of people walking between the skyscrapers (while denser than most other neighborhoods of Los Angeles) was not as crowded as downtown San Francisco.
I believe this has a lot to do with the fact that Los Angeles' tallest skyscrapers were constructed with the automobile in mind. The downtown workers experience in the 60's, 70's, 80's, and even the 90's was driving into downtown from a suburb - exiting the freeway and driving down into an underground parking area beneath an office building - then taking the elevator up to the office. Basically never leaving the building or the close vicinity of your building.
While this has been changing a whole bunch for the past 15 years - we're still only in the midst of a process of breaking down that auto-centric urban layout that has held sway for the better part of 60 years.
On the other hand, while SF's tallest skyscrapers were also built in the 60's, 70's, 80's, these buildings were not built with the same auto-centric concept in mind. San Francisco's downtown already had a much older and compact context to build within and may have had tighter plots of land to develop as a result. In addition, the Bay Area was already developing the mass transit Bart system into downtown SF with the idea of bringing commuters into the financial district without an automobile. In the post war era, San Francisco was already developing it's downtown with pedestrians at the focus - many decades before Los Angeles would consider this for their own downtown.
DT SF is really on fire now. Rincon Hill is just exploding with highrise construction. I cant think of anywhere in CA that is so crowded with cranes and concentrated highrise development.
The view of all the new towers driving in from the Bay Bridge is very dramatic.
I like them both but I like LA's more. More height. More color. More interesting individual buildings. When I hear people talk autocentric, do they mean the downtown is autocentric? Because to me it's quite a traditional looking and feeling dt. But anyway I find San Francisco's skyline has a rather flat top appearance in some angles, except for Transamerica and BoA sticking out the top and rather bland in color and look.
I think people are referring strictly to Bunker Hill when they talk about DTLA being "auto-centric." From an urban planning perspective, Bunker Hill is effectively a suburban-style office park, with cars funneled into an underground parking garage. Street-fronts of buildings in Bunker Hill are also quite unfriendly to pedestrians and fortress-like.
But this only applies to Bunker Hill, not the rest of DTLA which is a classically-dense American downtown.
Location: Baghdad by the Bay (San Francisco, California)
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Quote:
Originally Posted by 18Montclair
DT SF is really on fire now. Rincon Hill is just exploding with highrise construction. I cant think of anywhere in CA that is so crowded with cranes and concentrated highrise development.
The view of all the new towers driving in from the Bay Bridge is very dramatic.
I was around 1st and Howard the other day and, looking in every direction, there were probably 12 cranes visible from street level working on multiple projects.
I was around 1st and Howard the other day and, looking in every direction, there were probably 12 cranes visible from street level working on multiple projects.
Yeah. I work there, and ditto. There is SO much construction around there.
San Francisco's skyline is larger and more imposing. At night when perception is blurred, coming in from 101 or 280, the skyline is very long and imposing and has almost a Manhattanesque quality to it. There is no equivalent in LA for coming into SF via the Bay Bridge. There is also no equivalent in LA for the waterfront views (each different) that SF skyline offers. To compensate, LA has a more dramatic mountain backdrop and a few taller buildings.
To say that the architecture in LA is that much better is really not making a statement at all. Both cities have flat top buildings (literally by law in LA until now). SF's skyline is large enough to be a "tabletop" with a few features here and there sticking out.
In terms of classifying LA's downtown as being half classically dense - I get it, there are really 2 main strips that cross that are lined with older buildings. But LA's downtown is not classically dense. You can walk a block and be in a sea of surface parking or one story industrial use buildings. The actual "downtown" part where the workers are is very much a poster child 70s/80s/90s downtown. The other downtown part is essentially a loft district, but not necessarily filled with downtown workers - instead, people who just crave that aspect of a city and realize in all of LA's massiveness, this is the only part of it that can offer a glimpse of that.
I don't know which one is "better", but I know right now I prefer SF's. It's one of only a handful of skylines in the US that captivate you every time you see it in the way that a "big city" draws you in. LA's skyline isn't small by any stretch, but its setup oddly in a vast expanse of odd urbanity, some say dense suburbanity, does not impose on you that big, bustling city feel that NYC, Boston, SF, Chicago, Philly, and Seattle do.
I equate LA's skyline with that of Houston's or Atlanta's. Both are BIG surprises, in the literal sense, but they don't emanate the same kind of "financial center" or "traditional city" feel that the others do.
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SF has got the better skyline
