Farmlab Public Salon
Victoria Yust and Ian McIlvaine
Friday, May 29, 2009 @ Noon
Free Admission




Old Ideas that should be new again...and other dreams for L.A.


About the Salon

Monorail? Solar hot water on every roof? Courtyard housing? Shared green spaces? Natural hot spring community bathhouse?

Architects Ian McIlvaine and Victoria Yust, of Tierra Sol y Mar, will present a few projects, still in their very early stages, that incorporate these old, yet still forward-thinking, ideas. Small steps that could make Los Angeles not only a more sustainable place to live, but a more pleasant one. We lost the red car system; would a monorail be the 21st century solution? We used to have unlimited space and room for everyone to have a freestanding house and a garden; would a "small lot subdivision" with a shared central park be the solution for a denser city? Los Angeles has long been called a collection of neighborhoods in search of a city, but these neighborhoods need to maintain their sense of community; is a mixed-use building at the old Bimini Baths, on an LAUSD-owned site, a way to do that?


About the Salon Participants

Ian McIlvaine, AIA, LEED AP, and Victoria Yust, AIA, formed Tierra Sol y Mar in 1994 to provide environmentally conscious design through a close collaboration with builders, artists, and most importantly, their clients. Their first project was the design and construction of a straw bale pavilion for the 1994 Yuba-Sutter County Fair, using rice straw, a local waste material. Projects completed since then range from single family residences, including a house in Venice which was the first permitted SCIP (Structural Concrete Insulated Panel) building in Los Angeles, to commercial projects including a three story commercial building in downtown Santa Monica where they collaborated with three different artists. In their own 4-unit building in Venice, they had the opportunity to test their mettle as "green developers". 90% of their current clients have come to them asking for sustainable design – a noticeable change since 1994.

Image: The Schwebebahn (monorail), in Wuppertal, Germany, built in 1900 and still in operation.(LIFE Images)

from: http://www.californiasolarcenter.org/history_solarthermal.html via Victoria Yust

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1 Comments:

At 7:45 PM , Blogger VK said...

Thank you for the thought-provoking discussion. I'd love to see a monorail system implemented that incorporates garden space below and a walkway/bikeway above. I also wonder if the outer walls of your multi-family residential plans could incorporate wall pockets for gardens and also living walls...vertical gardens...to make use of the space and create a better view from outside?

 

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