Fall marks season of revival for architecture in Los Angeles

Architecture is not just slow. It's a hurry-up-and-wait profession at its core, chancy and contingent, as vulnerable to the cold feet of clients as the whims of capital markets. During the Great Recession, as financing dried up and confidence cracked, the construction of important new buildings in Los Angeles ground nearly to a halt.

And so this fall, which brings with it a number of significant architectural debuts, is both welcome and a little alien: For the first time in nearly a decade, thanks to a stronger domestic economy and an influx of investment from China, South Korea and elsewhere, a steady supply of ambitious, market-tested architecture is emerging from the city's cultural pipeline.

The crop includes ground-up projects by some of L.A.'s most talented architects. The city is also learning to reuse its underappreciated older buildings in inventive ways.

All in all, it's a season of marked if still cautious revival for Los Angeles architecture: a fall that feels more like a spring.

An improving economy tends to produce what might be called a reverse domino effect. A big project coming out of the ground pulls up others by sheer force of momentum. Witness the buildings, good and mostly bad, sprouting like mushrooms in the shadow of L.A. Live's Marriott hotel tower downtown.

Even stalled projects can have this effect. Opening next month on Bunker Hill, across a new plaza from Eli Broad's delayed contemporary art museum, is the Emerson, an expedient-looking residential tower by the firm Arquitectonica with 271 apartments on 19 floors.

More impressive models for new residential architecture have popped up in Santa Monica, where the second phase of the Expo Line is expected to begin running to the beach by early 2016 and where a mid-rise collection of condos and apartments has just opened across the street from popular Tongva Park. Divided into a section of affordable rental units by Koning Eizenberg and condos by the Santa Monica firm Moore Ruble Yudell, the complex offers a compelling combination of spare neo-modern design and generous open space.

An expanding transportation network is also producing new architecture in Orange County, where the $190-million Anaheim Regional Transportation Intermodal Center, or ARTIC, will open in late fall.

As designed by architecture firm HOK and engineers Parsons Brinckerhoff, the station may seem an overly grand arrival hall for the scant number of passengers it is likely to attract in its first years of operation. Enclosed under a wide roof covered with pillowy ETFE (ethylene tetrafluoroethylene) panels, it was designed in part to hold high-speed trains that won't begin running for about two decades, if ever; perhaps over time the train-riding population in the O.C. will grow to match its magisterial scale.

The colleges and universities in town, many of which kept building at least modestly during the recession, with endowments or fundraising efforts robust enough to withstand the downturn, are now accelerating those efforts.

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Fall marks season of revival for architecture in Los Angeles