Playa vista stages

Colonel James Rhodes. Jeff Bridges as Obadiah Stane. Other Cast. About the Production. The Suit s. On Location.

State-of-the-art Cars and Bikes. Initial Design Concept Process. Groundbreaking Special Effects. The Iron Monger Suit. Theatrical Trailer. Image Galleries. Interviews and Articles. Worldwide Release Dates. In fairness, the promised public amenities of Playa Vista, voluminously codified during the s, have all been kept: There is a mix of housing for people of all incomes.

There is a high ratio of open space to buildings, even if much of that open space is flat, unshaded grass. Here and there, one can see the electric buggies that the developers promised as a gadget-crazy alternative to driving. And whether or not I like the housing, it does add critically needed units in Los Angeles: For the approximately 1, units that remain to be built in the first phase of 3, units, there are 40, names on a waiting list.

At this moment, though, it is difficult to remember that Playa Vista, or at least its site plan, had been one of the great promises of the New Urbanism. In its earliest stages, Playa Vista was imagined by designers as a group of different housing types and different scales, designed in varying styles by many architects.

The original vision of Playa Vista was a walkable place with little of the uniformity usually imposed by developers. This was a genuinely exciting idea for one of the largest urban infill projects in the country.

Despite this move from creativity to uniformity during the charrettes, many New Urbanist planning principles remained in place: The sharp corners, the streets lined with buildings, the emphasis on landscape, the notion of locating stores and transit within walking distance of homes.

The easy answer, which is not exactly right, is that the money men took control of an unconventional project that they were too crass to understand. The financiers and merchant homebuilders cheapened and conventionalized Playa Vista to maximize their profit. That kind of cheap shot will satisfy the Playa Vista haters, I suppose, but I think the real answer is more subtle. The project fell into some crevasse between the intentions of the original designers and the practices of conventional homebuilding.

In particular, there seems to be a fundamental problem with the building type. The trusses utilized nearly 8, connector bolts and , lbs of steel connector plate, which exhausted the entire domestic supply of that particular size of bolts and gauge of steel plate material.

The trusses were assembled at the fabricators yard in Oregon, disassembled for shipping, re-assembled inside the structure and hoisted into place.

Existing structure constraints necessitated a custom rigging system — the roof of the soundstage structure was 8 ft below the roof of the existing hangar. The Google Spruce Goose office complex remained occupied during construction of the sound stages. The limitations challenged the team to develop a secondary high ceiling structure out of light gauge framing and plywood that sits above the architectural finish ceiling and below the existing wooden roof, completely supported by the walls below.

The team repeated the approach for Building