Design and Architecture

Orange County Museum of Art gets new a museum designed by Morphosis Architects, and it tips its hat at Richard Serra’s “Connector.” Will it bring urban life to suburban Costa Mesa? And design critic Alexandra Lange explores “good” toys and playgrounds and wonders if children would be just as free and creative if left to play with a cardboard box.

The Orange County Museum of Art closes this weekend. But not forever. After 41 years in Newport Beach, it’s moving to its new permanent home in Costa Mesa. And one of LA’s best-known architects, Thom Mayne and his firm Morphosis, has designed it.

A historic summit between President Trump and Kim Jong-un raises hopes among Korean-Americans. Could brothers and sisters reconnect? Could technology and infrastructure in the hermit kingdom make a great leap forward? And Santa Monica considers a pilot program for dockless e-scooters, as competition heats up between rival companies. Will it limit a popular, clean, first mile last mile solution -- or contain a public nuisance?

Starting Thursday, LA’s design community will congregate at the four-day Los Angeles Design Festival (LADF), an annual celebration that celebrates our city’s rich design culture. It includes four days of conversations, studio tours, design shows, and parties all centered at ROW DTLA in downtown LA’s industrial district.

We remember fashion icon and handbag designer Kate Spade. The arrival of autonomous vehicles and online shopping has Santa Monica considering the way forward in a future disrupted by tech. Ruth E. Carter designed the costumes for "Black Panther" and tells DnA about creating an identity on screen for a community long left out of the picture.

If you’re at a restaurant or cafe in Malibu and ask for a straw, starting June 1 you won’t be given a single-use plastic straw. The same goes for stir sticks or other plastic utensils. The environmentally-oriented beach town is just one of a growing number of cities outlawing single-use plastic implements.

We bid farewell to Andy Warhol’s Interview, and talk to artist and celebrity photographer Matthew Rolston about working for the magazine, and the creation of the “glamour- industrial complex.” And the hippie movement may have begun in California, but it spread across the globe - even beyond the Iron Curtain. We visit an exhibition of Soviet hippie culture at The Wende Museum.

A decade after the Great Recession, how is Los Angeles doing? A new study out this week looks at creative economy jobs in California, and finds they now exceed the pre-recession peak in 2007. That’s just one finding from the annual Otis Report on the Creative Economy. But costs of participating in the creative economy are growing too.

Saturday's royal wedding ended with the newly married Duke and Duchess of Sussex driving off in an electric car: a retrofitted 1968 E-Type Jaguar. Can all classic sports cars go clean? We also get a preview of the U.S. Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale. And we hike up to Yamashiro, the faux-Japanese hilltop restaurant in Hollywood, as part of our ongoing look at identity in design.