Kevin Scanlon

Heather Shaw

One of the fascinating Angelenos featured in L.A. Weekly's People 2013 issue. Check out our entire People 2013 issue here.

Here's how Heather Shaw spent 2012: She was production designer on her first TV show, a little singing competition called American Idol. She had three installations on various stages at Coachella. She designed and fabricated a "water chandelier" for the poolside club at the Cosmopolitan in Vegas. She created and built an 80-foot-tall, 30,000-capacity "dance temple," graceful and neon-colored like a raver's Angkor Wat, for a music festival in Portugal. And she took her parents to their first Burning Man. ("They loved it," she's happy to report.)

So what does she do in her free time?

"I don't have any," the 35-year-old CEO of Vita Motus Design Studio admits with a laugh. It's early evening and she's sipping coffee at Swork near her home in Eagle Rock, fueling up for the latest in a never-ending series of late nights with her CAD software. "If something comes across my table, I want to do it."

Eva Recinos

Do you ever sit at home wondering where you can find a set of Shepard Fairey-designed playing cards for your next poker tournament? Or maybe what store carries those 24-karat gold Karl Springer chairs you ache to add to your dining table?

Well, it seems the folks at Hammer and Spear somehow heard your crazed mumbling. Power couple Scott Jarrell and Kristan Cunningham -- you might recognize the latter from HGTV's Design on a Dime -- bring their flair for design to a new store downtown that offers all sorts of unique objects.

The store's interior looks like something out of the pages of Dwell magazine; expect to spend a good amount of time just roaming the many sections and finding little treasures in every square inch.

Hammer and Spear opened to the public March 15 and the surrounding neighborhood gave it a warm reception. "We're still racing around and remerchandising since selling quite a bit of product in the first few days, but it's a great problem to have, and we're grateful for it," says Cunningham.

Metro

Sam Erenberg's artwork at the Roscoe station

The Expo Line's opening last spring may have snagged all the headlines, but a few months later, the Valley debuted its own transit triumph: the Orange Line busway completed its 18-mile route connecting North Hollywood to Chatsworth. This light-rail-on-wheels has become an internationally recognized and locally beloved institution, and a new exhibition showcasing its public art program, explaining the process behind the artworks that are at 18 stations now dotting the San Fernando Valley.

Twenty artists are featured in the show, which is on view until Dec. 13 in a gallery tucked into Los Angeles Valley College's art building in Valley Glen. The roster includes lead artist Renée Petropoulos, whose vision was to create a "necklace" of artworks that string through the Valley, so each station is portrayed as a link in this chain, with uniform elements like elliptical mosaics and porcelain enamel steel panels. Even the Orange Line's landscaping is a work of art: we learn that landscape artist Jud Fine chose the distances between trees, for example, to create a sense of movement.

For the rest of the 18 artists, who are all working in California, the exhibition shows the explorations that led to their site-specific works as well as photos of their work in context at each of the stations. Seeing them together, themes emerge. Most artists, for example, chose to nod to one of the Valley's major exports like agriculture, entertainment and tectonic shifts (no porn industry references, however).

Alissa Walker

The streets of Venice Beach whir with the crunchy hum of skateboards, the utterly '80s rhythm of Rollerblades, the impossible physics of a surfer pedaling a beach cruiser barefoot, one arm slung around a board. A new design exhibition on Abbot Kinney that focuses on human-powered movement is almost ridiculously place-specific, since many of the products hanging on the wall are just as likely to go whizzing by outside.

"Moving LA: People-Powered Design" is a collaboration between two Venice designers: furniture designer Ilan Dei, whose studio is a few blocks away, and product designer Stuart Karten, whose firm designs medical technology like hearing aids. When Dei tossed out the idea for Karten to curate a show in his new pop-up store on Abbot Kinney, the overriding theme was already obvious: Dei and Karten met 15 years ago at Dei's first store, passed each other on the Venice bike path a few days later, and have been riding together ever since.

In choosing the products, Karten focused in on three areas -- wellness, recreation and transportation -- but he quickly realized the lines between them were blurred. In essence, the products on display show how Southern Californians have made the best of moving through our exquisite climate and unique geography, says Karten. "It's how people rationalize their existence in the outdoors. It's not enough just to be hanging out outside -- I gotta be doing something."

photo by Mina Marefat, Yale University Archives

OSS graphics

Eero Saarinen's fingerprints are all over mid-century design's greatest hits, and even if you can't pronounce his name, you definitely know his tulip chair. From the St. Louis Gateway Arch, to the Dulles Airport main terminal to the grasshopper chair, the gamut of the architect's best known works are now on view as the A+D Museum hosts the traveling exhibit "Eero Saarinen: A Reputation for Innovation." The show also features some of his recently uncovered, lesser-known projects, and a peek into the secret life he led at the pinnacle of undercover government espionage.

Image by Parsons Brinkerhoff, via presentations from the City of LA Bureau of Engineering Sixth Street Viaduct Replacement Project website.

A digital rendering of Parsons Brinkerhoff's egret wings-style design for the Sixth St. Viaduct Replacement project.

Finalists for the re-design of the Sixth Street Viaduct, a bridge spanning downtown and Boyle Heights, revealed their plans to the public recently. Depending on the mood at the Bureau of Engineering in the coming weeks, we'll soon see three golden "guardian angels"(a proposal by AECOM), a pair of egret's wings (Parsons Brinkerhoff), or a cartoonish row of arches (HNTB) take shape over the LA river.

The winner will be chosen this month, and the entire project, budgeted at $400 million, is scheduled for completion in 2018.

Alissa Walker

Six years ago, when I decided to abandon my car for a multi-modal cocktail of walking, biking and bus-riding, I lived in Hollywood. The pedestrian and transit parts came easy in my super-dense neighborhood, but biking terrified me -- rolling out of my driveway I was confronted with three routes, each of them moderately suicidal: the extended on-ramp for the 101 that is Highland Avenue, the dangerously narrow lanes of Franklin Avenue, or the unpredictable shitshow of Hollywood Boulevard.

But I soon discovered Yucca -- sweet, sweet Yucca, weaving a mellow east-west path through the heart of Hollywood that was surprisingly car-light. That's because the Department of Transportation had installed traffic diversions to keep motorists from using Yucca as a shortcut (and to prevent other unsavory behaviors). At a handful of intersections, concrete bollards and signage directed cars to turn right, while bikes could glide blissfully around them. It made the street a cyclist's wet dream. And in an interesting twist, the city has recently recognized this informal use with official infrastructural improvements, christening .8 miles of Yucca as L.A.'s first "bike-friendly street."

Courtesy of Blu Homes, John Swain Photography

Blu Home exterior

Prefab, or prefabricated buildings, are typically manufactured in component parts, typically in a factory, then shipped and installed on-site. Pre-housing bust several developers specializing in prefab lauched in SoCal, including Marmol Radziner and LivingHomes, delivering mass-produced modern homes. These homes, while having a high design quotient, were often not much cheaper than a custom-designed home on a per square footage basis. Enter Blu Homes: the latest entrant into the prefab space focused on sustainable solutions aiming to provide affordable housing.

One of the earliest prefab innovators marrying architecture and manufacturing was Michelle Kaufmann, who launched her eponymous architecture firm in 2002 in the Bay Area specializing in green homes that used modular, prefab technology. While her firm closed in 2009 due to the tanking housing economy (she later opened a new design firm), she sold several of her designs to Blu Homes. This past weekend, the first Blu Home in SoCal, set against the alien-esque desert backdrop of Joshua Tree, was open to the public for a tour.

Courtesy of the artist and CB1 Gallery

Jaime Scholnick's postcard, Godzilla With T-pot Fossil Tower (2012)

This week, artists fix up and sell other artists' artwork, a choir performs songs based on protest techniques and discarded packing material invades pop culture.

5. Paper girls in a dress shop
In Satine Boutique on Third Street, artist Bari Ziperstein's 3-D girl made of newspaper-colored paper is doing an arabesque on a table covered with designer shoes. Another paper girl perches on a cabinet and Ziperstein has stretched colored tape along the walls and floor. The tape outlines the layout of Satine's new Abbot Kinney store, but you don't need to know that; you can just appreciate the geometric divisions it cuts across the room. Independent curator Emma Gray organized the show, connecting Ziperstein with Jeannie Lee, who runs Satine. The effect of the art in and around the merchandise isn't earth-shattering -- but once you know it's there, you pay just a little more attention to everything you look at. 8134 W. Third St.; through October. (323) 655-2142, emmagrayhq.com.

Nanette Gonzales

The Hildebrand Construction crew builds a bubble house.

The AltBuild Alternative Building Materials & Design Expo, in its ninth year, is regarded as a place for the "green-curious" to make the leap to "green-committed." For people who had already waded past compact fluorescent bulbs deep into eco-consciousness territory, however, it was the place to show off, compare carbon footprints and otherwise feel greener-than-thou.

One of the greenest people at the Santa Monica Civic Auditorium had to be David Karp, with the Los Angeles County Department of Public Works. Karp stood in front of a bin of worms and plunged his hand into the wriggling mess. Worm feces, a powerful natural fertilizer, leaked out the bottom of the bin. Karp scrounged around in the catch tray and let the poop dribble through his fingers. "That's the good stuff," he said.

Sometimes he brews a cup of worm tea with the poop, using five gallons of water, molasses, fish food and an aquarium bubbler. The tea is not for him but his plants.

Karp, a worm aficionado, waxed poetic about their characteristics: how the components of the bin mimic the top six inches of jungle leaf litter; how worms are hermaphroditic ("They make each other pregnant"); how they live two years in the wild and five "in captivity;" how, like many convention attendees, they adore vegetables and abhor meat and dairy.

Stick their bin in a warm, shady spot, pop in a few melon rinds, and the wigglers will happily defecate a garden's worth of compost. "What if the worms leave the bin?" a woman asked Karp.

"Why would they leave? Where would they go? They hate light," Karp said. "They're not curious."