Non-Productive Entities Public arteries providing spectacular views Renting units for guest researchers and conference attendees
Sears Palace
The Rio Vista Center for Environmental Urban Studies Focusing on renewable energy and water issues in an urban context, the center is a node for conferences, seminars and informal meetings between global greentech conglomerates and local university and private researchers.
How do you make a biogas facility an icon of science? What’s most amazing is that you barely hear it. Solar panel-covered waste containers swish by on rail a few meters above your head, and you instantly realize how little you miss the old city full of noisy gasoline trucks. The waste is still all around you, but it flows in silence on elevated rails. This bloodstream has re-made the classic Sears building into the Sears Palace, a waste management bio gas facility of central Los Angeles and a node in the Rio Vista Center for Environmental Urban Studies. Providing a green collar jobs cluster for both skilled and unskilled labour, the Rio Vista Center is an incubator for a range of different environmental technology companies establishing themselves in Los Angeles. The central building, located in a former warehouse provides equipped laboratory renting units, apartments for guest researchers and conference attendees, and an environment for water and energy research, are provided in the central building, a redeveloped warehouse. A significant feature is also the Labs’R’Us science center for kids, where local school kids can perform science experiments in a controlled environment. The Rio Vista Center started with the ambitions to create a Clean tech Manufacturing Center by the former mayor Antonio Villaraigosa. ”Los Angeles shall be the global capital of clean technology” he said in 2008, and he turned out to be halfway right. Being rightfully criticized as just a hyped up investment category fad, clean tech and its focus on hi-tech solutions needed a complimentary focus on the classic environmental technologies such as sewage treatment and garbage management. This duplex character is emphasized in The Rio Vista Center and the Sears Palace, providing a clean green glocality and a Silicon Valley-configuration for the 21st century. 64
As a Boyle Heights native, Oscar de la Hoya has invested a good part of his career earnings in Sears Palace, a bio gas facility providing the Strip with its entire electricity supply. When did you begin to think of redeveloping the then desolate Sears building into a bio gas palace? – For me, the Sears building was not first and foremost a historic cultural landmark, but an East Los Angeles landmark. I remember shopping there with my mother when I was a little kid and wanted to give something back to the Boyle Heights neighbourhood. – First, we wanted to create a mixed commercial and residential use for the Sears building but that resulted in concerns about gentrification. So we re-worked it to create local green collar jobs which made things more interesting to the community. – I love when Boyle Heights kids pass The Sears Palace with a sense of pride on their way home after a day of hands-on laboratory exercises in the Labs’R’Us center for kids. Oscar de la Hoya, 47, retired American boxer
The Contain-O-Pod system The solarpowered waste containers carry the strips organic waste, paper and combustibles to Sears Palace and nearby facilities on elevated rail. The system is monitored centrally and create no boundaries in ground level. Every fifth Contain-O-Pod is used for personal transport, which create mixed usage.
THE FIFTH ECOLOGY. Beyond Desire: Los Angeles