Las Urbanistas

Even as they reopen the southernmost runway at Los Angeles International Airport today, officials are looking ahead to a more dangerous project: building a parallel taxiway between two runways while jets traveling more than 100 mph take off and land just yards away on each side.

Dozens of excavators, oversized dump trucks and other machines will toil 20 hours a day to build a 1.8-mile-long concrete taxiway on the airport’s south side, even as controllers work to wedge in hundreds of flights around them.

“This is, without a doubt, a greater safety concern,” said Jake Adams, runway project manager for the city’s airport agency. “We’re taking the appropriate measures to make sure the contractor does what he’s supposed to do.”

Airport officials said they were satisfied with Tutor-Saliba Corp. and its subcontractors’ safety record during reconstruction of the southernmost runway, 55 feet farther away from its twin. The project is coming in 7% under budget and only about a week late despite some unexpected obstacles.

“We put in $170 million worth of runway work in seven months and blew everyone’s mind,” said Ronald N. Tutor, president of Tutor-Saliba. “It was uneventful.”

Even so, building inspectors cited the firm and its subcontractors several times since work began in July for not complying with stringent safety requirements, a Times review of inspection reports found.

The requirements included erecting orange plastic fencing around various job sites, installing beacons and large orange-and-white checkered flags on construction vehicles, not overloading trucks and providing flagmen to ensure that trucks yield to aircraft.

The citations were meant in large part to reinforce safety rules so the contractor and workers understood the importance of adhering to them when construction on the center taxiway begins this month, Adams said. Officials expect to complete the project in June 2008.

The city’s airport agency spent years trying to convince residents and the City Council that it needed to rework the south airfield at LAX to prevent close calls between aircraft on the ground.

About 80% of such incidents occurred on the south side when pilots landed on the outer runway, turned onto a series of taxiways and stopped too close to the inner runway, where aircraft take off. LAX historically has had among the nation’s highest rates of so-called runway incursions.

By moving the southernmost runway and installing a center taxiway, officials hope to cut down on incursions. When the project is finished, pilots will be directed by controllers after they land to turn onto the taxiway, where they will await clearance to cross the inner runway.

A settlement agreement forged between airport-area communities and the agency in late 2005 allowed some projects in Mayor James K. Hahn’s $11-billion LAX modernization plan to proceed — including the $330-million south airfield reconstruction.

Moving the southernmost runway was a massive undertaking that required months of planning to reorchestrate the airport’s 1,800 flights a day.

Airlines and air traffic controllers were concerned that shutting down one of the airport’s four runways for the project would cause delays, not just at LAX, but also at other regional airports.

But things went relatively smoothly. Less than 1% of all flights from July through March experienced reportable delays — or those 15 minutes or longer — as a result of the runway closure, according to air traffic control data.

Officials said months of planning by the FAA and the airport agency, fewer operations at LAX and good weather helped keep delays at bay.

“I’ll bet if you spoke with the average passenger flying through here, they wouldn’t have known anything was different,” said Marv Shappi, operations manager at the LAX tower.

Project managers also managed to avoid concrete shortages common in today’s busy construction environment by calling on several pre-approved suppliers.

There were several problems, however. Early on, workers discovered a 1,200-foot runway buried near the Sepulveda Tunnel. The 1940s-era runway wasn’t on construction documents and required the contractor to stop the entire project to remove the concrete. The excavation cost $1.3 million and delayed reconstruction efforts for 23 days.

There also were several incidents involving damage to “critical cables” that supplied power and information to sensitive equipment that pilots use to navigate the airfield, according to a letter from the Federal Aviation Administration to the city’s airport agency obtained through a Freedom of Information Act request.

Correspondence between George Aiken, the FAA’s manager for safety and standards, and Lydia Kennard, then the agency’s executive director, points to four instances from Aug. 7 to Dec. 8 when workers severed or damaged cables. Flights were delayed in a Nov. 7 incident after a contractor sliced through a cable, cutting power to lights that pilots relied on to orient aircraft for takeoff and landing on the inner runway on the airport’s south side.

In additional correspondence, Kennard attributed the problems to the contractor, who, she wrote, failed to mark the conduits properly or didn’t “exercise proper care” when working around them. Tutor-Saliba referred questions on the matter to the airport agency.

The agency promised to increase inspections of construction activities, according to a follow-up letter March 28 from Aiken to Samson Mengistu, the agency’s acting executive director. In it, the FAA reminded airport officials that they must “strictly enforce airfield safety” to ensure construction doesn’t interfere with navigation aids.

As for the center taxiway, it will be built in multiple phases to allow officials to rebuild a series of taxiways that connect the southern runways while continuing to operate an active airfield. The inner runway will have to be closed periodically to allow workers to stitch on these taxiways. The closures may come from 1 to 7 a.m. and could affect heavy jets headed to Asia that typically depart in the early morning.

Since the inner runway on the airport’s south side is its longest, carriers must plan ahead for its closure to ensure that their aircraft aren’t too heavy to take off on one of LAX’s three other runways.

“Were talking about less than a half dozen airlines,” said Frank Clark, executive director of the nonprofit organization that represents carriers operating at the Tom Bradley International Terminal.

He said the airport agency is “good about giving them advance notice … so they can plan accordingly if they have to hold off cargo and work it through other cities.”

Air traffic controllers said center taxiway construction will not require them to reroute flights as extensively as they did when the southernmost runway was closed.

When the runway reopens, however, controllers will need some time to adjust to directing planes onto fewer taxiways between the two runways on the south side, said Shappi, the operations manager at the LAX tower.

Residents also will be in for an adjustment period when flights resume on the southernmost runway. Airport officials are bracing for noise complaints from neighboring communities.

“We’re really concerned about the perception of the runway being 55 feet closer,” said Adams, the airport agency’s runway project manager. “For the last eight months, they’ve had a wonderful silence. The reality is the runway is not significantly louder now.”

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jennifer.oldham@latimes.com

Rachel Gordon, Chronicle Staff Writer; Monday, April 2, 2007

The San Francisco Municipal Railway will remove the training wheels from the new Third Street streetcar line when it begins full service Saturday, and only then will officials know whether their promise of improved transit service for the city’s southeastern neighborhoods will be fulfilled.

One of the biggest questions is whether the $648 million rail project will provide a faster ride than the workhorse 15-Third bus line that has served the corridor for 67 years and will be retired when the streetcar takes over.

If a Chronicle reporter’s ride two weekends ago was any indication, there’s a lot of work to do. It took one hour to get from the end of the line in the Visitacion Valley neighborhood near the Daly City border to Fourth and King streets near the Giants ballpark in San Francisco’s South of Market neighborhood. That’s double the time that Muni hopes to achieve with the new line.

But officials are quick to point out that the new streetcar line, officially known as the T-Third, is in the test phase and that the slower running times were anticipated during the period. Still under way, they say, is training for the operators learning the new stretch of track, tweaking of the new high-tech signals and testing the electrical system to make sure it can handle the load without shutting down.

“We’re still in testing mode and knocking out the kinks, getting through the myriad of things that could go wrong,” said San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency chief Nathaniel Ford.

Muni began weekend testing of the new streetcar line in January as part of a soft-launch, temporarily allowing passengers to ride for free. On Saturday, the 5.1-mile T-Third will join the rest of the Metro light-rail system full-time, and within a decade is expected to carry 71,000 riders per day.

Ford said the travel-time goals are: 23 minutes between Visitacion Valley and the ballpark, and 47 minutes between Visitacion Valley and the Castro Station. During the trial period, the run times have averaged 27 minutes and 54 minutes, respectively, Ford said.

During the weekend tests, passengers have been allowed to ride for free and ridership has been light — two factors that speed boarding — and traffic hasn’t been as heavy as it would be on weekdays, meaning that the trains don’t have to contend with as much time-consuming congestion.

On the other hand, Ford said the trains deliberately have been running at a slower-than-optimal speed, partly as a precaution because people driving cars in the area still are getting used to the fact that trains are running down the middle of Third Street and new traffic rules are in place.

Ford predicted success come opening day.

“It took decades to get to this point,” said Ford, who inherited the project when he took the top post at Muni 14 months ago. “We’re very proud of getting to this milestone.”

Janet Tyler, a 24-year-old receptionist who recently moved back into her mother’s Bayview district home and works downtown, now rides the 15-Third — a trip she said now usually takes her about 45 minutes — and hopes the change will make her commute swifter and smoother.

“What I heard from friends is that the train is slow,” Tyler said Thursday morning as she waited for the bus on Third Street. “But Muni says it will get better. I hope they’re right. People out here have waited a long time for this.”

Completion of the project was more than a year behind schedule and ran more than $150 million over the original cost estimate. It has been in the works for more than 20 years — construction began in 2002 — and represents more than just another capital project.

It also represents a real and symbolic link between neighborhoods in the city’s economically struggling and largely black and Asian southeastern neighborhoods with the political and financial strongholds downtown. The project even has a slogan: “Connecting people. Connecting communities.”

Mayor Gavin Newsom has a lot riding on the project. Newsom, running for re-election in the fall, has made improving the city’s troubled transit system a top priority and the T-Third line can be used to showcase an accomplishment or be held up by critics as a failure.

The mayor said last week he is confident that the new light rail line won’t disappoint.

“No one expects it to be perfect from day one; people have to be a little patient,” he said. “But there will be better service, better on-time performance, more convenience. Otherwise, we made a $648 million miscalculation — but I don’t believe that to be the case.”

In today’s Manhattan, there are few better ways to assume the mantle of sophistication than shelling out millions to live in a building designed by a famous architect. The result is a surfeit of architects pumping out emblems of conspicuous consumption.

But on occasion the result is also exquisite architecture.

Two new residential buildings designed by the French architect Jean Nouvel even raise the possibility that hedonistic materialism is good for the soul. Both buildings — one nearing completion in SoHo, the other just getting under way in Chelsea — are being marketed as collectibles for the ultra-rich, but they are more than baubles.

Their dreamy lobbies and sleek apartments conjure the kind of voyeuristic fantasy that, as Hitchcock understood, makes city life so tantalizing. At the same time they take their cues from the rough edges — empty lots, blank brick walls, rooftop graffiti — that express New York’s essential gritty identity.

Of the two the SoHo building is the more restrained. Its muscular steel frame rises on Grand Street between Broadway and Mercer, formerly a light-manufacturing area, later an art mecca and now a trendy shopping district overrun with tourists. The neighborhood’s once-derelict cast iron-frame buildings are now prized real estate.

Mr. Nouvel doesn’t reject this history; he tips his hat to it, showing us what can be accomplished through ingenious planning and calculated consideration of the setting. The building’s heavy steel frame, for instance, can be read as an updated version of those cast-iron structures that give SoHo its industrial character. The height of its five-story base loosely follows the cornice line of the masonry buildings along Broadway, and the upper floors are set back from the street to make room for large terraces, at eye level with the nearby rooftops.

Architects will doubtless notice how the steel I-beams framing the exterior play on the formal elegance of Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building uptown, perhaps the city’s greatest Modernist landmark. They also bring to mind the glass-and-steel grids of Richard Meier’s recent residential towers on the West Side Highway at Perry Street and Charles Street.

Mr. Meier’s finely detailed creations suggest the cool precision of a Swiss watch, but Mr. Nouvel is after something more slyly playful. Mr. Meier likes his steel white; Mr. Nouvel, battleship gray. The I-beams in Mr. Nouvel’s SoHo building are set flush with the glass, giving it a taut profile. The rear, overlooking a narrow empty lot that will be transformed into a private garden, is treated as a raw concrete wall punctured by unadorned windows: the kind of blank side wall we associate with humdrum tenements.

There are other signs that this building is not ready to conform. In a rather strained note, an odd trellis-like structure decorated with blue glass louvers wraps over the building’s top corner, a kind of contemporary cupola meant to contrast with the dome of the 1909 Police Building a few blocks away. Horizontal bands of dark blue and red glass interrupt the purity of the street facades. On warm days big mechanized glass panels set into the facade — essentially moving walls — will slide open, transforming the apartments into covered terraces and giving the building the appearance of an elaborate machine.

Mr. Nouvel has played this trick before — most notably in his Nemausus housing project in Nîmes, France — to allow the messiness of the apartments to spill into view, breaking down the distance between the building’s inner life and the life of the street. (Picture, if you will, how much livelier the SoHo building would be with satellite antennas and clotheslines strung between the windows.)

It’s only when you step inside that you experience the building’s underlying hedonism. The lobby, not yet finished, is conceived as a vertical slot, extremely high and narrow, framed by windows overlooking a leafy tree-filled garden on one side; on the other, panels of reflective glass are superimposed with black-and-white images of a forest.

As you proceed through the lobby, the images will dissolve into spectral scenes, a haunting fairy tale landscape of trees, real and fake, and shadowy figures. A slot of glass laid into the lobby floor allows you to peek down at an underground pool in which residents will be visible bathing surrounded by white marble.

Real estate agents, no doubt, have promised glimpses of a dripping wet Uma Thurman (who has been dating André Balazs, the building’s developer), although you’re more likely to spot an overweight bond trader. But who cares? The point is titillation. And once you enter the apartments, the views are truly stupendous: elaborate cornices, wrought iron facades, wood water towers and rooftop graffiti.

By comparison Mr. Nouvel’s building on the West Side Highway has an unvarnished, raucous quality. Scheduled for completion in late 2008, it will rise on 19th Street across from Frank Gehry’s sparkling new IAC building, which might well have inspired Mr. Nouvel to pump up the glitz factor.

As with the SoHo Building, Mr. Nouvel makes a starkly classical distinction between the back and the formal public facade. The north and east exterior walls, which don’t face the street, will be fashioned out of crude black concrete blocks punctured by irregularly sized windows. The full beauty of the building doesn’t reveal itself until you circle around to the front, a gleaming glass-and-steel mask that wraps around its southwest corner.

That beauty emerges from the complexity of the glass facade. The 1,650 window panes in its glass-and-steel grid are set at different angles, so that each will be imbued with subtly different qualities of light and reflection. Portions of the facade will seem to shimmer like the surface of water at times, and at others be more opaque. The silhouette will glow like a torch one minute and dissolve into the surrounding skyline the next.

Heightening the sense of surprise is the facade’s relationship to the interior. At ground level a protective glass barrier creates a transitional zone between the street and the restaurant and lobby. Terraces will bridge the space overhead. Down below, the back of the lobby is anchored by a tranquil garden, luring you deeper into the space.

Over all it’s a heady alternative to the austere, buttoned-down tone of, say, Park Avenue’s residential buildings. For those who can afford it, why not? For the rest of us Mr. Nouvel’s buildings make fetching architectural eye candy.