JOHN WYKA AIA

08/14/2025

Under Construction - The SMPD SMART Center - a 24/7 operations facility designed to coordinate responses to on going events in Santa Monica. When complete it will feature a raw concrete ceilings, columns and beams, floor to ceiling glazed internal walls, and state of the art audio visual technology.

08/13/2025

Placemaking at Santa Monica Airport - a series of portable classrooms past their prime - renovated and refreshed as artist studios.

08/13/2025

Just watched Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’eclisse again this weekend. Largely filmed in Rome’s EUR district, Pier Luigi Nervi’s Palazzo Della Sport features prominently in the first few scenes. I’ve always preferred his Palazetto dello Sport, the Palazzo’s smaller cousin, with its graceful ribs of reinforced concrete. This Reminds me next time I’m in San Francisco to visit Nervi’s Cathedral of St. Mary of the Assumption. My last visit was as a small child attending mass with my parents soon after it opened in 1970. Even as a young boy I could sense but not explain the power of its architecture. I hope the power is still inexplicable - the one true sign of great architecture.

03/01/2025

Rue Clouet, Faubourg Marigny - original cobblestone paving

03/01/2025

The recently completed ANDYS, a fast casual restaurant in Chino California.

02/07/2023

My letter to the editor of The New Yorker has been published in the week's issue! I wrote the letter in response to a recent article regarding the feasibility of using 3-D printing techniques to construct housing.

Letters respond to Rachel Monroe’s article about 3-D-printed architecture and Merve Emre’s review of “Professing Criticism.”

11/17/2022

Walyalup Civic Center - Fremantle, Western Australia, Kerry Hill Architects, 2021.

Named after the traditional Aboriginal place name for the area around present day Fremantle, the civic center houses the council offices, adminstative offices and the city library. Adjacent to the previous neo-classical civic center, Walyalup Civic Center is a sensitively scaled addition that respects the context of Walyalup Koort, previously known as King’s Square.

Placing the library one level underground allowed the architects to scale the building to the height of the old civic center while at the same time creating an inviting spatial flow from the ground floor to the reading room below. The light wells to either side of the library provide ample natural daylight as well below grade landscaping.

The reading room’s slanted sod roof provides a sloped green space facing the Koort, but it’s too steeply sloped to be particularly useful except as a grandstand for public events. There are also some nice details throughout, although the ex*****on is a little uneven for my taste.

All in all, a thoughtful project sensitive to its location.

11/14/2022

The Western Australia Museum Boola Bardip - design architect OMA. While the museum, completed in 2021, represents an important acknowledgment of the Aboriginal peoples of Western Australia, the building itself does nothing to further that kind of understanding. Largely a collection of scaleless hallways connecting generic exhibition halls, the design is about as cold as the personality of Rem Koolhaus himself. What I assume are slight nods to Aboriginal culture in the form of bronzed escalators and so on simply leave one wondering what the design idea, if there was one, might have been.

Architecturally, the most unfortunate part of this project is the roughshod treatment of one of the most beautiful heritage buildings in Perth, Hackett Hall - originally the main building of the State Library of Western Australia. The museum simply rams into and through Hackett Hall with all the delicacy of a bull in a china shop. It’s also unfortunate that the exhibit designers did not see fit to use most of the delicately scaled rooms in Hackett Hall for the exhibitions, instead preferring the ”soundstages” in the newer part of the museum. That would have required taking into account the architecture at hand rather that presenting preconceived “experiences”, but if done well, well worth the effort.

Overall, this is a project that would have been better executed by local architects, such as Kerry Hill, who would have been more sensitive to the museum’s physical and cultural contex.