Up on the roof of the VDL house – architect Richard Neutra’s experiment in modernist living built in 1932 – almost amber, late-afternoon Los Angeles sunlight glints off a reflecting pool and a breeze disturbs an array of pale blue satin cords. Entitled ‘Inverting Neutra’, Bryony Roberts’ installation is on view until 7 September in the historic home restored by Cal Poly Pomona. True to the title, the blue strings unsettle the rationality of Neutra’s glass and steel architecture and turn the logic of the mid-century residence on its head. Read More …
At Broadway & W. 218th Street there are only a few blocks left of Manhattan Island. 219th. 220th – the vestigial tail of 9th Avenue. Marble Hill and The Bronx are just across the Harlem River but this neighborhood, Inwood, is the narrow end of the landmass, the point where the accumulated capital (real and cultural) of the Big Apple goes to seed. It’s here, on this inauspicious corner in the nosebleed north of the borough, where we find Steven Holl Architects’ first ground-up building in New York City. Read More …
It’s a sunny spring morning in Venice, CA. At 10 a.m. there’s no lingering marine cover, and the sky is such a bright blue it makes you blush to think of gray climes just emerging from winter. Cars fill the Westminster Avenue Elementary School parking lot, and visitors arriving for a Los Angeles Conservancy walking tour pile out, ready to hit the asphalt in sensible shoes. The self-guided tour is entitled Venice Eclectic: Modern Architecture from the ’70s and ’80s and part of “Curating the City Modern Architecture in L.A.,” the Conservancy’s ongoing contribution to Pacific Standard Time: Modern Architecture in Los Angeles. Read More …
SCI-Arc prides itself on being a restive institution. The school routinely claims edginess, shadow-boxing disciplinary and professional boundaries. So, unsurprisingly, when asked to look back on a 40-year history as part of The Getty’s initiative “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA”, SCI-Arc chose a heretical mantle. “A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice, 1979″, curated by Todd Gannon, Ewan Branda, and Andrew Zago, zeroes in on a 9-week period in autumn 1979 when eleven architects exhibited in a makeshift gallery that popped up in Thom Mayne’s house. The curators unearthed contents of The Architecture Gallery shows through a series of reviews written by then Los Angeles Times architecture critic, John Dreyfuss.
Each practitioner — some more renegade, some more established — upped the ante for the next in the series with an exhibition and accompanying lecture at SCI-Arc’s Berkeley Street campus (all available for viewing at the SCI-Arc Video Archive). The participant list includes some of LA’s most notable figures as well as those for whom the Pritzker remains out of reach: Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate Jr., Frederick Fisher, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville, Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi), Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian), and Eric Owen Moss. Artist-architect Coy Howard delivered an opening salvo. At the time, each one of these men was prickly with ambition; a gallery show was the opportunity to prove their worth in the LA scene. Read More …
Big City Forum returns for a second annual residency at Armory Center for the Arts with a new series, entitled Transforming the Social, which features six panel conversations that recognize and celebrate the ability to create transformative moments within the scope of the built environment and social space. Armory is pleased to have been hosting Big City Forum in residence since 2012, which saw the launch of Mapping LA, a series of four events exploring current creative practices that inform the landscape and geography of Los Angeles. Through its residency at Armory, Big City Forum is deepening its ongoing investigation of social and civic space within the built environment of the Los Angeles region. The residency builds upon a shared interest between the Armory and Big City Forum in advancing public discourse on the notion of social and civic engagement.
This panel discussion brings together four practitioners from the fields of art and architecture to discuss the complexity of social engagement. Speakers will investigate the agency of art and design when shaping spaces for a public. What I Talk About When I Talk About Community asks for more refined understanding of community, in order to reveal the politics, pitfalls, and pleasures of these practices.
Featuring:
Victor Jones, principal of Los Angeles-based Fievre Jones, cultural activist, and writer, whose research lies at the intersection of architecture, urban design, and community building within cities. Recent design projects include the Platform for Watts House Project (2011) and a skate park for New Orleans’ City Park (2009). His design work has been supported by numerous grants, including the Graham Foundation, Artplaces, and the Nathan Cummings Foundation. He is currently Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California.
ennifer Su and Laura Noguera, co-owners of Thank You for Coming, a communal restaurant/residency program that “aims to give people with varying experiences and backgrounds an opportunity to explore and execute ideas around sharing food. Residents are invited to utilize our restaurant space as a platform for public engagement and creative experimentation.
James Michael Tate received his Masters of Architecture from Yale University and Bachelors of Environmental Design from Texas A&M University. He has previously worked for MOS, Peter Eisenman, and Samuel Mockbee. Tate co-taught a studio with Michael Maltzan at Rice University this past spring; the experience motivated him to move to Los Angeles. Tate designs, makes, writes, and participates in a variety of architectural affairs. His current affinities include narratives, oppositional dialectic blends, seeking refuge in unsettled territories between art and architecture, the latent potentialities of history in contemporary experiments, and the Korean taco food-truck.
Moderator:
Mimi Zeiger, editor and publisher of loud paper, a zine and blog dedicated to increasing the volume of architectural discourse. As writer and critic she covers art, architecture, urbanism, and design for the New York Times, Domus, Dwell, and Architect, where she is a contributing editor. Zeiger is author of New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World; Tiny Houses; and Micro Green: Tiny Houses in Nature.
JOIN US FOR THE FINAL DISCUSSION OF DIALOGUES
AND THE CLOSING OF THE EXHIBITION
HTTP://
DIALOGUES #4
ART/ARCHITECTURE
PARIS/LOS ANGELES
BARBARA BESTOR
CLAUDE COLLINS-STRACENSKY
VINCENT LAMOUROUX
DOROTHEE PERRET
FRANCOIS PERRIN
moderated by
MIMI ZEIGER
TUESDAY, APRIL 16, 2013, 6-8pm
ForYourArt
6020 WILSHIRE BLVD
LOS ANGELES, CA 90036
THE PROGRAM IS DEDICATED TO THE MEMORY OF MICHAEL ASHER
To mark the launch of the exhibition Archizines in Los Angeles, a discussion moderated by Sylvia Lavin, UCLA architecture and urban design professor and director of critical studies and M.A./Ph.D programs, will bring together architecture, art and design publishers to explore the different approaches to subversive visual culture and how this relates to architectural criticism.
Panelists include:
Elias Redstone, curator of “ARCHIZINES”
Susan Morgan, editor of “Art Papers on Design and Architecture” magazine
Thomas Lawson, dean of the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts and editor of the online art magazine East of Borneo
Jonah Rowen, founding editor of Project
John Southern, founding principal of Urban Operations
Leonard Koren, editor of Wet magazine
Mimi Zeiger, journalist and critic
Exhibition Opening: 8 – 9 pm
Perloff Gallery, Perloff Hall
UCLA A.UD is delighted to host the critically acclaimed international exhibition ARCHIZINES in the Perloff Gallery, the 18th stop on the world tour that has taken in cities from Tokyo and Osaka to New York, London, Paris, and Berlin.
ARCHIZINES celebrates the resurgence of alternative and independent architectural publishing around the world. The touring exhibition, curated by Elias Redstone and initiated in collaboration with the Architectural Association, now features 90 architecture magazines, fanzines and journals from over twenty countries that provide an alternative to the established architectural press. Edited by architects, artists and students, these publications provide new platforms for commentary, criticism and research into the spaces we inhabit and the practice of architecture.
The publications, all launched after 2005, vary in their style and approach to editing architecture. However, together they make an important and often radical addition to architectural discourse and demonstrate a residual love for print matter in the digital age. Each publication has selected one issue to be presented in the exhibition. These are all available to read alongside video interviews with their creators, revealing the people behind the publications and the shifting relationship between architecture and publishing today.
The ARCHIZINES collection continues to grow as more publications are discovered, and the full collection is being transferred to the National Art Library at the Victoria & Albert Museum, London.
If you’ve ever looked at an aerial view of Los Angeles via Google Maps or on decent into LAX then you know: L.A. is a city of houses. Precarious mansions climb up the hills and fill in the canyons. Detached single-family homes sit side-by-side on modest lots across the basin. “Miles and miles of little houses, wooden or stucco, under a Technicolor sky,” wrote Christopher Isherwood in his diary in May 1939, aghast. British expat viewed L.A. as ugly and unreal when compared to East Coast and European cities — New York, London, Berlin — are dense with skyscrapers, office towers, apartment buildings, and tenements. But the reality is that this condition makes the city rich with possibilities for how to live.
“The house was and continues to be the most predominant building type in the city. It was just the sheer numbers that made it so the experiment could happen,” explains architect Michael Maltzan on the phone from his Silver Lake office. Read More …
You can find Design, Bitches’ office on a pre-war residential street in Los Angeles’ Atwater Village. Out front: two motorcycles and a succulent garden. In the rear: a shed-like studio and three chickens. Founded by Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph, their workspace is just a few blocks from the Beastie Boys’ former headquarters where, until recently, a small shrine adorned with a bouquet of mums placed in front of a State Farm Insurance paid tribute to MCA (Adam Yauch). Understanding where Design, Bitches is located in LA’s urban fabric, that high-low mash-up of typologies, ethnicities, and palm trees, goes a long way to understanding where Design, Bitches is located philosophically. You’ll find them at the corner of architecture culture and pop, throwing a little attitude towards disciplinarians who like to keep the edges of architecture nice and neat.
Film Appearance
TINY is a documentary about home, and how we find it.
The film follows one couple’s attempt to build a “tiny house” from scratch, and profiles other families who have downsized their lives into homes smaller than the average parking space.
Through homes stripped down to their essentials, the film raises questions about good design, the nature of home, and the changing American Dream. Read More …