Rem Koolhaas’ Elements of Architecture in the Central Pavilion at the 14th Venice Architecture Biennale opens with a ceiling. Well, two ceilings: the existing, recently restored 1909 dome painted by Galileo Chini and a utilitarian drop ceiling hung at 2.7 meters, complete with electrical and mechanical systems. “One man’s ceiling is another man’s floor,” sang Paul Simon in 1973, some seven years before the first architecture biennale in Venice. A twangy number from a solo album, the song departs from Simon and Garfunkel’s summer of love utopianism and delivers an existential lyric that pivots on the “is,” eluding a single definition a basic architectural element. Koolhaas’ installation might seem like a parody of preservation, a subject he’s known for reconsidering. According to accompanying text, the ceiling is meant to oscillate between symbol and utility pointing out a lingering hang-up of modernization: one man’s iconography is another man’s abstraction. Read More …
Edited by: Margo Handwerker and Richard Saxton. Featuring works by: Richard Saxton, municipalWORKSHOP, and M12 Collective. Graphic design: Peter de Kan Publisher: Jap Sam Books.
Art has its Billboard charts. They focus mostly on artists and exhibitions in urban centers. A Decade of Country Hitsis devoted to uncharted hits thriving instead on rural aesthetics and rural knowledge. This richly illustrated volume documents ten years of collective works initiated by artist Richard Saxton in rural communities around the world, from the American Midwest and Southwest to parts of Europe, Australia, and South America. Impossible to attribute to any one artistic genre, the works archived here explore a growing community of artists and researchers drawn to the rural experience in all its complexity. It resembles a sketchbook: with drawings, photographs, and from the hip accounts in the field, as well as contributions from likeminded artists, musicians, poets, and writers. Designed by Peter de Kan, the book is published by Jap Sam Books and distributed in North America and Canada by RAM Publications & Distribution.
A Decade of Country Hits includes an international roster of contributors. It contains interviews with Todd Bockley, co-director of the Center for Social Sculpture; Twink Metzler, founder of Living Room Studios; architectural historian Robert Nauman; and Wapke Feenstra, artist and co-founder of Myvillages. Featured throughout are new collaborations with Zach Boddicker, singer and songwriter for 4H Royalty; Kurt Wagner, singer and songwriter for Lambchop; and Matthew Fluharty, director of Art of the Rural. Providing context for the work are essays by artist Stuart Hyatt, founder of TEAM Records; as well as essays by critics and writers Josh Garrett-Davis, author of Ghost Dances: Proving Up on the Great Plains; Mimi Zeiger, author of New Museums: Contemporary Museum Architecture Around the World, Tiny Houses, and Micro Green; and Enrique Ramirez, whose writing has appeared in Perspecta, Thresholds, AA Files, and elsewhere. In addition are essays by award-winning artists Marjetica Potrč,Chris Sauter, and Fernando García-Dory, founder of A Shepherds School; as well as essays by curators, Ian Hunter, director of the LITTORAL Arts Trust; Marco Marcon, co-founder of International Art Space, and Kirsten Stoltz, programming director of the M12 Collective.
Los Angeles–based architect Barbara Bestor may have been dubbed queen of her neighborhood after publishing the book Bohemian Modern: Living in Silver Lake, but her love of art and culture goes beyond any zip code. A nonstop traveler, Bestor works what she’s seen—bright tile in Istanbul, mud mosques in Mali—into bold designs that are changing the face of L.A.
“Could life be more beautiful?” wrote Deborah Sussman on 1 November 1954 in a letter home to her parents. A young designer living in the Eames house and working for the office, she would become the environmental designer responsible for the iconic colourful graphics of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics and countless bold visions, including the cartoonish lettering used on the billboard for the 1972 documentary Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles.
Sussman passed away in August. Sharply present on the LA scene, even at 83, she had been quietly fighting breast cancer over the last year and news of her death was a sad shock to the design and architecture community. How could someone so vital be gone? Graphic designer April Greiman recalled a story of petite Sussman introducing herself by saying, “I’m kinda a big deal”. Read More …
Long Beach resident and activist Elliot Gonzalez has been working seven years to get the roof garden atop the public library at the Long Beach Civic Center reopened to the public.
He was twenty when he first hatched his plan. He spied the ruins of terraced lawns, abandoned planters, and open-air concrete bleachers through chain-link fencing. Stairways that once lead to the park were shuttered with steel gates and signs reading “Area Closed,” “Roof Closed,” “Trespassing Will Be Cited.” Read More …
Panel discussion with artist Santiago Borja, critic Mimi Zeiger and curator/artist Anthony Carfello.
This two-day conference investigates the power of experimental art installations to remake the spatial and social realities of modernist house museums. The symposium responds to the curatorial shift in the maintenance of house museums, in which directors are supporting increasingly transformative art installations that both challenge and celebrate the modernist landmarks. These collaborations with artists point to alternative preservation strategies, which move away from the conservation of historic homes as static objects and instead affirm the importance of human occupation and transformation. The conference will host a series of conversations between house museum directors, curators, critics, artists and architects to reveal the curatorial motivations and artistic processes behind these interventions. Read More …
Host curators are Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design), Leonardo Bravo and River Jukes-Hudson (Big City Forum), and Sarah Lorenzen (Neutra VDL Research House).
This fall, curators from three Los Angeles-based organizations come together as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project, to present Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles. This series of exhibitions and events is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Neutra VDL Research House.
Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles explores the multivalent meaning of “host” though spectacle, parasitic opportunism, and domestic landscapes. The Neutra VDL Research House serves as the site of these investigations and the house, embedded with spatial effects—mirrors, screens, and pools of water—heightens and confuses the relationship between the domestic interior and the exterior. Read More …
This past May, octopus bacon—a little surf, a little turf—landed Superba Snack Bar in a spot on Jonathan Gold’s hotly anticipated 101 Best Restaurants in Los Angeles list. The food isn’t the only thing playing fast and loose with diners’ expectations. The interiors capture Venice’s mongrel vibe—Dogtown meets Silicon Beach. There are bike racks, of course, and artist and skateboarder Geoff McFetridge designed the wallpaper. But the zany details, created by Los Angeles-based Design, Bitches, keep going: A tile wall near the open kitchen mimics the inside of a swimming pool, ticking off the depths, and surfer-esque poncho fabric covers the banquettes. Read More …
The Los Angeles Seminary for Embodied and Civic Arts and its extended community present Sundown Stock & Exchange. This Labor Day weekend marketplace explores the social, economic, creative, and communal nature of work. Participants and visitors pause, perform, and posture actions that reveal embodied relations to labor and production. Work is offered for barter, exchange, negotiation and sale. Visitors are also encouraged to bring personal belongings and valuables to exchange. Programming includes street sales, artist advisory services, in-house production, screenings and more.
Curated and organized by Reid Ulrich. Contributors & Participants: Amanny Ahmad, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Mark Allen, Maura Brewer, Danielle Bustillo, Joey Cannizzaro, Carey Chiaia, Alexis Disselkoen, Zackary Drucker, Lauren Elder, EARL GRAVY, Maya Gingery, Paige Gratland, Fritz Haeg, Matt Merkel Hess, Hesse Press, Bettina Hubby, Iko Iko, Helena Keeffe, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Emily Marchand, Ian Markell, Metonym, Public Fiction, Anna Ruetinger, Justin Stadel, Thank You For Coming, Reid Ulrich, Rosten Woo, Lucas Wrench and Mimi Zeiger.
This is a tale about a blob in a park. Or, this is a tale about a blob in a park with a bridge. Or the tale of a blob in a park, a bridge, and a tower designed by LA’s most famous architect. Or, it’s the tale about a city and a blob in a park, a bridge, a tower, a lacklustre sphere, and a subway stop. It’s a cautionary tale.
In late June the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) releasedPeter Zumthor’s revised design for its new museum building. His earlier preliminary design, a self-described “black flower” raised some 30 feet above the ground on oversized glass footings, oozed a wee too close to the La Brea Tar Pits that inspired its undulating form. Leadership at the Page Museum, which actively uses the pits for research, expressed concern and asked Zumthor to back off. Squeezed in and smooched out, the new Schmoo-like scheme maintains the approximately 400,000 square feet required to display museum’s extensive collection, but it does so by stretching across Wilshire Boulevard to a piece of property that is currently a LACMA parking lot. Read More …