“You can’t rehearse what you ain’t invented,” said Frank Gehry in an interview in this month’s issue, offering up his favorite quotation from jazz musician Wayne Shorter. For L.A.’s most famous architect, the line speaks to improvisation, invention, and the vast possibilities of art and architecture. Vernacular in its delivery, it recalls Gehry’s early experiments with everyday materials. But so much for unrehearsed; he’s quoted it before—most recently to critic Oliver Wainwright when speaking about the Foundation Louis Vuitton, a project as couture as its client. Read More …
During the opening days of the Chicago Architectural Biennial, as first the press and then the public (including some irascible architects) filed through the Chicago Cultural Center to see the dozens of projects on view, AN’s Mimi Zeiger sat down with Joseph Grima, co-curator of the inaugural exhibition, to discuss the urgencies of architectural practice. Read More …
Frank Gehry is having what publicists call a “moment”: Frank Gehry, a retrospective at LACMA, opened on September 13; Building Art: The Life and Work of Frank Gehry, a biography penned by critic Paul Goldberger, was just published by Knopf; and he’s the 2015 recipient of the J. Paul Getty Award. The only problem is that, as a prolific architect for more than half of his 86 years, he’s moved beyond a moment, or even Warhol’s fifteen minutes. What we’re seeing now is the writing of his legacy and the prodigious desire for the archetypal architect to steer his firm, Gehry Partners, into a future beyond his signature. That future includes out-of-character projects, such as the study for the L.A. River.
Mimi Zeiger: What does it mean to you to have a retrospective of work opening at LACMA, an institution you’ve worked with for so many years? This new show is a far cry from renting furniture for a show you designed for Billy Al Bengston in 1968.
Frank Gehry: I have a problem looking back. I love working with [LACMA senior curator Stephanie Barron], on shows, but I couldn’t bring myself to work with her on my show.
What do you mean by “I have a problem looking back”?
Well, I think I work forward. I love my projects, but I figure if they’re worth documenting, other people will do it. Does that make sense? Read More …
First published in the exhibition catalogue for Vacancy: Urban Interruption and (Re)generation, edited by curator Neysa Page-Lieberman. (You can download a PDF of the catalogue or order the hard copy through the Glass Curtain Gallery.) Read More …
In May 2015, Mimi Zeiger was named the West Coast Editor of the Architect’s Newspaper. She oversees all content for the West edition of the paper, writing and editing stories and reviews. She also contributes to all national issues and is a feature editor.
For a complete collection of her writings for the blog, click here. For articles in past print editions, click here.
The gesture was more graceful than the act. With one generous flick of the wrist I sent the paperback sailing across the room. The book, The Age of Earthquakes: A Guide to the Extreme Present, is a small volume tri-authored by an intellectual supergroup: novelist and artist Douglas Coupland, international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and cultural critic Shumon Basar. In wry deference to its subject, the cover is inked in an oil slick chromo metallic. As Earthquakes arced from the couch to the closet door, which it hit with a thud before dropping to the floor, light reflected off its glistening surface, giving the appearance of a salmon spawning upstream.
(For the record, S,M,L,XL also boasts a silver cover, but I can’t imagine throwing the six-pound tome very far. Earthquakes, by contrast, is lightweight at 7.8 ounces).
When it landed, facedown, pages splayed and pressed against the floor, the half-light of the living room lamps seemed to illuminate a mysterious object. An alien ship crash-landed on oak boards. And so it sat there for a few days. Until my irritation with leaving a book on the floor trumped my irritation with the book itself and I picked it up. Read More …
Anticipated, delayed, and debated, The Broad opens its doors to the public on September 20. Plans for Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s contemporary art museum for the collectors and philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad were first unveiled in early 2011. Four years later, deep into the Instagram age, the photogenic $140 million building wove itself into Los Angeles’s digital and cultural fabric long before the ground floor shed was removed. Read More …
The Frank Gehry retrospective on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art starts out magnificently modest. Visitors enter the Resnick Pavilion and walk through a gallery of recent contemporary artworks gifted to the museum. The architect’s name hangs in capital letters against a navy background and, for a moment, the exhibition signage resembles the work of another Los Angeles master, Ed Ruscha. That fleeting misperception leads to another: Is the title simply an honorific celebration of the 86-year-old Pritzker-winning designer, or is that Frank, frank—a curatorial pun referencing an honest, stripped down approach to architecture? Read More …
I couldn’t sleep last night. LA was having another heatwave and rather than lay awake I read a back issue of The New Yorker, catching up on a report that said a Cascadian earthquake was overdue and would knock out much of the Pacific Northwest. A resulting tsunami would break across the West Coast devastating all architecture and infrastructure west of Interstate 5. “Toast,” noted author Kathryn Schulz.
After falling into a fitful slumber, dreaming of higher, more stable ground, I awoke to another blazing day courtesy of climate change. The sky was singed brown at the edges from wildfires taking out homes somewhere more easterly and the sound of helicopters – the vernacular “ghetto birds” – circled overhead. The reason for police action was neither immediately clear nor personally threatening. I made a note – “get earthquake kit” – then brewed coffee. Pending crisis averted.
Over the last decade, especially with the rise of research-oriented design practices, architecture has tried (and struggled) to address crisis. Specific methodologies vary, but two modes dominate: pre- and post-natural disaster. The second we recognise as social-impact design from the likes of Shigeru Ban and others. MacGyver-like, architectures responsive to aftermath are deployable, agile, and cheap. They may even earn you a Pritzker. Read More …
In late May, Cameron Sinclair, best known as the co-founder of the non-profit disaster relief organization Architecture for Humanity (AFH) announced his latest venture, the Department of Small Works, a decidedly for-profit social impact practice.
Before Sinclair stepped down as executive director of AFH in 2014 (the organization filed for bankruptcy under new leadership in early 2015), he was on the ground in Haiti, Pakistan, and Kosovo. A leader in the field of social impact design and a recipient of numerous awards, including the TED Prize, he’s already at work on schools for Syrian refugees and rethinking water utility systems in slums. Mimi Zeiger spoke to him by phone from his Sausalito, California office. Read More …