Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

June 1, 2016

Opinion: On Architectural Honesty

Is architecture really as guileless as Aravena's Biennale suggests?

TAGS

Alejandro Aravena, Architecture, Detroit Resists, Sam Jacob

View Original

Alejandro Aravena opens his Reporting from the Front with a backhand lob. “ARCHITECTURE IS” greets Biennale visitors entering the Arsenale, the first of his exhibition’s two main venues.

Neither a question nor a statement, it is an open phrase that begs completion. Aravena fills it in with the tenderhearted sentiment “giving form where people live”, and the accompanying exhibition displays an equally sensitive array of designs that are humanistic, material-based, and locally contextualised. Read More …

April 28, 2016

HACLab Pittsburgh Salon

Where to Next?

TAGS

Architecture, Events, Urbanism

View Original

Salon Participant

HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern

The city of Pittsburgh encountered modern architecture through an ambitious program of urban revitalization in the 1950s and ’60s. HACLab Pittsburgh: Imagining the Modern untangles Pittsburgh’s complicated relationship with modern architecture and urban planning.

In this experimental presentation at Carnegie Museum of Art’s Heinz Architectural Center, architects-in-residence over,under highlight successive histories of pioneering architectural successes, disrupted neighborhoods, and the utopian aspirations and ideals of public officials and business leaders. These intertwined narratives shape the exhibition’s presentation, which includes abundant archival materials from the period, an active architecture studio, and a salon-style discussion space, all unearthing layers of history and a range of perspectives.

Through these stories, HACLab Pittsburgh demonstrates the city’s national influence in the development of the modern American city, and focus on several neighborhoods and sites, including Gateway Center, the Lower Hill, Allegheny Center, and Oakland. Read More …

April 2016

Robert Irwin’s Light-Filled Moment

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Robert Irwin

View Original

Robert Irwin is all about context—or, more to the point, our perception of context. For close to four decades, he’s made art about how we see place and atmosphere: His gallery installations transform lowly fluorescent tubes and fabric scrim into otherworldly environments, and his carefully attuned landscapes offer up meditations on color, light, and time. His precise placement of one light bulb or one tree might lead viewers to reconsider their understanding of a window, a painting, or even the sky. So it’s a wonder to learn that the artist’s studio is no place of any note—a rental unit among a series of roll-up doors in a nondescript warehouse just north of La Jolla, Calif. Read More …

April 2016

Life Between the Lines

Unpacking the Drawings of Lawrence Halprin

TAGS

Anna Halprin, Architecture, Articles, Lawrence Halprin

View Original

At 95, the dancer, choreographer and activist Anna Halprin has no time for nostalgia. Last summer she celebrated her birthday with a performance on the dance deck at her home in Marin County. Bare feet on redwood boards, white hair framed against the pine trees beyond, she was as present and lively as when her late husband and collaborator, the landscape architect Lawrence Halprin, first built the deck for her in 1954. Read More …

April 7, 2016

Opinion: The Creative Office Aesthetic

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Creative Space, Digital Culture, Selldorf Architects

View Original

“If all possible old building stock in Los Angeles was converted to creative office space, that still wouldn’t meet the demand for creative offices,” a commercial real estate broker once explained to me.

At the time, his company was trying to crack the workplace code: how to cater to the technology sector’s voracious taste for converted industrial warehouses and lofts? Established tech companies and startups alike had aligned the rough-and-ready aesthetics of the artist studio with the well-worn terms of Silicon Valley – disruption, innovation, and flexibility. Read More …

March 20, 2016

Op-Ed: A tiny roof over one’s head is better than none

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Tiny Houses, Urbanism

View Original

Until recently most Angelenos likely regarded tiny houses — residences as small as 70 square feet — with bemusement, as fodder for cable TV series or design magazines. Last month, however, tiny houses became a social justice cause when the city seized three that had been donated to people who are homeless.

Boxy and brightly painted, with wheels, lights and a lockable door, these particular crowdfunded shelters were constructed by Los Angeles resident Elvis Summers and provided to homeless people in South Los Angeles as a step up from the tents and tarp settlements that now dot the city. His act of good samaritanship has sparked a debate among city officials, activists, homeless individuals, and neighborhood residents over whether tiny houses are blight or salvation. Read More …

March 17, 2016

EDITORIAL: YOU COULD BE HOME BY NOW

Matthew Messner and Mimi Zeiger reflect on affordability and density in their respective cities.

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Urbanism

View Original

Shelter. Let’s start there. It’s a basic need. The root of architecture— Marc-Antoine Laugier’s enlightenment frontispiece offers up the primitive hut as reason over nature. A right, right? We’d like to think so. But globally and nationally, the simplest of human acts of shelter are elusive, politicized, and pushed to extremes. In architecture building types conventions split along economic lines: house versus housing. The former is a client-driven expression of taste, while the latter requires a systematic juggling of multiple units and services. Read More …

March 2, 2016

Opinion: What to do with Old Houses?

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Articles, Chris Burden, James Goldstein, James Turrell, John Lautner, Michael Govan, Michael Heizer

View Original

Last month, LACMA announced that James Goldstein — an eccentric personage familiar courtside at Lakers games — had promised his iconic John Lautner–designed home to the museum. The gift, which includes $17 million (£12.1 million) for preservation and maintenance, was widely reported along with the well-known piece of pop cultural trivia, that the house was featured in a Coen brothers’ film — as summed up with one clickbait headline: The Porn House From The Big Lebowski Has Been Donated to a Museum. Read More …

March 1, 2016

Viewpoint: Now In Architecture

On Gender

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Dang Qun, Denise Scott Brown, Eva Franch, Jing Lui, MAD Architects, SO-IL, Tamar Sharif, Toshiko Mori, Zaha Hadid

View Original

Nearly a month after Denise Scott Brown and her husband and partner Robert Venturi received the 2016 AIA Gold Medal and a few days before the RIBA awarded Zaha Hadid the 2016 Royal Gold Medal, I get on the phone to outspoken curator and architect Eva Franch i Gilabert, director of New York City’s Storefront for Art and Architecture. I explain I’m writing a piece about women in architecture. Read More …

January 26, 2016

CRIT> BAMPFA

Diller Scofidio + Renfro's new design and adaptive reuse of a historic printing plant.

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Larry Rinder, Mario Ciampi, Toyo Ito

View Original

Architecture of Life. There’s nothing retiring about the ambitious title of the inaugural exhibition of The University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA). When the new building by Diller Scofidio + Renfro opens at the end of January, the sweeping survey curated by museum director Lawrence Rinder will fill all of the galleries with an imaginative, interdisciplinary, and international collection of some 250 works drawn from art, architecture, and science. Read More …