Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

September 18, 2013

Frontiers of Design Criticism

Panel Discussion

TAGS

Alexandra Lange, Architecture, Collective Criticism, Design Criticism, Events, Florencia Rodriguez, Shantel Blakely

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Today the feedback, spin, and other acts of interpretation that were once the preserve of historians and other experts are often virtual, instantaneous, and open to input from a broad audience. What does this mean? Mimi Zeiger, critic and journalist based in Los Angeles, will consider expanded models of architectural criticism and discursive platforms. Alexandra Lange, New York-based critic and 2014 Loeb Fellow, will explain why architects should use Twitter and Instagram to show their influences—what they read, the design pilgrimages they make, the colleagues they admire—not just to promote themselves. Florencia Rodriguez, editor of Plot (Buenos Aires) and 2014 Loeb Fellow, will explore the question of criticism’s social or disciplinary responsibility; should it be “useful”? A discussion will follow, with GSD student writers and bloggers.

Moderated by Shantel Blakely of Harvard GSD Public Programs.

September 17, 2013

Reread Remix

Experimental Criticism Workshop at Harvard Graduate School of Design

TAGS

Architecture, Collective Criticism, Digital Culture, Events

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Reread Remix is a cross-platform criticism workshop that explores the act of critical writing as it translates from the page to the screen to performance. The workshop questions the role of the critic in a digital age, cautiously embraces the potential of the social web, and posits a collective criticism as a productive mode for expanding discourse.

Prior to the workshop, participants were asked to read and respond in a public manner to the following texts:

Ada Louise Huxtable, Plastic Flowers are Almost All Right (1971)
Reyner Banham, Bricologues a Lanterne (1976); see also: Charles Jencks and Nathan Silver, Adhocism (1972; 2013)

Working in groups, students made critical commentary, using the 140 character limit of Twitter, on the texts or on the discussion going on in the workshop. All tweets were tagged ‪#‎rereading‬. Students then chose 3-5 of their tweets to perform in rapid succession. The goal of the reading was to continue the translation between platforms and to apply the immediacy of performance to critical practice.

September 12, 2013

Architect Peter Zellner’s Tijuana Experiment

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Peter Zellner

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Architect Peter Zellner stands in the entry foyer of the house his firm ZELLNERPLUS has just finished in Tijuana. Named Casa Anaya, the house is perched on the edge of a hill, and the windows offer a panorama of the border city below, Otay Mesa in the near distance, and the mountain ranges in southeastern Santa Diego County beyond. But Zellner has his back to the view. His phone is out, and he’s filming a tiny waterspout that keeps forming spontaneously in the fountain between the two wings of the building. Over and over the funnel-shaped vortex develops and, like magic, dances for a second as the wind blows off the cul-de-sac, then disappears. Read More …

July 25, 2013

Architectural Sculpture

Bruce Nauman's 'Untitled (Equilateral Triangle)'

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Architecture, Art, Bruce Nauman, Christopher Mount, Frank Escher, Kimberli Meyer, Morphosis, Peter Zumthor, Ravi Gunewardena, Rudolph Schindler, Silvia Lavin, Stephen Prina

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Ever since the Getty’s initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. kicked off in April and continued all spring and summer with nearly a dozen exhibitions and dozens more programs and events across Los Angeles institutions, there’s been a conversational buzz. At openings, on panel discussions, and in reviews those murmurs have been less about celebrating any particularly iconic buildings in the city and more about the dialogues, blurred boundaries, and differences between art and architecture. Read More …

July 2013

Toward a Collective Criticism

Volume #36: Ways to Be Critical

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Architecture, Articles, Collective Criticism, Digital Culture, Javier Arbona, Kazys Varnelis, LGNLGN, Michael Maltzan, Silvia Lavin

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The internet gets blamed for a lot of things, our current crisis of criticism being just one of its victims. The explosion of free content, the rise of unpaid bloggers, a diffuse democracy of likes and retweets, has surely weakened the authority of traditional critics. But in this new landscape Mimi Zeiger sees a host of new possibilities for architectural debate. Explaining her notion of ‘collective criticism’, she shows how platforms like Twitter can help build momentum on critical issues that often fall through the cracks of the pressroom floor.

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July 19, 2013

Inverting Neutra

Bryony Roberts at the VDL House, LA

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Bryony Roberts, Richard Neutra

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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 …

July 8, 2013

Sports & the City

Steven Holl’s linebacker of a Sports Center

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Steven Holl

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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 …

May 14, 2013

Eclectic Revisited

Preserving Venice's Architectural Context

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Architecture, Articles, Brian Murphy, California, Frank Gehry, Fred Fisher, Los Angeles Conservancy, Steven Ehrlich, Urbanism, Venice

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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 …

May 9, 2013

A Confederacy of Heretics

Looking back on a 40-year history, SCI-Arc choses a heretical mantle.

TAGS

Andrew Zago, Architecture, Articles, Eric Owen Moss, Frank Gehry, Morphosis, Studio Works, Todd Gannon

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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 …