April 1-July 23, 2023

Seeking Zohn

TAGS

Alejandro Olavarri, Alejandro Zohn, Architecture, Exhibitions, Fabien Cappello, Lake Verea, Lorena Canales, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, Tony Macarena, Zara Pfeifer

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Seeking Zohn presents works by Mexican-Austrian architect and engineer Alejandro Zohn (1930-2000) through contemporary photography and design. The exhibition takes as subject Zohn’s robust civic and commercial architecture built in Guadalajara from the 1950s to the 1990s, with an interest in how the city’s social, cultural, and material histories are interwoven with his structures.

Commissioned photography and video by artists Adam Wiseman, Lake Verea, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, and Zara Pfeifer veer from the documentary conceit of architectural photography toward the subjective. This work is decidedly interpretive, seeking out the many narratives contained within parks, markets, collective housing, malls, and bureaucratic buildings. Zohn, a Jewish emigree who fled Vienna during World War II at the age of 8, dedicated his career to creating a modern Guadalajara. Through these photographs—acts of investigation and translation—we find glimpses of his utopian desire amidst the chaos, beauty, and violence of everyday life. Read More …

February 8, 2023

Barbara Kasten: Architecture and Film (2015-2020)

Book Launch

Neutra VDL House

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Architecture, Art, Barbara Kasten, Events

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Join artist Barbara Kasten (b. 1936) alongside authors Stephanie Cristello and Mimi Zeiger for this exclusive program featuring the advanced book launch of her most recent monograph, Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020), published by Skira (March 2023).

Delving into unearthed comparisons and histories, this conversation contextualizes Kasten’s ongoing investigations into how moving images and perception play within and through architectural forms in the setting of one of her influences, the former home and studio of Richard Neutra.

February 10, 2023

Episodes: Powerhouse Company

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Architecture, Books, Gay Gassmann, Hans Ibelings, Powerhouse Company

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With 18 projects ranging from a chair to high-rise buildings, this book offers a cross section of the recent work of Powerhouse Company, which is based in Rotterdam, Munich, and Oslo. These projects are episodes in the success story of an architectural office that only completed its first building, a villa, in 2007. In three essays, Mimi Zeiger, Hans Ibelings, and Gay Gassmann share their insights on the work and the motivations of Powerhouse Company. Episodes traces how Powerhouse Company’s architecture has evolved while retaining what sets it apart: its attention to craftsmanship and innovation, its generosity, its comfort, and its resolute beauty.

December 13, 2022

The Orange County Museum of Art Embeds Culture in a Changing Suburban Context

Designed by Thom Mayne’s Morphosis, the new art museum boasts radical geometry and public open space, but questions of access persist.

Metropolis

TAGS

Alicia McCarthy, Architecture, Art, Articles, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Morphosis, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Sanford Biggers

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“This is the beginning of a cultural institution,” said Morphosis principal Thom Mayne in late September, seated in the plaza of the nearly completed Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), in Costa Mesa, California. Behind him, VIPs dressed in black tie streamed from the valet to the white-on-white lobby for an exclusive opening event on the structure’s upper terrace. The $94 million building—its swooping prow jutting like a glazed pompadour from the facade—opened to the public on October 8.

Located at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a suburban campus studded with architecture by Pelli Clarke Pelli and Michael Maltzan Architecture, Morphosis’s 53,000-square-foot museum is the last piece of a plan devised by civic leaders and philanthropists in the late 1960s and begun in the ’80s. It was designed to cluster Orange County’s arts organizations—like a food court for culture where you can catch the symphony, a touring production of Hamilton, and now an art exhibition.

December 2022

Under the Influence

Two architects create a novel form of collage

Aperture

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Herzog & de Meuron, Mark Lee, Sharon Johnston, Thomas Ruff

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The architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are seated at the long conference table in their Los Angeles office. Stacks of art and architecture books are piled in front of them, forming a landscape of references and influences. Lee picks up a sizable monograph, opens it to an image, and places the book on top of the pile. Thomas Ruff’s Sammlung Goetz (1994) fills a double-page spread. The photograph is a deadpan portrait of a contemporary art gallery in Munich designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog + de Meuron.

December 2002

From the Archive

Andrea Zittel’s Tiny, Prophetic Joshua Tree Laboratory

Dwell

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Andrea Zittel, Art, Articles

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In 2002, the artist hoped her 63-square-foot cabin—temporary, portable, and made out of aluminum-framed fiberglass panels—would help make the High Desert an art destination outside of Los Angeles.

Andrea Zittel is a homebody. The artist, who finds herself globetrotting from Berlin to Brooklyn or from the California high desert to Stockholm, maintains two residences that double as laboratories for her artwork. A-Z East is in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn and A-Z West is two hours outside of Los Angeles, in the town of Joshua Tree.

March 28, 2023

Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020)

Considering the spatial and cinematic dimensions of Kasten's transmedia creations

TAGS

Architecture, Art, Barbara Kasten, Books, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Humberto Moro, Irena Haiduk, Stephanie Cristello

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Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten (born 1936) has developed her expansive photographic practice through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile and installation. Well known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, the Chicago-based artist has recently begun to be reconsidered within the broader context of architectural theory. This survey contextualizes Kasten’s investigations into how moving images and light play within and through architectural forms.

June 2022

Review: “ORDER” by Óscar Monzón

Aperture

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Art, Articles, Óscar Monźon

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In 1956, Alison and Peter Smithson, then enfants terribles on the British architecture scene, penned a treatise for Ark magazine celebrating the popular art of advertising and effectively collapsing distinctions between lowly and venerated forms of cultural production: “For us it would be the objects on the beaches, the piece of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and the pop-package. For today we collect ads.”

May 10, 2022

OP-ED: Calls for a permanent COVID memorial neglect our fragmented political culture

The Architect's Newspaper

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Daniel Libeskind, MASS Design Group, Maya Lin, Sekou Cooke, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, Thomas Heatherwick

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In early March, just as case numbers and mask requirements were dropping, the New York Times editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Why New York Needs a Covid Memorial.” City and citizens, the op-ed argued, would be stronger if it could “confront its grief instead of trying to outrun it.” The authors were necessarily hazy about shape and size, style and site, but particular about the need for a place for people to gather and mourn.

In year three of the pandemic, the United States is just shy of a million COVID-related deaths. Global deaths are six times that number, with each data point representing an individual with a constellation of loved ones, friends, co-workers left behind. Clearly, there’s a need to honor the dead. But when and how? Read More …

April 28, 2022

MCASD Has a Complicated Relationship With Its History

Metropolis

TAGS

Annabelle Selldorf, Architecture, Articles, Denise Scott Brown, Mosher Drew Architects, Robert Venturi, Selldorf Architects, Sol LeWitt

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We generally want to interpret contemporary art museums in good faith—not as mausoleums of wealth, but as open, accessible places, removed from the vicissitude of the market and designed to produce an experience, foster education, and nurture communion with art. The recently reopened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla checks all those boxes, even adding a gentle Pacific breeze and the sound of crashing breakers. Yet the $105 million renovation and expansion gives off monied vibes, accommodating a mushrooming collection and driven by the ambitions of the museum board.

Low-slung on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and conservatively clad in travertine panels, the expanded Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building, by New York-based Selldorf Architects, greets visitors with a pavilion-like entry shaded by a massive Mission fig tree. Maybe it’s the glass and aluminum storefront facade, or the gift shop positioned to the right of the ticketing desk, but the details smack of high-end retail. The vibe: minimalist, tasteful, functional. In short, everything that Venturi Scott Brown and Associates’ (VSBA) weird, whimsically vaulted Postmodernist lobby is not.