Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

April 13, 2014

Letter to Mayor Garcetti

For 'Letters to the Mayor' Exhibition

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Eric Garcetti, Exhibitions, Mike Davis, Urbanism

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Dear Mayor Garcetti,

“The best place to view Los Angeles of the next millennium is from the ruins of its alternative future.”
—Mike Davis, City of Quartz (1990)

“L.A. WANTS 2 HELP U”
—Billboard Oracle, L.A. Story (1991)

What is the future of Los Angeles? This is the question everyone is asking. And it is the perennial question posed by everyone from William Mulholland to Walt Disney to Frank Gehry. In each casting of the runes, the city is both subject and object. It is a place where the wind rustling the bougainvillea is a siren song and the Santa Ana’s blowing down palm fronds is an omen. But you know this, my fellow Angelino. Just as you know that The Los Angeles 2020 Commission wrinkles its collective brow with concern as it evaluates the next six years and that the LA2050 initiative (funded by the Goldhirsh Foundation) foresees an optimistic, crowdsourced metropolis. Read More …

April 1, 2014

Emerson College Los Angeles

A new Hollywood outpost brings added density—and a striking silhouette

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Morphosis, Thom Mayne

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Drive down Los Angeles’s Sunset Boulevard and you’ll discover Morphosis Architects’ latest project, a futuristic cube, rising from a strip of lowly fast food outlets. The structure is the West Coast micro-campus for Boston’s Emerson College, and is home to 217 students majoring in television, film, marketing, acting, screenwriting, and journalism. As you draw closer, the solid mass reveals itself as a proscenium, framing a patch of blue sky. The building’s two residential towers bookend open-air courtyards and performance spaces. “Some might say it is an aggressive building, but I see it as rather classical,” says Thom Mayne, FAIA, principal of Morphosis Architects, with offices in Culver City, Calif., and New York. “[The design] is a critique of an institutional building as a big block.” Read More …

March 31, 2014

Past to Present

Unforgetting L.A. Uses Wikipedia as an Activist Art Platform

TAGS

Art, Articles, Digital Culture, East of Borneo, UnforgettingLA

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History was written on a sunny Sunday afternoon. Or at least a little piece of it, as a group of volunteer Wikipedia editors gathered in MOCA’s outdoor plaza for Unforgetting L.A., an edit-a-thon sponsored by online art magazine East of Borneo. The third in a series, the event’s goal was to build Wikipedia articles for artists, curators, and galleries of the past 30 years — the three art-rich decades since MOCA’s inception. Read More …

March 21, 2014

Opinion: The TED Talk and the Rant

Patrik Schumacher's viral-friendly outburst

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Patrik Schumacher

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This week Patrik Schumacher took to Facebook to decry the state of architecture as both a discipline and a discourse. Quickly filling his timeline, he scolded “critics and critical architects” for their agnosia, or form blindness.

“This [visual condition] is involved in the critic’s inability to grasp the significance of parametricism,” he wrote, aghast at the lack of appreciation of a high period of organic form derived from computational inputs. An hour later he continued his imperatives, writing “STOP political correctness in architecture. But also: STOP confusing architecture and art. Architects are in charge of the FORM of the built environment, not its content.” Read More …

March 6, 2014

Emerson College Los Angeles

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Morphosis, Thom Mayne

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Emerson College Los Angeles, the newly opened West Coast outpost of the Boston-based institution, sits on a stretch of Sunset Boulevard that is rapidly changing from seedy to cinematic. The school has strong alumni community in Los Angeles and an established internship program. Designed by Wallpaper* Design Awards judge Thom Mayne of Morphosis Architects, the $85 million, 10-storey building-cum-microcampus hosts students majoring in television, film, marketing, acting, screenwriting, and journalism. Read More …

March 2014

Reasonable Dream

A vibrant housing development in Santa Monica

TAGS

Architecture, Articles

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“We build what developers won’t build: family-sized units,” says Sarah Letts, the executive director of the Community Corporation of Santa Monica (CCSM), standing on the outdoor terrace on the top floor of 2802 Pico Housing—a recently opened 100-percent-affordable housing project by the nonprofit developer. The family-oriented design by Moore Ruble Yudell Architects & Planners provides ten three-bedroom and 23 two-bedroom rental units—all at 25 to 30 percent of market rate.  Read More …

February 24, 2014

Blurry Boundaries

New Architecture Exhibitions Survey Cross-Disciplinary Practices

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Benjamin Ball, Design Bitches, Doris Sung, Elena Manferdini, Gaston Nogues, Jenna Didier, Jose Sanchez, Ramiro Diaz Granados, Somewhere Something

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Architecture, especially at its most conceptual, is murky territory. It takes a risk for the public to wade in. The field is routinely blasted for using alienating jargon or offering up sci-fi designs that produce head scratching. Three exhibitions on view right now across the southland celebrate experimental design, while making it accessible to a broad audience. Each show — Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB); Materials & Applications: Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful, Projects 2002 – 2013 at Cal State Long Beach University Art Museum; and Blindspot Initiative at the Keystone Gallery in Los Angeles–provoke a collaborative dialog about architecture and its allied disciplines: art, design, fabrication, and digital technologies. While the installations run the gamut from the scrappy to the institutional, when taken together these shows reveal a rich and diverse community united by an ethos to question both the academic and professional boundaries that surround architecture. Read More …

February 4, 2014

Bottom-up, In-between, and Beyond

On the Initial Process of Uneven Growth

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Atelier d'Architecture Autogeree, Barry Bergdoll, Bottom-Up, MAP Office, Nader Tehrani, Network Architecture Lab, Pedro Gadanho, Superpool, Urbanism

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When Barry Bergdoll, MoMA’s outgoing Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, took the podium at an October workshop for Uneven Growth: Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities, he warmly welcomed the participants, who had gathered at the Museum from around the globe. On hand to embark on a yearlong study exploring potential architectures of global urbanism were architects and researchers from Boston and Brazil, New York and Nigeria, as well as from Spain, Switzerland, the Netherlands, India, France, Turkey, and Hong Kong, all of whom had been selected by architecture curator Pedro Gadanho. Read More …

February 1, 2014

Revival on 22nd Street

What David van der Leer's Arrival Means for the Van Alen

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Collective-LOK, David van der Leer, Jon Lott, Kai-Uwe Bergmann, LOT-EK, Michael Kubo, Stephen Cassell, Urbanism

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This year, the Van Alen Institute in New York celebrates its 120th anniversary. It’s hard to believe that an organization that was founded in 1894 as the Society of Beaux-Arts Architects would find itself in 2014 with a taxi-yellow bookshop on West 22nd Street, the drive to keep reinventing itself, and a new leader with a global vision. Read More …

January 27, 2014

Q&A: Shigeru Ban

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Shigeru Ban

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The Tokyo architect takes us behind the scenes of the Tamedia headquarters in Zurich, a modern mid rise employing ancient Japanese joinery construction.

Having explored material in every format – from his cardboard tube emergency shelters to his Centre Pompidou-Metz, with its glulam timber roof – the Tokyo architect and his firm now turns their attention to miyadaiku and sukiya-daiku, the Japanese carpentry techniques of tea houses and temples, which use no nails, screws or other hardware. This sophisticated joinery is the main feature of the 10,120-square-metre Zurich head-quarters of Tamedia, a major publisher of newspapers, magazines and online media. Azure contributor Mimi Zeiger spoke with Ban about what makes this style of wood construction both innovative and sustainable. Read More …