June 27, 2019

La Brea Tar Pits’ trippy new pavilion from Spain’s Selgascano could be L.A.’s next selfie magnet

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, José Selgas, Lucia Cano, Selgascano

A psychedelic-hued pavilion straight out of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s “Dune” has landed at the La Brea Tar Pits. A wormy twist of organic shapes and iridescent colors, the 866-square-foot structure opening to the public Friday is the work of Selgascano, a Spanish firm bringing its knack for creating exuberant architecture to Los Angeles with a portfolio of high-profile projects.

In projects across Europe, founders José Selgas and Lucia Cano are known as designers who defy conventions and gleefully embrace a trippy, sci-fi aesthetic. Their translucent, tangerine-colored Palacio de Congresos de Plasencia in Spain is quite possibly a hallucination drawn from a Tom Wolfe acid trip.

Their tar pits installation, called the Second Home Serpentine Pavilion, was commissioned by the Serpentine Galleries and exhibited in London’s Hyde Park in 2015. (It’s named after the co-working-space company Second Home, which is opening a Selgascano-designed campus this summer.)

June 19-20, 2019

On criticism, lateness, and Huxtable

Notes from Ada Louise Huxtable and the Formation of the Architecture Critic Workshop

NESS

Getty Research Institute

TAGS

Ada Louise Huxtable, Articles, Events, Ann Harrison, Anne Helmreich, Barbara Penner, Emily Pugh, Gary Fox, Maristella Casciato, Mary McLeod, Meredith Clausen, Peg Rawes, Pippo Ciorra, Suzanne Stephens, Thomas Hines, Wim de Wit

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Presented as part of the Ada Louise Huxtable and the Formation of the Architecture Critic Workshop held at the Getty Research Institute, organized by Maristella Casciato and Gary Fox. Participants included: Barry Bergdoll, Maristella Casciato, Pippo Ciorra, Meredith Clausen, Gary Fox, Ann Harrison, Anne Helmreich, Thomas Hines, Mary McLeod, Barbara Penner, Emily Pugh, Peg Rawes, Suzanne Stephens, Wim de Wit, and Mimi Zeiger.

Questions of criticism in relationship to time have been on my mind lately. So, I wanted to start with a quote from Huxtable taken from her 1969 review of Robert Venturi’s Complexity and Contradiction published in the New York Times under the title “The Case for Chaos”:

Today’s theory is tomorrow’s practice. With the speedup characteristic of our age, it has a way of becoming today’s practice. Any thinking feeling citizen involved with his environment in this latter part of the twentieth century (that’s right—latter—with all the “projections” to the one awesome remote year 2000 no more than comfortable middle age for the present generation) must know the wave of future or succumb to the undertow of the past.

—Ada Louise Huxtable, New York Times, January 26, 1969

May 16, 2019

How Two Getty Initiatives Are Saving Global Modernist Heritage

The Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI) and Keeping It Modern grant are dedicated to supporting new methods and technologies for the conservation of Modernist buildings.

Metropolis

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Gail Ostergren, Getty Foundation, Louis Kahn, Pierre Jeanneret, Susan Macdonald

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“Architecture is the will of the epoch translated into space,” Mies van der Rohe famously wrote in 1924, putting forth a case for Modernism. His argument, like many of the era, sought to break with the stodgy past and its artisanal techniques.

While the oft-quoted line couples buildings and culture, later in the same text Mies mandates timeliness over timelessness, suggesting that design is subject to the forces and flows of the current moment. The art of building, he mused, “can only be manifested in living tasks and in the medium of its epoch.”

But what happens when architecture is subject not to its own time but rather to the ravages of time? Materials age and uses obsolesce. Curtain wall gaskets wither. Laminates come unglued. Architectures designed to propel us into the future are thus welded to the past. The strategic upkeep of Modernist buildings is the key concern of two ongoing and sometimes dovetailing programs: the Getty Conservation Institute’s (GCI) Conserving Modern Architecture Initiative (CMAI) and the Getty Foundation’s Keeping It Modern grant.

Spring/ Summer 2019

DIG

A VOYAGE INTO THE HAND DUG DESERT CAVES OF RA PAULETTE

Pin-Up

TAGS

Art, Articles, Georgia O’Keefe, Ra Paulette

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It’s midday in northern New Mexico, and the guided tour starts with a request (nay command) to stay on the sandy path. We’ve come to visit a cave: in 1994, local cave digger Ra Paulette (he shirks the term artist) began burrowing into a sandstone cliff to create the intricate interiors of Windows on the Earth, a sanctuary-like hideaway. Dug by hand over the course of two years, it comprises a sequence of tall and narrow vaults converging on a central space, where a throne-like seat is set high up in the wall; as you move through the cave, eccentric ornamentation — organic whorls, fossil-like seashells, shrine alcoves — punctuates implausibly smooth surfaces. It’s a wonder of man shaping the landscape, but first, we’ve stopped for a New Age biology lesson.

April 30, 2019

At America’s Top Architecture Schools, Female Leadership Is the New Normal

Architectural Digest

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#MeToo, Architecture, Articles, Sarah Whiting

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Sarah Whiting will become the first woman dean of Harvard’s GSD, joining a growing contingent of female leadership in academia. But will such appointments bring equity to the profession?

On July 1, when Sarah Whiting steps into the job of leading the most prestigious architecture school in the country, she will be the eighth dean and the first woman to helm Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design. And while her appointment is a personal and professional achievement for Whiting, it also marks a sea change for an institution still grappling with the aftermath of architecture’s #metoo moment. Last year, faculty and student populations alike petitioned for reform.

March 21, 2019

Spring architecture picks

LGBT Center, L.A. River, UCLA art studios, Coachella and more

Los Angeles Times

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Diébédo Francis Kéré, Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Handel Architects, KFA Architecture, Leong Leong, Margo Leavin, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Office Kovacs, OMA, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Renzo Piano, Studio Gang, Warren Techentin Architecture

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Construction is abundant across Los Angeles right now, and amid the backhoes and the cranes we are seeing signs of fresh takes on expressive architecture: glass domes, geometric facades, soaring arches. Charges of elitism swirl around big-time architecture, but many of the new designs opening this season promise to advance cultural and social life in L.A., whether with a riverside park that filters rainwater or a campus crafted to uplift the lives of LGBTQ homeless youth.

February 18, 2019

Sterling Ruby’s Aerial Portrait of California’s Endless Prison System

The artist’s new show DAMNATION is a powerful exposure of America’s system of incarceration. Here, he speaks on the project with architecture critic and curator Mimi Zeiger

AnOther Magazine

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Robert Smithson, Sterling Ruby

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The celebrated multidisciplinary artist Sterling Ruby has long been concerned with freedom. With its degradation, its expression and its preservation – as well as its literal and conceptual importance in the identity of his home and homeland, America. Having grown up in Baltimore and rural Pennsylvania, and then studied in both Chicago and LA, Ruby has drawn from the contours of these variegated US landscapes, compiling a body of work that is equally aesthetically and texturally diverse. What all these environments have in common, though, is an epic scale – rural, urban, industrial – an element that has governed his practice since the start.

January 9, 2019

Brutal is beautiful when it comes to architecture’s ugly duckling

Los Angeles Times

TAGS

AC Martin & Associates, Alison Smithson, Architecture, Articles, Charles F. Murphy & Associates, Chris Grimley, Hans Asplund, Jean Dubuffet, Le Corbusier, Louis Kahn, Mark Pasnik, Michael Kubo, Peter Smithson, Reyner Banham, Yeekai Lim

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If there was any lingering doubt that Brutalism — the architectural style derided for everything the name implies — was back in fashion, the “Atlas of Brutalist Architecture” quashes it with a monumental thump. At 560 pages representing some 878 works of architecture in over 100 countries, the outsize volume is part reference tool, part coffee table book, and certainly part of an ongoing design trend favoring big, big books.

January 2019

NOTES ON A SCANDAL

INTERVIEW WITH KIMBERLI MEYER, FORMER DIRECTOR OF LONG BEACH’S UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM

Pin-Up

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Art, Articles, Kimberli Meyer, lauren woods

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Art institutions often crow about their roles as bastions of progressive thought — places robust enough to tackle tough cultural questions in the gallery. Yet the 2018 firings of several prominent curators and directors exposed the precarity of women who speak out and through their exhibitions and programs, provoke conversations about race, gender, privilege, and power. As we move into 2019, it seems more important than ever to interrogate the dubious narrative of the museum as a safe space, but also to hold out hope that it can be a place of resistance. Read More …

December 21, 2018

Year in Review 2018: Architecture’s Gender Reckoning

Mimi Zeiger writes how the hard work of #MeToo is decidedly less swift and less spectacular than any celebrity takedown.

Metropolis

TAGS

#MeToo, Architecture, Articles, Deborah Berke, Ellie Abrons, Eva Hagberg, Ibiayi Briggs, Lorraine Gemino, Richard Meier

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Last March, #MeToo finally came to architecture. While the specifics of the allegations of sexual misconduct against Richard Meier, white-haired lion of the New York scene, were indeed shocking, many in the discipline were wondering what took so long.

In the months between the accusations that brought down Harvey Weinstein and others in Hollywood, comedy, and media, women in architecture asked one another, “Who will be ours?” Via back-channel messages we speculated about prominent and charismatic figures with reputations for bad behavior. Which architectural heavyweight would be first to fall?