Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

September 25-November 13, 2014

Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles

Worldwide Storefront

TAGS

Alexei Tylevich, Andrew Kovacs, Anthony Martin, Architecture, Charlotte Hannson, Erin Besler, Events, Exhibitions, Ian Besler, Jia Gu, Jonathan Crisman, Jose Sanchez, Katya Tylevich, Laurel Consuelo Broughton, Leonardo Bravo, Luis Callejas, Productora, River Jukes-Hudson, Sam Lubell, Sarah Lorenzen, Wonne Ickx, Worldwide Storefront

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Host curators are Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design), Leonardo Bravo and River Jukes-Hudson (Big City Forum), and Sarah Lorenzen (Neutra VDL Research House).

This fall, curators from three Los Angeles-based organizations come together as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project, to present Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles. This series of exhibitions and events is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and the Neutra VDL Research House.

Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles explores the multivalent meaning of “host” though spectacle, parasitic opportunism, and domestic landscapes. The Neutra VDL Research House serves as the site of these investigations and the house, embedded with spatial effects—mirrors, screens, and pools of water—heightens and confuses the relationship between the domestic interior and the exterior.  Read More …

Labor Day Weekend 2014

Sundown Stock & Exchange 

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Architecture, Exhibitions

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The Los Angeles Seminary for Embodied and Civic Arts and its extended community present Sundown Stock & Exchange. This Labor Day weekend marketplace explores the social, economic, creative, and communal nature of work. Participants and visitors pause, perform, and posture actions that reveal embodied relations to labor and production. Work is offered for barter, exchange, negotiation and sale. Visitors are also encouraged to bring personal belongings and valuables to exchange. Programming includes street sales, artist advisory services, in-house production, screenings and more.

Curated and organized by Reid Ulrich. Contributors & Participants: Amanny Ahmad, Lisa Anne Auerbach, Mark Allen, Maura Brewer, Danielle Bustillo, Joey Cannizzaro, Carey Chiaia, Alexis Disselkoen, Zackary Drucker, Lauren Elder, EARL GRAVY, Maya Gingery, Paige Gratland, Fritz Haeg, Matt Merkel Hess, Hesse Press, Bettina Hubby, Iko Iko, Helena Keeffe, Los Angeles Museum of Art, Emily Marchand, Ian Markell, Metonym, Public Fiction, Anna Ruetinger, Justin Stadel, Thank You For Coming, Reid Ulrich, Rosten Woo, Lucas Wrench and Mimi Zeiger.

April 30 - May 24, 2014

Letters to the Mayor

TAGS

Architecture, Articles, Events, Exhibitions, Urbanism

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As a civic figure, the architect has the privilege and responsibility to articulate and translate the collective aspirations of society, and specifically of those not able to sit at the decision-making tables.

Throughout history, architects have engaged with this responsibility and the structures of economic, political and cultural power in different ways and with varying degrees of success. With the rise of globalization and the homogenization of the contemporary city, the role of the architect in the political arena has often been relegated to answering questions that others have asked. While designing the next economically driven cultural-iconic-touristic object, an increasing amount of both architects and with them, politicians, have forgotten the ethics that should be associated with architectural practice and the potential of design in the construction of public life.  Read More …

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 …

February 1–23, 2014

Piminski

A Show of Works by Joakim Dahlqvist

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Architecture, Art, Exhibitions

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Curator

Joakim Dahlqvist is an architect, designer, illustrator and digital artist. This exhibition presents a collection of Dahlqvist’s illustrations that teeter on the edge between reality and fantasy. Defying the sublime tendencies of architectural rendering, he represents imagined objects with an analytical coolness. Cast with an artificial fluorescent glow, these artifacts and environments tease with the pleasure of their verisimilitude. However, with a droll touch worthy of Jacques Tati, they offer a surreal joy that transcends the digital model. Read More …

October 25-26, 2013

Uneven Growth

Tactical Urbanisms for Expanding Megacities

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Architecture, Bottom-Up, DIY Urbanism, Events, Exhibitions, Pedro Gadanho, Tactical

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Advisory Board Member and Respondent

In 2030, the world’s population will be a staggering eight billion people. Of these, two-thirds will live in cities. Most will be poor. With limited resources, this uneven growth will be one of the greatest challenges faced by societies across the globe. Over the next years, city authorities, urban planners and designers, economists, and many others will have to join forces to avoid major social and economical catastrophes, working together to ensure these expanding megacities will remain habitable.

To engage this international debate, Uneven Growth brings together six interdisciplinary teams of researchers and practitioners to examine new architectural possibilities for six global metropolises: Hong Kong, Istanbul, Lagos, Mumbai, New York, and Rio de Janeiro. Following on the same model of the MoMA exhibitions Rising Currents and Foreclosed, each team will develop proposals for a specific city in a series of workshops that occur over the course of a 14-month initiative.

Uneven Growth seeks to challenge current assumptions about the relationships between formal and informal, bottom-up and top-down urban development, and to address potential changes in the roles architects and urban designers might assume vis-à-vis the increasing inequality of current urban development. The resulting proposals, which will be presented at MoMA in November 2014, will consider how emergent forms of tactical urbanism can respond to alterations in the nature of public space, housing, mobility, spatial justice, environmental conditions, and other major issues in near-future urban contexts.

Urban Case Study Teams:
New York: Situ Studio, New York, and Cohabitation Strategies (CohStra), Rotterdam
Rio de Janeiro: RUA Arquitetos, Rio de Janeiro, and MAS Urban Design ETH, Zurich
Mumbai: URBZ, Mumbai, and Pop Lab, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Cambridge
Lagos: NLÉ Architects, Lagos, and Inteligencias Colectivas, Madrid
Hong Kong: MAP Office, Hong Kong, and Network Architecture Lab, Columbia University, New York
Istanbul: Superpool, Istanbul, and Atelier d’Architecture Autogérée, Paris

October 6, 2012 - January 12, 2013

Seaworthiness Test I

Past Futures, Present, Futures

TAGS

Architecture, Exhibitions, Urbanism

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OVER BLACK

Sounds of the inner spaces rushing forward.

Then a splinter of blue light in the center of the picture.
It breaks wide, showing the top and bottom a silhouetted curtain of razor sharp teeth suggesting that we are inside of a tremendous gullet, looking out at the onrushing under-sea world at night. HEAR a symphony of underwater sounds:
landslide, metabolic sounds, the rare and secret noises that certain undersea species share with each other. Read More …

August 29-November 25, 2012

spontaneous interventions: design actions for the common good

U.S. Pavilion at the 13th International Venice Architecture Biennale

TAGS

Architecture, Exhibitions, Urbanism

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In recent years, there has been a nascent movement of designers acting on their own initiative to solve problematic urban situations, creating new opportunities and amenities for the public. Provisional, improvisational, guerrilla, unsolicited, tactical, temporary, informal, DIY, unplanned, participatory, opensource—these are just a few of the words that have been used to describe this growing body of work.

Spontaneous Interventions frames an archive of compelling, actionable strategies, ranging from urban farms to guerrilla bike lanes, temporary architecture to poster campaigns, urban navigation apps to crowdsourced city planning. These efforts cut across boundaries, addressing architecture, landscape, infrastructure, and the digital universe, and run the gamut from symbolic to practical, physical to virtual, whimsical to serious. But they share an optimistic willingness to venture outside conventional practice and to deploy fresh tactics to make cities more sustainable, accessible, and inclusive.

Awarded Special Mention for National Participation.

Commissioner and Curator: Cathy Lang Ho
Co-curators: David van der Leer and Ned Cramer
Curatorial Advisors: Paola Antonelli, Anne Guiney, Zoe Ryan, Michael Sorkin and Erik Adigard
Project managers: Gordon Douglas and Mimi Zeiger
Design: Freecell, M-A-D, and Interboro Partners

“[T]he show may not be the first but it is the latest and one of the most panoramic surveys of this sort of insurgent, unplanned, provisional, do-it-yourself micro-cultural citizen activism.

That many of the projects here skirt authority and don’t involve architects suggests not that architects aren’t important or that cities don’t depend on top-down plans. It suggests that cities and architects still have a ways to go to catch up with an increasingly restless public’s appetite for better design and better living.

And that the public isn’t waiting.”—Michael Kimmelman, The New York Times

July–August 2012

unfinished business

25 Years of Discourse in Los Angeles

TAGS

Architecture, Exhibitions, Los Angeles, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, Urbanism

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Unfinished Business: 25 Years of Discourse in Los Angeles is a major retrospective of the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design.

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design has been at the center of the city’s architectural discourse since 1987. Through each decade – the scrappy 1980s, the experimental 1990s, and the booming 2000s – the Forum has vigorously interrogated the culture of architecture and urban design in Los Angeles. Although geographically positioned on the far edge of the continent, the organization nonetheless impacts the discipline at large: Forum events and programming routinely introduce emerging talent; issues of contemporary design are captured in its exhibitions; and its publications and competitions speculate on urbanism and often challenge the conventions of what architecture means in L.A. The retrospective Unfinished Business unpacks the organization’s archive, revisiting a history of commentary and debate. In looking backward, the exhibition finds within the Forum’s history the architectural questions, urban design conversation starters, and critical loose ends that are just as relevant now as they were over the past quarter century. Unfinished Business doesn’t come to any fixed conclusion, but opens up a rich and potentially provocative dialogue.

Curators: Siobahn Burke, Thurman Grant, and Mimi Zeiger

press
“Now L.A. is still the place that Craig Hodgetts described in one of the original publications, reprinted in the current pamphlet: “The grids open vistas, frame trivialities and frame inconsistencies–of thoughtless breadth and pragmatic anticipation which has bred, albeit carelessly, the culture of cruising, hatchbacks and convenience corners, which exemplify the present vision of the future city.”

It is true that hybrids have replaced hatchbacks, and that taco trucks, rather than malls, are the new emblems of melting pot. It is also true that L.A. is becoming a place with a mass transit system and even bike plans. But, as the area around the forum event showed, it is also a vital, sleazy, fun, and terrifying mess. There is indeed a great deal of unfinished business for the Forum, and I look forward to seeing what they accomplish in the next 25.”—Aaron Betsky, Architect