Mimi Zeiger

Critic, editor, curator and instigator.

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 …

You can find Design, Bitches’ office on a pre-war residential street in Los Angeles’ Atwater Village. Out front: two motorcycles and a succulent garden. In the rear: a shed-like studio and three chickens. Founded by Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph, their workspace is just a few blocks from the Beastie Boys’ former headquarters where, until recently, a small shrine adorned with a bouquet of mums placed in front of a State Farm Insurance paid tribute to MCA (Adam Yauch). Understanding where Design, Bitches is located in LA’s urban fabric, that high-low mash-up of typologies, ethnicities, and palm trees, goes a long way to understanding where Design, Bitches is located philosophically. You’ll find them at the corner of architecture culture and pop, throwing a little attitude towards disciplinarians who like to keep the edges of architecture nice and neat.

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t a time when the words “big box” are spat out as insult of overconsumption, Zellnerplus’s recent project, the Matthew Marks Gallery in West Hollywood, is a windowless medium-sized. Architect Peter Zellner designed a 3,000 square foot study in restraint. A single (albeit elongated) glass door opens onto two white-walled galleries lit by a deceivingly simple grid of skylights, six rectangular apertures centered in the larger space. The venue opened its West Coast outpost in late January with the exhibition Ellsworth Kelly: Los Angeles, a collection of the 88-year old artist’s spare geometries. Read More …

The day before the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale opened to the public, Wolf D. Prix, COOP HIMMELB(L)AU’s resident avant-gardist issued a statement to the press. Rebuking the curators for banality in the face of crisis, Prix’s missive evokes a colourful vision of architects packed into a sinking gondola, a metaphor for the discipline’s “powerlessness and irrelevance.” And his prickling has a target. “Politicians and project managers, investors and bureaucrats have been deciding on our built environment for a long time now,” he writes. “Not the architects.” Meanwhile, deep in the Biennale, Public Works: Architecture by Civil Servants, OMA’s contribution to Common Ground, counters the Austrian’s lament.

Public Works celebrates the bureaucrat. Read More …

I heard Anthony Vidler lecture twice this past spring — once in Boston and once in Los Angeles. The subject matter varied as a much as the venue: the East Coast lecture a trip through Vidler’s own intellectual history and at SCI-Arc a jaunty tribute to Big Jim, made tart with a couple well-placed jabs at Shumacheresque parametricism. Yet, in both of Vidler’s lectures the same slide appeared, Richard Hamilton’s collage Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing? that appeared as the poster for the Independent Group’s This is Tomorrow exhibition in 1956.

Vidler outted the collage fragment depicting Earth that looms above at the top of the composition, noting that it was torn from a 1955 issue of Life. As this view of the world entered into mainstream public consciousness via the most popular magazine on the planet it carried with it the tension between rampant consumerism and the Cold War. Entitled a 100 Mile Portrait of Earth, the composite photograph was made from stills taken by an aerial movie camera attached to a rocket. At the time, no other color photo had ever been taken from such a high vantage point.

This popularization and implied democratization of a once-privileged view mixes with a Cold War chill in the exhibition Ends of the Earth: Land Art to 1974 at MOCA’s The Geffen Contemporary in Los Angeles. This broad, historical retrospective brings together a generation of artists working under threat of nuclear annihilation, the space race, who possessed an expansionist drive to push outside of the gallery and into the unknowns of landscape. Read More …

In Los Angeles: the Architecture of Four Ecologies, Reyner Banham describes Freewayland: the swaths of flat acreage by the I-10 and former ranchos heading out towards Irvine and Pomona. He drolly titled the chapter on these suburban territories “The Plains of Id.” But really, architecture is a landscape of ego. In LA, the icons of modern architecture take to the hills. Houses and apartment buildings climbing up foothills and canyons, climbing higher as economy permits and striving for ridge tops, Freewayland famously appears as backdrop in photographs of these home — a twinkling grid of lights in the distance.

Sitting in that distant grid, on a street south of the Miracle Mile where an early developer skimped on trees, are the Mackey Apartments, designed in 1939 by Rudolph Schindler. Pearl Mackey’s commission was limited: three units and a two-level penthouse for herself. The white stucco box, broken up by the architect’s signature slippage of volumes, is one of Schindler’s few forays into Freewayland. With two exceptions — the Buck House and the iconic Chase House, located on Kings Road in fairly-flat West Hollywood — his residences tend to perch atop or cascade down hillsides. Read More …

The city. The city is arguably the dominant subject of architectural discourse today. Its return came in topical waves over the last decade: landscape urbanism, infrastructural urbanism, networks, shrinking cities, and wholesale metropolises constructed in China and the Middle East. And the 2008 bust, with the almost overnight evaporation of building commissions, by default solidified the city as subject, as the singular project for investigation. New York City’s grid, Detroit’s ruin, and Los Angeles’ heterogeneous sprawl proved enticing topics of research and speculation. Read More …

On the last night in December, on the last day of the 2011, the Merce Cunningham Dance Company performed for the last time. The avant-garde choreographer passed away in 2009 and the Park Avenue Armory Events, as the piece was called, was an immersive celebration of his legacy, embodying Cunningham’s experiments in chance procedures and collaborative work. (He famously partnered with John Cage nearly 50 years, who, according to company lore, was not only the music advisor, but in the early years, the bus driver.) Read More …

In late November, Barcelona-based Portuguese artist Carlos Bunga took over the lobby of the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, installing an architecturally scaled artwork made out of his signature materials: cardboard, packing tape and paint. The site-specific sculpture, which fills two walls adjacent to the museum’s semi-monumental staircase, is enigmatically entitled Landscape (2011) and is part of Hammer Projects: Carlos Bunga, a show that includes not only the installation but also a selection of Bunga’s drawings, paintings, sculptures, and videos dating from 2002 to 2008. The title conforms to a naming conceit reserved for visual artists and poets. Everyday vocabulary is held up for more specific inquiry. Language vagaries are turned over and over for multiple readings. Read More …

“California design is not a superimposed style, but an answer to present conditions….It has developed out of our own preferences for living in a modern way,” explained architect and designer Greta Magnusson Grossman in 1951. Casually, she captured the essence of midcentury West Coast design—a movement built on climatic, economic, and technological responses to Los Angeles combined with a non-doctrinaire embrace of modernism. It’s her quote that opens California Design, 1930–1965: “Living in a Modern Way,” the latest exhibition at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Read More …