Anticipated, delayed, and debated, The Broad opens its doors to the public on September 20. Plans for Diller Scofidio + Renfro’s contemporary art museum for the collectors and philanthropists Eli and Edythe Broad were first unveiled in early 2011. Four years later, deep into the Instagram age, the photogenic $140 million building wove itself into Los Angeles’s digital and cultural fabric long before the ground floor shed was removed. Read More …
In late May, Cameron Sinclair, best known as the co-founder of the non-profit disaster relief organization Architecture for Humanity (AFH) announced his latest venture, the Department of Small Works, a decidedly for-profit social impact practice.
Before Sinclair stepped down as executive director of AFH in 2014 (the organization filed for bankruptcy under new leadership in early 2015), he was on the ground in Haiti, Pakistan, and Kosovo. A leader in the field of social impact design and a recipient of numerous awards, including the TED Prize, he’s already at work on schools for Syrian refugees and rethinking water utility systems in slums. Mimi Zeiger spoke to him by phone from his Sausalito, California office. Read More …
Groundswell: Guerilla Architecture in Response to the Great East Japan Earthquake, which recently closed at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, was a modest exhibition about a catastrophic event. Organized by the MAK’s director Kimberli Meyer, with input from Hitoshi Abe, the show documented several architectural answers to a seemingly impossible question: How might architecture—fragile, temporal, and arbitrary in the face of a 40-foot-high tsunami—offer, if not a solution, guidance to rebuild devastated communities? Read More …
City in a City: A Decade of Urban Thinking by Steven Holl Architects opened at LA’s MAK Center for Art + Architecture in late January. Do not be fooled by the title. The exhibition is not about any particular city. Instead, it profiles a suite of projects by Holl’s office across China. The urban thinking in question, then, plays out in the scale of these built works and proposals, which express themselves over huge swaths of landscape and dazzle with their square footage. Consider the numbers:
2,383,797
7,035,000
215,280
1,296,459
3,500 Read More …
For an exhibition about architectural projects that never broke ground, there’s something rather cheery about Never Built: Los Angeles, on view at the A+D Museum through October 13. Outside, an oversized lenticular facade is a shade of yellow that shouts Southern California—it’s all citrus groves and sunshine. A billboard-sized image of the Cadillac-like Goodell Monorail is frozen mid-zoom along Wilshire Boulevard. Inside, a map of the Los Angeles Basin stretches out across the gallery floor. Sam Lubell and Greg Goldin have brought together a selection of unrealized works, many of which, if built, had the potential to change our understanding of the city. For the curators “what if” is not a lament, per se, but rather a celebration of speculative possibilities and a challenge to the present status quo. Read More …