April 1-July 23, 2023

Seeking Zohn

TAGS

Alejandro Olavarri, Alejandro Zohn, Architecture, Exhibitions, Fabien Cappello, Lake Verea, Lorena Canales, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, Tony Macarena, Zara Pfeifer

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Seeking Zohn presents works by Mexican-Austrian architect and engineer Alejandro Zohn (1930-2000) through contemporary photography and design. The exhibition takes as subject Zohn’s robust civic and commercial architecture built in Guadalajara from the 1950s to the 1990s, with an interest in how the city’s social, cultural, and material histories are interwoven with his structures.

Commissioned photography and video by artists Adam Wiseman, Lake Verea, Onnis Luque, Sonia Madrigal, and Zara Pfeifer veer from the documentary conceit of architectural photography toward the subjective. This work is decidedly interpretive, seeking out the many narratives contained within parks, markets, collective housing, malls, and bureaucratic buildings. Zohn, a Jewish emigree who fled Vienna during World War II at the age of 8, dedicated his career to creating a modern Guadalajara. Through these photographs—acts of investigation and translation—we find glimpses of his utopian desire amidst the chaos, beauty, and violence of everyday life. Read More …

December 13, 2022

The Orange County Museum of Art Embeds Culture in a Changing Suburban Context

Designed by Thom Mayne’s Morphosis, the new art museum boasts radical geometry and public open space, but questions of access persist.

Metropolis

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Alicia McCarthy, Architecture, Art, Articles, Michael Maltzan Architecture, Morphosis, Pelli Clarke Pelli, Sanford Biggers

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“This is the beginning of a cultural institution,” said Morphosis principal Thom Mayne in late September, seated in the plaza of the nearly completed Orange County Museum of Art (OCMA), in Costa Mesa, California. Behind him, VIPs dressed in black tie streamed from the valet to the white-on-white lobby for an exclusive opening event on the structure’s upper terrace. The $94 million building—its swooping prow jutting like a glazed pompadour from the facade—opened to the public on October 8.

Located at Segerstrom Center for the Arts, a suburban campus studded with architecture by Pelli Clarke Pelli and Michael Maltzan Architecture, Morphosis’s 53,000-square-foot museum is the last piece of a plan devised by civic leaders and philanthropists in the late 1960s and begun in the ’80s. It was designed to cluster Orange County’s arts organizations—like a food court for culture where you can catch the symphony, a touring production of Hamilton, and now an art exhibition.

December 2022

Under the Influence

Two architects create a novel form of collage

Aperture

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Herzog & de Meuron, Mark Lee, Sharon Johnston, Thomas Ruff

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The architects Sharon Johnston and Mark Lee are seated at the long conference table in their Los Angeles office. Stacks of art and architecture books are piled in front of them, forming a landscape of references and influences. Lee picks up a sizable monograph, opens it to an image, and places the book on top of the pile. Thomas Ruff’s Sammlung Goetz (1994) fills a double-page spread. The photograph is a deadpan portrait of a contemporary art gallery in Munich designed by the Swiss architecture firm Herzog + de Meuron.

March 28, 2023

Barbara Kasten: Architecture & Film (2015–2020)

Considering the spatial and cinematic dimensions of Kasten's transmedia creations

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Architecture, Art, Barbara Kasten, Books, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Humberto Moro, Irena Haiduk, Stephanie Cristello

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Since the 1970s, Barbara Kasten (born 1936) has developed her expansive photographic practice through the lens of sculpture, painting, theater, textile and installation. Well known within photographic and contemporary art discourse, the Chicago-based artist has recently begun to be reconsidered within the broader context of architectural theory. This survey contextualizes Kasten’s investigations into how moving images and light play within and through architectural forms.

Alongside full-color plates, the book features a long-form interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, whose 2019 Chicago Marathon stage was designed by Kasten, as well as a number of essays: artist Irena Haiduk discusses Kasten’s collaborations with corporations such as Polaroid; curator Humberto Moro explores the relationship between Kasten’s constructions and midcentury architects from Mexico and Brazil; curator Mimi Zeiger examines the Bauhaus movement from a feminist lens; and editor Cristello recalls historical moments that provide a “stage” through which to consider Kasten’s formulations of space as cinema.

Edited with text by Stephanie Cristello. Text by Irena Haiduk, Humberto Moro, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Mimi Zeiger.

June 2022

Review: “ORDER” by Óscar Monzón

Aperture

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Art, Articles, Books, Óscar Monźon

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In 1956, Alison and Peter Smithson, then enfants terribles on the British architecture scene, penned a treatise for Ark magazine celebrating the popular art of advertising and effectively collapsing distinctions between lowly and venerated forms of cultural production: “For us it would be the objects on the beaches, the piece of paper blowing about the street, the throw-away object and the pop-package. For today we collect ads.”

May 10, 2022

OP-ED: Calls for a permanent COVID memorial neglect our fragmented political culture

The Architect's Newspaper

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Architecture, Art, Articles, Daniel Libeskind, MASS Design Group, Maya Lin, Sekou Cooke, Suzanne Brennan Firstenberg, Thomas Heatherwick

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In early March, just as case numbers and mask requirements were dropping, the New York Times editorial board published an opinion piece titled “Why New York Needs a Covid Memorial.” City and citizens, the op-ed argued, would be stronger if it could “confront its grief instead of trying to outrun it.” The authors were necessarily hazy about shape and size, style and site, but particular about the need for a place for people to gather and mourn.

In year three of the pandemic, the United States is just shy of a million COVID-related deaths. Global deaths are six times that number, with each data point representing an individual with a constellation of loved ones, friends, co-workers left behind. Clearly, there’s a need to honor the dead. But when and how? Read More …

April 28, 2022

MCASD Has a Complicated Relationship With Its History

Metropolis

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Annabelle Selldorf, Architecture, Articles, Denise Scott Brown, Mosher Drew Architects, Robert Venturi, Selldorf Architects, Sol LeWitt

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We generally want to interpret contemporary art museums in good faith—not as mausoleums of wealth, but as open, accessible places, removed from the vicissitude of the market and designed to produce an experience, foster education, and nurture communion with art. The recently reopened Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego (MCASD) in La Jolla checks all those boxes, even adding a gentle Pacific breeze and the sound of crashing breakers. Yet the $105 million renovation and expansion gives off monied vibes, accommodating a mushrooming collection and driven by the ambitions of the museum board.

Low-slung on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean and conservatively clad in travertine panels, the expanded Joan and Irwin Jacobs Building, by New York-based Selldorf Architects, greets visitors with a pavilion-like entry shaded by a massive Mission fig tree. Maybe it’s the glass and aluminum storefront facade, or the gift shop positioned to the right of the ticketing desk, but the details smack of high-end retail. The vibe: minimalist, tasteful, functional. In short, everything that Venturi Scott Brown and Associates’ (VSBA) weird, whimsically vaulted Postmodernist lobby is not.

March 31, 2022

SPRAWL SESSION 3: HOUSE AS CRISIS

SCI-Arc

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Architecture, Art, Design, Events

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This event is co-organized by Gavin Kroeber & Mimi Zeiger and presented in partnership with SCI-Arc.

The discussion will feature a remarkable group of architects, designers, and planners, including Keller Easterling, Patty Heyda, James Rojas, M. Casey Rehm, and Andrew Zago, along with artists Mary Ellen Carroll and Tim Portlock, journalist Gustavo Arellano.

January 25, 2022

On Futures: Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo

SCI-Arc Channel

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Art, Articles, Arturo Ernesto Romo, Sesshu Foster

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Sesshu Foster and Arturo Ernesto Romo are authors of ELADATL: A History of the East Los Angeles Dirigible Air Transport Lines. A surrealist history that flows backwards and forwards in time, their novel tells a utopian story about airships and revolution—including how groups like the East LA Balloon Club and the Bessie Coleman Aero Club were hard at work to revolutionize travel, with an aim to literally lift oppressed people out of racism and poverty. The text, a series overlapping narratives and imagined artifacts, grew out of a long collaboration between Foster and Romo and is accompanied by drawings, collages, and photographs.

Based in Alhambra, CA, Foster is an award-winning writer. He taught composition and literature in East L.A. for over 20 years, and at the University of Iowa, the California Institute for the Arts, and the University of California, Santa Cruz. Romo was born and lives in Los Angeles. His artwork, mostly collaborative mixed media works and drawing, has been circulated internationally.

July 2022

INTERVIEW: ARTIST SADIE BARNETTE ON SWAGGER, SURVEILLANCE, AND SOFAS FROM THE FUTURE

Pin-Up

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Angela Davis, Art, Articles, Black Panther Party, Elizabeth Alexander, Sadie Barnette, The Kitchen

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Oakland-based artist Sadie Barnette makes work that is born from her family history — a narrative that is both intensely personal and speaks to a legacy of resistance and opposing societal conditions of racism. Her father, Rodney Barnette, is the subject of much of her work. He was an activist, a member of the Black Panther Party, and later the proprietor of the first Black-owned gay bar in San Francisco. Sadie Barnette’s artworks recontextualize and reimagine these histories, working hundreds of pages of FBI reports into liberatory acts and fantastical objects.