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Pragmatic Radicalism, Aesthetic Bliss, and Other LA Stories
Todd Gannon
Last June, two weeks late and amid a welter of controversy, an exhibition ostensibly titled “A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California” opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art’s (MOCA) Geffen Contemporary gallery in Los Angeles. Part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. – a series of exhibitions and related events sponsored by the Getty1 – “A New Sculpturalism” focused on built work by Los Angeles architects from the last 25 years, but had been nearly unraveled by an embarrassing tussle between a faltering institution wishing to appeal to the general public and a skittish architectural community desperate for rigorous critical attention. In the end, the exhibition offered disap- pointingly little to its constituencies. MOCA publicly rehearsed its familiar pattern of dysfunction, the exhibi- tion-going public received eye candy where it could have found edification, and the participating architects missed out on opportunities to productively assess their recent past and to nurture new audiences for the immediate future.
A Muddle at MOCA When the Pacific Standard Time Presents lineup was first announced in September 2012, “A New Sculpturalism” appeared poised to answer the Getty Research Institute’s sweeping historical overview, “Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990,” with an emphatically contemporary conclusion.2 MOCA received the largest grant from the Getty Foundation ($445,000) and scheduled the latest opening date ( June 2) of the 11 exhibitions.3 Press materials promised “the first scholarly and extensive examination of the prolific and often radical built forms that characterize buildings designed in Southern California during the last twenty-five years” and to showcase “emerging and younger talent” with a collection of pavilions designed by “less established f irms in L.A.”4 Having jettisoned its curator of architecture and design in 2009,
1. The PSTP initiative provided sizeable grants to eight institutions in support of 11 exhibitions that examined Los Angeles ar- chitecture from 1940 to 1990. Grantees, in addition to MOCA, included the Southern California Institute of Architecture, where, I should note, I cocurated, with Ewan Branda and Andrew Zago, the exhibition “A Confederacy of Heretics.” 2. See Wim de Wit and Christopher Alexander, eds., Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990 (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2013). 3. SCI-Arc’s exhibition opened first, on March 29, 2013, with the Getty’s and LACMA’s opening just over a week later. Grants for the other exhibitions ranged from $260,000 to $430,000. 4. Press release for “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.,” September 27, 2012. MOCA invited 12 firms to submit proposals for pavilions to be included in the show, of which three were executed. The proposals are documented in the exhibition catalogue. See Christopher Mount, A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture in Los Angeles (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013), 234–55.
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the museum tapped Christopher Mount, formerly both a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and exec- utive director of the Pasadena Museum of California Art. The announcement was a welcome respite from the controversies that had plagued MOCA in recent years,5 and seemed to signal that the embattled institution had set a new curatorial course. Unfortunately, that optimism was short-lived. Just a month ahead of the scheduled opening, following weeks of lurid gossip in the architectural community, the Los Angeles Times con- firmed that Frank Gehry had pulled out of the show, citing discomfort with its “trivialization” of his work.6 The same article recounted Mount’s fears that, owing to budgetary concerns, the entire exhibition would be canceled. Rampant speculation ensued: the show was off, then it was back on, but without Mount. The scope and venue would change. Thom Mayne had stepped in to curate. Neither MOCA nor the Getty could be reached for comment. The rumor mill churned unceasingly. Even participants in the exhibition were unsure what would happen. Given MOCA’s recent troubles, the collapse of not just the show but also the entire institution seemed within the realm of possibil- ity. Nonetheless, there appeared to be ongoing activity related to the exhibition at Morphosis, SCI-Arc, and at least some of the offices that had been commissioned to build pavilions for the show. Anticipation – if not always for the exhibition, then at least for the next tawdry detail – swelled. The day before “A New Sculpturalism” was due to open, the Los Angeles Times assured its readers that the show was on and Gehry was back in, having been “coaxed by Thom Mayne,” who claimed to be acting not as a curator but as some sort of “facilitator.” The article confirmed that MOCA would re- main the venue and Mount the curator, despite Gehry’s quoted explanation that he had returned only because Mount had been replaced (at Gehry’s request) by Mayne.7 Confusion was amplified when the exhibition finally opened two weeks later. On the title banner outside the Gehry- designed Geffen Contemporary, the show’s original title had been scratched out and replaced with “Contemporary Californian Architects.” Inside, the gallery wall offered a third option: “Contemporary Architecture Comes from Southern California.” Further muddling the situation, the wall text assigned only the “original concept” to Mount. Installation and production were credited to Stray Dog Café, with Anne Marie Burke listed as the project manager. No men- tion was made of any involvement by Mayne, but those
3. SCI-Arc’s exhibition opened first, on March 29, 2013, with the Getty’s and LACMA’s opening just over a week later. Grants for the other exhibitions ranged from $260,000 to $430,000.
4. Press release for “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.,” September 27, 2012. MOCA invited 12 firms to submit proposals for pavilions to be included in the show, of which three were executed. The proposals are documented in the exhibition catalogue. See Christopher Mount, A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture in Los Angeles (New York: Skira Rizzoli, 2013): 234–55.
5. See Bob Colacello, “How Do You Solve a Problem like MOCA?,” Vanity Fair, March 2013. 6. Christopher Hawthorne, “MOCA’s ‘A New Sculpturalism’ Faces Uncertain Future without Gehry,” Los Angeles Times, May 3, 2013. 7. Mike Boehm, “Frank Gehry Back in MOCA Architecture Show, Coaxed by Thom Mayne,” Los Angeles Times, June 1, 2013.
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in the know recognized Stray Dog Café as the obfuscating label on the facade of Morphosis’s studio back in the 1980s, and were familiar with Burke’s long tenure as Morphosis’s communications director. The exhibition’s installation was equally puzzling. Despite being housed in the cavernous side gallery at the Geffen, it felt strangely insignificant. To access the space, visitors had to tiptoe through a field of several thousand crumbling clay figures installed in the main gallery by Swiss artist Urs Fischer.8 Beyond this unceremonious vestibule, visitors were greeted by three pavilions – by Tom Wiscombe Design, PATTERNS, and Atelier Manferdini – before being deflected into a vast collection of often poorly lit models and drawings. The show included a broad sampling of internationally recognized names, including Eric Owen Moss and Neil Denari, lesser-known local firms such as Brooks + Scarpa, and “younger” practices such as Griffin Enright and Predock Frane. A large model of Morphosis’s Phare Tower proposal for Paris loomed near the center of the space, part of a wide selection of the firm’s earlier projects on display throughout the room. Dashed lines painted on the floor loosely divided exhibited projects into oddly conventional programmatic categories.9 Projected images of buildings flashed on curved panels overhead, while a recording of commentary by the exhibit- ing architects echoed throughout the space. Gehry’s contribution – a suite of presentation materials from his second-place scheme for the National Museum of China competition – was detached from the side gallery altogether. To find it, visitors had to leave the space and again negotiate Fischer’s clay-figure labyrinth.
8. MOCA had commissioned Ball Nogues Studio to design and install an entry pavil- ion, but budgetary and scheduling issues in the months leading up to the exhibition forced its last-minute cancellation. Ball Nogues’ proposal would not have changed the path through the Fischer installation. 9. Moving past the pavilions to the opposite end of the hall, visitors first encountered residential projects, then housing, com- mercial, civic/governmental, cultural, educational, and “research” projects.
Entrance banner for “A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California,” at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA, June 16–September 16, 2013. Photo: Brian Forrest. © The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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Following several conflicting accounts of Mayne’s involvement, it became clear that Mount remained curator in name only, and that Mayne’s team had more or less reimag- ined the installation from scratch. Though Mount’s initial selection of firms remained almost unchanged, his intent to include only built projects was abandoned and the focus of the exhibition shifted toward drawings and models.10 Mayne’s intervention certainly improved the largely superficial affair that MOCA appeared poised to deliver, but the failure to clarify Mount’s casual sampling of firms and, worse, to offer a substantive alternative to his concept of “sculpturalism” left many of the show’s initial shortcomings glaringly intact. Naturally, the critics pounced. Los Angeles Times archi- tecture critic Christopher Hawthorne derided Mount’s notion of sculpturalism as “supremely narrow . . . singling out form and aesthetics at the expense of all the other ways that buildings are made and operate in contemporary Los Angeles.” True to his dependably negative stance toward Mayne, Hawthorne also attacked the installation’s banal organization and leveled accusations of insularity, not just at Mayne, but at the entire “architectural ruling class in Los Angeles.” The show, he intoned, was “unapologetically a celebration of white-male architecture, floating in a bubble of its own making, hardly pausing even to glance in the direction of contemporary Los Angeles and its cultural complexity.”11
10. Mount’s initial selection of architects and his general ambitions for the show were made available several weeks ahead of the exhibition’s scheduled opening by the early release of the exhibition catalogue. 11. Christopher Hawthorne, “Review: MOCA’s Revamped Architecture Show a Model of Insularity,” Los Angeles Times, June 29, 2013.
“A New Sculpturalism.” Installation view of Morphosis’s Phare Tower. Photo: Brian Forrest. © The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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Some of Hawthorne’s indictments rang true. Sculpturalism is, no doubt, a crude and clumsy concept. It adds very little to a discussion of Los Angeles’s vibrant tradition of formal, material, and tectonic innovation, and instead brands the manic diversity of the city’s architectural output over the last three decades with a single, woefully inadequate slogan. Mount was rightly, if inelegantly, taken to task for it by the architects. Hawthorne was also right in pointing out that Los Angeles’s predominately white, predominately male, archi- tectural community has been inattentive to its historically homogeneous and privileged demographics. But it is unwise to imply that overt references to topics such as race and gen- der (or “ecology” and “public interest design”) are necessary components of an architectural exhibition, and downright foolhardy to understand the show’s “insular” architecture as somehow divorced from Los Angeles’s “cultural complexity.” Hawthorne is too attentive a student of the city’s (and, one hopes, architecture’s) long history of productively private cliques to be permitted such a lazy assertion. As the impact of the so-called “LA school” and countless other groups here and elsewhere attests, small, self-contained communities of formally obsessive architects have a far better track record of producing lasting political and cultural effects than even the most earnestly “engaged” practitioners. The error of “A New Sculpturalism” was not an excess of aesthetics and insularity, but rather an inadequate assessment of just how aes- thetically diverse and tribal Los Angeles architecture has become.
Radicalism Redux By the end of the 1980s, the bad-boy iconoclasm conjured a decade earlier by Gehry, Mayne, Moss, and other LA offices had matured into a formidable and, for some, even profitable mode of professional practice. As offices grew and young assistants craved independence, a generation of fledgling practices was spawned. In 1991, the newly formed Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design assembled a broad cross-section of these new firms in its first major publication, Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles.12 Some in the collec- tion, including Josh Schweitzer (ex-Gehry) and Michele Saee (ex-Morphosis), delivered idiosyncratic single-family houses and bespoke restaurant interiors to LA’s Westside in the familiar idioms of their mentors. Others, such as Victoria Casasco, dabbled in overtly postmodernist themes, while Charles and Elizabeth Lee returned to a more orthodox, modernist idiom. A few, including Neil Denari, the Central Office of Architecture,
12. Aaron Betsky, John Chase, and Leon Whiteson, eds., Experimental Architecture in Los Angeles (New York: Rizzoli, 1991). Frank Gehry provided an approving introduction.
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and AKS Runo, devoted significant energy to ambitious speculative projects and painstaking drawings and models, which projected the more visionary aspects of the previous generation into bold new territory. Alongside this proliferation of stylistic and tectonic diversity, a significant number of Los Angeles architects turned their attention toward the city’s urban fabric and the unique structures of public and private life it engendered. In 1999, John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski released Everyday Urbanism, also through the LA Forum.13 The everyday urbanists paid particular attention to low- income neighborhoods such as Watts and East LA, and favored vibrant street life, ethnic and economic diversity, and do-it-yourself initiatives over the automobile-centered and developer-driven affluence that underpinned many of the Westside experimentalists. Complementing these urban initiatives was an unabashed enthusiasm for Los Angeles’s peculiar, anonymous architecture. Chase’s 2000 anthology, Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving, is perhaps the most serious attempt to plumb LA’s quirky vernacular underbelly, and offers an important treatment of the midcentury “dingbat,” the city’s pervasive stucco-box-on-stilts apartment typology that has served as an organizational template and ideological scapegoat for LA architects since the 1950s.14 Through the 1990s, these varied strains of LA architec- ture were producing new work at a rapid pace. Concurrently, the Westside client base of artists, entrepreneurs, and post-’68 hooligans that the older architects had seduced through the 1970s and ’80s had given way to a well-heeled creative class eager to stake a claim (and often, to turn a fast buck) in the now trendy enclaves of Venice, Santa Monica, and Silver Lake. Intoxicated by skyrocketing real-estate values, a generation of amateur speculators and unimaginative copycats set to work converting hard-won disciplinary achievements into viable commercial products. A particularly effective tactic hybridized the full-custom idiosyncrasy of the experimental residence with the vulgar efficiency of the everyday dingbat. Eames chairs, Nelson lamps, and fashionable couples were arranged and photographed in white-walled and alarmingly interchangeable interiors throughout the formerly grungy neighborhoods that had sustained the eccentricities of the earlier generation. By the end of the decade, a huge swath of Los Angeles had been made over and recast as a homogeneous, high-dollar, postradical Dwell-scape. With potent lines of development thus largely exhausted
13. John Chase, Margaret Crawford, and John Kaliski, Everyday Urbanism, 2nd ed. (New York: Monacelli, 2008). 14. John Chase, Glitter Stucco and Dumpster Diving: Reflections on Building Production in the Vernacular City (London: Verso, 2000). Chase’s book builds on a long tradition of campy connoisseurship, which stretches back through UCLA’s two postmodernist Charleses (Moore and Jencks) at least to Denise Scott Brown, who “discovered” the Santa Monica Pier for serious architectural consideration while teaching at UCLA in the late 1960s.
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of disciplinary interest, many LA architects turned their attention to more unconventional approaches. Greg Lynn’s arrival in the mid-1990s brought intensive digital design and fabrication research and an expansive catalogue of novel forms and materials, while Gehry’s experiments with CATIA software demonstrated how unprecedented formal complex- ity could be deployed in commercial practice. Equipped with this formidable computational arsenal, Gehry’s work began to shift from the figural aggregations he explored through the early ’80s – for example, the California Aerospace Museum near downtown and the Schnabel House in Brentwood – toward the more voluptuous, curvilinear forms of the Team Disney Building in Anaheim and the Disney Concert Hall. Moss and Morphosis also changed course through the ’90s, with the manic articulation of the former’s Gary Group Building and the latter’s Crawford House giving way to a more gestural abstraction apparent in Moss’s Stealth Building in Culver City and Morphosis’s Diamond Ranch High School. At the turn of the millennium, another cabal of young architects began to come into its own. Freshly graduated from progressive programs at Columbia and UCLA, thirty-some- thing practitioners such as Hernan Diaz Alonso, Jason Payne, and others espoused few of LA’s familiar mannerisms and in- stead adopted more intellectualized, East Coast concerns that traced their aesthetic and ideological roots largely through Greg Lynn to Peter Eisenman. Steeped in digital production and fabrication techniques, their working methods quickly displaced the painstaking handicraft espoused by older ar- chitects, and the mechanistic, ad hoc assemblages of the late 20th century gave way to smooth, shiny, and increasingly cornerless compositions developed in the virtual space of 3D modeling and animation software.
A Tale of (at least) Two Cities All of these strands of development (if not all of these archi- tects) were represented in “A New Sculpturalism,” and any number of frameworks might have been deployed to eluci- date them. Unfortunately, the exhibition elided significant differences in favor of portraying Los Angeles architects as one big, happy family. This genealogical ambition was reinforced by the “Professional Timeline” published in the exhibition catalogue, which tracks the emergence of new firms from older ones in a disciplinary family tree.15 This diagram is particularly revealing when compared to the revised version prepared for the gallery guides. The original – multicolored
15. Mount, New Sculpturalism, 230–31.
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and somewhat difficult to decipher – attempts to illustrate the complex, overlapping trajectories through which many LA practices developed. The revised version is much clearer, but in pruning Mount’s original tree, it reduces the complex lineage of each practice to a single source. The revised version also highlights five firms (Gehry Partners, Morphosis Architects, Eric Owen Moss Architects, Hodgetts + Fung, and Greg Lynn Form) as apparently more significant than the others, but offers no insight as to why that might be the case. Stranger still, well-known developments such as Craig Hodgetts’ exit from Studio Works in 1983 and Michael Rotondi’s exit from Morphosis in 1991 pass unacknowledged. The agenda, as with the exhibition itself, seems to be one of tidy, if inaccurate, simplification. Problematic though they may be, the timelines could have offered a workable framework with which to engage the exhibited work. Arranged more strategically, the exhibition could have illustrated how the various master/protégé relationships introduced by the timelines played out. Unfortunately, the typologically organized installation largely canceled the pos- sibility of such comparisons, and ultimately favored passive consumption over engaged scrutiny.
Despite the overriding impression of continuity advanced by “A New Sculpturalism,” few could miss the anomalous note struck by Lynn’s work at the far end of the hall. The playful, brightly colored plastic of his Blob Wall and Toy Furniture contrasted with the slick, predominantly monochrome mod- els elsewhere in the exhibition, while the mirrored surface of Lynn’s Sociópolis Housing Block answered the show’s overarching tone of self-seriousness with the twinkling insouciance of costume jewelry. Three medusoid Numinous Lamps floated overhead to complete the scene. Where much of the work in the exhibition pointed deferentially to previous generations, Lynn’s stood irreverently independent, pointing forward to an alternative LA agenda that is just now coming into focus. Further hints of what this agenda might hold were pro- vided by the three pavilions at the opposite end of the hall. Tom Wiscombe’s untitled scheme explored his interest in both the tectonics of composite materials and the spatial effects of complex volumes and surfaces. Three impossibly thin black panels, constructed of a water-based polymer with carbon- and glass-fiber reinforcing, leaned toward each other to form a loose pyramid. Strange, trefoil shapes appeared to have been pushed through each panel from the outside. Inside, a
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momentary sense of stable centrality was quickly undone by the intrusion of these trefoil shapes, which seemed to in- sist that occupants move to the perimeter, where a series of elegant interstitial spaces defined the puckered zone between the surface of the panel and the mass of the impacted shapes. Taken together, these peripheral spaces implied a kind of nascent ambulatory, which reasserted the initial feeling of centrality and set in motion the next cycle of alternating cen- trifugal and centripetal sensations. A few steps beyond, PATTERNS’ Textile Room also experimented with the tectonic and affective possibilities of synthetic materials. Black carbon fiber and yellow aramid filaments were stretched taught around a multisided steel frame with video images (culled from popular films shot in Los Angeles) calibrated to and projected on the pavilion’s radially patterned surfaces by media artist Casey Reas. As seen in an online video clip, the effect is mesmerizing.16 But as installed, with a cacophony of other objects competing for attention, the intended effect largely evaporated into the surrounding milieu. PATTERNS’ investment in advanced material and fabrication technology also underwhelmed. Relegated to the role of cladding and dematerialized by the projections, the robotically laminated surfaces were over- powered by the blunt physicality of steel-frame structure, particularly on the interior, where large, bolted connection
16. “Textile Room 03 Full,” http://vimeo. com/71997211.
“A New Sculpturalism.” Installation view of projects by Greg Lynn Form. Photo: Brian Forrest. © The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
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plates reminded visitors that, regardless of the technical and affective achievements of the cladding, conventional con- struction remained at the heart of the endeavor.17 The final pavilion, Tempera, by Atelier Manferdini, distilled various strands of the firm’s recent preoccupations with tessellated geometries and painterly surface effects into a beguiling cocktail of affective fancy. The scheme comprised a cubic volume tilted up and pried open to reveal a florid in- terior, with a cascade of color spilling onto the adjacent floor and wall. On the exterior, floral excrescences bloomed from meticulously detailed aluminum panels. Within, all indica- tion of tectonic craft was effaced to foreground a billow- ing graphic printed on the aluminum panels and punctuated with an array of inset mirrored disks. At first, the mirrors appeared as perforations in the printed panels that gave way to a strange inner layer of additional printed surfaces. Draw- ing closer, visitors discovered through their own unexpected reflections that they were already immersed in that inner space, which produced (at least in me) a jarring shock that failed to dissipate even after the trick had been discovered. The three pavilions combined with Lynn’s projects to bracket the main body of the exhibition with a kind of plastic exuberance that I suspect lay at the heart of Mount’s notion of sculpturalism. Because of its last-minute erasure, this re- ductive term hung stubbornly over the work in the show, particularly the anomalous offerings at the periphery. The installation’s deadpan categorizations – “pavilions” and “research” – and the pavilions’ lack of programmatic speci- ficity only reinforced the possibility of their being seen as less than fully architectural, or worse, as merely sculptural. Thus, the installation inadvertently rehearsed exactly the trivi- alization for which Mount had been sidelined. Even worse, I overheard a few visitors reverse this implied hierarchy, parsing the show into the “sculptural” – that is, complicated, interesting – and the “architectural” – ordinary, boring. These unfortunate side effects notwithstanding, par- titioning Lynn’s “research” and the three pavilions from the rest of the exhibition highlighted an important swerve in recent LA architecture. Whereas these works were developed largely unencumbered by the stultifying realities of com- mercial practice and quotidian use, most of the other projects in the exhibition are remarkable primarily for their art- ful engagement of exactly those constraints. Indeed, it was through inventive wrangling with unbuildable sites, inflexi- ble construction systems, and unreasonable budgets that LA’s
17. An earlier version of the scheme employed an additional interior skin of stretched filaments that concealed the steel structure and the video projectors. Unfortunately, budgetary constraints foreclosed this more provocative proposal. See Mount, New Sculpturalism, 252.
Tom Wiscombe Design, MOCA Pavilion, 2013. Photo: Brian Forrest. © The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.
17. An earlier version of the scheme employed an additional interior skin of stretched filaments that concealed the steel structure and the video projectors. Unfortunately, budgetary constraints foreclosed this more provocative proposal. See Mount, New Sculpturalism, 252.
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architects secured some of their greatest achievements, ulti- mately inventing the receptive audience so necessary for their continued success. The tactical facility exhibited by so many in a context so unforgiving gave rise to the unique tradition of architectural innovation that “A New Sculpturalism” cele- brated but ultimately failed to articulate. Let’s call it “pragmatic radicalism.” Such inventiveness is not unique to Los Angeles, but this city’s disciplinary culture has evolved a distinctive valence of that quality. Pragmatic radicalism is the attitude that brought world-class architecture to the back alleys of Venice and the blank warehouses of Culver City, and launched Los Angeles architecture into the international spotlight.
Learning from Lolita As “A New Sculpturalism” demonstrated, pragmatic radical- ism’s potent tincture of ardent individualism, ad hoc ingenu- ity, critical skepticism, and unbridled ambition is occasionally fouled by debilitating bouts of anti-intellectualism and brooding insecurity, and is dangerously easy to dilute with slipshod execution, lazy imitation, and commercial oppor- tunism. But under the right circumstances, it can sweep away the banal contingencies of the everyday, driving to the root of architecture (as radicalism’s etymology dictates) to unleash primal, exhilarating effects one might refer to as “aesthetic bliss.” The phrase comes from Vladimir Nabokov, who coined it in 1956 to describe his literary ambitions. “Lolita,” he writes, “has no moral in tow. For me, a work of fiction exists only insofar as it affords me what I shall bluntly call aesthetic bliss, that is a sense of being somehow, some- where, connected with other states of being where art (curiosity, tenderness, kindness, ecstasy) is the norm. There are not many such books.”18 There are not many such
18. Vladimir Nabokov, “On a Book Entitled Lolita,” in Lolita (1955; repr., New York: Vintage International, 1997), 314–15.
PATTERNS, Textile Room. 2013. Image courtesy PATTERNS. Right: Atelier Manferdini, Tempera, 2013. Image courtesy Atelier Manferdini.
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buildings, either. Most have a moral in tow. That moral may have to do with the program, budget, or even bombastic ambition to advertise an architect’s carefully constructed alterity. Whatever its source, such moralism always under- mines the irreducibly architectural. Just about all of the projects in “A New Sculpturalism” wore their aesthetic agendas on their sleeves, but only a few rose to that elusive state of aesthetic bliss. Manferdini’s pavilion did, as did Wiscombe’s, in a different way. I also noticed that blissful quality in Lynn’s plastic aggregations, in Coy Howard’s rich accretions of graphite, and in Johnston Marklee’s curious building masses. I saw it elsewhere in the exhibition too, but I also saw plenty of projects that missed the mark. Some were solid examples of proficient professional practice – respectable buildings to be sure, but out of place in a major museum show. Others were the architectural equivalents of what Nabakov referred to as “didactic fiction” and “topical trash.” By mixing important innovations so casually with later, derivative examples, “A New Sculpturalism” inadvertently demonstrated that the pragmatic radicalism that proliferated in Los Angeles in the 1980s and ’90s used to be an effective vehicle with which to pursue aesthetic bliss, and that today, this formidable attitude has skidded well past the point of diminishing returns and largely disintegrated into a collec- tion of stylistic clichés. Indeed, Gehry, Mayne, Moss, and the other early innovators of the manner have long since moved on to more productive ways of working. While I look forward to the offerings the elder generation has in store, I will be keep- ing a closer eye on the largely untested inventions of Lynn and the younger generation, who have diverged even more sharply from LA’s now conventionalized mode of radicalism. Had “A New Sculpturalism” directed more attention to dif- ferences rather than similarities, the exhibition could have clarified the many important distinctions among contem- porary LA architects and offered an opportunity for both professional and popular audiences to cultivate their recep- tivity to the rarefied inflections of aesthetic bliss. That it did neither should be seen as a dereliction of institutional duty that this city and our field can ill afford to repeat.
Todd Gannon is a Los Angeles– based architect. He teaches history, theory, and design at SCI-Arc.
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WEEK 10 READINGS/Lavin_Architecture_Is_Not_a_Bee.pdf
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Essay:
An Architect is Not a Bee Sylvia Lavin
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Reyner Banham's rose colored rearview mirror image remains to this day the lens through which the world reads the architecture of Los Angeles - and thank god for that because before Banham there was no way to See Los Angeles through its haze of acid smog and endless sprawl. Instead of looking in vain for the monumental signs of downtowns and densities , Banham tracked footprints in the sand and gas stains along the freeways transforn1ing as he did Los Angeles from a city manque into a series of overlapping and ever fecund ecologies, And while his love of Los Angeles remains palpable today, his Los Angeles: The Architecture ofFour Ecologies was less about urbanism as such than it was a theory of architectural production , of how an urban ecology rather than an urban plan or even an urban policy is the best terrain for growing the greatest variety of architectural species, In concluding his defense of the city 's architecture, he marvels at how it could have produced in just over half a century the Gamble house, Disneyland, the Watts towers, the freeway system, the Eames house, the Xerox Data Systems complex". and so on. Through this almost endless list, it is not the quantity of structures that is meant to astound the reader, nor their intrinsic quality, but rather their yjrtually infinite diversity.
One must also wonder if too much variety or variety for its own sake remains a useful concept. If a strange and for some horrifying form of urban spectacle when Banham was writing about Los Angeles in 1971 , diversity today is a cliche at best and increasingly the expected and legislated nOlm in new urban developments from Dubai to the Pearl River Delta. Designed obsolescence, which helped generate today's cult of variety, has become heterogeneity by design. Ecologists indeed use biodiversity to measure the strength of an ecosystem, yet it is precisely in the equation of quantity with power that the analogy with design collapses. Ecology is useful in characterizing some important features of the Los Angeles architectural landscape: like an ecology, Los Angeles does not operate according to traditional notions of hierarchy or history, related logics both beloved by architects. There is too much coming and going of people, too many random mutations caused by proximity to other fields and sudden if sometimes brief access to fame, and there are no institutions of adequate authority to constrain and discipline experimentation and influence. The architectural culture of Los Angeles is a collective that works without the oversight of a superego like those created in other cities by the collaboration or collusion of newspapers, museums, governing bodies, profeSSional organizations and so on that mete out power, assess value and locate centers. The net result is that it is meaningless to describe Los Angeles in telms used for
other places, like generations, schools or other hierarchical and stabilizing historical structures, Ergo ecologies, which have orders like food chains with a top and a bottom , but do not have clear centers of power. Every link along the food chain has a role to play within its niche and the death of even an apparently minor species may cause the whole chain - and the ecosystem it generates - to collapse,
Los Angeles architects have celebrated Banham's ecological model of design 's natural habitat because it promises to serve as a guarantor of absolute creative freedom and offers the appealing hope that the horizontal dispersion of the city will be mirrored in a utopian political democracy the way a lawn becomes isomorphic with the contours of a front yard. But just as Christopher Alexander argued that a city is not a tree, an architect is not a bee in an ecosystem fluttering unfettered from f10wer to flower and producing thereby more and more varied f10wers. An architect who has too much undirected interaction with his surroundings that offer no resistance and only the siren call of endless options can lose his way. In a field of unlimited pOSSibilities, radical relatiyjsm means anything goes and nothing can build up enough mass to matter. An uncontrolled id is not something you want to share with your neighbors and a metropolis full of them - or full of bees for that matter - is not good urban policy.
In order to keep what's useful about the notion of an ecology without falling prey to its overly simple love of natural law, I'm going to substitute chromology for ecology and argue that color is the prinCipal territory where nature and culture collide. I will offer no false scientific justification for this rhetorical gambit: I have no idea if the interaction of topographies and socialities really does produce a distinctive color wheel. But I can say with utter confidence that the Inuit are able to discern myriad shades of white, Baroque Rome is said to be a dusty shade of orange, and Diana Vreeland called pink the navy blue of India, a crazy array of half-truths that make color a more than adequate theoretical tool for describing the character of places without too much essentialism. Color, color as such, not the material in which it is suspended or the technologies used to produce it, moves promiscuously around, has no pure state, blends with other colors to yield unexpected results , produces zones of shared sensibility and is organized by intensity rather than hierarchy, impact rather than power, effect rather than truth. If Los Angeles was once an architecture of four ecologies, today, Los Angeles has generated an architecture of four interactive chromologies, a particular conceptual palette where hues shift depending on the time of day, the tint of your sunglasses, the
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i' link along the food chain has a an d the death of even an apparently
whole chain - and the ecosystem it
'elebrated Banham's ecological wit at because it promises to serve 'eative freedom and offers the izon tal dispersion of the city will liti cal democracy the way a lawn Ie co ntours of a front yard, But just c- _rl that a city is not a tree, an '<'OSys tem fluttering unfettered from 10 9 th ereby more and more varied
.5 too much undirected interaction Iffe r n o resistance and only the siren Ise hi s way. In a field of unlimited 1/ 1 lIl eans anything goes and nothing
m atter. An uncontrolled id is h ar e wi th your neighbors and a full uf bees for that matter - is not
uJ about the notion of an ecology rly s:impl e love of natural law, I'm ~. fo r ecology and argue that color It" Jlature and culture collide, I will
k a bnn for this rhetorical gambit: lio n of tupographies and socialities 'l i'l c (;olor wheel. But I can say
Llluit are able to discern myriad me is said to be a dusty shade of cal led pink the navy blue of India , a at make color a more than adequate Ig th e character of pla ces without II". col or as such, not the material :he technologies used to produce undo has no pure state, blends le.,x!Jected results, produces zones Irganized by intensity rather than n power, effect rather th an truth, If :bi tecture of four ecologies, today, n architecture of four interactive
Jl Geptual palette where hues shift Iy. th e tint of your sunglasses, the
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14
First row: Reyner Banham in the car, from the documentar), Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles, BBC, 1972. Second row: Freeways in Los Angeles, from Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles. Third row. Los Angeles Department a/Water and Power Building, A. C. Martin, 1964. Q) 1. Paul Getty Trust. Used with permission. julius Shulman Photography Archive, Research Libra,)' at the Getty Research Institute. Fourth row: Danziger Studio, Frank Gehry, 1963. Photo courtesy of
the archit ec t. Images offiTS!, second andfourth rows were manipulated with color.
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15
16
proximity of bougainvillea and the projective reflections of the neighboring LED billboard.
The principal colors of Los Angeles are blood red, hot pink , vintage grey and shiny silver. Blood red is the color of Los Angeles's elan vital , the binding of authenticity and form with sweat and tears. Architects in New York don't cry, and in Paris they don't sweat, but in Los Angeles rock bands form under the red gel of stage lights to perform the ritual dance of genuine and raw power. Hot pink is the color of the outsider, the frankly experimental and therefore intrinsically and persistently alien, the one who sees the extraordinary possibilities in Bazooka gum and who greets every new cultural and technological invention with as much curiosity as cunning. Vintage grey is, in Los Angeles much as it is elsewhere, the color of meaning , the character of communication, truth to materials and all other forms of cant. This is the most difficult color to see in Los Angeles's smoggy atmosphere. Typical sustainable architecture calls itself green but is really grey just as certain crazy shapes appear to be abstract and beyond meaning but actually say, "you feel me " with utter clarity. Finally, Los Angeles sparkles in the reflections of shiny silver, the hue of the city's special liberty with models of professional practice where the corporate firm operates under the li teral patina of the space age, the silver screen and other institutionalized forms of progress. Silver is the color shared by the con artist and the secret agent, making them difficult to distinguish.
All the historic figures of Los Angeles's architectural Valhalla worked in this palette - a good forensic scientist would no doubt find Frank Lloyd Wright's blood in the concrete blocks of the Ennis-Brown house , you 'd probably believe me if I told you that the first Eames chair was made in hot pink fiberglass , Irving Gill was grey before gTey was vintage and of course Richard Neutra invented silvery architecture. There are interesting historical genealOgies of color to be tracked down - how is it possible that Victor Gruen is simultaneously the Austrio-Angelino inheritor of Rudolf Schindler's pink and the silver of Neutra, the origin of Jon Jerde's grey shopping malls and also the progenitor of the ruddy Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne (bo th of whom worked for Gruen). But no one practicing today belongs entirely to any one of these zones. Gehry and Eric Moss may have a lot of red , but look closely and you'll see pink and silver in the one and bluish grey in the other. Qingyen Ma and Hitoshi Abe may be the newest of many newcomers , but Ma is definitively silver with just a touch of pink highlights while Abe is turning silver to gold. Greg Lynn is iridescent pink mercury, Hernan Diaz-Alonso is RED and Neil Denari is an uncanny mix of silver and pink, a combination of such distinctiveness that perhaps a new color name is required to capture the flavor. Yves Klein invented Klein Blue and maybe Denari has conjured Pilver.
Los Angeles' architecture of four chromologies gives rise to an almost infinite range of hues. Go dO'wn the Who's Who of Angelino architects and see if you can' t concoct the appropriate color cocktail for each of them using these basic ingredients. But what you will also find is that if you mix too many colors , if you constantly color correct by adding a bit more of this and a bit more of that , when you realize that once added color is impossible to take away, you end up with a big, dark, muddy black hole; not true black necessarily, since much of the mediocre architecture in Los Angeles is actually beige, but the deep darkness of total irrelevance. And that is the unfortunate downside to the architectural culture of a city with
a sense of infinite possibility at its side, v"ith deep palettes if not pockets, without a shared superego, with simply the lavv of nature that Banham celebrated to lure it toward ever more variety. Biodiversity produces flora and fauna of unprecedented brilliance ; excessive architectural chromophilia , on the other hand , can produce dead ends, lost generations, architecture designed by absorbing color without commitment or concept. The unfortunate result of looking around too much and wallowing in all the beautiful colors is archi tecture that ends up florid but insignificant. In most places. Architects, wi th a capi tal A, archi tects who aspire to con tribute to the ecology of design (no t all architec ts have this aspiration), are subject to the survival of the fittest. They either produce meaningful design or their practices die out. There are many forms of extinction: closing the doors of your office is only the obvious one. A less obvious but more treacherou s form of cultural extinction for an architect is simply becoming a high style hack , a species that breeds especially well in Los Angeles because it seems easy to add just one more color to a colorful city. Who could possibly notice a little dab of fuchsia along Rodeo Drive, much less distinguish it from hot pink , amongst the riot of colors produced by the 'vanguard corporate firm ' (a unique organism indigenous to the region characterized by designer camouflage that actually manages to fool people into thinking that it is architecture). Many cities have by now absorbed and adapted to Banham's ecological metaphor and perhaps the unfit do die off in those places, but in Los Angeles the survival of the fittest doesn ' t obtain - everything survives, it just moves to the Valley.
Los Angeles is one of the world's great architecture cities because some architects - and photographers, filmmakers, product designers etc. - have worked hard and carefully to produce a precisely mea sured admixture of pigments that lead not to euphoria but pixels that cajole the city into accepting zones of visual intensity and that seem to reorganize the world around them. Other cities prefer elegant sleekness as much as possible, others want bravura monuments beside banal backgrounds and still others wish everything was a monolithic shade of orange. Los Angeles, however, is erratic in its desires and works more like an impressionist canvas: just one hot pink dot can cast a wide but soft shadow on all that surrounds it. Some are continuing to pay a high price for believing the myth that anything goes here; you can still see many things going , going gone. But Los Angeles is also entering its second life, a virtual life where ecology becomes a chromology and in which the palette of impressionism is giving way to new, as of yet unimagined colors. Silvery pinkish red is being reconfigured into an as of yet unnamed but about to be patented - precise, measured, reflected, controlled - effusion of color. A leopard , which is certainly very ecological, cannot change his spots, but Los Angeles architects will recolor the world, one pantone chip at a time.
Sylvia Lavin is Professor of Architectural History and Th eolY at UCLA and has been a visiting professor at Harvard , Princeton, Columbia a nd elsewhere. A leading figure in current debates, Lavin is known both for he r scholarship and her criticis m in contemporalY archilecture and design. Her next book, The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms ofArchitectural Contemporaneity is forthcoming from MIT and she is working on a se ries of exhibition s on design culture o f the late 1960s including an exhibition on the Institute for Architecture and Urba n Studies for the CCA. She is an editor of Crib Sheets, a compilation of polemical wTitings and sound bites on current buzzwords issued by Monacelli press and her Form Follows Libido: Architecture and Richard Neutra in a Psychoanalytic Culture was published by the MIT Press in 2005.
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olio )\-"f7 - J-':k'¥, /,1) /7-. l- /:k'¥. :J 0 / 1::7:k:+Iil' 1J'0) :;3: iH Jtffl:it lliHL aF~
~~mO)mm~.3T~~:;'ij-(/~, .~ill~!:::.~f~~/~ ~~~~O).~ tlli
(1) iffii1i'TriJ~~1.~o ;fJ:,7i !The Flash in th e Pan and Other Forms of Architectural
:ont emporaneity.J1J'iBA MlTi±lJ:&J: 1)..t;f9!tn~o *t:;iJ'T)iillJ;IH:/)/- (eCA) ~e::
til ~ :t ~ rrn stit ute for Architecture and Urban StudiesJ In:it i<l:l:if.>. 1960 :q=.f~*o)T'
+j'~ /~fl:i<::fJ!l~ Q '0/ I) - ;;(In:itil';lilli'+'o m !J'i'.O)rmfrils:it t 'J ~Mtc;l'l'~ . n!k(:l1~ r Crib :i h eets~ ( -tT-t: ':J I) i±lJt\i) O)Uljj~:m;z-m~~o Jfr~ I'Form Follows Libido : Architec ture
Jnd Ri cha rd Neutra in a Psyc haoana lyl ic Cu ILUre., i;): 2005iF f<:: 'vI1T HIJ:t;i J: I) R il'o
nr('hitecture and design. Her next book, The Flmih !rr'hitec[ural Contemporaneity is fo rthcoming n a ~eries of exhibitions on design culture of the iMl o n the In s titute for Architecture and Urban '(I i tor of Crib Sheels , a compi lati on o f polemical rTPllt buzzwords issued by Monacelli press and IptllJre and Richard Neuva. in a Psychoanalylic UT Press in 2005,
17
__MACOSX/WEEK 10 READINGS/._Lavin_Architecture_Is_Not_a_Bee.pdf
WEEK 10 READINGS/Lavin_Studs_Snapshots_and_Gizmos.pdf
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·
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·
I
i
l
Everything loose Will land
, ~ .. k"'~ . :. ! -( ., -r. _
Sylvia Lavin
Studs, Snapshots, and Gizmos:
Los Angeles Dearchitectured
Robert Smithson was one of the best
known architectural tourists of the twentieth cen
tury. He not only famously toured the monuments
of Passaic with the requisite camera in hand but
also circled widely through the fields of late modern
architecture, observing closely without ever becom
ing a permanent resident . His double architectural
vision-intimate yet alien-in fact occluded the idea
of both permanence and residence. In 1969, for ex
ample, he came to Los Angeles from New York to tour
Kaiser Steel and American Cement as part of the Los
Angeles County Museum of Art's (LACMA) Art and
Technology (A&T) program. 1 On the one hand, he
was repeating a longstanding tradition of architec
tural visitors to hinterland building industries and
26 industrial buildings. On the other hand, ratherthan
~ ~
, h ~.I .. ~ It .. c ". .. t:. l
...... ".·,:-." ..U, ...
---('!' I- ........ I!I .... • ~
rli ... !~:--. .
Robert Smithson , PorI Graphite 011 composition LICensed by VAGA . New
investigate adva
was expected of
limestone mines
tours through the
ries of what he ca
consisted of cons
and then distribL
tUI'al fragments . I
Cement wanted t,
This
understood as al
sCI'ibes a proces5
place during the
the conceptual s
to be understooc
pel'manence or t
ture became a qL
an element of lar
interface . These
the relationship b
and hence what v
world itself from
important is that
ization, arch itect
for the combinec
of mediurr
27 transform:
Curator's Essay Studs. Snapshots. and Gizmos
·;1 ....
c Cl-Jl .. u .~ ':
... "".1.0 ~f ~f.. r-... ,tJ
, ~ - - ·f ~ ;
,_ C' C'.M . !'.T-c, t.~.... ~ :3 c '· '..("r,
j.- '-" t L ,,-.•.• 1, C ;, \ e~~-t ~) i ·e s ,-, I , -L .J. i-.
r1 0eC\ r- c n""c. t ","-e=i \ ~ ' I _ If()
,1. - ' : -/ '
1""'~ j"I ' r-.·.'t~
L 1: (",..,., S l"f~ __- ~ .. ~
.-c ....... {" ..,r S;'f €f
THE CEMENT STORE # 1I ,\ .......I /,r-::.. I
(UNDER 5.000 POP.) .;;; I ~:~fGl r-;.....;:,
L'~ c.;..-, ~tit.S l!""W't ... rt ~ .a ', , ,,i, ~ , ~
HI,~AOLZ ISS!
'. ( i ~ . "ff ...-! ..r ~~;.J I ",~~)~ Edward Kienho)z. Cement Store No.1 (under 5.000 pOp.I. 1967
,"'..J.' I Plaque or engraved breiS> on wa lnut 9v. ·ll V4 ,(" "0·- \--, Copyright Kfenholz . Cou rresy 01 LA, Louver. Venice . CA /~",\ .,.....1
~
Robert Smithson , Portlilnd Cement Sites; A DeiJrchiteclured Project, 1969 Gra phite on composit ion board I 16Y, - 13 Copyright Estate of Raben Smit hson! Licensed by VAGA. New YOI k cou new of J ,1 1MS Conan Gallery, New Yor k/Sl1(lnghai
investigate advanced fabrication technologies as
was expected of him, Smithson insisted on seeing
limestone mines and slag yards. The result of these
tours through the back lots of architecture was a se
ries of what he called Dearchitectured Projects that
consisted of constructing a building, demolishing it ,
and then distributing its components as architec
tural fragments, Neither Kaiser Steel nor Amel'ican
Cement wanted to pursue his ideas for A&T.
This tale about Smithson is best
understood as an anecdote among many that de
scribes a process of dearchitecturization that took
place during the 1970s when, for roughly a decade,
the conceptual structure of architecture ceased
to be undel'stood in traditional terms, Instead of
permanence or technical advancement, architec
ture became a question of resource management,
an element of larger distribution systems, and an
interface , These mutations fundamentally altered
the relationship between building and architecture
and hence what was undel'stood to distinguish the
world itself from its cultural systems, What is most
important is that, in the process of dearchitectur
ization, architecture became an operational model
for the combined effects of rethinking the nature
of medium and materiality in the arts, the
27 transformation of the passive viewer into an
active participant, and the development of an en
vironmental approach to the space of art , Each of
these shifts is evident in much of the cultural pro
duction of the decade, but architecture was the
only discipline that hosted them all. Because the
effects were especially visible in Los Angeles, the
city's often misaligned contact between architec
ture and other art forms offers a uniquely effective
means of describing important changes in the logic
of culture itself.
The nature of this feedback between
architecture and other visual arts can be under
stood by considering the contrast between the
relationship of the painter Robert Chuey to Richard
Neutra, on the one hand, and that of Edward Ruscha
to Reyner Banham (and to Frank Gehry) on J See MaUl'ice Tuchman ,
the other, Chuey, an abstract expressionist, A Repor t on the AN and Techno l
commissioned Neutra to build a modernist ogy Pl'ogl'om of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. 1967-1971house for him and his wife in 1958.2 Chuey (Los Angeles; Los Ange les
and Neutra operated according to the princi County Museum of Art, 1971), pals of medium specificity, maintained clarity 320-21. Texts by Maurice
Tu chman and J ane livin gstone, in their I'espective creative and professional 2 On the l'e latio nship
roles as artist and architect and client and be tween Neutra and the Chueys,
designer, and produced a house where studio see m y FOl'm Follows Libido: Al'chitecture and Richardand living were adjacent but distinct, Their Neutra in a Psychoanalytic
rapport was mutually I'einfol'cing yet funda Culture (Camb l'idge. MA : MIT
mentally autonomous and detached. Press , 2004) , 76- 81 ,
l
Everything loose Will land
None of these distinctions was ob
served by Banham, who was an architectwho didn't
build and a writer who made films, or Ruscha, who
was a photographer who often didn't use a cam
era and a filmmaker who wrote words. Both were
interested in the infrastructural urbanscape of the
city, yet the intersection of their work was more like
a mishap than a formal dance. Banham praised
Ruscha for his "art of doing his own thing," rath
er than for producing old-fashioned fine art; and
he wrote that the laconic indifference of Ruscha's
well-known artist's book Thirtyfour Parking Lots,
which consisted of photographs of parking lots shot
from the air and presented as if untouched byaes
thetic framing, compelled attention. 3 But when it
came time to publish Los Angeles: The Architecture
of Four Ecologies, Banham chose old-fashioned
art for the cover-David Hockney's oil painting A
Bigger Splash (1967)-and of the works by Ruscha
reproduced in the book, only his 1968 Hollywood
silkscreen is attributed to the artist. 4 The five pho
tographs from Thirtyfour Parking Lots that Banham
used in the book are identified only by place name .
Banham excluded the artist's name, lest it betray
the pretense that these images were indeed indif
ferent documents, and suppressed the repeated
presence of works of art in his book lest they belie
fact that he was constructing a fiction about Los
Angeles as a fundamentally artless city.
If Banham was ambivalent about how
to credit Ruscha and, more importantly, howto clas
sify his work and if to render it visible as art, Ruscha
returned the favor to architecture. In 1977, he en
gaged Frank Gehry to build him a house. A heavily
worked series of drawings in pencil indicate that
Gehry focused carefully on the design, which indeed
got built. Gehrywent so far as to list the house in his
first monograph .s However, Gehry ultimately excised
the building from his oeuvre and not a single image
of the Gehry/Ruscha house has ever been published
by either of them. Associated with two of the most
visible names in the history of both the art and arch
itecture of Los Angeles, this house is now invisible,
its disappearance caused by a crisis in attribution.
While neither man formally claims full creative
credit, the house instantiated a dispute over what
constitutes architectural design and authorship. 6
Just as he sometimes had other pho
tographers shoot pictures for him, Ruscha wanted
the architect to provide an invisible service rather
than a visible architectural idea . Along with
28 collecting photographic views of anonymous
architecture, Ruscha had been collecting anony
mous architectural components, such as windows
and bowling alley floors, and wanted the house to
be built around these objets trouves and to seem to
be made of stock architectural images, such as the
hitching posts that adorn spaghetti westerns and the
theme park and film set of Pioneer Town , which was
located not far from the house. I n order for the house
to appear to be an undesigned assemblage of quo
tidian parts, it could not be associated with the name
of an architect, particularly one well known precisely
for his deliberately composed assemblages of anon
ymous materials. Working drawings produced in
and stamped by the Gehry office reveal literal holes
between the various conceptions of arch itectu re and
of architectural systems that collide in this building,
gaps that not only required material adjustments
and shims but also through which the house fell and
disappeared. 7 The artist of laconic indifference was
treated laconically by Banham and in turn treated
Gehry with strategic indifference.
3 For a close reading of this book, 6 This discussion is based on a
see Susanna Newbury's " Thirtyfour series of inte,'views I conducted with Parking Lots in the F,'agmented Frank Gehry (May1 1. May 22, June
Metropolis" in th is volume. 1. and June 5, 2012) and Patricia
4 Before pub lishing The Olive,' (May 25, 2012) , who worked
Architecture of Four Ecologies in in the Gehry office at the ti me and
1971, Reyne,' Banham fi,'st presented was assigned to thi s project. and on his Ideas about Los Ange les dur- a phone call from the Ruscha stud io
ing a series of ,'ad lo bl'oadcasts (on October 1. 2012) ,'eceived by
that were then published in Tile Kimberli Meyer, who, as dl,'ectol' of
Listener as " Encounte,' with Sunset the MAK Center. was assisti ng me in
Boulevard" (Aug ust 22 . 1968): 235-36: develop ing information and malerial " Roadscape with Rlisting Ra il s" for the exhibition . R~scha declined to
(August 29 . 1968): 267-68: " Beverly be inte,'Vicwed on this subject 0,' to
Hills. Too. Is a Ghetto" (September 5. pI'ovlde fUI' ther Informat ion or materi
1968) : 296-98: and "The Ar'l of Doing als In r elation to the house , except to Your Thing" (September 12. 1968): state that the des ign was his and that
330- 31 . In the latte,', he states , "I n Gehry ass isted in Its construction out
the eyes of the community at la,'ge . of friendsh ip and kindness. For further
an a,'tist is just another guy doing his info,'mation, see "A ,lnotated Checklist
thing." Banham then turn s to Ruscha o f the ExhibltJon" in this volume.
in particu lar and wI' ltes of Thlrtyfour 7 Of pa,' ticu lar Interest on the draw Parking Lors , "The very obtuseness of ings a,'e the notes in dicating the need
the presentation compels attention ." for Infiliin varying amounts between
The A ,'chitecture of Fow' Ecologies lhe wi"dows and the concrete block
has recently received w ide attention , produced by the difference between
inclUding two new editions with fore the regulal'ity of the new blocks and the
words by Anthony Vidlel' and Joe Day. irregulal'ity of the ,'ecycled and varyin g
S See Peter Arnell and Ted Bickford . windows . The drawings and real estate
eds .. Fronk Gehry, Buildings and records also only indicate geographi
Projects (New York : Rizzoll, 1985) . cal coo,'d inates ,'ather than the mo"e
whe,' e the project Is listed on the standard street address. These COOI'
comp lete list of pI'ojects on page Ix but dlnates. however, do not correlate with
is not included in the catalog section of real estate tl'aI1sact ion records.
the monograph .
PR4
As F
disputes over ter
in underlying sy!
ists and archite(
once been distinc
proper use of the
ed fundamental
than simple unce
the same struct
gories of art, Ian
arena of artistic
example, Nancy
East Coast, Wes
between a verbo!
syllabic slacker (
cliches about Ne
to use variations
categorical inde1
such. Indeed, Kr
the 1970s as requi
used like captiom
collapse of artisti
A sir
but one specific
tween art and arc
Andre's arrangin!
nents such as bri
materials, placen
rather than on ba
with lofts as spac
confused the diff.
sculpture in gener
primary geometr
materials, howevi
turbing the histori
Although straigh1
Andre's rigidly ore
materials caused
cal terms used to
adrift somewherE
and installation a
Andre 's works be
projects changed
at odds with the lit
gravitas ofthe ma1
use . For example.
inally installed in
Angeles in 1967, U
instigated:
29 between ot
s discussion Is based on a
,f Interviews I conducted with ,ehry (May 11, May 22, June
une 5, 2012) and Patt'icia
May 25. 2012) , w ho wot'ked
.eht·y offlce at the time and
;Igned to th is project . and 011
1 calt ft'om the Ruscha studio ober 1, 2012) received by
'II Meyet·. w ho. as director of K Centel', was assisting me in
ting information and maleria l
exhi bition , Ruscha dec lin ed to
'viewed on this subject or to
, flirt her In[ormation or materl
llation to the house , except to lat the design was his and that
.ssisted in its construction out
dshlp and kindness . For further
llion , see "A nnotat ed Check li st
x hlbltlon " in this volume,
pa"tlcular Interest on the draw
~ the notes indicating the need
I in varying amounts between
dows and the conc,'ete block
ad by the difference between
ulari ty of the new blocks and the
ll'ity of th e l'ecycled and varying
IS , The drawings and real est ate
; also only Ind icate geograph l
,'d inates rath e,· than the more
rd st,'eet address, These coor
• however. do not correlate w ith
ate transaction records.
Curator's Essay
PROCEDURES
As Rosalind Krauss famously argued,
disputes over terminology are a symptom of shifts
in underlying systems of classification. When al't
ists and architects stopped working in what had
once been distinct domains, the deviation from the
proper use of the terms artist and architect reflect
ed fundamental epistemological changes rather
than simple uncertainty about protocol. Reflecting
the same structural transformation in the cate
gories of art, language itself was brought into the
arena of artistic practice with new urgency. For
example, Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson's film
East Coast, West Coast of 1969 stages a dialogue
between a verbose intellectual (Holt) and a mono
syllabic slacker (Smithson) not merely to oppose
cliches about New York and Los Angeles but also
to use variations in speech acts to characterize the
categorical indeterminacy then pervading art as
such, Indeed, Krauss characterized much art of
the 1970s as requiring words, small bits of language
used like captions to compensate for the underlying
collapse of artistic codes, 8
A similar resistance to classification,
but one specifically related to the dynamic be
tween art and architecture, was introduced by Carl
Andre's arranging of industrially produced compo
nents such as bricks. Minimalism's use of building
materials, placement of pieces directly on the floor
rather than on bases or pedestals, and association
with lofts as spaces of both production and display
confused the difference between architecture and
sculpture in general terms, Andre's use of grids and
primary geometries to organize and shape these
materials, however, went further than most in dis
turbing the historical distinction between mediums,
Although straightforward to measure empirically,
Andre's rigidly ordered deployment of architectural
materials caused a tear in the fabric of art histori
cal terms used to descl'ibe his works, leaving them
adrift somewhere between site-specific sculpture
and installation art. The nominal indeterminacy of
Andre's works became especially apparent when
projects changed location, because movement is
at odds with the literal stasis of architecure and the
gravitas of the materials he most frequently chose to
use. For example, when Andre's Equivalents, orig
inally installed in New York in 1966, came to Los
Angeles in 1967, the flight from East to West Coast
instigated a process whereby equivalence
29 between objects became spatial reversals:
Studs, Snapshots, and Gizmos
-..: , . - ".. . ~
n/rc/&.Fed.• "
Carl Andre, Cuts. 1967 Exhibition poster for Dwan Gallery 22 ,;' ,16'h I nch~ Copyright Carl Andre Co ur tesy of DWen Gallery reco rd s. Archives of American Art , Smithson ian Inslitu Ji on
solid capstones became void, depth became height,
The transition also required an incidental detour
through architecture because, in order to repre
sent this phase shift, Andre made a drawing that
not only represents the work, now called Cuts, but
also turns the once separate groupings of concrete
capstones into a floor plan measured on graph pa
per. The drawing, in other words, while made after
the fact as a record of the installation, is the kind of
document an architect makes, a drawing not after
nature but of something that does not yet exist. 9 Not
intended as such, the drawing of Cuts nevertheless made Equivalents available as an inadvertent act
of architecture.
Like all good misadventure, this one
produced further detours. Gehry has often dis
cussed his first encounter with an Andre sculpture
8 These Issues are discussed in II Typica lly. Carl Andre made draw two of Krauss ' s best-known essays: ings after the fact, in ordet' to cons ider Rosali nd E, Krauss , " Sculptu ,'e in th e or explain an existing work rather
Expanded Field." The Origlnal/tyof Ihe lhan as a means of conceiving a work
Avonl - Gorde and Other Modernist to be produced In the future . Myths , repro(1993 ; Cambridge .
MA: MIT PI'ess , 1985) , 276 - 90; and
" Notes on t he I ndex : Seventies Art In
Arnerica Part 2 " October 4 (A " turnn 1977) : 58 - 67,
,
l
Ev~rylhing loos~ Will land
and the assumption he made that Andre had pro
duced the wOI'k by verbally giving instructions over
the telephone about where to put how many bricks. lo
In Gehry's view, this kind of detachment was intrin
sic to architectural production and hence he read
Andre's sculpture as architecture. Or rather, he saw
it as an effort to overcome architectural alienation
by eliminating the layers of med iation introduced by
drawings and contracts and by reducing the building
process to the most prosaic materials and types of
fabrication . In fact , Andre selected every brick and
laid them out himself by hand, but Gehry 's m isdi
agnosis shaped the architect's decision to simulate
architectural immediacy by reducing the num
ber and type of instructions used in construction ,
leaving building surfaces unfinished and casually
detailed. This crossed wire led to further detours
because, as the laborers realized that their handi
work was going to be exposed, they started to add
finish and refinement, choosing what they consid
ered to be the most elegant two-by-fours or the
smoothest pieces of plywood, becoming collateral
agents in the design process and thereby produc
ing collateral effects. In order to compensate, Gehry
had to invent more and more convoluted systems for
producing immediacy effects, such as sketching in
three dimensions with timber or roughing up the
surfaces of his cardboard furniture .lI
These architectural and psychological
projections were made possible by loose concep
tual fits that opened room for misunderstanding
through which a host of silent partners entered the
space of architectural design , not just laborers and
contractors, but artists, curators, writers , users,
and ultimately the architect newly imagined. In 1968,
Gehry was somewhat improbably converting Larry
Bell's cubic glass sculptures, noted for their effects
on the viewer's perception of the environment , into
lighting fixtures and working to transform the spa
tial ambiguities associated with the artists of the
Light and Space movement into the programmatic
flexibility required by retail spaces . Simultaneously,
Gehry was working on the installation for a Billy
AI Bengston exhibition at LACMA .12 Designed as
a mock studio in order to combat the formalizing
effect of the museum 's monumental architecture on
Bengston's work , the everyday life of an artist was
represented through the use of found materials and
domestic miscellany. The studied casualness of the
scheme is at odds with the rigor of the notes about
construction schedules that cover Gehry 's
30 drawings and with the exactingly polished
surfaces of Bengston's paintings. But in all this
calculated infol'mality, a different form of loose
ness appeared: em bedded with inearly d rawi ngs for
both the commercial and the museum schemes are
the first markings in what would become Gehry's
famously wobbly gl'aphic idiom. For Gehry, the path
through unartful and anonymous means of produc
tion had yielded a highly identifiable signature , and
he found a loose architecture while collaborating
with artists known for precision and while he was
working hard to avoid architecture altogether.
These unanticipated byproducts of
direct collaboration and indirect asymmetries in
modes of production demanded new systems of
10 Gehry often me"tions t he impact
tha t going 10 th e exhibition Primory
Structures at the Jewis h M L, seu m in New York , In 1966 , had on his think
Ing, par ti cu larly In re laUon to An dre .
For two differen t co m ments made by
the architect. see th e Interviews with
Ba ,'bre Isenberg. in Barba,'a Isenberg .
"S hould an Ar twork Have Toil ets ?" Conve,'sotions wit h Fronk Geh,'y (New
York : Rando m Hou se , 2009), 61; and
Kurt Foster In KU I't W. Foster, Fra nk
O. Gehry. ed . Christina Bech t le"
(Os tf il dern-Ruit, Cantz Verlag,
1999) , 63 .
11 Ge l1 ry's unbu ilt Fami lian Hou se
of 1978 is Ihe most i ntense explora
t ion of how th e stu d , particuls ,'ly as
foun d in " th e ro ugh wood butche ,' tract
house" (as Gehry described it in hi s
monograp h, Frank Gelwy: Buildings
and PI'ojects . 128), can be used to
convey the immediacy of const,'uction
procedu.'es .'at he,' t han the tectonic
stabil ity of a fi nished bLd ldlng. Whi le
Gehry links the aesthetics of th e stud
to unfinis hed cons t ,' uctl on . th e te r m
wood butc he,' was also lIsed during the
1970s to .'efer to l he aesthe t ic of DIY
houses. less unfini shed In literal terms
th an ha nd- hew n and " woodsy" In aesthetic terms. FOI' a period book on
wo od butchery. see A ,'t Boericke and
Barry Shapiro , Handmade House, A
Guide to the Woodbutcher's A" t (San
Francisco: Scrim shaw Press , 1973) .
Although m ade of a matel'ial t hat
is apparen t ly simple to mani pulate ,
Gehry's firs t line of fur ni ture , Easy
Edges (1969 - 73) , was hi ghly engi
neered In OI'd er t o m ake It suitable for
m ass pro du ction . Ow'abllity for every
day use was assured by th e supel'
imposit ion 01' the seatin g surfaces of
fin ished materia ls. It is worth noting
th at M ic hael As he" . who wO I'ked In lhe
Gehry office d UI'ing this pe" iod . was
specifically Involved In t he design of
t hese ap plied surfaces. A st,-ategica lly
deve loped adver Isi ng and r'obus t
ma ,-keling ca m pa ign was Fun da m en
tal to the co mplex and comprehe n
sive prod uct ion plan fOI' Easy Edges
and include d a showroom di splay
at Bloomi ngdales in New York . The
room , Gehry 's fil'st fu lly cal'dboard
interior, was designed in his office
bu t supervised by Barbara D'Arcy.
She was a coord in ating designer at
BloomingdalEIS who was res po"sible
for hiring Mass im o Vl gnelli to design
lh ei r Br'own Bag Cam paign In 1973 .
an impol't ant example of the card
board aesthetic e,'ter,ng the fas hion m ilieu. Before she died in 2012. D'Ar cy
recounted a sto r' y to Alexandra Loew. a UCLA student r esearcher, t hat the Bloomingdale's staff was cur ious to
see who wou ld purc hase t he flrSl
Easy Edges chaio'. It was sol d, accol'd
ins to thi s tale, to a t ,'uck driver who
wanted seat ing he cou ld use during pit stops that would not be da m aged
in the t ruck .
Ult imately, the cost of ma lntain-
I ng the patent and lhe merchan dis ing
effort pr oved over ly st l'enuous and
Easy Edges went out of prod uc t ion .
Geh .,y later developed Experime nt al'
Edges (1979-82). a fu r'n itu l'e line w it h a much more gestural appearance- the
,' ougl, surfaces exaggerate instead of
cover up t he shredded effec t of torn
cardboard . fo,- exam ple , m aking t hem
appea ,- less designed than Easy Edges .
T he hand-made rathe.' t han mass
p.'oduced quality of Experimenta l
Ed ges also suggests that th ese objects
sought t he status of art as much as
that of " produc t ," an am bition ,'ein
fo ,'ced by t he fact t hat Expel'im ental
Edges were promi nen tl y shown not in Bloomingdale 's but in galleries
an d, above all. in Geh.,y' s f irst m ajor
retrospec ti ve, he ld at the W alker Art
Centel' in 1986.
Billy AI Bengston rubes 37 - 28 in ches CO uMesy
description to be r
became an espec
effort . Bengston,
attention to the a
in the LACMA sh
between where thi
duced therein by p
artists ' stud ios a
graphs , mostly of
and others and c o
address , use , squ ~
conditions . All the
designed and built
attended no fewer
w ithout getting a e
dows out of his StL
and Ruscha , who c
cupation-are ren<
redesigning enviro
enough to be draw
unpolished and pre
bits no longer than
captured by the qu
Archi l
once to learn about
niques of observat
was invited to co
Quarterly concern
almost as r l
31 journal's edi
led adve"tising and robust
ting campaign was hmdamen
1e comple~ and comprehen
oduction plan fOI' Easy Edges
:Iuded a showroom display ,m iI,gdales In New York. The
Cehry's first fully cal'dbo;!rd
r. was designed in his office )ervised by Barba,'" O·Arcy.
lS a coordln;!ting designer at
Ingda les w ho was respons ible
ng Massimo Vigne lli to design
,'own Bag Campaign in 1973.
,ortant examp le of lhe card
aesthetic ente"ing the fashion Before she d ied in 2012 . O'Arcy
,ted a story to A lexandra Loew.
I\. student resea"cher, that the
Ingda le's staff was curious to
,0 wou ld purchase the fiPst
dges chair. It was sold . accord
.his ta le. to a truck driver who
j seating he could use during
ps that wou Id not be damaged
:ruck. :i mately. the cost of ma intain
patent and t he me"chandising
,"'oved overly slrenuou sand
dges went out of prod,'ction .
lale,' developed Experimental (1979-82) . a furn iture line with a
more gestural appearance- the
surfaces exagge,-ate Instead of
JP the shredded effect of tOI'n lard, for examp le, making them
r less designed than Easy Edges .
lnd - made rat her than mass
:ed quality of Experimenta l
also suggests that these objects
t the status of art as much as "pl'oduct ," an ambition r ein-
by the lact that Experimenta l
were prom inently shown not
'mingda le' s but in galleries
bove all . in Gehry's f i,'st maior
pective . held at the Walker Art
'in 1986.
Curator's Essay
Billy Al Bengston Tubes /ea/(, 1965 Lacqu er on FOI micil 37 ·28 inches Cou llesy of Billy AI Bengslon Ai lisl Siudio Holdings
description to be rendered visible and photography
became an especially connective medium in this
effort. Bengston, for example, followed up on the
attention to the architecture of the artist's studio
in the LACMA show and on the link it suggested
between where things were made and what was pro
duced therein by publishing in 1970 a photo essay on
artists ' studios across Los Angeles. '3 The photo
graphs, mostly of interiors, were shot by Bengston
and others and captioned with architectural data:
address, use, square feet, orientation, and lighting
conditions . All the artists-including Ed Moses, who
designed and built his studio; Peter Alexander, who
attended no fewer than four architecture schools
without getting a degree and cut troughs and win
dows out of his studio with architectural precision ;
and Ruscha, who added on to his space by serial oc
cupation-are rendered as architects designing and
redesigning environments that did not stay still long
enough to be dt'awn. Their worlds were described in
unpolished and prosaic language delivered in small
bits no longer than a short photo caption and barely
captured by the quickness of a camera shutter.
Architects tw'ned to Ruscha more than
once to learn about photography and other new tech
niques of observation. Remarkably, in 1970, Ruscha
was invited to contribute to an issue of Design
Quarterly concerned with conceptual architectw'e;
almost as remarkable was the fact that the
31 journal's editor chose to publish Ruscha's re-
Studs, Snapshots. and Gizmos
frank Gehry, Billy AI Bengston, LACMA. 1968 Delall Graphile on Iracing papel 30 18 inches I Cou rtesy of Gehl)' Partners. llP
sponse: pinup photographs of five different women . 14
The wordplay of the title , "Five 1965 Girlfriends ,"
turns these images into an inventory of dated prod
ucts that displaces the architectural object (and the
photographs of building models commonly seen in
12 Gehry and Larry Bell were in close
contact during this period and both
reca ll discussing lighting as Gehry
was developing hi s des ign for the
Magnin stores . although the details of
these discussions were not recorded
and neither recalls specif ics . Gahry
mentioned th is aspect of his associa
lion with Be il in a 1975 lecture (see
"Frank O. Cehry: January 1. 1975"
SC I- Arc Med ia Archive . availab le
at http://sma .sciarc.edu/subcllp/ frank - o- gehry-l -of-2-cl lp_899j)
and again in 2007 i n an Inte rview
with Hun te" Orohojowska-Phllp. See
Orohojowska - Phltp. " Between Form
and Function : Frank Gehry." Rebels In
Paradise: The Los Angeles Art Scene
and rile 19605 (New York : Hen,·y Ho lt
and Company. 2011), 177.
Gehry's dl'awings, of which t here
are an excessively large number. fa,' greate,· than would normally be
produced fo,' a commercial project.
attest to t he degree to which the basic
!'Ieed to generate a wO"kable scheme
was "Iso an opportunity to pursue a quasi - autonomous design Investiga
tion . Across hundreds of dl'awings
of plans. sections. fa~ade studies .
display systems , slgnage , and fixtures.
the del ivery means and effects of
light emerge as the scheme ' s primary
design material and establish ::r sut'prising link between lhe conce,'ns
of the Light and Space artists and
the contempo,' ary emergence of the
concept of ,' etall as theater. coi ned by
Ma"vi n Traub , Ihen chief executive of
Bloomingdale 's.
T he 1968 ,'et "ospective Billy AI
Bengs/on was accompanied by a
catalog designed by Ed Ruseha. entit led Billy, w ith text by James
Monte. The book . like the install a
tion, was also designed as a rough
constl'uction: the ca t alog pages were
sandwiched between coarse grit
sandpaper he ld together wi th machine
screws and nuts. For further Informa
tion, see "Annotated Checklist of the
Exhibition" in t his vo lume.
13 Bengston ' s "los Angeles Artists '
Stud ios " (Art In Ame"ieo 5811970) : 100-106} is repr in ted in ·'Works on
Paper" in th is volume . The studio's
polymorphou s nature as home . wO"k
place. display system, and mal'ket
was of wide Interest during the 1970s.
See also , for examp le. Daniel BU" en
and Thomas Repensek . "The Function
of t he Stud io," October 10 (Autumn
1979) . 51-58.
Everything Loose Will Land
Venturi and Rauch with Denise Scott Brown . California CityI Twenty Mule Team Parkway. 1970 Photographs and pantone on photomechanica l transfer 21 . 26 V Inches i Copyrlghl Venluri and Rauch Courtesy ollhe Architectural Archives, University 01 Pennsylvania. g ift of Robert Venluri and Denise SCOI! B,owil
design journals) with girls as models and car models.
Ruscha's exclusion of architectural images did not,
in other words, indicate that he lacked a concept of
architecture but rather indicates that he considered
architecture to be composed of an interchangeable
set of signs on the brink of obsolescence.
The best known example of how pho
tography was used by artists and architects alike
as a means of reading an increasingly unintelligible
environment came in 1968. On the eve of their now
famous trip to the desert, Denise Scott Brown and
Robert Venturi took a group of students to Ruscha's
studio . They came away armed not only with cam
eras and helicopters but also with ideas about
designing buildings conceived as images to be seen
from the air. Scott Brown and Venturi's spectacu
lar signs for fantastical cities in the desert were not
hypothetical, however, but actual proposals for a
new development in which very practically minded
architects and engineers like Konrad Wachsmann
had long been involved. ' s Yet it was precisely the con
ceptual aspect of these images, like those made by
Banham and others-made on the move with video
cameras and instamatics, ratherthan sketchbooks,
and with the intent of being seen in magazines or
on screens-that left the most enduring traces. In
fact, just as a visit to Rome was part of the arch
itectural grand tour of the 18th century, a trip to
Los Angeles and its surrounding deserts became
a necessary part of architectural education in the
1960s and 1970s .1G This often undirected and ap
parently aimless traffic , whether it occurred on the
ground, in the air, orvia mass media, led to all sorts
of unanticipated and often productive intersections.
In 1973, the Architectural Association
sent 130 students to Los Angeles, where they took
their own helicopter rides . What they saw was not
a pop vernacular but social striation .17 One
32 of these visitors was Bernard Tschumi , who
14 The speciat double issue on
conceptua l archltectw'e of Design
Quartedy78/19 (Minneapolis. MN:
Walker Al't Center. 1970) wa edited
by John S. Margolies. In addition to
Ruscha, contr'ibutors included Peter
Eisenrmm . Ant Farm. Archlgl'am. Archizoom . Fr'an<;ois Dallegret, Haus
RLlcker-Company. Cra ig Hodgetts, Les
Levine . Ony x. and Superstudio. 15 One year after they were mar
ried in Santa Monica in 1968, Robel't
Ver'llurl and Denise Scott B,'own com
pleted a competition for' a civic cen ter
In Thol.lsand Oaks , a planned com
mun ity In Ventura County jus t north
of Los Angeles that was developed In
the 1950s and incorporated in 1964. In
1970. they wer'e hil'cd by Gr'eat Western
Cities In c. to work on California City.
Scott B,'owl' pub lished their scheme in " CallfOl'nia City," Architecture and
Urbanism 2.10 (Mal'ch 1971): 103-6.
During these same years, Venturi and
Scott Brown wel'e working w ith stu
dents at Yale and UCLA .. respectively.
on their study of Las Vegas , which was
published as Leorning from Los Vegas
(Cambridge . MA: MIT Press . 1972) .
By 1966. w h9t1 he became involved
in developer Nathan Mendelsohn 's
plans for Califor nia City. Wachsmanl'
was already known fOl' pio neer-
Ing the development of modular.
pl'efabricated build in g components
and using rapid assembly pl' efab"ica
tion in designing prototype aircraft hangars for the U.S. AII' Force . For
the California City Civic Center.
Wachsmann presented e pr-e-stressed
cable design featuring broad . f,'ee
span expn"ses that, on the one hand .
looks back to projects such as Mies
van der Rohe 's unbuilt design of1953
for the Chicago Convention Cen ter. On
the athel' hand. the construction of the
model li nks the scheme to hand tool
ing, electrical gadgetl'y. and the net
work logic of the contemporaneously
emerging culture of pel'sonal
computing. The scheme was Ii,'st
publ ished In "The Work of Konrad
Wachs mann ." Arts and A ,'c/Jitectw'e (May 1967): 6-29. A fult-size model
of the pl'e - stl'essed cable structure
was the central piece of th e exhib ition
Konrad Wachsmann, 50 Year's of Life
and Work TOWfH'd Industr'iallzation of
Building. at the USC Fls her Museum
of Art , In 1971.
16 Ventul'i himself had been in Italy from 1954 to 1956. as t he recipient
of th e Rome Prize from the Americnn
Academy in Rome. His trip is often
cited as a pivotal event In the develop
ment of the historical tLI rn within
Postmodern architecture . And while
t he lise of often commercially avaitable
photographs rat her than drawings as
analy tic tools In Ventw'i 's ComplexIty
and Contradiction In Architeclure
(New York: Museum of Modern Art
Press. 1966) . which emerged fr om
his studies in Rome, constitutes an
important point of continuity between his European t,'svels 'and his visits to
the American West. stu dents hop ing
to advance the state of the field In t he
1960s genel'ally found institution
ally directed tourism thaI focused on
historically recognized monuments
fa r' less I'e levant than a back lot tour of
Universal Studios or a joy I'ide through
the Mojave 111 a Mustang.
Giinter de Graa ff. AD Go MagaLine cover 11 . 8 '
saw the city throu~
sive territories, wI"
than communal si,
become the opera
geography.'8 In so
of unacknowledge
the schemes of (
tions who looked a
city and invented t
jects visible and a(
minoritarian subje
scape of the city i
For example, littlt
response to Watt
such as Kennard a
located on Charco~
street after every s
the ground in 196E
other architect in
to Thom Mayne, or
While Kennard wa
designing It's Your
game designed to
the development of
The m
emerge duri
33 was the city
ul/Yl aJ fhe ()"\QjWJe (A/Jetlt
)~ y 9[l:?!)t UJI/)ftjj() C(tJen
callransf~r
coli Brown
erglng culture of personal
nputing. The scheme was IIrst
llished in "The WOI'k of Konrad
.chsmann," AI'ls and Architecture
ay 1967) : 6-29 . A full-size model
he pre-stl'essed cable structure
s the central piece of the exhibition
,rad Wachsmann. 50 Years of UFe
j Work Toward Industrialization of
i/ding. at the USC Flsher Museum
\rt, in 1971.
Venturi himself had been In Ilaly
m 1954 to 1956 , as the recipient
he Rome Prize from the America n
ademy In Rome. His Il'ip Is often
ld as a pivotal event in the develop
nt of the historical tUI'n within
'tmodern architecture. And wh ile
use of often commercially available
)tographs I'ather than drawings as l lylic tools in VentUl'i 's Complexity
:J Contradiction In Architecture
lW York: Museum of Modern Art
lSS . 1966). which emerged f,'om
studies in Rome, constitutes an
portant polntof c~ntinulty between European travels and his visits to
I American West, students hoping
.dvance the state of the field In the
iDs gene l'a lly found Instltution-
I dh'ected tou rlsm that focused on torically /'ecogn i.zed monuments
less relevant than a back lot tOUI' of
Iver sal Studios or a Joy ride through , Mojave in a Mustang.
goes West !"f~hih:ctUhtl .Du:,,:n 9 I q 7) ":' j p
17 The archives of the
Architectural Association
contain detailed Informa
tion about the tl'lp, Including
who attended, whel's they
wen!. and what they saw.
Students and tutors docu
mented aspects of the trip
In Ihe September 1973 issue
of Arcilitectural Design 43 .
entlUed "AD Goes West." One
of the most telling features
of the AD issue . in which
every contributor was free to
detel'mine the content and
layout of hiS/her pages, is how
eve n at I he famous ly free
wheeling AA, student Intel'est
and official intel'est diverged .
For example, Helen Petit. an
Gunter de Graaff. AD Goes West Cover. 1973 Magazine cover , U-8 Ydnche, I courte~y 01 GOnler de Graalf
saw the city through datascapes-in terms of exclu
sive territories, which he called sanctuaries, rather
than communal signs-and anticipated what would
become the operational premises of Postmodern
geography.18 ln so doing, he foregrounded the work
of unacknowledged authors of the city, publishing
the schemes of community planning organiza
tions who looked at otherwise invisible parts of the
city and invented tools for making overlooked sub
jects visible and active . The eruptive emergence of
minoritarian subjects in turn transformed the land
scape of the city in under-acknowledged ways, ID
For example, little is known of the architectural
response to Watts, despite still extant buildings
such as Kennard and Silvers's 102nd Street School,
located on Charcoal Alley, the nickname given to the
street after every structure save one was burned to
the ground in 1965 . Kennard, like just about every
other architect in Los Angeles, from Frank Gehry
to Thom Mayne, originally worked for Victor Gruen.
While Kennard was redesigning Watts, Gruen was
designing It's Your Town, Citizen Brown!, a board
game designed to promote public participation in
the development of environmentally friendly cities. 20
The most important urban concept to
emerge dUI'ing the period of the Watts riots
33 was the city within the city, which argued
aM student rathel' than an AA
stlldent who joined the trip,
devoted her pages to a visit to The Fominist Studio Workshop in Van
Nuys, which was not on the official
program . On the other hand, the stu
dents as a group were taken to USC to
hear a lectuI'e by Dr. Pat MacMurray
en titled "LA Is a Woman," which,
accol'ding to notes taken by Peter
Wylde, then a second year student
at the AA, argued that Los Angeles
was a city of pleasure, a place of ideal
climate and geograp hy that made It a
"seductive she ."
18 Bernard Tschumi , · Sanctuaries :'
Ai'chilectul'o! Design 43 (Septembel' 1973): 575-90 . (Tschumi's "Sanctu
ades" Is republished in " Works
on Papsl'" In this volume.) Unlike
Banham's view of Los Angeles.
which emp l1aslzed fluid movement
on freeways and the unfettered,
pleasure-fi ll ed mig/'ation of people
from plains to foothills to oce~n ,
Tschuml descI'lbed the city as divided
into discrete and isolated pockets of
homogeneous populations seg/'egated
by I'ace and class , contained within
guted communi ties and what he called
socially exclusive sanctuaries. Rather than images of buildings in the graphi
cally strong visual Idiom typical of the
AA In the eal'l y 1970s, maps and statis
t ical analyses drawn fl'om Independent
plann ing agencies, such as the Urban
Workshop , IIluslr'ate Tschuml's essay.
Tschumi used these images 110t only
to articu late that archltectUl'e must
always be understood as promoting an
UI'baM ethos, which would become an
impol'leJ1t theoretica l principal moti
vating his later work, bul also to argue
that eve n though social pixilation in
cities was a widespread phenomenon .
the stro ng presence of the DIY citizen
and activist organizations uniq ue to
Los Angeles might prove to be the best
means of interrupting Lhe pro lifel'ation of sanctuaries.
1!1 After the Watts uprising, only
36 units of new housing and limited
investment had been brought into
South Centrnl and other largely
African-Amel'ican com mun itie s in
Los Angeles. and the primary urban
renewal strategy implemented had
been r azi ng. In orde/'to counter such
practices, al'chitects Eugene Brooks,
W illia m GOI'don Smi th, and Edgar
Goff, p/'eviously a project manager [0/'
Victor Gruen, established the Urban
Workshop In 1965. This non-profit
community planning organization.
fun ded by the U.S . Department of
Housing and UI'ban Deve lopment.
drew up a document entitled " The
Community Planning Project for
SOl/th Central Los Angeles ." The repO I'l included maps that highlighted
the region's st/'engths, drawing atten
lion to the al'ea's healthy Ind ust r ia l
sectors in order to p/'omote invest
mentln South Central Los Angeles ,
and outl ined altel'native plans to
those proposed by the city. The U I'ban
Workshop also worked close ly with
the nei ghborhood co.mcll mambe/'s of
Pico Union to prod LIc e step-by-step
instruct ions for how to tr:;ns form al'ea
residents into active participants in
th e planning process . Such com
munity involvement Is now slanda/'d practice in city planning departments,
but dUI'ing the 1960s, it was a form of
civil disobedience that relied 011 Indi
vidual agency.
20 The game was a product of
the Victor GI'uen Cen tel' for
Environmental Planning. which
Gruen established In 1970 with
the explicit mission of educating the
general public aboulthe environ
mental effects of urban sprawl. See
"Annot ated Checklist of the Exhibition"
j" this volume.
Everything loose Will land
'-Konrad Wa chsmann. California Civic Center. 1966-71 I Nodel pholOgraph Copyright Konrad Wdchsmann Coul1esy of A~ademle der KOnsle. Berlin . Konrad Wachsmilnn -Archiv. l\WA·010147 f16
3534
Curator's Essay Studs, Sndpshots, dnd Gizmos
Gruppo 9999 (Fabrizio Ffumi. Giorgio Birelli. Carlo Caldini , Paolo Galli) , Los Angeles IIlegaslmclure, 1966 35 Siamps on semi-rigid cardboard 39 <27 If, inches COPYrlghl Gruppo 9999 (ourtesy or Carlo (aldmi
I
Everything Loose Will Land
ly interwoven in James Turrell 's Mendota
Stoppages. 23 Beginning in 1966, Turrell turned
the material fabric of the Mendota Hotel into a spe
cial effects machine, cutting and removing bits and
pieces of structure, blocking windows , and record
ingthe resultant atmospheric fluctuations . Thatthis
work belongs to the history of art rather than the
history of architecture may say more about the in
flexibility of historical discourses than it does about
the work . But it does not obviate the fact that the
mechanics of producing this kind of work required
architectural systems of notation. In Turrell's case,
the drawing operated primarily as a recording de
vice . But as the Light and Space movement evolved,
drawings became increasingly architectural not
only because they were used to represent space
and building structul'e but also because they began
to be drawn in anticipation of a work and as a set
21 The long and fraught history of be an important Inst,'ument facilitat
t he concept of the city with in the city is ing cooperation between arc hitectu,'e.
beyond the scope of this essay, how city pla nn ing agencies and "eal estate
eve l' its Impact on the urban hi story development. The conflicts surro un d
of Los Angeles is wor th noting . TIle ing the notion led to much discussion
Century City development. one of the amongst arch ltectul'al and urban
first to be refe,'red to as a city within theorists during the 19705. See , for
the city. wi th a master plan by Welton example. O.M . Ungers's project "The
Becket. saw the completion of its fil'st City With in the City: Be,'lin as G,' een
building In 1963. just two years before Archipe lago" (completed with a group the Watts Riots. Organi zed around a of Cornell summer school st udents
series of super-blocks. the hugely suc and co-taught with Rem Koolhaas.
cessful m ixed-use development was Peter Riemann , Hans Kolhoff, and
pl'edicated on vi"tually total separation A,'thur Ovaska in 19n) and th e special
from the Increasingly disturbed c ity Issue of A"chitectUl'e and Urbal1lsm .
aro,md it . After th e riots , the concept ed . Leon Krier (November 1977): was redep loyed as a means of foste,' 69-152 . Ing deve lopment w ithin underserved 22 Craig Hodgetts' s "Biography of
neighborhoods by creating economic a Teach ing Machine" (Artfo,'um 12
and cllltu,'a l centers of semi-Inde [19731: 61- 65) offers a co "tempol'a ,'Y pendent intens ity. Hopin g to com bine view of these inst itutional misall iances,
the fisca l fec undity of Century City specifically In ,'elation to CalArts .
with civic projects focused on local 23 On Turrell. see Craig Adcock,
neighborhood conce,'ns. these par James Turrell , The Art of Light and
ticular cities within the city reflect the Spoce (Berke ley. Los Angeles. Oxford:
Infl uence of the separati st orien t ation University of California P,'ess, 1990);
of the period . Without external eco and John Coplans . "James Tur,'ell ,
nomic suppaI'\. however, the concept Projected Light Images." Al'lforum 6
failed to p,'oduce anything but fur ther (October 1967): 48-49.
isolation for areas like Watls. On the other hand , th e concept continued to
The most intentionally inde
scribable environments of the period were
produced by the artists of the Light and Space
movement, a quintessentially California
phenomenon associated with the demate
rialization of the object and the cultivation
of the total beholder in absolute space. The
operation most common to these artists is
the use of buildings as material or site. These
architectural factors are most axiomatical-
Alison Knowles. House of Dust. 1971 Photograph 8 '1z 'lOIf, Inches, Copyright Alison Knowles Courte~y of Ihe CahforJ11 <1 Instltule ollhe Arts. Institule Archive
that underserved neighborhoods should become
discrete entities with internally directed economic
engines, even at the cost of urban integration . This
idea was never realized in SUppOI't of Watts. But it
did underwrite the way in which Bunker Hill was de
veloped as an island disconnected from the rest of
downtown Los Angeles, and, more specifically, the
way in which John C . Portman designed the cap
stone of the development, the Bonaventure Hotel , as
an autonomous mini metropolis. The hotel's monu
mental atrium, with the visually active qualities of
urbane public space yet cut off from the public at
lal'ge, ultimately became both Portman's signatul'e
design element as well as the basis for his global real
estate enterprise. Z1
All of these anecdotes describe mo
ments of cultural aporia when the densifying and
heterogeneous cultural infrastructure in Los Angeles
led to more contact and misalliances between art
and architecture. Take, for example, the transforma
tion of Venice into an art and architectural district;
the founding of schools such as CaIAI'ts, which col
lected more than what Craig Hodgetts called the
typical "cacophony of sounds .. . and of disciplines";
the establishment of LACMA as an encyclopedic
museum; and the spaces for urban al't carved out by
architects such as Gruen , who had achieved enough
civic prominence to insist on such allocations even
if only inside shopping malls.22 To rephrase Bal'nett
Newman's infamous remark that sculpture is what
you bump into when you back up to see a painting,
from the late 1960s on, art and architecture con
stantly seemed to bump into each other when they
backed up to look at Los Angeles. Instead of getting a
good view of a well-defined cityscape, however, they
found themselves engulfed in an environment
36 that was not easy to see or describe.
of instructions.
Asher not only I
worked for arch
men in order to
architecture as
stitutional critiq
the circulation 0
began to draw Ii
to draw like arti~
Dur
for artists and e
currency, a mea
could both ration
work and compE
the object. The (
other kinds of c
facture then attr
cardboard and fr
painting. Once tl
market was esta
merely to use me
properties, as he
itectural axiom. I
seen as designee
cycles of product
to representatiOi
~
1
~
s
e 1
':1
d
)
d
:1
s e 1
At
e
d
e,
e- d ,
)t
:e
in
et
~11mportant instrument racilltat
cooperation between architecture,
planning agencies and rea l estate
alopment. The conflicts surround
the notion led to much discussion
)ngst architectural and urban
)Tisls during the 19705 . See , for
mple. O.M. Ungers' s proiect "'The
I Within the City: Berlin as Green
hlpolago" (completed with a group
:ornell summer school students
I co - taught wit h Rem Koolhaas, er Riemann. H ans Kolhoff. and
hur Ovaskaln 1977) and the special
Je of Architecture and Urbanism. Leon Kl'ier (November 1977):
152 . Craig Hodgetts 's "'Biography of
~achl l,g Machine '" (Artforum 12
731: 61-65) offers a contemporary N of t11ese Institutional misalliances.
lcifically in relation to CalArts .
On TU1"reii , see Craig Adcock.
l1es Turrell: The Art of Ught and
,ce (Berkeley. Los Ange les , Oxford:
ivel"sity of California Press, 1990):
j John Coplans . "James Turrell:
>jected Light Images : ' A,·tforum 6
; tober 1967): 48-49 .
Curator's Essay
of instructions. Ultimately, artists such as Michael
Asher not only used building as material, but also
worked for architects, hired architectural draughts
men in order to produce their work, and relied on
architecture as the technical support for their in
stitutional critique. "4 As a result of this increase in
the circulation of the architectural drawing, artists
began to draw like architects and architects began
to draw like artists, and both did both.
During this period, drawings became,
for artists and architects, instructions as well as
currency, a means of entering the art market that
could both rationalize the production of site-specific
work and compensate for its dematerialization of
the object . The drawing as commodity linked it to
other kinds of commodities and modes of manu
facture then attracting attention , from plastics to
cardboard and from vacuum forming to automotive
painting. Once the link between materials and the
market was established , it was no longer possible
merely to use materials or to exploit their intrinsic
properties, as had once been a fundamental arch
itectural axiom. Instead , materials themselves were
seen as designed and manufactured, belonging to
cycles of production and consumption and subject
to representation and conceptualization . Edward
Studs. Snapshots. and Gizmos
Kienholz 's The Cement Store #1 of 1967 used
a comple x repertoire of representations, con
tract, tax code, verbal descpiption, and plaque
to imbricate the immaterial distinction be
tween bu ilding as commerce and building as
art. Smithson too ex plored the conceptual
malleability of architectural materials when
he storyboarded the life cycles of cement and
steel as they shifted status and form, moving
from resource to building to detritus.
Architectural materials often
brought artists and architects into intimate
rapport and direct collaboration, as well as
revealed pe r sistent differences in how and
when each discipline understood itself to en
ter the flow of matel'ial life. One of the most
turbulence-inducing materials in this regard was
the stud , an apparently modest member that plays
an uncannily significant role in the architectural
history of Los Angeles. In a city largely made of
wood-frame buildings, the stud is the most ubiq
uitous and essential component of its architectural
fabric . By the 1970s, its importance made it almost
a fetish object, as virtually every house addition and
installation not only relied on stud construction but
also deliberately left studs exposed to view, often in
24 On M ichael Asher and his
relationship to architecture , see Michael Asher and Benjamin
Buchloh , Writings 1973-1983 on
Works 1969-1979 (Halifax. N.S.:
Press of the Nova Scotia Col lege
of Art and Design; Los Angeles :
Museum of Contemporary
Art. 1983): Benjamin H.D,
BllChloh , "Michael Asher and the Conclusion of Modernist
Sculpture," Neo-Avontgorde and
eu/lul's Industry (Cambridge ,
MA : MIT Press. 2000): and
Miwon Kwon, "Approaching
Architectul"e : The Cases of
Richm'd Serra and Michael Asher," Yols University Art BtllleUn (2009) : 2 2-33 .
All an Kilprow. Documentation of tile Cons/ruction of fluids. 1967 R~p rl rl1ed photograph 11,14 inches COPYright Alla ll Ki.lprow
Everything Loose Will Land
i f. gs
'11111
T
IR~ B
Billy AI Bengston with 42 , 28 Inc tIes Copyrlgl
Jl'1orphosis (Thom Mayne. Michael Rotondi) . Venice 11/ House framing modeJ. 198(}-82 Wood model . 24 x12 - 24 inches : Copyrighl f>1o rphosls Courte~y 01 MIChael ROlondl
3938
Cu rator's Essay Studs, Snapshots, and Gi zmos
~" - ""- - ..;;;:;:::::::"
fe~..... s g~fll~rY u !J~ • ,_ ... . L ~ L
I,It,lll]:] !Iiii;\1, I~I THE
.Y
MOSES IRWIN • PRICE
BENGSTON
Billy AI Bengston with Ken Price. The Studs, 1965 Exhibition poster for ferus Ga llery ~2 .28 inches COPYright ferus Gallery i Courtesy 01 Dagny Corcoran
Constructing the Woman 's Building, Los Angeles. 1973 Courtesy of the Wornan's Bui lding Image Archive ell Otl~ College of Art and Design, los Angeles
39
...
I
I
:
Everything loose Will land
Peter Alexander and Clytie Alexander with Carl Oay. House al Tuna Canyon. 1973-74 Photograph 8 'IJ . 11 Inches Copyrigh t Peter Alexa nder and Clytie Alexan der wilh Carl Day courtesy of Oytie IIlex<'l nder
as raw a state as possible. Artists and architects
still squabble today about who first peeled back
the drywall to display the stud or showed it to most
advantage. A stud is also the Los Angeles artist of
the 1960s, a member of a merry band of outlaws
who depicted themselves as virile stallions in the
Wild West ..25 The two definitions are linked in more
than their brutishness . It required not only bravado
but also lawlessness to cut into rented walls or to
remove a ceiling . Artists from Ed Moses to Peter
Alexander and Bruce Nauman worked consistently
at the edge not only of the architectural discipline
but also at the edge of its professional appara
tus-its legal structure of contracts, permits, and
responsibilities. z6 A stud, in other words, is an unli
censed architect, a do-it-yourselfer.
USERS
To operate within the protocols of
do-it-yourself (DIY) is to take architecture into un
authorized hands. The DIY ethos that spread across
the art and architectural terrain during this period
is directly related to the Light and Space movement,
and both movements signal a wider transformation
in the conceptualization of the architectural sub
ject. Previously understood primarily as a client and
consumer of architectural goods and services, the
subject of arch itecture rapidly acq uired agency as he
or she came to be defined as an active partici
40 pant in architectural production . Beholders,
in other words, became users, and users required
buildings that operated as tools. Harnessing the
agency of the participant is a key and well-noted
element in the Happening, a concept developed
by Allan Kaprow before arriving at the University
of California, San Diego, in 1974. But Kaprow also
turned the participant into a volunteer builder, a DIY
architect. Fluids (1967) was composed of a series
of ice houses distributed across Los Angeles . The
structures were built block by block by unpaid pass
ersby and revealed the daily architecturing and
dearchitecturing of buildings that constitute the
invisible performance of urban life .
One of the most significant impacts of
the DIY movement is the transformation of the arch
itectural object from predictable form-knowable
and describable in advance through drawings-to
unpredictable process. For example, Jef Raskin, on
the faculty atthe University of California, San Diego,
in its nascent computer center, developed Bloxes
in 1970. These cardboard elements were conceived
as components to be arranged by users partici
pating in an architectural happening rather than
25 The Studs was the name of a peo'formed In the space by throwing group show at the Ferus Gallery in r ice dust when visitors arO'ived In order
1964 thalll1cluded Ed Moses . Ken to make the li ght shafts fl'OOl above
Price . Billy AI Bengston . and Robert appea o- more palpable. He also posed
Irwin. For moo'e on the exhibition i n worker clothing In a photograph by
poster, see "Annotated Checklist of the Bengston that suggests he " scu lpted"
Ex hibition " In this volume. the ceiling himself In ordeo- to produce
2 6 Ed Moses worked p o'eclsely aeo'oss the hypaethral apertures, but Moses
multiple platforms for his 1970 Instal In fact only conceived of the idea of
lation at the Mil'uno Gallery. embrac removing the ,-oofing material and
ing some new al'listie opera ti ons functioned as consto'uction manager
while eschewing others . He paInted while day laborers did the direct mate
the walls of the galleo'y himself and rial intervention .
designing a bui
architects itself
spaces with arti
rators. The colle
large-scale builc
of off-the-shelf I
tion manuals; ar
gas stations, an
labor and limit
StudioWorks, Po
all of these elem(
ing proposal for
a fully integrate
Womanhouse. 1
catalog designe
in the shape of
the catalog and
exhibition-and
Woman's Buildi
in downtown L.
a center for a bl
de Bretteville, J
the renovation c
happening. The)
surrounded neitt
al domestic port
as in typical depi<
rather with powe
attracted to the!
how easily they
rather to empha5
ic, and programn
enforces. By wor
protocols, these
expectation that
to direct building
Thel
makes it clear th
of Ruscha's phot<
characteristic of
As ifdeliberately t
Schindler's King
was said to have
Yosemite, Peter ~
in Santa Monica
and work in Tuna
the site when thE
nomads, gradual
them. Like the t
Barthes, w
41 pieces of it!
d
e d
d
Y o
Y
~s
,e
s-
d
Ie
)f
h Ie
:0
In
~o,
~s
~d
~i-
tn
rOnTIed in t he space by t hrowing
Idust whe n visitors arrive d In ordel'
~ake the lig ht shafts fr<;1m above
,ear more palpab le. He also posed
10l'ker clothing In a photograp h by
Igston that suggests he " sculpted" ceiling himse lf in OI'de l' to pl'Oouce
Iwpaethral aper tu res , bu t Moses
let only conceived of the Idea of l oving the roof ing material and
ctlonecl as construc ti on manager
Ie day laborers did the direct mate
inte/'vent lon ,
Curator's Essay
designing a building. StudioWorks, a collective of
architects itself in a constant state of flux, shared
spaces with artists, graphic designers, and collabo
rators. The collective conceived of everything, from
large-scale buildings to furniture to people, as made
of off-the-shelf parts; turned drawings into instruc
tion manuals; and imagined ways to make theaters,
gas stations, and entire cities using only unskilled
labor and limited horse power. One member of
StudioWorks, Peter De Bretteville, even integrated
all of these elements into a single, small-scale build
ing proposal for Ajax car Rental Company.
There is no better example of
a fully integrated work of DIY architecture than
Womanhouse. This claim is substantiated by the
catalog designed by Sheila Levrant de Bretteville
in the shape of a theoretical house type. Within
the catalog and the rooms of the Womanhouse
exhibition-and again and more elaborately in the
Woman's Building project, a space that opened
in downtown Los Angeles in 1973 and became
a center for a broad range of feminist activities
de Bretteville, Judy Chicago, and others turned
the renovation of a building into an architectural
happening. They posed endlessly for the camera,
surrounded neither by family photos, as in tradition
al domestic portraiture, nor by easels and chisels,
as in typical depictions of artists in their studios, but
rather with power tools and drywall ?7 Theytoo were
attracted to the stud, not out of the desire to prove
how easily they could flaunt its regulations, but
ratherto emphasize precisely the economic, tecton
ic, and programmatic systems of discipline the stud
enforces. By working outside existing professional
protocols, these kinds of DIY projects loosened the
expectation that architecture's primary effect was
to direct building toward a predictable future.
The proliferating art of DIY architecture
makes it clear that the deliberate amateurishness
of Ruscha's photographs of architecture was also a
characteristic of interventions within architecture.
As if deliberately repeating the origin story of Rudolf
Schindler's Kings Road work/live house, which
was said to have been inspired by a camping trip to
Yosemite, Peter and Clytie Alexander left a home
in Santa Monica and a studio in Los Angeles to live
and work in Tuna Canyon. There was no house on
the site when they arrived, so the family lived as
nomads, gradually building up a campsite around
them. Like the Argo ship allegorized by Roland
Barthes, which sailed around with bits and
41 pieces of its structure requiring replacement
Studs. Snapshots. and Gizmos
along the way until itwas a completely new ship with
an old name, individual components of the house
were replaced, often with recycled materials, until it
became a permanent house created not by genius or
inspiration but by the modest act of substitution. 28
Indeed, it became a relatively permanent house with
room units that rolled outdoors, no architectural
finishes, and even structure being added after the
fact. The house cannot properly be named a house,
rather it is an unhouse or what Banham called an
environment bubbJe. 29
The unhouse made by unarchitects,
often through a process of dearchitecturization,
27 For mo/'e on Womonho(Jse and the Woman ' s Bu ild ing,
see Peggy Phe lan 's "Revisi t! ng
Wo m onhouse: Archltecl ure as Pr imary Stl'uct ure " and
"Annot ated Checkli st of th e
Ex hi bition," both in this volume .
28 T he Tuna Canyon House
was colle boretively produced ,
both in its design and t h roug h
th e process of In habitation .
by Peter A lexa nd e,' and Clyti e
Alexan der, an artist and his
wife, along w ith the architect
Ca/'I Day. For fur'ther informa
t ion . see "Annotated C hecklist
of the Exhibition" in th is vol
ume . On t he Argo. see Roland
Berthes. Roland Bw'thes . trans.
Ric h ard Howard (New y o,'k , HI li
and Wang. 2010) , 46 ,
29 On this notion and th e
design for a n env ironment
bubble produce d with Frano:;ois
Dallegret , see Reynlll' Banhem,
"A Home Is Not a House " (1965), in Design by Choice. ed . Penny
Sparke (New Yo/'k : RlzzolI ,
1981),56- 60.
Mike Kelley. Birdhouse for it Bi rd that is Near and a Bird that is far. 1973 Ilirdhouse, acry l/c on wood, metal 27 '/. ,37 x 11'/- inches rtt le drowtn g' mk 011 po pel 9Y, x6 Inches Copyrlgh l Estale of Mike Kelley. dll TighlSreserved COllrlesy of ~llke Kelley fou nd alion for Ihe ATl s
Everything loose Will Land
TV /camera skull cap containing universal
~===:::============~===::~ lens and back-up clip-on systems for:: " '" TV/cameras. ' ", "'--- _ --0 Antenna for sending and receiving signals.
"- 0 Brain senSOr 'or keeping .rack of brain functions.~ ---0 Vision and sun correcting glasses with built in digital readout chip and micro/macro
~ capability. '" '-- ----- --- - -0 Microphone linked for audio input into tape, '", TV, phone, and sound amplification sY$tems.
"-- - ---------- --0' Headphoneforsoundinputand environmental dampening. Coaxial cable for connecting headset to waist brain .
"'" Whole system
'" '" life pac ;;-_ __-_ - --'-"" '", , - ----0 Health pac containing body chemistry pills,
, ' ''' health aids for dealing with physical , '" , breakdowns, microfilm medical history. "', ,'-----~O Food pac containing vitamin pills, food
" '- '" wafers, and taste sensations. '-',,- "" 0 Weather pac containing rain/wind wear.
, 0 Information pac containing information storage cards (computer inputs), casselles, and microfilm.
·,,'---- ----------- 0 Tools pac for repairing portable person and dealing with the outside mechanical world. Protection pac with a built-in aggression bomb .
. Transporters pac with collapsible containers.
Wrist bands Information indicator band for, time, date, weather, and health (endo system for body and ecto system for mechanical and electrical systems). ,, Control input band for phone, computer, TV, radio, tape, systems.
Waist brain Fuel cell for operating electronic systems and heating/cooling systems. Rechargeable casselles for exchange at 'City terminals'.
'" ------0 Plug-in jack for using local power source. ''---- ---00 Coaxial cable connection to body suit
connecting all systems to waist brain. '- - ---- ---0 Internal circuitry with jacks for connecting
all hardware. Minicomputer with both built-in programs and slot for program card inputs, Interfacing mechanism for external communication with larger computer. Medical monitoring storage and analysis unit connected Ihrough belt to medical sensors.
--------- ---<) Card input for medical history (up to date) . TransmitterIreceiver tor phone , TV , and radio linked to headset antenna and
---------(0. Amplifier/preamplifier/converter for phone, TV, radio , and tape systems.
- - -----------------'0 Mini-casselle tape deck. TV monitor for head, hand or table use, Camera storage.
Body suit --<l Heating system with grid of heating elements.
'---------------- - - ----------<> Cooling system with insulating/heat dissipating material. Body health sensors, tnternal coaxial cables connecting head set. wrist bands, and waist'brain .
Additive o Back pack/carry-all bag containing
professional , recreational , comfort, shelter items.
------- <J Motorized collapsible feel. o Service terminals for exchanging fuel cet'ls ,
input, output, power terminals and aC,quiring expendables.
Robert Mclngurian , Portable Person, 1973 Dig ital prln l 22 d7 Inches Courlesy of Robeli fola ngll rian, Stud lOWorks
Judy Chicago a Cola log des igne [OU I tesy of Ihe (
42 43
'
l
Studs, Snapshots, and GizmosCurator 's Essay
raining universal .ystemslor
eceiving signals. rack 01 brain
glasses with built I micro/macro
dio input into tape. ,Iificalion systems. utand g, ing headset to
Iy chemistry pills. h physical edical history, 'in pills. food Ins. lin/wind wear. i9 information inputs). casselles.
rtable person and lechanical world , t-in aggression
lapsible
d lor, time. date. system lor body
anical and
,"e, computer , TV.
ctronic systems tms, Rechargeable : City terminals', tl power source . to body suil waist brain. s lor connecting
uilt-in programs inputs, Interfacing
ommunication with
ge and analysis unil I medical sensors . •lory (up to date), phone. TV, and radio land onverter lor phone. ns,
I or lable use.
01 heating elements, laling/heat
tnnecting head set. lin.
containing II. comfort , sheller
II. hanging fuel cells. inals and aC,quiring
Judy Chicago and Miriam Schapiro, Womanhouse. 1971 Cdtalog deSigned by Sheila Levran! de tiretteville 11 x 8 ',' inches Copyrighl Judy Chicago Ilnd Miriam Shilpiro Courlesy of the California Instllute of Ihe Arts, tn~litule Archive
43
Everything Loose Will Land
became a significant building type during the 1970s.
Terry Schoonhoven, of the L.A. Fine Arts Squad,
designed a primitive house of rammed earth, to be
self built, off the grid, a veritable compost heap of
raw materials, and, in utter contradistinction to the
photorealism of his murals, amateurishly drawn. 3o
Perhaps the most powerful example of these inves
tigations into the crafty denaturing of architecture
is the series of houses for birds made by lVIike Kelley,
the earliest of which were made while he was a stu
dent at CalArts in 1978. Kelley's birdhouses invite
both architecture and its subjects to regress until
one is nothing but a low-tech machine for reproduc
tion and the other is a dozen eggs.
These are not merely unhouses, but
also a category of technological objects that require
some industry in the fabrication of their components
but little infrastructure or skill to operate. Banham
argued that the American cultural environment,
which is to say the suburban landscape for which
Los Angeles is the exemplar, was produced by the
use precisely of such objects, which he called gizmos:
self-contained, high-performance, and often mobile
units. 31 Gizmos were the technological interface be
tween subjects and their situations, the tools users
deployed to create their environments. In fact, if DIYs
turned architectul'e not just into tools for users but
specifically into gizmos, the result was a radically
transformed understanding of the environment, one
fundamentally denatured and subsumed into a log
ic of circulation systems, consumption cycles, and
communication feedback loops.
ENVIRONMENTS
For Banham, the mobile home and the
camera were the particular gizmo-types that had
had the most decisive im pact on the creation of the
American West. This link between architecture and
photography suggests that the various helicopters
ridden by Ruscha, Venturi and Scott Brown, and the
British architecture students collided in such a way
as to cause an environmental accident, a moment
in which the effort to systematize natural processes
releases unpredictable effects. By 1971, with the
publication of Barry Commoner's best-selling The
Closing Circle, environmentalism was widely con
sidered as much an epistemology of the accident and
of interrelations as a matter of the proper use of nat
ural resources. In fact, the first of Commoner's four
laws of ecology states that everything is connected
to everything else. Commoner specifically thanked
Los Angeles for teaching the world about ecology
and considered architecture-the factory door-to
be the interface between environmental success and
technological failure. Larry Bell's glass boxes and
structures were such factory doors, archi 30 The L.A. Fine Arts Squad .
tectonic fabrications covered-as were many fou nded by Victor Henderson contemporary factories, office parks, and and Te "ry Schoonhoven and
latel' joined by J ames F.'azin company headquarters-with smoky glass and Leonard Koren. operated
panels and filled with toxic "Los Angeles Air" between 1969 al,d 1973 and (the title of a chapter in Commoner's book). 32 created a series of large- scale.
hYPBI'realist murals on bui ld Rather than meditations on the phenome In g exteriors princ ipally in
nology of perception, Bell's sculptures can be Los Angeles but also In other classified profitably as gizmos, devices that locations in the United States
an d EUI'ope . The group ' s subject link environment and technology by making matter focused on natw'a l and
the density of particulate matter in the air per othel' types of dlsastel'. destruc ceptible on both sides of its doors. tion. and decay. See "Annotated
C hec klistoF the EXhibition " In
th is volume .
31 Reyner Banham . ''The Great
Gizmo ," A Crl!ic Writes : Essays
by Reyner Banham (Be('ke ley : Univ91'sily of Califor ni a. 1996).
108 - 14.
Eleanor Antin . 100 Boots Parking, June 28. 1971 I Photo offset Ill hographs ,,'f · 7 inciles I Copyright Eleanor Antin Courtesy of the Getty Research Insmute. los An geles
SITE ,'lode
If t~
tivated the arcr
Program (1946
walls of glass th:
terior world, an(
as pure phenomE
other visual arts,
material most err
came a visible pa
su rfaces of office
appear as seaml
Dust was densifiE
such as Alison Kr
made in New Yor
pus of CalArts, w
more akin to Fred
Pierre Koenig's g
Dust was sucked
flatables blown u~
students during
Bang Quick City.
once shared with
mosphere of inter
LUN
A re
quired to naviga"
them generated I
communication.
ently simple enou
games for childrel
ingly comp
45 700 Boots (
l i
SITE (Alison Sky and James Winesl. BEST Parlu'ng tot Building. 1976 Model 3 1/:. 25 . 25 Inches I Courtesy of SITL AKA Sculpture In The [nvlronmenl
30 The L.A. Fine Arts Squad ,
fa" nd ed by Victor Hendel'son
and Terr'Y Schoonhoven and
later joined by James Fr'azin
and Leonard Koren , operated
between 1969 and 1973 and
created a series of large-sca le,
hype r r'ea llsl murals on bui ld
ing exteriors principally in
Los Ange les but also In other
locations In the United States
and Europe. The grOl!P's subject
matter focused on natural and
other' types of disaster. destruc
tion . and decay. See "Annotated
Checklist of the Exhibition" in
this volume .
31 Reyner Banham . "Th e Great
Gizmo." A Critic Writes, Essays
by Reyner Bonhom (Berkeley, University of California , 1996).
108-14 .
Bools Parking, >Io · oltsel lil hographs
right [Ieanor Anlin Research Instltule .
If the desire for light and space mo
tivated the architects of the Case Study House
Program (1946-66) to design houses with large
walls of glass that opened buildings to an ideal ex
terior world, and if this notion of light and space
as pure phenomena also linked architecture to the
other visual arts, by the 1970s dust was instead the
material most emblematic of their overlap. Dust be
came a visible patina on the proliferating reflective
surfaces of office buildings increasingly designed to
appear as seamless and impenetrable as possible.
Dust was densified into building material by artists
such as Alison Knowles, whose House of Oust, first
made in New York in 1969 then moved to the cam
pus of CalArts, was a dark and cave-like structure
more akin to Frederick Kiesler's Endless House than
Pierre Koenig's glass and steel Case Study house.
Dust was sucked into and partially structured in
flatables blown up by large numbers of architecture
students during temporary events such as Whiz
Bang Quick City. The abstract space architecture
once shared with the other arts became a thick at
mosphere of interconnections and entanglements. 33
LUMENS
A repertoire of new tools was re
quired to navigate within this miasma, many of
them generated by new technologies of light and
communication. They began to appear in appar
ently simple enough forms-environmental board
games for children, for example-but grew increas
ingly complex as the decade wore on. For
45 700 Boots (1971), Eleanor Antin pl'oduced a
series of photographic postcards of bodiless boots
lined up in various locales and sent them to more
than 1,000 different locations. In the resulting com
pound system of image, communication web, and
suburban development. each postcard operated
as a place-seeking point in a three-dimension
al network, producing an analogue anticipation
of digital GPS devices. Parking lots no longer sat
still for the camera as inert signs but rose up, as
it were, to become themselves active environmen
tal agents. Rather than a big box adrift in a sea of
parking. SITE's Parking Lot Building designed for
Best Products treated the asphalt surface like a
seismically d riven tectonic plate, ri ppling into three
dimensions to erase the distinction theorized by
Venturi and Scott Brown between building, sign,
and environment. 34
32 Barry Commoner, " Los Angeles
Air," The Closing Circle: Nature. Man
ond Technology (New York ; Knopf.
1971).66-81 This best-seiling book , which was an impol'tant catalyst in
the environmental movem ent. devoted
an ent l r e chapter to the environ men
tal impact of the car in Los Angeles.
Although he acknow ledged that the
c~,,' was a "pa~adlgm of the enor
mous benefits of modem technol
ogy." Commone,· also ar·gued that
it destr'oyed I10t on ly human hea lth
but social progress QS well , That this
assessmel1t of the ecology of Las
A"geles was published the same year as Ban ham's The A rchl/eetura of Four Ecologies Is worth noting. If only as a
measure of the d ivel'slty of approaches
to ecological thinking In the eady
19705 . These conflicts were also
noted by Petel' Plagens in his review
of Banham's book . " Los Angeles: The
Ecology of Evil," Artfo/'um 11.4 (1972) : 67- 76. Con,moner 's "Los Angeles A ir'."
an essay by Ban ha m that lays out the
ar'gum ents developed more fully In
The A rchitectu"e ofFou~ Ecologies.
and Plagens I'evlew ::Ire reprod uced in
"Works on Paper" In this volume.
33 Architecture's role in the produc
tion and figul-ation of dust continues
to be an impol'tant theme today. See .
for example. Duslyrelief/B_mu (2002)
by the QI'chitectul'al team R&Sie(n) , an unrea l ized design for a contempo
rary art museum in Bangkok In which
particles of carbon monoxide a,'e electr'ostatically collected to Form a
building mass .
3 4 In an imp lic it homage to Robert
Smithson, James W ines. who in 1970 estab lis hed the environmental design
practice SITE. enti tl ed his book and
extended ma niFesto De-architecture (New York: Rizzol l, 1987) .
...
,
i
Everything Loose Will Land
Trank Gehry and Richard Serra. Connections. 1981
In~la llalion View, Collabori.l tion. Arc hiteClural League of New York, 19&1
The most extraordinat'y demonstration
of Commoner's law that everything is connected
to everything else is the work of Environmental
Communications (EC), a collective of architects,
planners, historians, photographers, artists,
Mat'shall McLuhan-ites, and marketers active dur
ing the 1970s.35 Their goal was not to make buildings
or works of art but rather to disseminate a con
cept of environment as comprised of every piece
of data. matter. and energy within the visual field.
In an early example of crowd sourcing, they har
nessed a massive and always fluctuating group of
people to produce catalogs, brochures, and most
importantly packaged sets of photographic slides
in order to create an enormous visual data bank. At
first concerned with Los Angeles, they document
ed billboards, contemporary architecture, street
art, Pop art, mobile homes, and truchitecture (EC's neologism for trucks so elaborated and lived in by
their drivers that they become quasi buildings).
Ultimately, EC produced slides, film, and video of
everything from pollution to the television environ
ment and everywhere from Osaka to India, until they
had captured thousands of images that constituted
the pixels of the global information environment.
The apparatus constructed by EC
indicates that delirium-inducing records of vola
tile events, information flows , and technological
ruptures had replaced the once essential arch
itectural tool of the handmade drawing. Indeed,
dearchitecture had so integrated the world's com
plexities that buildings now undermined the once
axiomatic distinctions between interior
46 and exterior and between use and mean-
courtesy of Gehry Part ners, LLP
ing. In response, cultural theorists such as Fredric
Jameson called for the development of internal
ized systems of cognitive mapping that might
enable Postmodernist subjects to critically locate
themselves in the amorphous space of global capi
tal. 36 The example he chose to articulate his sense
that a limit condition had been reached in the in
dividual's capacity to understand his or her place
in the world was Portman 's Bonaventure Hotel. 37
Completed in 1976, the Bonaventure Hotel was not
just a city within a city but also an endless interior.
By the time of Jameson's analysis, the cultural ge
ography of Los Angeles had become an object of
discourse that used architecture to consolidate a
theory of Postmodernism by demonstrating that
building itself, the heaviest and most obdurate of
all signifiers. had been turned into pure significa
tion. 3 8 The rhetorical function of architecture in
these discourses necessarily closed the door on
certain forms of looseness. Ironically, in becoming
35 Stili not wide ly known . 36 Fredr ic Jameson wl'ote about
Envh'onmental Commun ications was cognitive mapping on several occa
a team of architects. photog"aphers , sions. FOI· an analys is, see Robert
hlstoria"s, and othel's that docu Tally. "Jameson' s P,'oject of Cognitive
mented the emerging global media l Mapping," in Social Cartography,
u,'ban environment in an extel1slve Mapping Ways of Seeing Social and sedes of slides . catalogs . and other EducatIOnal Change, ed . Roll and G ,
publications , They we ,'e featured In Paulston (New YOl'k : Garland , 1996),
t he exhibition Ca lifornia : 5 Footnotes 399 - 416. 10 Modern Arl History. ed , Stephanie 37 For Jameson's discussion of
Barron (Lo s Angeles : Los Ange les the Bonaventure Horel, see Fredric
County Museum of Art. 1977) ; their Jameson . Postmader'nism ; The
section of th e LACMA catalog is Cultural Logic of Lote Ccrpitalism
reproduced in " Works on Papel' ''ln (Dw'ham. NC : Duke University Press,
this volume. For further Il1formation , 1991), 39-41 .
see also "Annota ted Check li st of the
Exhibition" In thisvol"me ,
fra nk Gehry and Rich.
Installalion View. Collab
a theoretical objl
sign of evet'-mut
still, Dearchitectl
A cl
ship between arcl
systematic rathe
ter, and that arc
host for these m
tion Architectura Angeles Institute
ambitious progr~
first showed pho
artists, who were
virtue of their inti
was a series of
gion that include(
Simond, and Bruc
tural sign precede
themselves treate
evident link to ar,
geneous collecti<
yet even this ana
underlying differ!
engagement with
lematics other th:
occupied big piece
by the artists as a
public sphere. Nol
in the show and t
timately to docurr
purview of arch it,
itectural presenCE
and even hi:
47 cludes that c
Curator's Essay Studs, Snapshots, and Gizmos
','edrlc Jameson wrote abom
Itive mapping on several occa
:. For an analysIs. see Robert
''Jameson 's Pl'ojec t of Cognitive
ling." in Social Cal'togl'apily,
ling Ways ofSeeing Social and
ational Chcmge, ed . Rolland G.
;to" (New YOI'k , Ga,'land , 1996),
416.
:or Jameson's discussion of
:ol1aventure Hotel , see Fredric
~son . Pastmodernism , The
11'01 Logic of Late Capital/sm
ham. NC: Duke Unive,'sity Press.
. 39-41 .
Frank Gehry and Richard Serra. Connections, 1981 Instdlldlion View. Col/dbordllOIl. Architectural l eague or New Yo rk. 1981
a theoretical object. architecture itself-even as a
sign of ever-mutating cultural systems-had to sit
still. Dearchitecturization was no longer possible.
A clear indication that the relation
ship between architecture and the arts had become
systematic rather than a matter of chance encoun
ter, and that architecture would no longer be the
host for these meetings, was the citywide exhibi
tion Architectural Sculpture, sponsored by the Los
Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art in 1980, The
ambitious program took place in two stages. The
first showed photographs of the work of over 60
artists, who were presented as a coherent group by
virtue of their interest in architecture. The second
was a series of installations throughout the re
gion that included projects by Mary Miss, Charles
Simond, and Bruce Nauman . In effect, the architec
tural sign preceded the "building" and the buildings
themselves treated architecture as sign. The most
evident link to architecture shared by the hetero
geneous collection of works was building scale,
yet even this anatomical isomorphism betrayed
underlying differences . Little revealed sculptural
engagement with architectul'al processes or prob
lematics other than the fact that the installations
occupied big pieces of real estate , Building was used
by the artists as a symbolic relic of a disappearing
public sphere. Not a single architect was included
in the show and the exhibition's purpose was ul
timately to document the move by artists into the
purview of architecture. 3~ The only directly arch
itectural presence is an essay by Craig Hodgetts ,
and even his response to the exhibition con
47 cludes that artists and architects had become
CourtesY or Gehry Parlner$.. llP
adversaries: "After a celebrated collaboration span
ning several thousand years, the simple fact is that
the two don 't get along anymore."40
This impasse between artists and
architects is made explicit in Connections, a work
Gehry and Richard Serra produced for the ex
hibition Collaboration, which took place at the
Architectural League in New York in 1981. 41 In their
scheme for a hypothetical bridge across Manhattan,
one end lands in a massive steel blade bending back
over the East River. The other end lands in a giant
and roughly assembled carp that leans in the oppo
site direction, as if straining to escape its hook into
the Hudson. That the sculptural and the architec
tural footings are more than ill at ease together is
pal pable . Their culturaj stakes are utterly opposed :
Serra's denuded steel operates as a sign of the
absence of architecture and Gehry's abject card
board signals the absence of building material in
order to indicate the presence of architecture.
38 The best know" example of this 40 See Hodgetts 's discussion of the
phenomenon Is Edward Soja 's Post Installation at Mount S. Mary' s College
Modern GeagraplJies: The Reassert/on in Arch/tectural Sculpture: PI'ojects
of Space in Critical Social Th~ory (vol. 2) . 33 .
(London: Verso Press , 1989). 41 Their joint project was called
39 The first sentence in vo lume Connections, referring not on ly to the 1 of the catalog is "AI'chitectul'al connection between the architect and Sculpture is a comprehensive survey th e artist but also to the fact that they reviewing the current activities or wo,-ked on a scheme thaI was com
many VIsual artist who explore areas prised primarily of means to establish
previously thought to be the province urban connectivity. See "Artists and
of architects and designel's ." See the At'chitects : Collaboration ," Barbaralee
foreword by LAICA director Robert Diamonstein, ed ., Collaboration , A/'tlsts
L. Smith , in Architectura/ Seu/ptul'e . &. Architects: The Centennial Project vol. 1. ed . Bridget Johnson and Howat'd of the Architecturol League (New York : Singerman (Los Angeles, Los Angeles Whitney Library of Design. 1981), 156
Instllllte of Contempot' ary Art. 1980). 6. 60; and Arnell and Bickford, 194-95.
Everything Loose Will land
After 15 years of kaleidoscopic intersec
tion, architecture and the arts landed in a tug of war,
or rather re-originated the structure of dearchitec
ture within what were again understood as discrete
disciplines. Artists no longer required the word
architecture as an alibi to leave the museum and
enter the arena of public space or belongtothe world.
At the same time, architects no longer considered
the world to be their purview, the naturally occurring
site of their work, 01' their particular responsibility.
Rather than come together to denature traditional
mediums, artists and architects increasingly com
peted for ever-shrinking cultural territory.
Residual effects of the previous decade
did not disappear instantly. Nauman's Untitled for
the Architectural Sculpture show and the Venice
alley houses by Morphosis, a series of three addi
tions designed between 1978 and 1982, continued the
decade-long interest in abject materials and the pro
cess of making . But if the Morphosis houses carve
out "a locus for meditation and tranquility," and use
yellow to "inject a joyous note of color" (according
to the architects), Nauman's deliberately deceptive
proportions and use of sodium vapor lamps, which
tinge the air with a noxious yellow, inject disequi
librium and toxicity into the environment instead. 42
Most importantly, the 1980s fostered direct compe
tition between architecture and the arts, as figures
from both vied for everything from cultural recogni
tion to percent for art funding. 43 It was no accident
that when Thom Mayne decided to establish a gallery
in 1979, it was exclusively devoted to architectul'e.44
While the architectural culture in Los
Angeles of the 1980s and 1990s is often defined as
"artistic," the art that then interested architects
was their own . As if heeding Voltaire, architects
began to cultivate their own gardens, institutions,
and autonomous formal questions. Architecture,
in other words, began to re-architecturize itself. In
this turn toward separation and independence, fun
damental differences in disposition between artists
and architects became increasingly evident. The
most important of these is that architects cannot
fully abandon the future. Inscribed within their work
are procedures that depend on projection, on users
that inevitably modify buildings, and on buildings
that will entropically decay as they occupy increas
ingly corrosive environments. None of these factors
intrinsically devolves the advancement of architec
tural ideas in the process, but it is a predisposition
of the field to assume that problems can and
48 should be solved.
2A-fr8 HO\JSE(' MOD. =MOR-74S·747 isometric
~lorphosis, 2-4 -6·8 House Isometric 1979 Ink on Mylar' 36 '1i x 37 V. inches' Courtesy 01 ~lorpllOSls Architects
While historically architectu re's faithful
" can-do" attitude has risked making its practitio
ners appear na'fve, if not complicit, it is also the force
that is enticing architects to open their doors once
again to productive if unsettling contact with the
arts. There is more traffic between architecture and
the arts today than there has been for 30 years , and
a particularly high degree of it is happening in Los
Angeles. The outcome of all this circulation is unpre
dictable, but the posture of architecture in the face of
unpredictability goes a long way to improve the odds
that any accidents encountered will be happy ones,
particularly ifthey succeed in dearchitecturizing the
field once again.
42 The description of Morphosis 's 4 4 In 1979, Thom Mayne estab
Venice III house , completed In lished the Architecture Gal lery,
1982, Is from the firm 's website . whe,-e he hosted one-week shows
See http://mo)'phopedia.com/ by a variety of local architects .
prOjects/ven ice- iii. Writing about archl tectu,-e fo ,- the
43 The long history of the many Los Angeles Times, John D,-eyfuss
so-called one percent for art actively supported the series. His
program s for government fundi ng final article on the series describes
of a,-t in public space is beyond the a " steady brew of respect, anger,
scope of this essay_ But the fact that p,-ide , iealousy, excitement and
they instigated often bitter disputes Interest " an,ongst the arChi tects
over the lega l status and definition and the broader effect of the series
of a,-t and a,-chitecture Is attested as having created fo.· architects
to by the effort of Eric Owen Moss "an increased aUI'a of legitimacy
and the developer F,-ede l-ic k Sm ith around their work. They have
to seek legal exemption from the engendered a sense of community
program In 1992. Moss and Sm it h and excitement among artisti
succeeded In a,'guing that the ca ll y oriented architects, thereby
roof asse mb ly of the Gary Office Increasing their professional
Building on Undblade Streelln momentu m," Dreyfuss , " Gallery
Culver City met the counc il 's " art" Stirs Up Architects," Los Angeles
requ irement. thereby exempting nmes, December 12, 1979 . Sliver from additionallaxalion.
Bruce N Asphall
49 Copyngt
Curator's Essay Studs. Snapshots. and Gizmos
isometric
ul
0
:e
:e le ld
ld
:>s
'e of
:ls
es,
'le
979, Thorn Mayne estab
he Aj'ch itedure Ga ll ery,
Ie hosted one-week shows
';ety of local architects. I about a,'chitecture for the
~ele5 Times. John Dreyfuss , SU ppor ted th e series. His
t iele on t he series desc r ibes
~y brew of I'espect , anger,
sa lousy. exc itement and
t" amongs t the architects
, broad er effect af t he series
ng cl'eated for a t'chitects
reased aura of legiti m acy
I t heir work . They have
lered a sense of com m un lty
:itement among artisti
'iented at'c hi rec t s. thereby
;in g t heir professional
lturn ," Dreyfuss, " Gallery
p Architects." Los Angeles
December 12.1979 . Bruce Nauman. Untitled (Equ ilatera l Triang le). 1980 Onglniliinsta li alion view. CalTech . Pasadena . CA Aspha it boards. aluminum. wood. Ihree l ow·pres~ure sod ium vapor lamps ! 16 . 20 lequilateral tri(lnglp) feel Copyright Bruce Nauman cOllnesy of Friedrich Chrisllan Flick Co llection49
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Greg Lynn
Hernán Díaz Alonso
Tom Wiscombe
Patterns
David Clovers
Jason Payne
Ball Nogues
words Justin McGuirk
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The new LA school is a band of digital revolutionaries. Obsessed with form and technique, this generation of young architects is
milking the city’s resources – from Hollywood to the aerospace industry – to redefine how architecture is made.
In 1980, Domus magazine published a feature entitled “The young architects of California”. Aside from a 51-year-old Frank Gehry
– pictured on the cover with black hair and an Inspector Clouseau moustache – the group included Thom Mayne, Michael
Rotondi, Eric Owen Moss, Robert Mangurian and Coy Howard, most of whom were in their early thirties. Their edgy
postmodernism, showing the first signs of later deconstructivist tendencies, was establishing LA as a place that was unafraid of
new ideas. “Historicism and contextualism are empty words in a city that has no history, no tradition and no context,” said Gehry at
the time.
A quarter of a century later, both that attitude and that spirit of adventure have been revived by a group for whom LA is a place
where geometric, biological and pop culture fantasies can be made real. From the sci-fi baroque creations of Hernán Díaz Alonso
to the bio-engineering of Tom Wiscombe and the hairy architecture of Jason Payne, the city is a breeding ground for
experimentalists.
Most are not native to LA, but migrated here from the east coast or Argentina, many of them after studying at Columbia University
in New York. They all came for the same reasons and in many respects they were all following a pattern set by Greg Lynn. Lynn
saw the potential in the city to start prototyping the kind of work that he had been designing with computer animation software.
The workshops that had grown up in LA around the automotive and aerospace industries, as well as the prop-making and set
design needs of Hollywood, were the perfect resource for modelling his curved and folded surfaces.
Far more than any local architectural vernacular, this is the context that the city offers its young architecture pioneers – hence
sci-fi and blockbuster movie references abound in the work.
Yet, a more specific factor links almost all of the architects gathered in this round-up, and that is the Southern California Institute
of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where most of them teach. Invited there five years ago by architect Neil Denari and critic Michael
Speaks, they have transformed the school into a hotbed of digital design practice, and the kind of place where students are
almost as likely to leave for careers as 3D animators as they are as architects.
In the sense that the protagonists are all friends, all exactly the same age (except for Lynn), and all keeping a very keen and
competitive eye on each other’s work, this is about as close-knit and coherent a group as you can expect to find in architecture
today. However, there are clear ideological fault lines.
To various degrees they are all dealing with new forms, but the question is whether it is for form’s sake or in the interest of
performance. At either extreme, you have the seamless curlicues of Díaz Alonso and the performance-focused experimental
structures of Wiscombe. Then there are those such as Patterns and Jason Payne, who are playing with the translucent or tactile
qualities of materials in search of holistic sensory experiences. Finally, on another fringe is the more alternative practice of Ball
Nogues – a slight anomaly here – which uses digital modelling software only as a precursor to a more craft-based sensibility.
Unlike their predecessors, this generation is not honing its skills on extensions and houses. Instead, it creates exhibition
architecture (pavilions and installations), it collaborates on motion graphics projects and produces concept pieces for mobile
phone and car companies keen to keep tabs on the marketing potential of radical design. The difficulty that this generation faces
is making buildings.
It is one of the cliches of both LA’s art and architecture scenes that they possess a Wild West, frontier mentality. And it is with a
clear pride in that attitude that the architects leave themselves wide open to attack. Needless to say, a lot of this work turns
stomachs in the sensitive and “civilised” circles of Europe, where it looks like aesthetic hysteria. By trading typologies for
topographies, is it rejecting an essential human quality in the work? How desirable is an architecture that pushes formal
boundaries but doesn’t care how it relates to the city? Is geometry content? And what will these buildings look like in the flesh?
These are important questions, but they don’t outweigh the feeling that one of architecture’s conceivable futures is germinating in
LA. This group of architects, as the modernists did in the last century, is pushing industrial technology to its logical conclusions –
it’s just that in this case the technology is not coming from within architecture but from industries that are advancing far more
rapidly. Instead of relying on the standardisation of conventional construction, they are forging a world of genuinely customised
architecture. There is no doubting the ambition of the agenda or the work, nor the fact that it is both exciting and scary.
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Greg Lynn
Greg Lynn is the crucial character in this story, and the pivot around which most of the architects in it revolve. As one of them put
it, “He’s the godfather… except he’s too young to be called that.” At 42, Lynn is only five years older than most of this group, and
yet he might as well be another generation – for starters, he taught several of them and it was his example they were following in
migrating from the east coast to LA. He essentially set the pattern for this generation, coming up with the theory and language
they use, and the cross-disciplinary collaborations they engage in.
What distinguishes Lynn from his protégés, for now, is that he is the complete article – everything from theorist, computer geek
and network-maker to built architect and product designer. After working in Peter Eisenman’s office, he set up Greg Lynn FORM in
Hoboken, New Jersey, but several factors attracted him to LA: the art scene, the entertainment industry, the fact that giant
corporate practices are less dominant here than in New York or Chicago. The key motive, however, was the concentration of
aerospace and automotive design studios in the city, and the potential they offered to prototype his digital designs.
“What better place to pursue architecture and its popular implications than Los Angeles? I believe the city is more dedicated to the
popular imagination than to high culture. I mean, this sci-fi dedication belongs here.”
In his studio in Venice, Lynn shows off his CNC router and rapid-prototyping machines. Although it is grounded in complex
geometry and the will to fashion buildings out of curves and continuous surfaces, everything Lynn does is defined by the tools he
uses. Countering standard typologies with freestyle, pliable surfaces, Lynn’s forms have their own logic, stemming from forces and
geometries generated in computer animation. In the late 1990s he coined the term “blob”, or at least applied it to architecture from
computer modelling, where it was an acronym for Binary Large Object (the word also explicitly referenced B movie science fiction).
Since then he has extrapolated a whole lexicon, from “blebs” to “shreds”, but they won’t necessarily help you understand why his
design for the Ark of the World museum in Costa Rica looks like a man-eating plant hiding under a doily. “People call it biomorphic
but I was never that interested in organic design. I’ve always been more interested in popular culture. The Costa Rica thing looks
like a plant but that’s because it’s in a jungle.”
Endowed with a natural experimental streak, Lynn was the first to use aerospace fabrication techniques and to collaborate with
motion graphics studios such as Imaginary Forces – both now regular collaborators with local architects. In one of his current
projects, he is designing an online city for eight billion people to be rendered at cinema quality.
For Lynn, the big debate in architecture is between form designing and form finding – the latter being “parametric” design, based
on feeding statistics into the computer. “I blame it all on Rem [Koolhaas]. The problem is that schools are teaching Rem – even
though Rem doesn’t do what he says he does – and the teachers don’t really understand computers so they encourage students
to just punch in data and design around the [building’s] programme. It’s really limited.” To Lynn, this is a wimpish cop-out, and he
clearly finds some solace in the fact that the LA scene is made up of “designers” and not “form finders”. If he has any criticism of
his younger colleagues it is that they are following too closely in his footsteps. “What I am critical of is that none of these guys has
got their own Imaginary Forces. There are dozens of younger motion graphics companies who would love to be involved with
them, but they’re going with what they know.”
Hernán Díaz Alonso
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Hernán Díaz Alonso looks, talks and acts like a swaggering bandido but designs like a nerdy child prodigy with a science fiction
fetish. His practice, Xefirotarch, represents the extreme end of the work coming out of LA in the sense that his designs are
self-consciously, operatically visual – and he is totally unapologetic about it. “I’m only interested in form. For me, form follows form.
That doesn’t mean that what we do doesn’t function, but function is never a driving force of the work, it’s just something that
needs to be accommodated. I’m interested in how the form reorganises how you would use it.”
Díaz Alonso’s rhetoric is actually very clever, not least because it has made him perhaps the most high profile of LA’s younger
generation, and has attracted a number of conceptual commissions from corporate marketing departments. Although his only built
work is the 2005 installation at PS1 in New York, and most of his time is spent on exhibition architecture and teaching, he does
actually have two clients: one for a house outside Paris and the other for an artists’ community in the Dominican Republic.
Born in Buenos Aires, Diaz Alonso wanted to be a film director but the film school had shut down so he studied architecture
instead, and felt good about the choice when he saw the catalogue for the Deconstructivist Architecture show at MoMA in 1988.
But he maintains that his work has a “cinematic logic” driven by computer animation software, and he frequently collaborates with
motion graphics firm Imaginary Forces. “My influence is more blockbuster movies. Tim Burton is a gigantic influence on me – he
blows my mind – but also Guillermo del Toro, the first Matrix, Bladerunner … I love vampire movies, especially the first Blade.”
This sci-fi aspect is more than an aesthetic, however. Díaz Alonso talks about his designs in terms of species, genetics and
artificial mutation. But, evident in the way that his baroque forms deliberately skirt the grotesque, the painter Francis Bacon was
also a profound influence. Like Bacon, he is comfortable with the uncomfortable, and has the provocateur’s knack of laying claim
to the language you might use to criticise him before you do.
Interestingly, Díaz Alonso has lost competitions for not emphasising his process enough, but again he is unrepentant. “I don’t mind
showing the process, but as an act of god,” he says. A veteran of Enric Miralles’ office, Díaz Alonso has adopted the Catalan
architect’s practice of seeing the process as an “autopsy”. “You do it and then you try to understand exactly what happened to go
to the next one. There’s a certain notion of surrealism that operates in the work. It’s more like the emotional state that you want it
to produce.”
Some of Díaz Alonso’s talk is clearly posturing. Another Columbia graduate and Peter Eisenman apprentice, he is well versed in
conceptual procedures. Furthermore, his designs are buildable (“they just cost five or six time more than clients are willing to
spend”). All Díaz Alonso is missing is some pragmatism. Asked at what point he might compromise for the sake of actually building
something, he replies: “Never! Zaha stuck to her guns, and six or seven years ago she’d only built a restaurant in Japan. Now
she’s taking over the world.”
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Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe makes architecture by combining the skills of the biologist and the engineer. His work is driven by a concern for
structural performance, but he is not averse to some theatrical form-making. He wants a roof to soar, but in the lightest, most
efficient way possible – and he is likely to find the solution in a dragonfly wing.
Wiscombe founded his practice, Emergent – which, incidentally, is a word that has often been applied to this kind of work because
of its focus on emerging technologies – in 1999. However, his career has been largely shaped by his 12-year, ongoing
collaboration with the Austrian practice Coop Himmelb(l)au, under the mentorship of its principal, Wolf D Prix.
The walls of his small studio on Wilshire Boulevard are pinned with pictures of bat wings, water lilies and even the art nouveau
forms of Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro. But these are just pictures – what interests Wiscombe is not the forms but the underlying
structures. In a recent installation at SCI-Arc, he created a giant aluminium cantilever that mimicked a dragonfly wing’s
composition of long beams connected by a honeycomb membrane. “It’s not attempting to look like a dragonfly wing but operate
like one,” he says. “Biology never has the perfect solution, but engineering plugged into biology does.”
Sometimes called “bioconstructivism”, Wiscombe’s work uses parametric software to find elegant structural solutions, and he sees
the results as a form of natural selection or genetic mutation. “Engineering is no longer about the analogue problem solving, it’s
generative. You can grow populations of solutions and breed them.”
In 2003 Emergent won the PS1 Urban Beach installation – a programme that has proved a launch pad for three of the practices
gathered in this overview. The wing-like creation looked more like the result of aerospace engineering than the biological research
he deals with today. Although this remains its only built work, the practice is increasingly finding itself on major international
competition shortlists, and this year narrowly missed out on winning the Prague National Library.
Despite the Austrian connection, Wiscombe is an obvious product of the LA architectural climate. “My work is global but it couldn’t
be anywhere; the community here has a huge impact on what you’re doing. Teaching together is really important, we all sit in on
each others’ reviews, and by disagreeing with each other we move things forward.” While not critical of any of his LA
contemporaries – the local scene is too mutually supportive for any real dissonance – Wiscombe hints that he finds some of the
work meretricious. “We need to get away from digital work that’s just about surfaces,” he says. What’s more, he is not waiting for
clients’ tastes to catch up with his talent. “I’m not interested in being a provocateur in the architecture community.
I like working in the world. We’re coming to the end of an age now where ego is a driver of the profession – we’re peaking now
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with Zaha and Gehry. There are new issues that are not about the hero, like sustainability, culture and process.”
Patterns
Patterns is the practice of Argentinian-born Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich, whose office is on Hollywood Boulevard (above
Marlene Dietrich’s star). The name is misleading at first, since of this group they are perhaps the most interested in the practical
and traditional aspects of architecture as opposed to form-making. The patterns that concern them are the behavioural ones
found, for instance, in repetitive structural systems. These result in weird prototypes that evoke both car chassis and close-ups of
reptile skin. Although they are essentially sculptural – Spina reveals the influence of British sculptors Richard Deacon and Tony
Cragg – a good deal of research goes into them and they have the potential to turn into monocoque structures.
Spina studied at Columbia and then worked for Reiser and Umemoto in New York, while Huljich worked for Thom Mayne’s
Morphosis. Moving to LA to teach at SCI-Arc, Spina was sceptical about the city’s architectural establishment. “Somehow I was
always critical of the LA school,” he says. “As much as I respect the work of Frank [Gehry] and Thom [Mayne], I like work that is
not in your eyes all the time. I’ve always been related more to European practices – Alvaro Siza was very influential to me.”
Patterns’ experimentation with materials expresses one of the practices main concerns. “We’re interested in the physicality of the
object, how you would touch it and what kind of surface you would get – both at the level of proto-architecture and building. We
see the prototypes as work – they carry their own formal message. We also see them as vehicles for exploration and research.”
Resin-based variations of fibreglass, super-plastics and new forms of concrete are cast or vacuum-formed into prototypes that can
serve as both skin and structure. Translucent and sometimes even gelatinous surfaces are exploited to create subtle variations in
experience.
“I like work that is sensation making but not necessarily sensational,” says Spina. “I’m not interested in the new, but in inflections
of things you already understand. Then there’s a deeper sense of effect that can be produced. We’re not interested in creating a
blob, or something ‘other’.”
The practice is currently designing the SCI-Arc cafe, which the architects are merging in a fluid way with the adjacent library’s
bookcases, so that shelves morph into tables and chairs. But more importantly, given the challenges their contemporaries are
facing, the architects actually have a building underway on Sunset Boulevard. The shopfront, which doesn’t fight the fact that the
building is just a box, is panelled in translucent resin-based polycarbonate that torques into a set of gill-like windows, introducing a
voyeuristic aspect that Spina describes as “like looking up a girl’s skirt”.
“Site specificity and context are words that are old-fashioned these days,” he says, tellingly. “In LA you’re not supposed to care,
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and I totally disagree with that. This is not gratuitous.” Less rhetorically inclined than some of his friends, Spina sees the
constraints of programme and context as invaluable. “The more close we are with that kind of conflict the better the project is in
our view.”
Patterns is also hugely reliant on the local fabrication culture, collaborating with, for instance, Warner Brothers’ set design studio
to vacuum-from the components of the SCI-Arc cafe. “In Los Angeles, especially at SCI-Arc, there is a tradition of fabrication that
forces you to get even closer to materials and certain technicalities of built assembly. The tools are here and the advanced
manufacture companies are here because of the movie industry, the car industry and the remains of the aerospace industry.”
David Clovers
David Clovers is another practice that combines the experimental nature of installations with the pragmatics of large-scale
architecture projects. Only founded earlier this year, it is already building 30 houses in Beijing – a capacious job for a couple
whose references would suggest a more arthouse output.
David Erdman was formerly of interactive and multimedia design group Servo, while Clover Lee joined him from LA firm Hodgetts
and Fung. Similarly to Patterns and Jason Payne, their work is preoccupied with sensory effects, whether that involves light, fog
or tactile materials. A proposal for a perimeter screen at the Schindler House in West Hollywood resembles a glowing sea
anemone that spouts water and fog. “We work with this fullness to produce an effect of mysteriousness, adding other orders or
matter into the architecture as a means of making it less legible and more full as an experience and an environment,” says
Erdman.
While they have collaborated with the Warner Brothers workshop and custom car manufacturers, as others have, there is no
sense that this is in any way glamorous. “I see it as very prosaic,” says Erdman. “To call it our interaction with ‘the film industry’
sounds a bit too heroic. It’s really the prop industry we’re working with. That’s why you see a moodiness and drama in the work,
and why it errs on the side of the cosmetic – in a good way.”
The Beijing houses, part of a scheme to create an entire artists’ district, are all variations of one original typology in which most of
the light is funnelled in through the roof. The designs are simple yet inscrutable, and their ambiguity is a quality that the practice
strives for, in distinction to the complexity of some of their local counterparts.
“We don’t necessarily look to architects, because when it comes to integrating multimedia technology other disciplines are a lot
further ahead, such as industrial designers or filmmakers or artists,” says Lee. In fact, the couple cite an unusual list of references,
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from Matthew Barney to The Talented Mr Ripley (“a character who is entirely translucent and murky”) and Jack Black from the
Pirates of the Caribbean. Somehow these are references that could only be taken seriously in the relaxed intellectual climate of
LA.
That atmosphere has also applied to the sharing of technology – an ethos established early on by Frank Gehry’s use of CATIA
modelling software. “What’s nice about LA is that everybody feels comfortable sharing information,” says Lee. “The East coast is
obsessed with the technology and it’s treated as almost proprietary secrets. ‘I have a fabricator who does this but I’m not going to
tell you about it because then you could do the same thing I can.’ There’s a different attitude about it here, which is: I can still do
something innovative as long as I have a unique idea.”
Jason Payne
Jason Payne is operating on the extreme fringe of the digital LA scene. Although he has a similar intellectual provenance to
Hernán Díaz Alonso or Marcelo Spina (he is a former Columbia University graduate who worked at digital architects Reiser
Umemoto and now teaches at UCLA), he has pushed his work away from concerns with the image towards the tactile and sensual
properties of materials.
He says his move from New York to LA was prompted less by the desire to see his designs prototyped than to see how they
would be changed by becoming material. The result is that his interest in curved and complex forms has been overtaken by an
obsession with… hairiness. It all began with computer-generated particle animations that looked like tangled masses of hair. “So
then I thought, wouldn’t it be amusing if I could somehow theorise hair in architecture… We started doing stuff that was in the
beginning organisationally hairy and then ultimately literally sticking hair on projects. What I found was that people were taking it
more and more seriously.”
Payne recently split with former partner Heather Roberge, with whom he ran a practice comically titled Gnuform (the gnu is a hairy
yak-like animal), and set up on his own under the similarly apt rubric Hirsuta. His current projects include a Taurus-shaped house
in Malibu and a house in Utah.
Payne’s most complete expression to date (one of Gnuform’s projects) is a bar and reception area for cable television channel No
Good TV. A total sensual experience, the bar is a curved and folded form in plastic with black rubber mounds for squeezing and
crevices lined with red fur. Beyond sexual allusions to some of the channel’s erotic material, the bar embodies Payne’s interest in
the tactile potential of architecture. “[Professor] Jeff Kipnis called it a new phenomenology but I’m still a bit troubled by the term
phenomenology so I call it sensate work because it’s meant to appeal very directly and overtly to the senses, and especially the
non visual – mostly the tactile but also in some cases smell.”
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Ball Nogues
Ball Nogues is in some ways the exception on this architectural tour. Although partners Benjamin Ball and Gastón Nogues are
digital practitioners, the two former SCI-Arc students belong to the school’s earlier tradition of making things by hand. Theirs is a
craft sensibility in which the forms happen to be generated by parametric modelling. However, what they have in common with a
number of the practices here is the desire to create a rich sensory experience.
Working out of a graffiti-covered garage in Echo Park, the pair may play the part of the alternative-scene hipsters but this year
they built the annual Urban Beach installation at PS1 in New York, really the only significant platform for young architects in the
US. And while Ball’s background is in set design for the film industry, Argentinian-born Nogues spent ten years working for Frank
Gehry. “What I took away from Gehry was a sense of exploration and discovery through playing – it was pretty amazing watching
him work,” says Nogues. Ironically, Ball does most of the computer modelling.
Ball Nogues’ work draws on an interesting range of references, from the super-light structures of engineer Frei Otto to, naturally,
Hollywood movies. An early work, Maximilian’s Schell (named after the actor), simulated a black hole-like structure out of
translucent golden mylar petals. Like the tent-shaped accretions at PS1 this summer, every piece was unique, calculated on the
computer before being numbered and assembled. The petals sit somewhere between Gehry’s beloved fish scales and village fete
bunting. “Part of that is a reaction against the minimalist surface, that real tiny thin surface of just material, and to create an effect
by the way that the light comes through and filters and reflects,” says Nogues.
Nogues says the language is based on nature but the practice clearly has none of the theoretical pretensions of its local
counterparts. A cardboard installation at Rice University in Houston earlier this year (icon 043) alluded to images from American
landscape painting but was essentially a beautiful climbing frame. “We wanted people to have a very child-like attitude of
exploration, letting them climb all over it.”
Regardless of the computer modelling, it is the collaborative act of building, which they invest with an almost performative quality,
that seems most important. Though still operating at the level of installation architecture, they aim higher. “We both have an
ambition to make buildings,” Nogues says. “We just have to have somebody that wants to make a building the way that we want
to make a building.”
images Monica Nouwens
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