Petition Launched To Save MOCA’s New Sculpturalism Exhibition
Rendering of P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S’ Pavilion for MOCA’s New Sculpturalism. (Courtesy P-A-T-T-E-R-N-S)
Los Angeles architect Arshia Mahmoodi, founder of the firm VOID, has launched an online petition to try to help save the troubled exhibition, A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture in Southern California at MOCA. The show, scheduled for a June 2nd opening, is currently in a holding pattern, and its curator Christopher Mount told AN he feared it would be cancelled. Mount blames mismanagement at MOCA, while several news reports have pointed to general apprehension about the show, and the recent withdrawal of Frank Gehry. Mahmoodi released the petition—directed to MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch—yesterday.
Event> Celebrate: The Journey at LA’s A+D Museum
WORKS FROM A + D ARCHITECTURE. CHRIS FOX, SALON JETPACKERS, QUIFF, PONYTAIL, BOB, 2011. (A + D Architecture + Design Museum > LA)
What: Gala / Celebrate: The Journey
When: Saturday, May 11, 7:00 to 11:00 PM
Where: Architecture and Design Museum, Los Angeles (5900 Wilshire on LA’s Museum Row)
Join AN, a media sponsor for the annual A + D Fundraiser and Gala, this Saturday for CELEBRATE: THE JOURNEY. The event at The Architecture and Design Museum of Los Angeles connects the design industry with innovators to acknowledge the creative journey that kindles preeminent design. The night’s main focus will center on one-of-a-kind carry-ons created by renowned architects and designers such as traditional train cases, modern day satchels and ultramodern jet-paks. Custom carry-on designers include Adams Morioka, Gensler, Dan Meis and Cristobal Valecillos among others.
The celebrations will consist of several curated silent auctions, intercontinental cuisine, music, drink and much more. Chris Fox ‘Jet Packs’ and Pan AM Vintage Uniforms will provide special presentations while Raul Campos will DJ.
Over 600 people attended CELEBRATE 2012 and 2013’s event will be bigger and better! Tickets are available for purchase online and CELEBRATE: THE JOURNEY silent auction items are accessible for preview and bids.
On View> OVERDRIVE: LA Constructs the Future, 1940-1990
OVERDRIVE: LA Constructs the Future, 1940-1990
The J. Paul Getty Museum
Los Angeles
Through July 21
Gleaming cars speeding down an intricate freeway system, flashy movie theatres, quirky coffee shops, sleek corporate towers and residential spaces, drive-in churches, the infamous Hollywood sign, LAX Airport (above), and a lucrative petroleum industry are just some of the many impressive characteristics associated with the rich culture of Los Angeles. This exhibition at The J. Paul Getty Museum explores a metropolis that remained in “overdrive” throughout the 20th century, implementing cutting-edge architectural design to effectively respond to civic, environmental, and socioeconomic challenges that plagued the city. In just 50 years, the city rapidly evolved into one the most influential industrial, creative, and economic capitals in the world. Through drawings, photographs, models, animations, oral histories, and ephemera, the exhibition celebrates the notable transformation of the city of Los Angeles from 1940–1990.
Where’s the Money, MOCA? Questions surround the possible cancellation of A New Sculpturalism
Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall. (Courtesy Gehry Partners)
The intrigue continues at MOCA, whose upcoming show A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture in Southern California, is close to being cancelled, according to multiple sources. The show’s curator Christopher Mount has told AN that Frank Gehry’s withdrawal is not the cause for the exhibition’s possible demise, as was suggested yesterday in the Los Angeles Times. The real reason, he said: MOCA director Jeffrey Deitch, who halted installation of the show a few weeks ago, claiming that money for the undertaking had run out. Mount, however, says there is plenty of money left in the show’s budget. Read More
LACMA Transformation Coming Into Focus
(Diana Lee Photography / Flickr)
The Wall Street Journal recently published a confirmation of two things we’ve been hearing whispers of for years: One, Michael Govan is more of a builder than a museum director; and two, that Govan and Peter Zumthor are planning to basically take LACMA apart and start over. The full scope of the plans will be unveiled in June, with LACMA’s exhibition, The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA. But for now the story has gleaned that under Zumthor’s plan, four of the museum’s midcentury structures will be replaced by “curvaceous modern glass structures.”
Let The Archi-Sparks Fly: Thom Mayne Fights Back Against Bad Reviews
Thom Mayne’s Perot Museum in Dallas. (Iwan Baan)
Ladies and gentlemen, we finally have a blood feud in Los Angeles. It seems that Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne doesn’t care for Thom Mayne’s work. At all. Reviewing his new Perot Museum in Dallas, he called the building, “One of the pricey, preening old breed.” Adding, “it is a thoroughly cynical piece of work, a building that uses a frenzy of architectural forms to endorse the idea that architecture, in the end, is mere decoration.”
Hawthorne has used this vitriol on other Mayne buildings, like the Caltrans building and the Cahill Center at Caltech, which, he said, employs a “skin-and-stair strategy that allows the client to make the rest of the building—every interior office or gallery—conventional at best and banal at worst.”
Mayne, not surprisingly, doesn’t appear happy. In a recent public tour of his new offices in Culver City, led by our friend and design journalist Alissa Walker, Mayne said he would not be allowing a local architecture critic to write about his new building for his firm’s offices—he was asking a science writer to do the story instead. “All local writers are horrible,” he said. “There are no good writers in Los Angeles.” We beg to differ!
Get Going This Weekend In Los Angeles: Venice House Tour, SCI-Arc Party, CicLAvia
Hopper Residence next to Arnoldi Triplex. (Larry Underhill)
For those of us who grew up in the 70s and 80s, it’s time to feel old. As part of its “Curating The City” series, the Los Angeles Conservancy is tomorrow hosting an amazing tour called Venice Eclectic: Modern Architecture from the 1970s and ’80s. The event features looks inside whimsical buildings by, among others, Frank Gehry (Indiana Avenue Houses/Arnoldi Triplex), Steven Ehrlich (Ed Moses Studio), Brian Murphy (Hopper House, above), Frederick Fisher, and Frank Israel. Yes, it’s time to appreciate these decades for more than disco and Madonna. After the tour there will be a panel featuring Ehrlich, Fisher, and Murphy.
And that’s just the beginning of a busy weekend for LA architecture and urbanism buffs. There’s also SCI-Arc’s 40th birthday party on Saturday night and CicLAvia—with an expanded route going all the way to the ocean for the first time—on Sunday. Get going.
Los Angeles’ First Complete Street On the MyFigueroa Corridor Close To Moving Ahead
Proposed elements include separated bike lanes, improved crosswalks, new lighting, and enhanced plantings. (Courtesy MyFigueroa)
It’s been about a year since the Los Angeles Department of Transportation (DOT) took the reins over MyFigueroa, a project that hopes to remake the 4-miles in and around Figueroa Street from LA Live to Exposition Park, near USC. But things are quickly wrapping up, because the $20-million Proposition 1C funds it was awarded need to be spent by 2014. On April 9, DOT hosted a community meeting in downtown LA to unveil updated designs for this crucial connective corridor, which when finished, would be the city’s first implemented complete street.
Q+A> Is Los Angeles’ Arts District As Hot As We Think?
Shimoda Design’s rendering of Alameda Square (Shimoda Design Group)
Last week, AN reported on the development of Alameda Square in Los Angeles, the 1.5-million-square-foot mixed use project being designed at the old American Apparel factory site on the southwest edge of LA’s Arts District. Movement on projects like this beg the question: Just how hot is LA’s Arts District? AN‘s West Coast Editor Sam Lubell sat down for a short chat with James Sattler, a Vice President of Acquisitions at JP Morgan Asset Management, to find out.
Bridge Over Troubled Freeway: Secretive Bridge In Los Angeles Moving Forward?
(Courtesy Google Maps)
Los Angeles’ impressive new bridges have gotten a lot of press lately, including HNTB’s epic 6th Street Viaduct and Andrew Leicester’s unusual so-called basket bridge for the Metro Pasadena Gold Line extension. But one crossing is being worked on in total secrecy: a span over the 101 Freeway at Los Angeles Street, connecting the Civic Center and the Pueblo de Los Angeles.
Artists Jenna Didier and Oliver Hess, who run the city’s Materials and Applications gallery in Silver Lake, are designing the bridge. No renderings have been unveiled, and it’s all very top secret within the city, which is why eavesdrop is on the case. And while Thom Mayne (101 pedestrian bridge) and Asymptote (Steel Cloud) have both failed to make similar ideas happen, this looks like it’s actually moving. Stay tuned.
Giant Solar Array at Occidental College Wows Los Angeles
Oxy Solar Array. (Sam Lubell/ AN)
At a DeLab (Design East of La Brea) Tour this Saturday, Los Angeles-based firm Lettuce Office shared the epic story of its new solar array for LA’s Occidental College. The 1 megawatt installation, made up of 4,886-panels, follows the contours of its hilly site, with its angled panels raised just two or three feet off the ground. To guard against sliding, each set of panels had to be imbedded into the earth via concrete-supported columns.
My LA2050: Vote to Change Los Angeles
Think LA has too many issues? Then start voting in the My LA2050 Challenge, a competition handing out $1 million in grants to some of the most innovative and creative ideas meant to tackle the city’s biggest problems. Voting, which is all online, began on April 2nd and lasts until April 17th.
More than 275 ideas have been proposed. One is AN West Coast Editor Sam Lubell’s exhibition, Never Built: Los Angeles, which brings to life more than 100 innovative, often unbelievable, unbuilt schemes—many dashed by LA’s inability to embrace innovation—and challenges the city to change its culture of public timidity and banality. Another favorite is Farm on Wheels, by LA-Más, in which food trucks will serve as citywide “hubs of healthy food.”
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