Archinect - The Los Angeles Biennale

Public Fiction

2014-05-05T10:31:00-04:00

I'm resending this email I just received from Public Fiction for y'all in L.A. to seriously consider. Loving the idea to bypass NY in such an elegant manner. Wish I was there. It feels odd to post something happening in L.A., coming from L.A. to predominately Angelenos, via NY, from Berlin. But then again, it could get "odder"—no?

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Frieze Projects New York,

May 9 - 12, 2014

In the spring of 1971, Allen Ruppersberg took over a two-story house on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, and converted it into a fully-functioning hotel. For the six weeks that followed, it was a site for hanging out, parties, performances and, of course, for spending the night. The rooms were installations, each one themed, the materials vernacular and the air, casual.

Purposefully temporary, the short-lived hotel remained a landmark and legend in LA’s history, highly representative of both Ruppersberg’s work and of the artist-run initiatives in LA’s landscape: laid-back, experiential and with an emphasis on ...

As It Lays: The New L.A. Game

2014-04-28T14:22:00-04:00

As It Lays is a new board game for interpreting Los Angeles. Players are cast as developers in the sprawling Los Angeles landscape, and must use their cunning to attune the city to a new likeness. Each developer has a selection of properties to build, varying only in terms of density, that they can place on the board’s grid according to a simple set of rules. For each new turn, developers must adapt to changing conditions on the board, determined by a set of “Situation Cards” that limit where and how they can build. These cards refer to historical, geographical, cultural and political phenomenons that may shape Los Angeles in the future. There are six different ways to win the game, referring to the varied patterns of developed properties that constitute the game’s New Los Angeles.

Whether the development patterns at each game’s end resemble the current Los Angeles is not important -- the goal isn’t to create a facsimile simulation of LA, but to perform a new city under the interlock...

A biennale that isn't

2014-03-26T14:49:00-04:00

Image: LA BIENNALE. Part Freudian slip, part squatter, part as home as it gets. The program banner at Ole Bouman’s Value Factory announcing the L. A. Biennale to be. Shenzhen, February 2014. Video still.

A recent trip to Shenzhen to take part in the yet to be founded Los Angeles Biennale, brought to mind an odd selection of works I treasure for their possible outcomes. More allusions than reference, they suggest an expanded view at lasting resistances.

“Perhaps it would be better to get accustomed to designing obscure uncertainty than presuming the design of certainty” closes Ettore Sottsass’ brief introduction to Designs for the destinies of man.(1) One piece in particular, Design of a floor on which your steps will be uncertain, demonstrates his operating the uncharted: a fragile grid spanning a reflective ground. Seemingly a combination of various scales, if any, it challenges your sense of surface, space and potential. This is probably the most ambiguous and revealing piece in th...

You can tell a book by its cover?

2014-03-02T21:07:00-05:00

Here is a little teaser from upcoming book of what happened in Shenzhen and what and who we are.

Made in China and maybe everywhere else

2014-02-23T04:59:56-05:00

A name scribbled on a cup and thrown into the OMA “exhibition.” This irreverent act on the reverent situation that is a biennale is critical to our LA Biennale– a moment, a message in the bottle of the Shenzhen Biennale. In this singular exploit, the creative director of our biennale made our contribution. Go on Orhan.

Maybe that is it; an actual LA Biennale must never actually be in LA. Maybe our biennale is only a series of messages encapsulated and floating in and amongst the clever statements and grand ambitions that have come to define the contemporary biennale. All other biennales are the platform for every other performance of this, the LA Biennale. We are them and they are us. Our biennale is an exercise in restrained resistance to the self-promotion that precedes our Los Angeles’ self. Keep LA an idea. To solidify and structuralize the things that LA is would be to defy the more important and interesting idea that LA may be.

The LA Biennale is a critical periphery....

De-Tribalizer in Shenzhen

2014-02-23T01:11:56-05:00

In Los Angeles, tribalism among artists and designers and architects and writers is the norm; the standard method of practice is to gather those of like mind and influence and wall off and even censor those of unlike mind and lesser influence. At stake is who gets what seat at what party and who gets invited to lecture or participate in an exhibit or conference or workshop, whose project is selected for this that and the other competition or prize. The tribal leaders collect followers and when they meet up the pow wow has the result and, indeed, intent of carving out a space that is incontestable by all those that stand outside, many of whom are waiting their turn to get in. Frustrated long enough and often growing old and with little prospect in site, this impoverished lot give up and start their own tribe, and hence, in sum, the city is at tribal war and the space for reasonable discussion in good faith on neutral turf is all but lost. So, what happens when the members of these tr...

Global responses to L.A. Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism

2014-02-22T23:38:57-05:00

"The Los Angeles Biennale in Shenzhen is an experimentation in creating a nomadic biennale on urbanism, hosted by the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. It is not possible to holistically represent Los Angeles in Shenzhen, but as a frontier-city, L.A. is constantly growing, seeking and evolving, manufacturing its progressive self. Why curb our physical boundaries, when Shenzhen and Los Angeles are partners in the traffic of a global economic network, and images of Los Angeles populate the world under all types of alternative names? Fiction is everything when every snapshot is fleeting, and we do not presume L.A. to have a sole reality. Through a hodgepodge of presentations, discussions, art pieces and interactive opportunities, the Biennale will perpetuate a generative study and performance of Los Angeles."

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A brief report from the Value Factory, Shekou, Shenzhen

2014-02-22T18:57:00-05:00

Saturday was the full day we have got to work as Ole Bouman, the Creative Director of UABB officially welcomed us and opened the Los Angeles Biennale of Architecture and Urbanism for working sessions.

We have selected a public space in the cafeteria to conduct our business, engaging the public continuously. We sit around a 20' x 6' table and talk about Los Angeles and collect words, images and sounds for our book, a manual of sorts, we aim to finish Sunday in either print form and/or digitally.

We have a challenge of editing mountainous material we have been collecting.

Saturday we briefly summarized our previous informal discussions and start to further plot our course of development, making Los Angeles our experimental subject. First we concentrated on individually presenting our work and commenting on each presentation.

I started first by reading Apartment Stories. The piece and following discussion showed a fictional face and a research based writing on Los Angeles housing, densific...

How big is it?

2014-02-21T10:22:42-05:00

This question comes up a lot with Los Angeles. Boundaries and expanse break down depending on your psychological and sociological scales of experience -- sometimes this manifest as neighborhoods, sometimes as routes on a freeway map. Coming to Shenzhen, in the vacuumed nave of a former floating glass factory (pictured), scale has a very fresh history. The massive renovation of the Value Factory for the biennale is a symptom of the city's massive economic growth within the meager past of a few decades, transforming from fishing village to pivot-point of world-trade, and perhaps eventually to cultural capital.

Dede

2014-02-21T05:11:00-05:00

Dede is a project which is an open ended short film. In its current research phase it is a composite of multiple thoughts, quotes and stories I reflect upon. This is the story of the immigrant with the American dream combined with the ambiguity of the Los Angeles dreamscape reality. These collection of stories are thoughts which I have struggled with over the years and in reality have become the subversive thoughts and questions that I play with everyday.

In no particular order:

Conversations with my family:

“Dad you’ve already won. You’ve won because you don’t ever have to worry about three rockets hitting another house of yours and blowing it up again. You’re free!” My grandfather was house sitting my parent's home in the month of September, 1978. During this time, Lebanon was in the midst of a Civil War. The attack happened! I was born in April of that year. I had a conversation with my father about a year ago discussing his "American Dream" and what it meant to him to have his ...

Arrival

2014-02-20T15:12:00-05:00

We spent the first day becoming familiar with our work location at the Value Factory, chatting with Ole, and wandering the streets, feasting on some great Chinese halal and local seafood.

Apartment Stories

2014-02-18T03:11:23-05:00

(Originally published in Archinect in June, 2010, this is a slightly edited version)

APARTMENT STORIES

by Orhan Ayyüce

As we were discussing a situation with my neighbor Joey Luna in unit G, I did say this, "all those dreams arrive in Los Angeles from distant places, dissipate into the thin walls of the dingbat apartments."

Earlier on, these boxy two story residential structures were the pride of ownership buildings, providing housing which were affordable, stylish and comfortable for the increasing population of Los Angeles. They were successful as single family dwelling replacements responding to demand of booming post war workforce and migration. They were human and they were worthy of some minor fantasies and California dreaming. If you were the owner, they were great as income properties, making you feel like a Conte or in English, the nobleman style Count entitled to first month's rent and last month's deposit. They could be called stucco retirement fund.
They are everywhere in Los...

Plausible reference #2

2014-02-17T21:03:22-05:00

In my last post “a plausible reference” I alluded to the idea that the Los Angeles biennale may be a work of fiction that nonetheless offers insights into this city we call home. Here is a second reference that may help to illustrate this premise.

With its infectious beat and sardonic yet cheerful lyrics Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day" was a big hit in 1993. The song starts with the sound of birds in the background, enter Ice Cube rapping: "Just waking up in the morning gotta thank God, I don't know but today seems kinda odd, No barking from the dogs, no smog..." The song continues to describe all the reason's that for Ice Cube "today was a good day." There was "no jacker in sight", nobody got "killed in South Central", he "saw the police and they rolled right past" him, "the Lakers beat the Supersoniks", he picked up a girl he'd "been trying to f**k since the twelve grade," and he didn't "even have to use his A.K." At the end of the song the absent helicopters (also mentioned in t...

A plausible reference

2014-02-17T20:03:13-05:00

"Essentially, all models are wrong, but some are useful." Statistician George E. P. Box

The difficulties in intervening in Los Angeles stems partly in our inability to grasp or describe all the underlying processes that give the city form. The only thing that is certain is that we need to account for contingencies and uncertainty. This complexity of our urban environments makes it extremely difficult to find causal relationships between a city's form and its social processes. Like other modern cities, Los Angeles "'has gone out of control . . . it has lost the signifying potencies and structural coherences that it once seemed to possess." (Steven Marcus cited in Stan Allen’s “Mapping the Unmappable” in Practice: Architecture, Technique and Representation. Amsterdam: G+B Arts International.) Stan Allen responds to this description of the modern city by suggesting that we should relinquish some measure of control. He proposes that we develop notational systems that can capture and rep...

Greetings from Los Angeles

2014-02-17T13:08:00-05:00

"The Los Angeles Biennale in Shenzhen is an experimentation in creating a nomadic biennale on urbanism, hosted by the Bi-City Biennale of Urbanism\Architecture. It is not possible to holistically represent Los Angeles in Shenzhen, but as a frontier-city, L.A. is constantly growing, seeking and evolving, manufacturing its progressive self. Why curb our physical boundaries, when Shenzhen and Los Angeles are partners in the traffic of a global economic network, and images of Los Angeles populate the world under all types of alternative names? Fiction is everything when every snapshot is fleeting, and we do not presume L.A. to have a sole reality. Through a hodgepodge of presentations, discussions, art pieces and interactive opportunities, the Biennale will perpetuate a generative study and performance of Los Angeles."