“How can you morally and ethically justify in your own mind working on a project that would take people accustomed to living on the ground, of having their gardens, chickens, and their little animals in their yards, having space around them, having flowers, to live in these twenty-four thirteen-story-high buildings?” The architecture critic asks the architect – modeled after Richard Neutra – in a play by the artist Karina Nimmerfall, part of her installation with Morgan Fisher at the Garage Top at the MAK Center in Los Angeles.

Entitled Past Future Housing, the exhibit comprises a painting by Fisher paired with a bare-if-not-quite-minimalist installation by Nimmerfall that includes a video and the play, printed out and stapled. An accompanying exhibit text clarifies the intention of the work as a meditation on historical, optimistic visions for public housing in the city, with some look towards the “future” implied if not readily evident.

More specifically, the show revolves around two ostensibly idiomatic anecdotes from the mid-century history of Los Angeles: attempts to create modular, mass-produced and corporately-funded housing in the 1930s and, some two decades later, the abandoned master plan by Neutra and Robert Alexander for a housing project in Chavez Ravine.

The painting by Fisher, entitled 4 (Silver Gray, Sky Blue, Terracotta, Red), has a similarly minimalist aesthetic and, according to the press release, is essentially a blown-up paint chip. To be precise, it’s sourced from Exterior and Interior Color Beauty, a publication produced by General Houses Inc., a company founded by the artist’s father that attempted to produce low-cost, high-quality housing in the mid-twentieth century.

The colors in the painting pair well with the painted wood installation by Nimmerfall, entitled 1953. Possible Scenarios of a Discontinued Future, which is certainly the more substantial of the works on view and was based on “fragments” of Neutra designs. It’s lovely to look at and has the added bonus of being a couch. Visitors can recline on its dandelion-colored cushion and watch the silent film that’s rear projected on one of the installation’s surfaces. The silent color video shows architectural details (from the Neutra house in Silverlake), some eucalyptus branches, Dodger Stadium (Chavez Ravine), and other atmospheric shots whose dreamy quality is enhanced by the projection technique.

As the video progresses, the viewer is expected to read along to the script, although the two media aren’t precisely tethered. Rather, the video serves as a sort of parallel and subsidiary visual essay; informed by the script but doing little in return.

The play is by far the most interesting aspect of the exhibit. According to the press release, much of the dialogue is quoted from primary sources that documented actual debates around Neutra’s plan for Chavez Ravine. As such, it’s chock full of the embedded racism and classism that historically, and presently, structures housing in Los Angeles (although without any supplemental text or added emphases, it’s also easy to skim over these elements). As a narrative, it opens a window to forgotten ambitions, all the while gesturing – perhaps a bit too subtly – at the fall-out from the failure of these initiatives.

Los Angeles, like most major cities today, is in the midst of a major housing crisis. In the artists’ predilection for minimalist gestures, they risk aestheticizing real human struggles. For the most part, they fail to adequately address, or represent, the different registers of the past, present and future of this crisis, choosing instead to focus on its intersections with high design.

That being said, despite a few grandiose statements in the press release, the artists’ ambitions were probably not to fully represent the (perhaps unrepresentable) tangle of socioeconomic, political, and architectural factors that together created the present condition of housing in Los Angeles. And, as a quiet meditation on largely-forgotten histories, Past Future Housing merits attention and certainly engenders thought.

Past Future Housing by Morgan Fisher and Karina Nimmerfall is on view at the Mackey Garage Top at the MAK Center in Los Angeles until June 25, 2016. For more information and hours, visit the MAK Center's website here.

This month Archinect is focusing on socially-aware projects as part of our special theme for May, Help. Have projects of your own that are oriented towards creating a more equitable and livable society? Submit to our open call before Sunday, May 22.