Now that the exhibition has opened at the museum's Geffen Contemporary branch in Little Tokyo, where it will limp along through the middle of September as part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents series, it's clear that it is the product of an architectural ruling class in Los Angeles that is not so much dysfunctional as increasingly insular. — Christopher Hawthorne, LA Times
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I find this show to be very captivating and inspiring in showing the craft of new architecture from some of the best firms, not clouded by some overwraught thesis that is more about the curator's ego then the art of building. Hawthorne and other critics seem to have a problem when the focus is not on them.
I wish Christopher Hawthorne and other critics could find a better way way to talk about architecture that doesn't involve segregating capital A architecture from the new hipster talk about bike lanes, etc. etc. I think he doesn't want to admit how he's lost interest in talking about the craft of building.
One pigtailing the other and then pigtailing the other as nothing radical happening after the initial Gehry push. There are some important pieces like Coy Howard's drawings and Michael Rotondi's sketch books. The opening night the lighting was really bad that I didn't see much of the work and opted for socializing. You have to realize though I grew up in this stuff when it start to get going in 70's and 80's as an architecture student at the epicenter, SCI Arc.
Getty funded three-four L.A. architecture shows so far and most of those people in all the shows. That's a lot of hyper curating and "I heard it from the grapevine" for you. They bypassed some important stuff because curators followed the usual suspects and objects. Yes, I agree with the curators that it is not a survey show like they say. It is pretty much a clusterfuck of millenium style spin with a lot of historical inaccuracies and personalization. I can only recommend Sylvia Lavin's Schindler House/MAK Center show, "Everything Loose Will Land" which has some critical ideas and curating behind it. It is creatively researched and curated.
I would wish the efforts leading to a memorable critique of L.A. architecture but there is no C word there among the architect sculptors.
Result..? Some beautiful models, body politics on pedestals, a headless corpse, periodic waxing and revel without a cause..
Sam Hall Kaplan, another great critic added on to the fodder.
http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=6728
Perhaps branding architects as sculpturalists would push the discussion out of the rabbit hole, as Mr. Kaplan said "its architecture as an art only when the architecture doesn't work," this from a 1985 sci-arc lecture recording.
And this discussion should be talked about in the schools, debated among the students and faculty. A silo has been built by these schools, isolating themselves from the interdisciplinary nature of the profession, and propagated by what Hawthorne describes as challengers of conventional practice, now teach at these institutions ascribing to the same conventional practice among the students they call "naive," and lambasting the naive with statements like "why are we always helping people."
Hail the new sculpturalists!!
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