Review SCI-Arc show cleverly tweaks the myth of the all-powerful—and typically male—hero architect
The LA Times reviews exhibition curated by UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Professor Sylvia Lavin
Professor Sylvia Lavin's latest exhibition challenges the notion that postmodern architecture is largely a matter of style and surface ornament, freed from the exigencies of political and technical systems by the force of architectural autonomy.
"Sylvia Lavin, a professor of architectural history at UCLA and an independent curator, has a superb exhibition running through Sunday at the Southern California Institute of Architecture, better known as SCI-Arc. On the opening night of the show, “The Duck and the Document: True Stories of Postmodern Procedure,” she gave a lecture that began with a contradictory sort of disclaimer.
“The Duck and the Document,” she said, is definitely not a SCI-Arc kind of show. Everybody nodded: the architects in the audience, the students, the director of the school (Hernán Díaz Alonso) and the critic in the second row. We nodded because we knew exactly what she meant. SCI-Arc is a school that has shown relatively little interest in history (except perhaps its own!) while focusing on technology and craft — on making new things with digital tools, not analyzing old ones with words or gallery displays.
And yet there we were, gathered at SCI-Arc for the opening of Lavin’s show, which is definitely not a SCI-Arc sort of exhibition. It was a riddle worthy of the show itself, which you might think of not as a single Trojan horse as much as a series of them, nestled one inside another like a bunch of insurrection-minded Russian dolls."— Christopher Hawthrone, May 22, 2017
Read the full article at the Los Angeles Times website.
Read UCLA Architecture and Urban Design Professor Craig Hodgett's review of The Duck and the Document at the Architect's Newspaper website.