You See LA: Fall 2015
Five things to see and do around L.A. this fall, handpicked by Greg Lynn
Greg Lynn is a professor in the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design (UCLA A.UD)
Greg Lynn has been an influential figure at the cutting edge of architecture and design culture across three decades. The buildings, projects, publications, teachings, and writings associated with his studio, Greg Lynn FORM, have been influential in the acceptance and use of advanced materials and technologies for design and fabrication. A faculty member at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design (UCLA A.UD) since 1996, Lynn teaches studio and leads the development of the department’s experimental research robotics lab.
Jai & Jai Gallery
Bust
I hate to let you know what you’ve missed but there was a small show, at a small independent gallery, on a small street in Chinatown, that was the best exhibition of contemporary architecture I have seen in a while. It was called “Bust” and it featured numerous Los Angeles architects showing one model each. “Bust” at the Jai & Jai Gallery was refreshing, challenging, and unexpected— all things that are tough to predict and forecast and that must be seen almost by accident. I now know to keep an eye out for exhibitions at Jai & Jai and hope you do too. I’m sorry you missed this one. It wasn’t a blockbuster but it was a stunner.
Jai & Jai
648 North Spring Street, Los Angeles, CA 90012
Tel: 818.319.2957 https://www.jainjai.com
Installation photograph, “Frank Gehry,” Los Angeles County Museum of Art, September 13, 2015-March 20, 2016. © Gehry Partners, LLP, Los Angeles; photo © Frederik Nilsen.
Frank Gehry at LACMA
I could have predicted how good the new Frank Gehry designed Foundation Louis Vuitton building in Paris would be. The experience of the building and the art within it is the opposite of claustrophobic and repetitive. One minute I was focused on art in a gallery space, the next I was between a glass carapace and said gallery looking across a forest at the city skyline beyond. When I saw the retrospective exhibition “Frank Gehry” at the Centre Pompidou — now on view at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) — I found a similar musicality in its curation and installation. The drawings and sketches are installed in such a way as to allow visitors to focus on them without making them overly precious. Grouped into suites, they are well curated to show the incremental transformation of many of the projects—like storyboards of the design process. For the first time in my experience, the models that accompany the drawings are free from the responsibility of showing incremental change; sequential model studies tend to be the default for curators exhibiting Frank’s design process. Beyond the drawings and sketches, other mediums are foregrounded for their impact on the development of the buildings; for instance the exhibition features digital technology that Gehry Partners has used to make exceptional architecture achievable within the constraints of normal budgets and schedules. This technical virtuosity opens up the opportunity to design not just museums and concert halls, but also residential towers, corporate office buildings, mixed use developments, and university campus buildings to name a few. The diversity of both objects and types of projects represented at the LACMA exhibition is astonishing and provokes new understandings of Frank’s work. So many exhibitions reinforce preconceptions, but this is one that might alter yours.
Frank Gehry at LACMA
Through Mar. 20, 2016
Open Monday, Tuesday, Thursday: 11 a.m.–5 p.m.; Friday: 11 a.m.–8 p.m.; Saturday, Sunday: 10 a.m.–7 p.m.
Tickets: $25
Broad Collection
The Un-Private Collection: Designing the Broad
Reinforcing that it is architecture season in Los Angeles is the opening of the Broad Museum and its Inaugural Installation, providing an opportunity to critically view architecture and its relationship to the art it houses for the first time in a new place. The Broad Museum, designed by Liz Diller, Ric Scofidio, and Charles Renfro is a new typology for a collection and its exhibition— with the main space floating above the city, separated by a vast archive space that visitors traverse on their way to view the art. A discussion “The Un-Private Collection: Designing the Broad” with Paul Goldberger, Liz Diller, Joanne Heyler, and Eli Broad is happening at Walt Disney Concert Hall on November 2. Dinner parties and university hallways have been occupied with discussions of the cultural ecology of Grand Avenue, the relation between art and architecture (or lack thereof), the phenomenon of philanthropists building their own museums rather than donating their collections to existing institutions, and the metaphor of “the veil and the vault” used to describe The Broad Museum’s institutional presence in the city; you need to form your own opinions on these matters and there seem to be as many opinions as there have been visitors to the inaugural exhibition so far.
The Un-Private Collection: Designing The Broad
Monday, Nov. 2, 8 p.m.
Walt Disney Concert Hall
Tickets: $15
Portrait of a Man, about 100 B.C., bronze, copper, glass, and stone. The Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Education and Religious Affairs. The National Archaeological Museum, Athens. Photo: Maurie Mauzy / Art Resource, NY
Boy with Frog at the Getty Center
If that was you I heard at the Getty Center’s “Power and Pathos: Bronze Sculpture of the Hellenistic World” walking around repeating, “Why don’t they make sculptures with so much feeling like these anymore?!” I suggest you go straight to the Getty, get off the train, walk to the right, and have a look at Charles Ray’s “Boy with Frog.”
The Getty Center
N. Sepulveda Blvd and Getty Center Drive
Open Tuesdays—Sundays, 10 a.m.—5:30 p.m. (9 p.m. on Saturdays)
Admission is Free, parking is available on site.
Hammer Museum
Catherine Opie: Portraits at the Hammer Museum
I know it isn’t January, but the show I am most looking forward to is “Catherine Opie: Portraits” coming up at the Hammer Museum. Several of our UCLA Arts faculty members share the ability to capture complex emotion without resort to irony—I am thinking of the aforementioned Charles Ray sculpture, “Boy with Frog.” I can recommend Catherine Opie’s portrait exhibition sight unseen as I know enough to predict that her portraits will be powerful, surprising, and most of all transformative. Whenever I see her portraits I leave feeling differently than when I came, and for me that’s what a great experience of art is all about.
Catherine Opie: Portraits
Opening Jan. 30, 2016
Tuesdays—Sundays, 11 a.m. —8 p.m. (5 p.m. on Saturdays & Sundays)
Admission is Free, parking is available on site.