Selections from Beate Gütschow’s S series—her photomontages of monumental urban scenes—are back on view in Berlin.
Through May 25.
Berlinische Galerie
Alte Jakobstrasse 124–128, Berlin.
Beate Gütschow, S series, images courtesy and © the artist. Beate Gütschow: S (2009) courtesy Hatje Cantz.
If [Peter Zumthor’s] new design is built, LACMA can no longer be associated with other encyclopedic museums in the United States that shaped their collections in the 19th and 20th centuries, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Chicago Art Institute, and the Detroit Institute of Arts Museum. Zumthor’s diminished plan would force it to shed the encyclopedic collections that are the very soul of the museum. It commits the original architectural sin of narcissism, of architecture for the sake of architecture.
This let-the-public-chew-concrete moment is all the more shameful because LACMA has gone ahead with demolition just as COVID-19 has taken over the country, state, county, and city, closing down all but essential activities. The administrations of two other museums under construction in Los Angeles — the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and the Lucas Museum of Narrative Art in Exposition Park — have had the common decency to stop construction, admitting they are non-essential projects, and, hence, not worth risking the health of construction workers. Under the phony pretense that it suddenly cares for the public after having ignored public opinion for over a decade, LACMA claims its intent is to infuse (mostly public) money into the local economy, as though suddenly this deeply selfish boondoggle had an altruistic purpose: job creation. — Joseph Giovannini*
As an imaginary counter to what Giovannini calls LACMA director Michael Govan’s “fait accompli,” the Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA accepted proposals from twenty-eight international architectural firms and collections, choosing six final designs in two categories: “Existing Buildings” and “Ground Up.”
The six designs are by Barkow Leibinger, Berlin, with Lillian Montalvo Landscape Design; Coop Himmelb(l)au, Vienna; Kaya Design, London; Paul Murdoch Architects, Los Angeles; Reiser + Umemoto, New York City; and TheeAe (The Evolved Architectural Eclectic), Hong Kong.
See link below for details.
*Joseph Giovannini, “Demolition Under Cover of Covid-19,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May, 1, 2020.
This week, Los Angeles Times art critic Christopher Knight won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles criticizing Zumthor’s design and Govan’s advocacy of it.
From top, designs by: Re(in)novating LACMA, by Reiser + Umemoto, New York (2); Unified Campus, by Paul Murdoch Architects, Los Angeles (2); HILLACMA, by TheeAe (The Evolved Architectural Eclectic), Hong Kong (2); LACMA Wing, by Coop Himmelb(l)au, Vienna; Reimagining / Restructuring, by Saffet Kaya Design, London (2); Tabula LACMA, by Barkow Leibinger, Berlin, with Lillian Montalvo Landscape Design (2). Images courtesy and © the architects and the Citizens’ Brigade to Save LACMA.
The Feminist Architecture Collaborative—Virginia Black, Gabrielle Printz, and Rosana Elkhatib—is “interested in designed ways of being: a woman, a citizen, a patient, a pile of compost. They approach these states as unstable constitutions, taking inventory of the matter and media that condition life under the law, capital, and a protracted hetero-patriarchy. What are the interceding artifacts, devices, and scripts that allow for survival under—and subversion of—such truly busted circumstances? Can we configure other realities from this mess with sharper critique and greater care?”
f-architecture has “sought something truer in fakeness, indulging in its delights (eyelash extensions, fake IDs and fan-fic) while also demanding closer scrutiny of the definitive measures that reify more powerful myths (the nation and how we belong to it, for instance). Self-authorizing identity documents, virginity simulations, and reconstructions of the clinic interior are among the objects of f-architecture s practice in reproduction. “
This week, f-architecture will give a talk at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, “illuminating several recent projects that center embodied experience and demonstrate ways of working through feminist critique.”
FEMINIST ARCHITECTURE COLLABORATIVE—HYMENS, PASSPORTS, AND OTHER COUNTERFEITS
Thursday, February 27, at 6 pm.
Long Lounge
MIT School of Architecture and Planning
77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge.
Images courtesy and © the Feminist Architecture Collaborative.
The comprehensive exhibition CHARLOTTE PERRIAND—INVENTING A NEW WORLD is in its last weeks in Paris.
CHARLOTTE PERRIAND—INVENTING A NEW WORLD
Through February 24.
Fondation Louis Vuitton
8 avenue du Mahatma Gandhi, 16th, Paris.
From top: Charlotte Perriand in the Chaise longue basculante B 306, 1929; Perriand, Agence Air France, 1957, photograph by Gaston Karquel; Le Corbusier, Pierre Jeanneret, and Perriand, Dining Room 28, included her tubular steel chair; Perriand, sketch of house elevation, 1993; Fernand Léger (left), Perriand, Le Corbusier (Charles Edouard Jeanneret), Albert Jeanneret, Pierre Jeanneret, and Matila Ghyka, Athens, 1933; Le monde nouveau de Charlotte Perriand exhibition catalog, Fondation Louis Vuitton and Gallimard; Perriand, Work and Sport, 1927–1929; Perriand, revolving chair, 1927; Dining Room 28 reproduction, Fondation Louis Vuitton. Images courtesy and © Adagp, Paris, 2019, the Vitra Design Museum, and the Archives Charlotte Perriand.
The MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House presents the group exhibition SOFT SCHINDLER, curated by Mimi Zeiger.
The show features works by Agenda, Tanya Aguiñiga, Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, Laurel Consuelo Broughton, Bryony Roberts Studio, Design Bitches, Sonja Gerdes, Bettina Hubby, Alice Lang, Leong Leong, and Anna Puigjaner.
SOFT SCHINDLER participants, through their respective practices and presented works, show the incompleteness of binary ideas in architecture, sculpture, and design— femininity vs. masculinity, inside vs. outside, heavy vs. light, rational vs. emotional—framing such notions outmoded. Each of these practitioners makes non-conforming aesthetics and ideologies manifest in space.*
Through February 16.
Schindler House
835 North Kings Road, West Hollywood.
Soft Schindler, October 12, 2019–February 16, 2020, Schindler House, from top: works by, left to right, Jorge Otero-Pailos and Design, Bitches; Sonja Gerdes, Pie of Trouble. Stays Trouble. Belly on Belly. Let’s Hang. Breathe you infinite. Animal Creature Plant Breath Soul. The Energy Plan. Amorphous Hypersensibility. Do Spiders Breathe? Mothersmilk. The Multiple Amorphous Us. Air For Free., 2019; Bettina Hubby, Don’t Stifle Your Emotions, Appease the Monkey Mind, 2015, and Relax, Etc., Release Tensions Regularly, 2015; Design, Bitches, Drawing Rooms, 2019; Bettina Hubby, The Response to a Hard Edge, 2019; Leong Leong, Fermentation 1, 2019, (2), with fermentations by Jessica Wang and Ai Fujimoto; Laurel Consuelo Broughton–Welcome Projects, Four Prototypes for Los Angeles, 2017–2019; works by, from left, Tanya Aguiñiga, Design, Bitches, and Bryony Roberts Studio; sculptures by Alice Lang; Pedro Alonso and Hugo Palmarola, Choreographies, 2016; Agenda, The Garden of Earthly Delights, 2019. Photographs by Taiyo Watanabe, images courtesy and © the photographer and MAK Center for Art and Architecture.
