NEW ACQUISITIONS AT SF MOMA

On display at SF MOMA are 2 years´worth of acquisitions by Henry Urbach´s Department of Architecture and Design. Highlights include the buildings made of sky.

SCHINDLER

BLOWING UP LAS VEGAS

A young LA artist has designed a new casino for Las Vegas that projects onto its facade the destruction of old casinos. Instead of refurbishing the buildings, condemned casinos are publicly destroyed in a fanfare of fireworks and controlled explosions. This proposal celebrates this final moment and allows the memory of these buildings to live on.

SCI-ARC BAR INSTALLATION

The end of term project for the first year students at SCI-ARC (a hot LA school and student body) is a 1:1 installation for the raised bar. The design process for the on-trend pink/purple plastic forms is displayed along the corridors leading up to the bar, from cardboard maquettes, to colour samples and scale models.





The final installation wraps up the wall and along the ceiling of the bar
Artist Dino Dinco in the bar
View of studios from raised bar

SCI-ARC GALLERY

According to its website, SCI-Arc Gallery is the only cultural institution in Los Angeles committed to exhibiting experimental projects by contemporary architects. Currently on show is the 'Live Wire' installation by Oyler Wu Collaborative, a practice established in NYC in 2001 and now based in LA, that "argues for an expanded relationship between tectonic expression and functional performance". The staircase can be read as a critique of static exhibition spaces, linking the ground and upper level to create movement through the gallery, but the computer generated design divided opionion.

THE COLLECTORS

Cocktails at a house full of art, including a very heavy Louise Bourgeois claw. There was too much to go on the walls. In storage there was everything from Richard Prince to Julius Shulman wrapped up and waiting for a rehang.

CENTER FOR LAND USE INTERPRETATION

This research organisation in Culver City is involved in exploring, examining, and understanding land and landscape issues. The Center employs a variety of methods to pursue its mission - engaging in research, classification, extrapolation, and exhibition. The current exhibition (slideshow) looks at the geographical and social impacts of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline.

SIMON DOES NEUTRA

THE AUSTRIANS: DEAD AND ALIVE

Austrian architects Stefan Rutzinger and Kristina Schinegger are also in residence at Schindler's MacKay apartments for six months, researching repeating objects that can be stacked to create new structures. They practice in Vienna under the name Soma, with a Brasilian architect, and their first project is a tiered landscaping project for a local school.

We drove over to Neutra's VDL Research House in Silverlake, where the austrian architect is now buried along with his wife and son. Tours are given by architecture students from Cal Poly Pomona where Neutra used to teach.
Kristina in her Schindler studio


Work in progress

Entering Neutra's house

A model of the new house, rebuilt after a fire burnt down the original


Neutra's control panel for the house by his bed

Simon Fujiwara, Stefan Rutzinger and tour guide

Back garden


Grave stone for Neutra and his wife

Discrete memorial to son, tacked to garden decking

LA

Staying with artist Simon Fujiwara in Schindler's Mackey Apartments. Simon is on the MAK Schindler residency and creating a new work in response to Schindler's Kings Road House, where the architect lived and worked from 1922 until his death in 1953. Richard Neutra, along with his wife and son, lived in the adjoining apartment from 1925 until 1930.