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5T H ANNIVERSAR Y YEAR
Also in this issue
• Process: Globe Theater
• lapetia &Torres
• Technics:
l’ Ambiance Collapse
Model Making
Progressive Architecture • p.”ton Pub lo ,.lIon May 1995
‘:’
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THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL
What’s Its Lasting Contribution?
A movement that started with beach cottages and art studios in the 1970s is now
recognized worldwide as an L.A. design trademark. Do its practitioners constitute a school?
What have they actually contributed to their metropolis and to the world’s architecture?
by John Morris Dixon
Metal-clad polygons teeter above conventional rooftops, glassy prisms burst through walls,
raw-edged incisions reveal geode-like complexities. These are some of the archi
tectural delights enjoyed by the sophisticated denizens ofL.A.’s Westside ,
noted around the world for their savvy and self-indulgence.
The architects who produce this fragmented, often
unsettling work constitute an identifiable
group, with enough design char
acteristics in common
to be called a
)mpeti
ws plus
IRIS
THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL: WHAT’S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUTION?
“school.” In his 1993 book Heteropolis
(Academy EditionlErnst & Sohn) the
perennial style-labeler Charles Jencks
speaks of an “L.A. School;’ which he had
identified in the 1980s, but the group’s
home ground is actually just a portion of
L.A.’s Westside, now marked off as area
code 310, centered on Santa Monica.
Of course, none of the leaders of the
group – individualists all – see themselves
as members of a school; there are, admit
tedly, no traditional master-disciple rela
tionships, but there is a more contempo
rary role-model-and-peers arrangement,
with Frank Gehry as the eldest , the trail
blazer, the figure revered by all other mem
bers of the school, even if they pointedly
distinguish their own work from his.
The group has attained sufficient visi
bility in the L.A. area, enough impact on
students, and enough recognition world
wide to invite the question: what are they
contributing to their city and to the com
munity of architects? Are the buildings
they produce durable, workable, and satis
fying to users – even those who are not
patron-clients? Since their influence ex
tends far beyond the narrow area where
most of their buildings stand, are they set
ting an example of value to the rest of the
world? Are they showing the way toward a
more responsive, responsible architecture?
The Place of Origin
To architects everywhere the locale
where this work originated, the few square
miles from Hollywood west to the Pacific,
is known as a place where individualism is
rampant, where image-conscious movie
moguls and agents dazzle each other with
the novelty of their ideas. It is also known
as an area where a benign climate tolerates
fragile, quirky building envelopes, where
awkward gaps between self-expressive
buildings can be quickly filled in with
palm trees and bird-of-paradise flowers.
To outsiders, this seems to be a locale
where a self-indulgent architecture can
flourish, supported by well-heeled pa
trons, with hardly a thought to the social
and economic agonies that plague other
parts of the L.A. region.
At the modest launching of this design
approach, it was applied mainly to the
artist’s studios and beach cottages of a few
art-oriented sophisticates; it was architec
ture-as-art for the low-budget collector.
Like the arugula and the sashimi that were
then becoming appreciated in the same
64
circles, this edgy, iconoclastic architecture
was definitely an acquired taste. Although
this design approach has since become
more widely accepted, it has neverthe
less retained elements of willfulness and
menacing aspects appreciated only by
cognoscenti, thus linking it more closely to
the world of contemporary art than to the
reality of most architectural commissions.
The members of the school. of course,
have been eager to produce more than
playthings for the rich – many of whom
prefer Neo-Nouveau in any case. Like
avant-garde groups before them, they have
not been quickly accepted for larger, more
public commissions. And the cultural pol
itics of the L.A . area have raised special ob
stacles: the Westside has for decades been
set apart from L.A.’s Downtown power
base, as a community open to unconven
tional ideas, to foreigners involved in the
movies, and to intellectuals attached to
V.C.L.A. This is the only part of town
where the word “subversive” might be
used approvingly for art or design. (The
Westside’s liberalism has its limitations,
but it is the place where America’s most
successful African-American architect to
date, Paul Revere Williams, did almost all
his work, and it remains the home of the
first black female Fellow of the AlA,
Norma Sidarek.)
Their Westside identity has guaranteed
the Santa Monica architects little chance to
build Downtown or even at exalted insti
tutions on their own turf, such as V.C.L.A.
or the L.A. County Museum. Not until
1992 did the school’s elder statesman,
Frank Gehry, who had already collected a
major share of the world’s architectural
prizes (Pritzker and others, see PI A, Oct.
1994) win his first downtown building
commission, the prestigious Disney
Concert Hall (PI A, Jan. 1993), construc
tion of which is now indefinitely on hold .
Younger colleagues such as Eric Moss,
Thom Mayne, M ichael Rotondi, and
Frank Israel are still handicapped – as
Gehry long was – by the impression that
this fragmented, angular, variously sur
faced work somehow won’t travel far be
yond the sound of the Santa Monica surf.
The Time of Origin
This school’s emergence coincided
with some important changes in L.A. as
an environment for architects. Architect
Ray Kappe, who founded the Southern
California Institute of Architecture in
EARMARKS OF THE SCHOOL
Willful sculptural forms, colliding or aggressively
juxtaposed, are requisites for school membership.
In Gehry’s Chiat/Day/MoJo office building in Venice
(2; PIA, March 1992), conference rooms occupy
Pop binoculars (designed in collaboration with
Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen), which
rise between two wings of radically different
shape and cladding. In the Bright & Associates
offices (4; PIA, Sept. 1990) by Frank Israel,
nearby in Venice, a muffin-shaped conference
room coexi.sts with other object forms within
an old Industrial shell, a frequent setting f
or
the school’s efforts. On top of a rehabbed
industrial building in Culver City (6), Eric
Moss has recently completed NThe Box,”
a conference room of twisted geometry;
another nearby sculptural incident by
Moss is on this issue’s cover. The Ecru
Boutique interior in Marina del Rey
by Michele Saee (1; PIA, April 1990)
represents the school’s more intricate,
sinuous, and sleek qualities. The
work of the MorphosiS firm has
played complex games with
Euclidean geometries, as
~ demonstrated In the model for
the Crawford house in Montecito
(3; PIA, Nov. 1991). The Nicola
Restaurant in downtown L.A.
(5), completed in 1994 by
former Morphosis partner
Michael Rotondi, sets
fanciful organic forms, all
neutrally colored, within
geometrical matrices.
Pho:os: 1 Milrvin Riln d j2Glan t Mudfofd;
3 Tom Banner; 4 Gr.Ul.t Mudfo:d;
5 ASSC)~s.i Produc tioM:6 Tom Bonner
THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL : WHAT’S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUnON?
Santa Monica in 1972, points out that the
region’s cutting-edge architecture up to
about 1970 was almost always located up
in the hills or in such bosky suburbs as
Pacific Palisades. In the early 1970s, de
sign-conscious clients began colonizing
the “flats:’ the hitherto seedy Westside ter
ritories of West Hollywood, Santa Monica,
Venice, and Culver City. The Santa Monica
school made these areas its arena and
hardly ever broke into the hillier terrain to
the north, even though the affluent contin
ued to build there. Doing much of their
work on narrow infill sites or in existing
industrial structures, they had little oppor
tunity to develop those intimate building
landscape relationships that distinguish
earlier L.A. Modernism. A certain brash
ness of form was also in order, compared to
the horizontality and the harmony of color
and texture that characterized even the
more adventurous of the hillside houses.
It is also no accident that the emergence
of this Santa Monica group coincided with
the establishment of new schools of archi
tecture in the L.A. area . Up to the late
1960s, L.A. did not have schools that en
couraged design innovation with enough
faculty openings to give cutting-edge de-
juxtaposition. This alone wouldn’t distin
guish its products from fragmented forms
generated in New York, London, or
Rotterdam. But the Santa Monica work is
largely intuitive and building-oriented,
not abstract and theoretical. The school’s
buildings typically contain unmistakable
references to vernacular building; con
struction details are likely to be strikingly
exposed, not suppressed. In form, this
work is typically additive in its composi
tion, not based on transformations of an
ideal form, and its components are usually
strongly varied in material and color, as
well as in geometry. There are exceptions:
Eric Moss’s recent work has involved sub
dividing spherical forms, as in his Lawson
Westen house (PIA, May 1993, p. 68).
One salient characteristic of this school
is its virtually exclusive concern with the
present. When Frank Gehry and a few
younger coUeagues were developing their
design principles in the early 1970s, the
issue of Modernism vs. Historical Allusion
was being debated from coast to coast; but
these architects, recalls design critic Pilar
Viladas, were totally indifferent to this de
bate. Nor were they any more interested in
the futuristic projections of teams like
While members of this group are generally liberal in their political views,
their built work shows little evidence of environmental or social concern.
signers an essential income base. The 1967
establishment of the architecture school at
U.C.L.A., in the heart of Westside, and in
1969 at Cal Poly Pomona, in the metropo
lis’s eastern extremity, changed every
thing. When the Pomona administration
failed to support an innovative school pro
gram stressing community resources as
well as academic requisites, dean Ray
Kappe and other dissidents bravely estab
lished the Southern California Institute of
Architecture, in Santa Monica, in 1972. At
23 years of age, SCIARC is now headed by
one of its alumni, Michael Rotondi, and
has become if anything too mainstream
a school that generates faculty positions
and has sent hundreds of graduates into
firms in L.A. and beyond.
Identifying Characteristics
Assuming there is a Santa Monica
School, what are its earmarks? Above all, it
deals with fragmented, fractured, or
folded forms, with abrupt slicing and
66
Archigram in London or the Metabolists
in Tokyo. Their buildings may include
some of the vaguely futurist imagery of
buildings produced by L.A.’s big commer
cial firms, such as DMJM and Gruen
Associates, where Gehry had long worked,
but for members of the school these struc
tures simply joined other contemporary
L.A. buildings as material to be trans
formed by manipulations of geometry,
texture, and color.
The group’s use of geometry and color
was undoubtedly linked to examples in the
world of art. Gehry has ‘long maintained
that he was influenced more by contem
porary artists than by arch,itects, and one
obvious influence is the geometrical play,
based on perceptual psychology, in paint
ings by Ron Davis, for whom Gehry de
signed a studio in 1972. Another art source
is Russian Constructivist painting, for
which Gehry designed a 1980 exhibition;
this movement has appealed to rebels in
every generation. (continued on page 68)
ORIGIN AND DIFFUSION
While not the oldest work of the school, Gehry’s own house
in Santa Monica (7; PIA, March 1980) has become its icon;
it still typifies the 5chool in Its form al moves, but the use of
commonplace components such as chainlink fencing and raw
plywood is now much diminished. Eric Moss’s 708 House in
Pacific Pa lisades (8; PIA, March 1982) illustrates the more playfu l
Pop imagery that he originally brought to the group. The Sedlak
house in Ven ice by Morphosis (9; PIA, March 1982) shows much
g reater subtlety in its geometrica l moves and Its materials palette.
Restaurant Interiors were important commissions for most school
members, and Fama in Santa Monica (10; PIA, Sept.
1989) by David Kellen displays
characteristic forms executed in restrained materials. Josh Schweitzer, once
in partnership with Kellen, applied bold colors to subtly modified cubic form
In his 1989 desert house in Joshu a Tree, California (12). Chicago architect
Joseph Valerio won a competition for senior housing (11; PIA, Feb. 1992) in
Colton, a distant LA. suburb, demonstrating how sk illfully th e school’s basic
strategies could be applied by like·mlnded architects from elsewhere.
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THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL: WHAT’S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUTION?
One characteristic that the Santa Monica
School work shares with some of its fore
bears among Southern California Modern
ist architects is lightness. Like the work of
Neutra and the Case Study architects – and
the commercial mainstream of L.A. firms
– this work has thin, buoyant, often trans
parent envelopes. While it is easy to relate
this lightness to the minimal climatic de
mands of building in L.A. and to the local
conviction that buildings are merely
temporary, there has nevertheless always
been an opposing grollp of L.A. architects
who followed the thick-walled tradition of
the Spanish Colonial, of Irving Gill, and of
Frank Lloyd Wright’s L.A. area buildings.
The competing new movement on
L.A.’s Westside as this Santa Monica school
emerged was the quintessential Post
Modernism of Charles Moore, who was
architecture program head at U.C.L.A
from 1978 to 1985, and his followers.
Although Moore had developed his basic
design strategies in other parts of the
country, the L.A. area was fertile ground
for them; he and his disciples wove to
gether the local tradition of ersatz Spanish
Colonial with elements of retail strip ver
nacular and Disneyland theming in pro
j;ects that cu lminated in the ironically
Baroque but obviously thin-skinned
Beverly Hills Civic Center (PI A, April
1993, p. 98), where the open spaces are
clearly the design objectives and the build
ing sO llids mere backdrops. While the
Moore school work suggests the transient
monumentality of a Cecil B. DeMille
movie set, the Sal1ta Monica work recalls
the backs of these sets, with their ragged
edges, improvised bracing, and accidental
spatial effects.
There have always been two faces to
Hollywood’s movie productions: the up
beat message of films that stress virtue and
heroism and the film nair aspect embodied
in detective movies and thrillers. When
Santa Monica architects display abrupt
transitions and menacing angles – not to
mention a penchant for exposed metal
they are joining film nair visual devices to
their back-of-the-movie-set imagery.
Critic Mike Davis, in his perceptive
book on L.A., City of Quartz, links this
image of toughness to a defensive posture
assumed by affluent Westside L.A. against
the poor, threatening population of nearby
districts; while a siege mentality has been
increasingly evident throughout this pe
riod, there is no indication that these ar
chitects and their clients feel any more de
fensive than those who design and live in
buildings of mainstream Modern or
Rococo inspiration.
The Distinctions Among Them
Of course, not all members of the school
design alike. While Gehry’s work tends to
be intuitive and sculptural, the work of
Morphosis, for instance, has always been
based more on spatial order derived from
grids or other geometrical devices, generat
ing a play between repetition and inter
ruption. The order in Morphosis bui,ldings
is at least as apparent on the interior as on
the exterior, while in Gehry’s sculptural
forms, interiors may seem to be almost
accidental outcomes of exterior form
shaping. Other members of the school are
generally neither as geometrically focused
as the Morphosis partners or as willfully
sculptural as Gehry.
The group’s design also differs in the
degree to which it refers to vernacular
buildings. The work ofThom Mayne or his
former partner in Morphosis, Michael
Rotondi, shows little reference to the ver
nacular, as does that of Morphosis alum
nus Michele Saee. Frank Israel’s work, too,
deals mainly with abstract forms, but often
as interpreted in Modernistic design that
represented glamour in 1930s Hollywood.
Eric Moss initially used a lot of Pop im
agery – ironic gables, supergraphics
which he no longer does, but he still makes
unconventional use of off-the-shelf win
dow frames or other standardized parts.
As Gehry’s dients and budgets have
changed he has largely stopped llsing
chain link fencing, exposed lath, corru
gated cardboard and other pointedly com
monplace materials, but the memory re
mains in unexpected use of materials by
the school’s members – and by architects
thousands of miles from Santa Monica.
There is also a wide range within the
group of intuitive vs. intellectual design
methods. While Gehry presents his work
as the product of an aw-shucks spontane
ity, backed up with characteristically
squiggly sketches, Mayne and Rotondi
present theirs as the product of geometri
cal manipulations, stressing this through
drawings with intricate overlays of regulat
ing lines in plan and section. The intellec
tual in the group, however, is acknowl
edged to be Eric Moss, who ingenuously
cites Joyce and Melville in conversation; in
his work, Moss deals with Jungian essen
68
PUBLIC-ORIENTED WORK
Members of rhe Santa Monica School have foul1d
it hard to get public or Institutional commissions,
and even now their success with such projects
is little recognized. Frank Gehry’s Loyola Law
School on the fringe of Downtown LA . (13; PIA,
Feb. 1985) combined remodeled academic
buildings with inexpensive new buildings to
create a lively intown campus, but one that
doses out its troubled neighborhood;
Gehry has continued to add buildings to the
complex. Koning-Eizenberg made modest
use of the school’s design devices to enliven
scattered-site public housing in Santa
Monica (14; PIA. Oct. 1988). Morphosis
designed ingeniously luminOUS spaces for the largely
underground Comprehensive Cancer Center at Cedars Sinai
Hospital in West Hollywood (15; PIA, July 1988); in this well
functioning facility, sculptural impulses were limited mainly
to a few objects set in a context that is regular but not boring.
Morphosis’s proposed theater (16; PI A, Jan . 1990) was one of
several components designed by the school’s architecls for
the Arts Park complex proposed (and not executed) for the
San Fernando Valley. Eric Moss designed the Cenlral Housing
Office for the University of California. Irvine (17 ; PIA, May 1989),
where expansion In the late 19805 induded works by Gehry
and Moore.
THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL: WHAT ‘ S ITS LASTING CONTRIBUTION?
tials such as universal archetypes and the
collective unconscious, whereas Gehry
more often displays overtly Freudian sym
bolism, as in his recurrent fishlike forms .
Michael Rotondi, since his 1991 depar
ture from the Morphosis firm, which
Thorn Mayne is maintaining, has been ex~
ploring improvisational design, decision
making on the site as the building goes up
(see his CDLT 1,2 House, PIA, Jan. 1992, p.
70). He is also increasingly involved in
projects with a strong social or philosophi
cal agenda, such as a school for a Native
American group in South Dakota or a rus
tic arts camp in the California mountains
(facing page); meanwhile, he is applying
his ad hoc design procedures to the rede
velopment of some industrial buildings
near downtown L.A. for a patron-client
somewhat comparable to the one who has
kept Eric Moss busy revamping light in
dustrial structures in Culver City. The on
going joint client -architect efforts of both
pee ted angles to enliven otherwise homo
geneous envelopes. Even Michele Saee,
who generates a lot of formal activity
within his typically small projects – all, he
says, in the service of the client’s public
image – tends to use rather low-keyed and
consistent palettes of materials .
Of course, the formal earmarks of the
Santa Monica school are related to design
impulses that developed in many other
places during the same period. The most
obvious kinship is to the middle genera
tion of San Diego architects – Rob Quigley,
Tom Grondona, and others – and to some
Bay Area firms, but many characteristics of
this work are simply in the air almost all
over the world. Often the formal relation
ship seems apparent, but the influences are
hard to sort out, as in the housing develop
ment illustrated here by Joseph Valerio of
Chicago; Valerio’s work had already shown
related characteristics before he won a de
sign competition for some Southern
We don’t necessarily want to carryon our lives inside tilted cones
or angular crystalline forms.
architects suggest strategies for urban revi
talization. Although these architects as a
group are known for self-contained build
ings with little urban connection, Moss’s
Culver City efforts, on-going for several
years now, suggest a promising urban de
sign strategy of sculptural incidents inter
spersed in an mundane physical fabric.
Younger practitioners whose work ar
guably places them in this school differ
from their elders mainly in not seeing their
work as art. Having executed relatively few
jobs before the current recession hit,
they’re acutely aware that the market for
freewheeling design experiment is limited.
Such architects as David Kellen, Josh
Schweitzer, Kate Diamond, and the part
ners Hank Koning and Julie Eizenberg all
portray themselves as simply building
buildings to suit the client and the situa
tion. Careful design, yes; architecture as
art, no. Koning Eizenberg are admittedly
at the edge of the school’s influence, with
work that is relatively calm and disci
plined, subtly manipulating vernacular de
sign; only at a few points do they introduce
angular juxtapositions and changes in
color (the only variation some of their
budgets permit). Kellen and Schweitzer
usually get more playful with their forms,
but typically rely on color and on unex-
California housing and executed a project
(page 66) that rates honorary membership
in the school. The partners of Coop
Himmelblau, widely recognized for their
meticulously crafted interpretation of the
fragmentation aesthetic in Austria, have
long maintained an L.A. area office , but
the Malibu house that would have been
their first American building (PI A, Jan.
1991, p. 85) hasn’t been realized.
What Lasting Contributions?
Why has the work of the Santa Monica
school impressed critics and other archi
tects? Why are the group’s members in
great demand to lecture and teach in archi
tecture schools? Why do these architects
continue to attract clients with exceptional
design sophistication?
I think it is because they found a
promising way to adapt Modernism to this
post-dogma era. At a time when Post
Modernism was offering nostalgia tinged
with irony, the Santa Monica group started
with the premise that the present was actu
ally okay. They drew on the abstract formal
principles of Modernism and combined
them with pragmatic local construction
methods in work that is at once lively and
unsettling – rather like an amusement park
as depicted in a (continued on page 112)
FUTURE DIRECTIONS
Frank O. Gehry & Associates design for the Guggenheim M useum
branch now under construction In Bilbao, Spain (19) , shows the
freewheeling sculptural approach the firm is still taking where
the context does not impose strong constraints. Computer
aided design helps make such sculptural forms possible at
large scale, and it is playing a key role for some other
members ofthe school. David Kellen is applying advance
CAD techn iques to shape the exotic spaces of Star City
(1 8), a themed entertainment complex in Singapore
(designed with Jefferson Eliot Concept DeSign ,
Panatom, and Design Team PTE). Thom Mayne and
his firm, Morphosis, are using CAD to generate the
angular “Stealth” contours of the Diamond Ranch
high school in Pomona, California (22; designed
with Wi ll iam Blu rock Associates of Newport
Beach). Mayne’s former partner, Michael
Rotondi, i.s taking the very different
approach of on- site design decision
making, with such projects as the Dorland
Mountain Arts Colony (21 ). The influence
of the Santa Monica School is evident in
work by local architects who have not
had direct affiliation with it: the
prominent new control tower at
LA. International Airport by
Siegel Diamond (20) displays a
sharp articulation of parts, with
overhangs. outriggers, and a
variety of materials rare ly
found in such structures.
PhotO!.: ISfl.rdt:lect’i, 19 Ioshud Whl~.
20 ,oV(“!1f'(1J; r Ai),U~ P’odU(f~
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University of California Press THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL (continued from page 70) Hollywood film nair. There is
_
and h
the Sant
great ap· One of the serious criticisms directed at this body of work i, Another common and justified criticism of this group’s work Younger practicioners whose work arguably places works strove to maintain a kinship. In recent years, of course The near indifference to landscape architecture amon While the members of this school are generally liberal i PIA Ma~[er or ArchitecLUre, Second Professional D\:.’gree
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Circle No. 311 THE SANTA MONICA SCHOOL (continued from page 112) conservation is admittedly not criti In the area of social concern, Frank Gehry expresses relief Yet another criterion on which the validity of this school’s _ principles to local traditions so effectively as to set an example The Santa Monica group has been inconsistent about offer Santa Monica Pros and Cons Monica school? Its drawbacks: it does little to address serious And now for its outstanding contributions: the work of the PIA 12
tioners had long been developing alternative modes
of inquiry. Theoretical projects, as opposed to com-
missioned buildings, had become widespread vehi-
cles of disciplinary innovation, and a rift had opened
between those committed to viable commercial
practices and those dedicated to seemingly antithet-
ical disciplinary pursuits and personal ambitions.
Much of this latter work addressed what
many understood to be a “loss of center” in the cul-
tural milieu, the apparent result of critical attacks
on the foundational tenets of Western humanism
by proponents of post-structuralist theory and de-
construction.4 Critics from inside and outside the
field called the unifying dogma of Modernism in
question,5 and architects set off in pursuit of wildly
divergent agendas. Simultaneously in the mid-
1960s, the Archigram group attempted to recuper-
ate Modernism’s links to technology, Robert Venturi
waxed poetical about his taste for complexity and
contradiction, and Aldo Rossi sought refuge in sym-
bolic forms and collective memory. Within a few
years, Venturi and his partner Denise Scott Brown
had made their way west to learn from Las Vegas
and other Pop and vernacular phenomena. Taking a
more academic approach to signs and signification,
critics such as George Baird and Charles Jencks
sought to establish a new ground for architectural
production in language. By the late ’70s, Léon Krier,
Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter had made compel-
ling cases for the appropriation of historical forms
alongside equally impassioned pleas for a renewed
attentiveness to architecture’s irreducible essence
from the likes of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind,
and Bernard Tschumi, among others.6 Each of these
varied agendas drew strong and devoted followings
whose output atomized the unified approach of
Modernism into an unruly constellation of compet-
ing alternatives for a postmodern world without a
center.
Los Angeles architects of the period were
not immune to this widespread suspicion of ortho-
doxy, and at the Architecture Gallery and elsewhere,
they pursued radical new trajectories. But where
their counterparts on the East Coast and in Europe
tended to characterize the loss of center as a burden
or tragedy, the predominant reaction among South-
ern California architects was a sense of liberation.
Such a response might have been expected in Los
Angeles, which for generations had made a virtue of
its peripheral status with respect to more established
(and establishment) centers to the north and east.7
Since at least the 1880s, Los Angeles architects had
exploited the city’s distance from established cen-
ters to develop idiosyncratic variations on imported
styles, as evidenced by the Newsom brothers with
Queen Anne, the Greene brothers with Arts and
Crafts, and Schindler, Neutra, and the Case Study
group with orthodox Modernism. In the late 1970s,
the city that had perfected the periphery was the
ideal place to speculate on how to organize a world
suddenly bereft of the notion of center.
Concentrating primarily on younger prac-
tices operating outside the commercial mainstream,
the Architecture Gallery showcased fringe mem-
bers of an already peripheral disciplinary culture.
But where like-minded apostates to orthodoxy in
other parts of the world tended to band together in
groups such as La Tendenza in Italy or the Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York,
architects in Los Angeles eschewed such collective
endeavors in favor of the individual pursuit of per-
sonal and idiosyncratic agendas. In his lecture for
the Architecture Gallery series, Eric Owen Moss
articulated his view of the situation: Though he observed that the Pythagorians
and, later, the Russian Constructivists had man-
aged to find a sense of order collectively, Moss saw
no such option available to his own generation: “It
A CONFEDERACY A Confederacy of Heretics examines the explosion
of activity associated with the Architecture Gallery,
Los Angeles’ first gallery dedicated exclusively to
architecture. Instigated by Thom Mayne in the fall
of 1979, the Architecture Gallery staged ten exhi-
bitions in as many weeks by both young and estab-
lished Los Angeles practitioners, featuring the work
of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate, Jr., Frederick Fish-
er, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville,
Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi),
Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Manguri-
an), and Eric Owen Moss. Another young architect,
Coy Howard, opened the events with a lecture at the
Southern California Institute of Architecture, which
hosted talks by each exhibiting architect. In an un-
precedented move by the popular press, the events
were chronicled in weekly reviews by the critic John
Dreyfuss in the Los Angeles Times.
Commonly understood today as a set of be-
liefs or practices in conflict with prevailing dogma,
the word “heresy” derives from the Greek αἵρεσις, also signified a period during which a young phi-
losopher would examine various schools of thought
in order to determine his future way of life.1 These
inflections neatly capture the ambitions and at-
titudes held by the architects at the center of this
presentation. Some had grown weary with what they
viewed as the stale orthodoxies of the establishment,
and saw their work as a distinct challenge to the
status quo. Others were less strident, and experi-
mented with a diverse range of historical sources
as potential platforms from which to develop their
individual idioms. Others still struck out in bold new
directions, drawing inspiration and techniques from
the art world, literature, and other sources. Such
wide-ranging activities defy any attempt to portray
these architects as members of a coherent group
or “L.A. School.”2 More correctly, the Architecture
Gallery constitutes one of many loose, temporary
confederacies into which these architects entered
during their formative years. Here, the heretics
found strength in numbers, and the impact of their
efforts was felt across Los Angeles and around the
world.
Gathering an array of original drawings,
models, photographs, video recordings, and com-
mentary alongside new assessments by current
scholars, A Confederacy of Heretics aims neither to
canonize the participating architects nor to con-
secrate their unorthodox activities. Rather, the
exhibition re-examines the early work of some of
Los Angeles’ most well-known architects, charts the
development of their most potent design techniques,
and documents a crucial turning point in Los Ange-
les architecture, a time when Angeleno architecture
culture shifted from working local variations on
imported themes to exporting highly original dis-
ciplinary innovations with global reach. Taken to-
gether, the exhibition, symposium, and catalog that
comprise A Confederacy of Heretics offer a unique
lens through which to analyze a pivotal moment in
the development of late 20th century architecture.
The Architecture Gallery opened in October
1979, a time when the continued viability of ortho-
dox Modernism was being contested in Los Angeles
and around the world. Not only had architecture by
then witnessed the passing of most of its Modern
pioneers,3 but the tumultuous socio-political events
of the 1960s had shaken the field to its core. By the
end of the ’70s, architecture’s most advanced practi-
t
d
g
n
o 14
Figs. 5 & 6: Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House, 1978. Parts and Assembly axonometrics.
will finally be my opinion that any sort of effort, on
a collective level, is, at least for us, at this point in
time, impossible. These kinds of searches have to be
carried out on an individual level.”9
The wide array of approaches on display at
the Architecture Gallery attested to each architect’s
commitment to his own personal ambitions, and
underscores the inability of any collective label to
adequately account for their activities. Nonetheless,
certain shared tendencies can be discerned. Most do
not encompass the entire group, but rather loosely
organize the participants into overlapping clusters
of interest. A majority of these architects, for ex-
ample, shared a distinctly pragmatic frame of mind
and a willingness to take on commissions, such as
garage renovations and small residential additions,
which more established practitioners might have
considered economically unfeasible or intellectually
irrelevant. Several, including Eugene Kupper, Frank
Dimster, and Roland Coate, grounded their endeav-
ors in disciplinary fundamentals such as archetypal
forms, functional performance, and attentiveness
to the exigencies of the building site [Figs. 2-4].
Many, including Frank Gehry, Frederick Fisher, and
Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi of Morphosis,
experimented with vernacular elements and ma-
terials, particularly in their residential projects. A
critical reassessment of disciplinary conventions
also colors much of the work on display. With the
2-4-6-8 House, for example, Mayne and Rotondi
took a small project as an opportunity to perpetrate
a wholesale reinvention of the conventions of con-
struction documentation. In now iconic drawings,
they outlined the building’s tectonic elements and
construction sequence in excruciating detail, care-
fully delineating even the simplest connections in
an almost comically thorough sequence of axono-
metrics [Figs 5, 6]. In this, the architects slid from
reimagining fundamentals to another common
tendency—the expenditure of unreasonable, even
unnecessary, effort. Craig Hodgetts and Robert
Mangurian’s voluminous production of drawings
and models for the South Side Settlement House
are another case in point [Fig. 7], as are many of the
artifacts in the present exhibition. As Ray Kappe re-
Fig 2: Eugene Kupper, Nilsson House, Bel Air, 1979.
Fig 3: Frank Dimster, Kelton Avenue Condominiums, Los Angeles, Fig 4: Roland Coate, Jr., Alexander House, Montecito, 1974.
t 16
when the city’s architectural community had been
working diligently to raise the level of public dis-
course and to make its activities known to broader
national and global audiences. Through the 1970s,
architectural exhibitions, lectures, and conferences
occurred in Los Angeles with increasing frequency.
And while many of these early efforts would not
broach significant influence beyond the city limits,
their increasing volume and sophistication brought
important attention to highly original new work,
and would prove a crucial catalyst for the Architec-
tural Gallery.
Events often were sponsored by one of the
three new schools of architecture that recently had
been launched as alternatives to established pro-
grams at the University of Southern California and
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The UCLA department of
Architecture and Urban Planning opened its doors
in 1964 under the direction of Henry C.K. Liu, and
from the start took a distinctly anti-orthodox tack.
By the late ’60s, Archigram members Ron Herron,
Warren Chalk, and Peter Cook were teaching in the
program. In 1970, the school launched a Master’s
program directed by Tim Vreeland. Formerly an
associate with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, Vreeland
brought with him close ties to East Coast architec-
tural personalities and debates. By the early ’70s, he
had recruited Kupper, Hodgetts, and Howard, a re-
cent graduate of UCLA’s planning program, as facul-
ty members. Charles Jencks, at the time a rising star
on the international scene, began making regular
visits to the school in 1974.
In 1968, Ray Kappe was invited to lead
an architecture program within the newly created
School of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomo-
na. A victim of his own success (the program grew
from 25 to 200 students in just three years), Kappe
soon came into conflict with the dean over the size
of the program.15 In 1972, Kappe left Cal Poly with
six of its faculty members and roughly fifty of its
students. Twenty-five additional students joined the
group and in September, “The New School,” official-
ly the Southern California Institute of Architecture
(SCI-Arc), was opened in a Santa Monica warehouse.
In addition to founding faculty members Ray and
Shelly Kappe, Ahde Lahti, Thom Mayne, Bill Simo-
nian, Glen Small, and Jim Stafford, Architecture
Gallery participants Eric Owen Moss, Roland Coate,
and Frank Gehry were soon teaching at this unorth-
odox “school without a curriculum.” Michael Roton-
di, who would later assume the directorship of the
school, was a member of the first graduating class in
1973 and joined the faculty the following year.16
These new institutions quickly amplified
the volume of architectural discourse in Los Ange-
les. In 1973, SCI-Arc launched its Wednesday-night
Design Forum lecture series, which drew local as
well as national and international personalities from
the outset.17 The following year, UCLA convened
an important conference designed specifically to
insinuate a West Coast presence into ongoing East
Coast debates. “Four Days in May,” also known
as “White and Gray Meet Silver,” was conceived by
Vreeland in collaboration with Hodgetts, Kupper,
Anthony Lumsden, and Cesar Pelli. The group in-
vited representatives of the well-known ‘White vs.
Gray’ debates, with the five Los Angeles architects
acting as counterparts to the five core representa-
tives of the opposed East Coast factions.18 The Los
Fig 7: SCI-Arc Student Presentations, c. 1974.
marked, “the drawing…almost became a thing in
itself for a lot of these guys. …Robert and Craig
were just drawing the hell out of projects. Obviously,
[this was] not necessary for construction; obviously
not necessary, even, to understand the building.”10
Kappe’s observation is valid, but fails to recognize
the more radical proposition, widely espoused by
younger architects of the period, that buildings were
not always necessary to understand the architecture.
Rhetoric such as this, though part and
parcel to East Coast architecture discourse, was
rare in Los Angeles, where production typically
trumped polemic. Hodgetts, Howard, and Rotondi
later recounted that much of the motivation for their
elaborate drawings and models had to do with the
sheer pleasure of making them.11 Love of the game
notwithstanding, these labor-intensive artifacts
had an additional benefit: they made for arresting
publications. A widely shared ambition among these
architects was a dogged pursuit of local and national
design awards. Particularly prized was recognition
by the P/A Awards, the annual competition held by
Progressive Architecture magazine. Each of the archi-
tects in the exhibition devoted significant effort to
P/A Award submissions, and their projects were
consistently found among the winners from the
mid-1970s onward. Coy Howard later elaborated on
his method:
The way you won P/A Awards is you would
draw like you were a maniac. …All these young peo-
ple were obsessive, and they’re just going to draw
this thing and draw this thing and draw this thing.
They’re so totally passionate about architecture that
[the jury] just has to give you an award.12
As with the theoretical significance of their **
It is important to recognize that the Ar-
chitecture Gallery did not occur in isolation. More
symptom than cause, the events took place at a time
Fig 7: Studio Works, South Side Settlement, Columbus, Ohio, 1976-80. Posters.
t 18
ments, sensitively knitted to their sites and inflected
by Modernism’s hallmark suspicion of capitalism,
remained the norm, and the radicalism of projects
such as Pelli’s Pacific Design Center, Lumsden’s
scheme for the Lugano Convention Center [Fig.
12], or Kupper’s UCLA Extension Building [Fig. 13]
went unacknowledged. Yet in their abandonment of
traditional part-to-whole coherence for ambiguously
scaled figures and open-ended systems, these proj-
ects signaled far more aggressive moves away from
orthodoxy than concurrent work by Stirling, the
Grays, or even—Eisenman’s and Hejduk’s polemics
notwithstanding—the Whites. Unfortunately, the
Silvers would not continue to meet after the 1976
conference, their later corporate works failed to live
up to the promise of early achievements, and the
episode was soon largely forgotten. Nonetheless,
the Silvers made a lasting impact on architectural
discourse in Los Angeles by generating significant
architectural debate—and whetting an appetite for
further conversation—in a city that previously sim-
ply hadn’t had any.24
The following month, another group of
Los Angeles architects debuted in an exhibition at
the Pacific Design Center. Twelve Los Angeles Ar-
chitects was initiated by Bernard Zimmerman and
organized by students at Cal Poly Pomona. The ex-
hibition featured the work of established local prac-
titioners Roland Coate Jr., Daniel Dworsky, Craig
Ellwood, Frank Gehry, Ray Kappe, John Lautner,
Jerrold Lomax, Tony Lumsden, Leroy Miller, Cesar
Pelli, James Pulliam, and Zimmerman himself. Like
the Silvers, the L.A. Twelve had been assembled as
a local response to out-of-town groups (specifically
the New York Five and the Chicago Seven), and its
organizers saw in the Twelve a similar commitment
to mainstream, as opposed to vanguard, practice.25
With projects ranging from elegant Miesian assem-
blages by Ellwood [Fig. 14] to stripped down com-
mercial facilities by Zimmerman and Lomax [Figs.
15, 16] to exuberant residential projects by Kappe
and Lautner [Figs. 17, 18], there was little formal or
stylistic commonality across the group.26 A series
of twelve monthly lectures was staged at the Pacific
Design Center in 1978, but the group had ceased to
meet regularly the previous year.27 Ultimately, like
the Silvers before them, the L.A. Twelve never de-
veloped beyond a parochial phenomenon.28 While
many of the participating architects continued to
produce significant projects (the bulk of them in an
Fig. 10: Frank Dimster for William Pereira and Associates, Houston Fig. 12: Anthony Lumsden for DMJM, Lugano Convention Center Angeles participants, dubbed “the Silvers,”19 did not
present any work at the conference, which focused
on the ideological and stylistic differences between
the neo-Modernist Whites and the post-Modernist
Grays. According to Hodgetts, the event “was more
about putting UCLA on the map, I think, than trying
to identify a group.”20 The Silvers put their own work
center stage two years later when UCLA convened a
sequel with “Four Days in April.” Hodgetts did not
participate, but the group swelled to six members for
that presentation, adding Frank Dimster and Paul
Kennon in his place.
Contrasting their White and Gray coun-
terparts, who pursued highly formalized agendas
through small private commissions, the Silvers
directed their efforts primarily toward large-scale
commercial projects. Major achievements, such as
Pelli’s Pacific Design Center [Fig. 8], Lumsden’s
Manufacturers Bank building, and Dimster’s Hous-
ton Center tower [Fig. 10], for example, each were
completed under the auspices of large corporate
firms (Gruen, DMJM, and Pereira, respectively)
where each architect functioned as design director.21
These and other projects were characterized by slick
glass envelopes reminiscent of recent projects by
Japanese architect Kisho Kurakawa as well as Nor-
man Foster’s groundbreaking corporate facilities for
Willis Faber and Dumas [Fig. 11] and IBM. A vague-
ly English attitude was further signaled by Vree-
land’s invocation of the group’s use of a pragmatic
“style for the job,” a catchphrase previously associat-
ed with the work of James Stirling in the 1960s.22
The Silvers’ unapologetic commitment to
the mainstream brought pointed criticism from
invited respondents at the 1976 conference. Charles
Jencks noted the ironies of what he labeled “sil-
ver-plated capitalism.” Esther McCoy, Charles
Moore, and David Gebhard each questioned the lack
of regional specificity to the work, and John Hejduk
worried that in the presented projects, “high tech-
nology is generally wrapped up in high romanticism,
with the danger that it could lead to totalitarianism.”
Stirling, for his part, saw the work as little more than
“chic packaging,” to which Pelli demurred, “All of
our projects are way below the level of people such
as Stirling.”23
Such criticism, as well as Pelli’s feeble re-
sponse, demonstrates the continued hegemony of
orthodox values over architectural culture in the
mid-1970s. Carefully tailored compositions of ele-
Fig. 8: Cesar Pelli for Gruen Associates, Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood, 1975.
t 20
unapologetically orthodox idiom), their collective
activities generated little of lasting influence.
Two additional exhibitions warrant specific
mention. In January 1978, Otis College of Art and
Design hosted America Now: Drawing towards a
More Modern Architecture, a condensed re-presenta-
tion of exhibitions held at the Cooper-Hewitt Muse-
um and the Drawing Center in New York the previ-
ous year.29 In a polemical catalog essay, curator Rob-
ert A.M. Stern argued that Modernism had favored
“polytechnicians” over poets and had dissipated the
power and importance of drawing by, among other
reasons, favoring conceptual axonometric projec-
tions over perceptual perspectival renderings. For
Stern, the recent renewed interest in architectural
drawing coincided with a waning adherence to the
tenets of Modernism and signaled a shift away from
“the poverty of orthodox modern architecture” to a
far richer postmodern poetry. 30
Though Stern’s critique was baldly tilted
toward his own stylistic predilections, his belief
that architects sought to advance beyond the stric-
tures of orthodox Modernism through drawing was
widely shared. That same January, Coy Howard as-
sembled a collection of drawings by local architects
at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.
Architectural Views: Physical Fact, Psychic Effect fea-
tured works by Richard Aldriedge, Frederick Fisher,
Eugene Kupper, Studio Works, and Howard himself
that went well beyond the representation of build-
ings to mine the medium of drawing for untapped
potential. Howard remembered his own motivations
as follows: Fig. 14: Craig Ellwood, Art Center College of Design, Pasadena, Fig. 17: Ray Kappe, Kappe Residence, Pacific Palisades, 1967. Fig. 18: John Lautner, Silvertop, Los Angeles, 1963.
Fig. 16: Jerrold Lomax, ACDC Electronics Building, Oceanside, Fig. 13: Eugene Kupper, UCLA Extension Building, Los Angeles, 1976. Earth and Sky axonometrics.
t 22
bition demonstrated the radical potential of alterna-
tive techniques being developed in Los Angeles.
By the late 1970s, such wide-ranging
activity had begun to draw attention from local,
national, and international audiences, with in-
creasing interest going to younger practitioners. In
addition to coverage in the P/A Awards, projects by
Architecture Gallery participants such as Coate’s
Alexander house, Morphosis’s Villas Florestas, and
Moss’s Morganstern warehouse received extended
reviews.33 Peter de Bretteville, Hodgetts, Mangurian,
and Howard were included among the “Forty under
Forty” list of significant young architects Robert
A.M. Stern compiled for the Japanese journal A+U
in 197 7.34 In 1978, A+U dedicated the bulk of its April
issue to a survey of young Los Angeles architects
assembled by Michael Franklin Ross.35 As with pre-
vious group presentations, this collection was stylis-
tically and programmatically diverse, held together
by little more than a common desire to move beyond
the International Style toward what Ross tentatively
referred to as a “possibly-post-modern” interest in
“indulgent complexity.”36 Unbuilt projects predom-
inated, though recently completed buildings such
as Helmut Schulitz’ high-tech residence in Coldwa-
ter Canyon [Fig. 24], Moss’s Playa del Rey triplex
[Fig. 25], and Morphosis’ small Delmer addition in
Venice [Fig. 26] demonstrated the viability of alter-
native approaches. For Ross, the work represented
Fig. 20: Coy Howard, Scythian Gold, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 1976.
An array of techniques was on view at the
exhibition. Studio Works hung a neat row of tiny,
carefully mounted pen-and-ink sketches that clear-
ly enumerated the functional and organizational
elements of their scheme for Nicollet Island in Min-
neapolis [Fig. 19]. Across the room, a series of evoc-
ative collages of their South Side Settlement House,
assembled in part from Mangurian’s meticulous
construction documents, offered little in the way of
technical clarity but an abundance of emotional im-
pact [see plate section]. Howard’s work displayed a
similar breadth of investigation. Two carefully inked
images of his exhibition design for the 1976 Scyth-
ian Gold exhibition at LACMA [Fig. 20] contrasted
an enormous and highly expressive perspective
drawing of his Rinaldi house mounted directly to
the wall with long, dynamically arrayed strips of
masking tape [Fig. 21].32 Kupper hung a series of six
axonometrics of his UCLA Extension project [see
pp._ _ _] as well as ink and colored-pencil studies
of his house for Harry Nilsson [Fig. 22]. Fisher’s
large-scale rendered site plan of his scheme for Ma-
chu Picchu also was fixed directly to the wall with
tape [Fig. 23], while Aldriedge’s careful perspective
drawings in ink and watercolor were fastidiously
mounted. In each case, the work on the wall went
far beyond the mere representation and planning of
a future building to stand as self-sufficient works of
architecture in their own right. Far more emphati-
cally than previous presentations, the LAICA exhi-
Fig. 19: Studio Works, The River and the City, Minneapolis, 1976. Sketches.
t 24
glass, galvanized metal, unfinished plywood, and
chain link. Inside, he stripped away finishes to
reveal the bare studs and lath beneath. Formerly
exterior surfaces were recast as unlikely interior
elements, and typical interior spaces such as kitchen
and dining were placed outside the original house,
with an asphalt floor amplifying the ambiguities of
the new enclosure [see. plate section]. The house
represented a bold departure from both modern and
postmodern orthodoxies and marked a significant
breakthrough in Gehry’s development. With it, the
architect established a line of exploration he would
develop over the next decade.
Gehry also used the house to take aim at
prevailing tendencies on the East Coast. In his lec-
ture for the Architecture Gallery series, he joked
that a model of the house made for a 1979 exhibi-
tion in New York was assembled with a deliberate
lack of traditional craft with the express purpose
of “upsetting the people in New York, who are very
precise about architecture” [Fig. 28]. He went on to
articulate a more serious statement of his personal
interests: Gehry’s taste for ‘carefully careless,’ frag-
mentary compositions executed in straightforward
vernacular materials would become a hallmark of
Los Angeles architecture through the 1980s and
’90s, leading many critics to see the architect as a
trailblazer and father figure for the younger gener-
ation. In truth, the relationship was much more of a
two-way street, and Gehry clearly drew off the en-
ergy of his younger colleagues.43 But few would dis-
agree that the house marked a spectacular achieve-
ment for Los Angeles architecture. With it, Gehry
was launched into the international spotlight, and a
parade of onlookers soon descended on Los Angeles’
West Side for a closer look.
Fig.24: Helmut Schulitz, Schulitz Residence, Los Angeles, 1976.
Fig. 25: Eric Owen Moss, Triplex Apartments, Playa del Rey, 1976.
Fig. 26: Morphosis, Delmer Residence, Venice, 1977.
“a restless desire to do something more, something
special, something that isn’t just another repetition
of what has gone before, but in some small way
expands the realm of possibilities for architecture
and for the people who experience it.”37 This widely
read presentation drew significant attention to the
younger generation from outside Southern Califor-
nia, and, despite Ross’s attempts to disprove any
collective ambitions, established the notion of a co-
herent group of young Los Angeles architects in the
minds of many observers in the city and beyond.
By the end of the decade new local journals
such as L.A. Architect, the monthly newsletter of the
AIA’s Southern California Chapter, and Archetype,
an independent effort launched by San Francis-
co-based architect Mark Mack, brought additional
coverage and provided important platforms from
which to broadcast activities and ideas. But it was
the writing of Los Angeles Times architecture critic
John Dreyfuss (1934-2004) that would prove partic-
ularly significant to the Architecture Gallery. Drey-
fuss, the son of the noted industrial engineer Henry
Dreyfuss, joined the Times in 1966 and became its
architecture and design critic ten years later. Of-
ten critical of the city’s Downtown architectural
establishment, he devoted significant attention to
new projects by unorthodox Westsiders in the late
1970s.38 Eric Moss remembers a “genuinely interest-
ed, genuinely supportive guy. …he was open and he
was sympathetic, and he didn’t come with an ideo-
logical perspective. As far as I could tell, he was just
looking for ideas, looking for new stuff, looking for
interesting characters.”39
Dreyfuss took particular interest in the
house Frank Gehry built for himself in Santa Moni-
ca in the summer of 1978, and in a long article in the
Times carefully outlined the architect’s unorthodox
intentions and design process, the house’s basic
organization strategy, and described salient effects
such as the perspectival illusions created by varied
wall heights along the building’s south façade.40
Setting up his readers for a positive response, Drey-
fuss also described a number of skeptical neighbors,
including Santa Monica’s mayor, who had been won
over after visiting the house and learning of the ar-
chitect’s intentions firsthand. Dreyfuss’s article was
the first sustained treatment of Gehry’s house in ei-
ther the popular or professional press, but it was far
from the last. The house was soon featured across
the architectural literature and national newspapers,
and even found its way into People magazine and a
cover story on American architects in Time.41
Drawing inspiration from the work of local
artists Charles Arnoldi [Figs. 27] and Ed Moses,
among others, Gehry wrapped his unassuming
Santa Monica house in a complex assemblage of
Fig. 21: Coy Howard, Rinaldi Residence, Los Angeles, 1978.
t 26
At that time…Bernard Zimmerman, Ray For Mayne, the Modernist project was ex-
hausted. “The people I studied under, Pierre Koenig,
et cetera, that was the end, that was the last group.
…[ours] was a group that was starting to redefine
things.”48 Soon after Mayne’s return to Los Angeles,
an opportunity to publicly stake out alternative posi-
tions presented itself.
Ray and Shelly Kappe took a sabbatical
during the 1978-79 school year, and remained away
through the summer. By the time they returned,
Mayne had organized the fall’s Design Forum
lecture series. His recollection of exactly how the
events came together is vague: “I can’t remember.
It was my turn or they asked me to do the lecture
series—we took turns doing that.”49 Kappe recalled
something more calculated: …I get back and Thom Mayne says to me, That new place had little room for members
of Kappe’s generation. For the lectures, Mayne
chose younger practitioners with the exception
of Gehry, whose radical new projects aligned him
more with Mayne’s generation than his own, and
Coate, with whom Mayne had collaborated in the
early 1970s. Most were teaching at either SCI-Arc or
UCLA, with Dimster and De Bretteville represent-
ing USC. Mayne drew participants from both the Sil-
vers (Kupper, Dimster) and the L.A. Twelve (Gehry,
Coate), choosing the most idiosyncratic characters
from each previous group. The series’ title, “Current
L.A.: 10 Viewpoints,” foregrounded the individu-
alistic nature of each practice over any notions of
shared methodology. An exhibition to accompany
each of the nine lectures was soon added to the
agenda, with Mayne’s sparsely furnished home and
studio in Venice serving as the venue. Coy Howard,
who would not exhibit his work, was slated to give
two lectures bookending the series. Each of the SCI-
Arc lectures was videotaped, and was screened on a
small black-and-white monitor in the gallery.51
By any metric, it was a heterogeneous as-
semblage, and, despite its lack of approval from SCI-
Arc’s director, it seemed to align with the school’s
experimental mandate. Moss later characterized it
as a natural development of SCI-Arc’s unorthodox
pedagogy—and the failure of its founders to fully
deliver on its initial promise:
If you set something up as a departure and
then try to teach something that was no departure
at all…the opportunity for departure manifests itself.
I would say, in retrospect, that these shows would
be a manifestation—the train had left the station,
you know? First you made the station, and then you
made the train, and then, finally, it took off.52
Howard delivered his opening talk—equal
parts criticism of the establishment and poetic
meditation of the nature of beauty—on October 3rd.
Kupper’s exhibition opened the following Tuesday.
The next morning, two articles by John Dreyfuss
appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The first outlined
the series of exhibitions as a whole; the second of-
fered a specific treatment of Kupper’s installation.53
How Dreyfuss came to write about the
shows is unclear. Mayne recalls the journalist con-
tacting him with a request to see Kupper’s exhibition,
and then insisting, against Mayne’s initial disagree-
ment, that he produce weekly reviews of remaining
shows.54 Rotondi, who worked closely with Mayne to
organize the events, remembers a discussion “to see
if we could get Dreyfuss to write about [the shows],
which he did.”55 Regardless of the motivating cir-
cumstances, Dreyfuss’s contribution was crucial.
With illustrations by Times photographer Mary
Frampton and others, the reviews certainly were
responsible for the steadily increasing—and largely
** In the summer of 1978, a 34-year-old Thom
Mayne returned to Los Angeles after a year at
Harvard. On the East Coast, Mayne had collected
a graduate degree and “realigned” himself after
a several years of deep involvement at SCI-Arc. 4 4
Michael Rotondi picked him up at LAX and drove
straight to Frank Gehry’s not-yet-completed house
in Santa Monica. For Mayne, “It was just a startle,
I’ll never forget it. I had been in Boston and [it was]
just dead. I was this L.A. kid…it was an enjoyable
year, but there was just no way I could possibly live
in Boston. …I really had a new appreciation for L.A.
and the kind of freedom I had here.”45
Rotondi and Mayne quickly set to work on
two new projects, a garage renovation in Venice and
a small single-family house in Tijuana. In contrast
to the more stringent functionalism of earlier Mor-
phosis projects such as the Sequoia School (which
had begun as Rotondi’s thesis at SCI-Arc) and the
Stirlingesque Reidel Medical Building, the 2-4-6-8
and Mexico II houses were composed of centralized,
symmetrical volumes capped by pyramidal roofs
[Figs. 29, 30]. 2-4-6-8’s iconic progression of four-
square windows was articulated in bright yellow,
blue, and red, with bands of pink concrete block
running through the base. According to Rotondi,
SCI-Arc director Ray Kappe was not pleased with
their swerve away from more orthodox methodolo-
gies: “Kappe was really pissed off at us when we did
that one because it had bright colors. He thought we
were selling out to Aldo Rossi. …Everybody was just
trying things out. And Ray was Ray. He was a Mod-
ernist, but with an open mind—but closed when he
thought we were giving in to Postmodernism.”46
Kappe’s paradoxical stance—open to
change, but committed to orthodox values—was a
key catalyst for the Architecture Gallery. As younger
faculty like Mayne, Rotondi, and Moss developed
their positions, their architecture veered further
from the status quo of Kappe’s generation. By the
late ’70s, a distinctly adversarial relationship had
taken shape. As Mayne recalled,
Fig. 27: Charles Arnoldi, Untitled, 1971.
Fig. 28: Frank Gehry, Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, 1977-78.
Fig. 29: Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House, Venice, 1978. View from alley.
t 28
ensuing decades. Rather than categorize works
according to individual architects or projects, we
organize the installation according to specific for-
mal criteria which register the range of projective
geometries through which the architecture of the
period was disciplined. Our method re-contextual-
izes individual artifacts as it echoes the mobilization
of counter-intuitive tactics and productive overelab-
oration in much of the exhibited work. Though our
gambit may obscure some aspects of the exhibited
work (including the architects’ intentions), we wager
that any losses will be more than offset by produc-
tive adjacencies more conventional interpretive
schema would be unlikely to produce. Part Three,
introduced by co-curator Ewan Branda, presents
new critical essays by contemporary scholars which
situate the work in current architectural discourse.
Branda introduces the section with themes by which
the 1979 work might be understood from today’s
perspective, particularly in terms of technology. Joe
Day maps the social and professional networks of
which Frank Gehry was a part, while Kevin McMa-
hon places the video documentation of the lectures
within a wider history of video technology in South-
ern California. Patricia Morton positions the work
in the broader context of postmodernism, paying
particular attention to the Architecture Gallery’s
relationship to the 1980 Architecture Biennale in
Venice, Italy, and Paulette Singley looks at Venice,
California as a new locus of creativity. In keeping
with his critical relationship to the original events,
we also include a new assessment from Coy Howard.
All told, A Confederacy of Heretics gathers
an array of artifacts across a wide spectrum of me-
dia. Collected here, these objects demonstrate the
breadth of tactics with which progressive young
architects experimented in the late 1970s and com-
prise a unique repository of nascent design ideas
which continue to sponsor innovative architecture
in Los Angeles. Not only does this collection show-
case some of the earliest instances of the formal,
material, and technical innovations that would de-
velop into the hallmarks of Los Angeles architecture
in the 1980s and ’90s, it also maps still-potent lines
of investigation to be developed—or contested—by
contemporary designers wishing to exploit the
promise of the periphery to imagine new possibili-
ties for a 21st-century world without a center.
non-professional—traffic in the gallery as the weeks
progressed.56 The articles also changed the tenor of
disciplinary conversation in Los Angeles. For the
participating architects, they afforded a heightened
sense of significance to their ongoing experiments.
For the city’s architectural establishment—many of
whom had close ties with the paper’s owners—the
attention, which meant a corresponding lack of cov-
erage for their own output, was cause for concern.
Dreyfuss soon found himself in conflict with the pa-
per’s editors, and after 1983 architectural reviews in
the paper would be taken over by Sam Hall Kaplan, a
critic who did not share Dreyfuss’s sympathy for the
younger generation.
Nonetheless, the buzz generated by the ex-
hibitions would continue unabated into the 1980s.
As Dreyfuss put it, they “catalyzed a significant seg-
ment of the Los Angeles architectural community,
precipitating a steamy brew of respect, anger, pride,
jealousy, excitement, and interest.”57 Dreyfuss’s con-
cluding article, which appears to respond directly to
criticism he received from establishment architects,
outlined an accurate prediction of developments in
Los Angeles architecture through the 1980s. As ar-
chitects in the exhibition—particularly Gehry, Moss,
and Morphosis—rose in significance, many estab-
lished practitioners indeed were “left by the wayside
in terms of being movers and shakers in their pro-
fession.”58 With the Architecture Gallery, the young-
sters emphatically put the city’s greying establish-
ment on notice, and their “obscure, theatrical, and
trendy” output would soon become synonymous
with cutting-edge architecture in Los Angeles.59
** A Confederacy of Heretics offers the first sus-
tained look at this crucial moment in Los Angeles
architecture. Our aim is not to reconstruct the orig-
inal exhibitions, but rather to unsettle prevailing
understandings of this work in order to catalyze new
interpretations and debate. Through the 1980s and
’90s, the “L.A. School” became synonymous with a
visual style of fragmented forms, intuitive composi-
tions, expressive details, vernacular references, and
varied materials.60 As the materials gathered here
attest, such a narrow description fails to account
for the array of individual—and collaborative—ap-
proaches pursued by these architects in the late ’70s
and early ’80s. To further broaden the conversation,
we pay particular attention to lesser known designs
and include several notable projects and artifacts
not exhibited in the original 1979 exhibitions. We
privilege drawings and models over photographic
documentation of built projects not because many
of the exhibited projects remain unbuilt, but rather
because these artifacts demonstrate most dramati-
cally the radicalism at the heart of the Architecture
Gallery. Many of the artifacts collected here have
not been seen since the 1979 exhibitions and are
published for the first time in this catalog.
The Architecture Gallery exhibitions were
small and, in many cases, hastily assembled affairs.
Many of the exhibited projects were underrepresent-
ed, and explanatory texts were often absent. Few
photographs were taken and even fewer records
were kept to document the events. In many cases, a
reliable accounting of exhibited works is impossible,
and a number of original artifacts have been lost or
irreparably damaged. A Confederacy of Heretics cuts
across this incomplete archive in several ways. In
Part One of this volume, original drawings, models,
and other items exhibited in the Architecture Gal-
lery are presented alongside each of John Dreyfuss’s
Los Angeles Times reviews and new statements from
the participating architects. We also include a 1979
review of the exhibitions by Joseph Giovannini, then
architecture critic for the Los Angeles Herald Exam-
iner. A selection of images by Times photographers
Larry Bessel, Judd Gunderson, and Mary Frampton
offers a rare glimpse at the original installations.61
The materials installed in the SCI-Arc Gal-
lery and illustrated in Part Two of this catalog are
assembled with awareness of subsequent develop-
ments and present-day reassessments. As outlined
in co-curator Andrew Zago’s introduction to Part
Two, we include a number of artifacts not included
in the original exhibitions which demonstrate the
unfolding of nascent themes at the Architecture
Gallery into more mature instantiations in the
t 30 The Los Angeles 12,” Architectural “Look Again: Morganstern Ware- 2012. Kevin McMahon has assembled an EndnotEs
1 The theologian Heinrich Schlier Hays, Architecture Theory since 1968 architects ultimately maintained A+U devoted an entire issue to the t 44
BUILDING
( In )THE By Aaron Betsky
BRAVE NEW WORLD
The landscape of Southern California is all but devoid of monu
ments in a traditional sense. In the same sense, it is also without a
clearly defined vernacular. Man has not elaborated the natural he built memorials to his achievements in subjugating
it. The architecture of Southern California exists with nature that turns building into an act either of of natural forces. Instead, architecture here has been Such statements, however, can only be made this city. In reality, Southern California is no Eden for oranges of a post-Descartian architecture from holo
graphic trees nurtured by pumped-in intellects. It is tioners affirm the existing social and economic status small group of mainly young designers tries to figure At the same time, the absence of controlling de history, an untainted natural landscape, or objects
that have become cultural and social focal points, Los Angeles lacks a clear civic architecture. Its from the surrounding office buildings, its cultural almost invisible, pavilions. The so-called civic center
of downtown Los Angeles has only one true focal not at the end of any clear axis, but sits outside of the rounding boxes created in the 1950s to house bureau Reagan State Building, continues this tradition a globular base eaten out by the requisite atrium stage set of civic rhetoric that is essentially hollow:
the tower is empty, and the solid front of the building The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a series of Museum of Contemporary Art is buried in a parking
structure so as not to obscure the view from the sur
roW1ding office buildings that paid for its construction. the Los Angeles landscape: oil derricks, freeway Yet all of these monumental markers are essentially of communication, of marketing needs, or of the foci such as shopping centers turn inward, leaving face the adoring sea of parked cars. Skyscrapers, function, are here cut off from the life of the street,
entered through labyrinthine parking garages, and ing pads on top of all tall buildings. The result is a city But what about the field around these objects?
Wouldn’t the vernacular richness of daily experience In response to the climate, buildings here have a
tendency to turn inward, leaving lush vegetation in city comes to an architectonic response to its geogra grab bag of wholly imported styles, including the in ephemeral constructions that are either torn down
or remodeled before they can accrue memories. There positional patterns that are generated wholly by the block, the fast-food stand, the strip shopping mall.
Yet these building blocks of a Los Angeles vernacu during the 1950s, do not reflect the need of their site. They are created because of economic necessity expressions of the nature of Los Angeles, they are so design , affordable given the tremendous development
pressures on almost every site in the city. The result thered by the continually changing population of the
Basin, which is quickly becoming the most ethnically do not dissolve before one generation has a chance to ment or because of the mobility of its own population. technology. Like all cities, Los Angeles is built on
vast and usually invisible systems of infrastructure of transportation. But where in other cities a bend in the Los Angeles it is the result of the meeting of two
different subdevelopments, and a major intersection memorated in bridges or fountains, but only in the
greenness of lawns. The places where infrastruc focal points in Los Angeles. Freeway exit ramps developments; the arrival of water from the Owens cading down the Grapevine Pass; and electrical spider’s web of sparkling power. Freeways form
street walls at a larger scale, while the military nology is the preeminent definer of the forms of The result of such conditions is that here,
more than in most cities, the notion of an indepen
dent architectural object seems slightly absurd, as and symbols of technology to turn them into a sys
tem of monuments and monumental open spaces artifice, namely their nature as scaffolding, not bility for architecture in Los Angeles. It just
indicates the need for letting go of the idea that uals, or between individuals and nature. The historical place of Los Angeles as the end of the manifest destiny can be constructed , has made
short shrift of the former. true symbol is Watts Thwers, a meaningless monu are left with communities parachuted into the
desert, isolated from each other, constructed from change. What we are left with is a city that will sprawling into an endless sea of tilt-up sweatshops, coalesce into any permanent form that will give it 45 46
spiraling worth of the landscape itself. What we are In Southern California, technology has created hostile environment where you have to learn how to The progeny of this desert appear slightly sur Of course, they are just the buildings or the something more ephemeral to keep them going: the First, the densification of Los Angeles is changing into a dense core. Taken together, these develop wholes in fact intensifies the confusion. It is now Second, this tendency towards post-humanism nature of the evolution of humanity beyond the defini structure of the city. itself as a defining factor. The earthquake faults are tenance for the man-made desert. young architects performing? First of all, they are of the lack of a center, static dividers, or the object living. these traditions, but is also informed by more clas 47 48
the Los Angeles avant-garde.” The other model is the
man/machine satyr, depicted at the end of the first one focused around the Southern California Institute generation of Los Angeles architects. primitives – the Los Angeles branch of a national !’Spanish, stage-set civic centers, except that the
methods of destabilization are here distinctly mod The plot thickens with the emergence of forms down, muscular, and thus more powerful than the Gym and Muscle Beach, except that the client turns This mixture of stripping and acting, the Some of the most creative work in Los Angeles, gram for young architects of a more theoretical bent, Beyond such multiple strategies, many of which
have been adapted at various times by several of the machinery of the city into the image of man, while scape, that glorifies the many machines that are dangerous, their forms promise something beyond The work of the design firms shown here, as surreal, or purely defensive gestures against the nology. Even when such optimism is replaced by the Los Angeles, and through the transformation of the ture can be found , projected, and constructed.
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Greg Lynn
Hernán Díaz Alonso
Tom Wiscombe
Patterns
David Clovers
Jason Payne
Ball Nogues
words Justin McGuirk
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ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t…
1 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM The new LA school is a band of digital revolutionaries. Obsessed with form and technique, this generation of young architects is
milking the city’s resources – from Hollywood to the aerospace industry – to redefine how architecture is made.
In 1980, Domus magazine published a feature entitled “The young architects of California”. Aside from a 51-year-old Frank Gehry
– pictured on the cover with black hair and an Inspector Clouseau moustache – the group included Thom Mayne, Michael
Rotondi, Eric Owen Moss, Robert Mangurian and Coy Howard, most of whom were in their early thirties. Their edgy
postmodernism, showing the first signs of later deconstructivist tendencies, was establishing LA as a place that was unafraid of
new ideas. “Historicism and contextualism are empty words in a city that has no history, no tradition and no context,” said Gehry at
the time.
A quarter of a century later, both that attitude and that spirit of adventure have been revived by a group for whom LA is a place
where geometric, biological and pop culture fantasies can be made real. From the sci-fi baroque creations of Hernán Díaz Alonso
to the bio-engineering of Tom Wiscombe and the hairy architecture of Jason Payne, the city is a breeding ground for
experimentalists.
Most are not native to LA, but migrated here from the east coast or Argentina, many of them after studying at Columbia University
in New York. They all came for the same reasons and in many respects they were all following a pattern set by Greg Lynn. Lynn
saw the potential in the city to start prototyping the kind of work that he had been designing with computer animation software.
The workshops that had grown up in LA around the automotive and aerospace industries, as well as the prop-making and set
design needs of Hollywood, were the perfect resource for modelling his curved and folded surfaces.
Far more than any local architectural vernacular, this is the context that the city offers its young architecture pioneers – hence
sci-fi and blockbuster movie references abound in the work.
Yet, a more specific factor links almost all of the architects gathered in this round-up, and that is the Southern California Institute
of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where most of them teach. Invited there five years ago by architect Neil Denari and critic Michael
Speaks, they have transformed the school into a hotbed of digital design practice, and the kind of place where students are
almost as likely to leave for careers as 3D animators as they are as architects.
In the sense that the protagonists are all friends, all exactly the same age (except for Lynn), and all keeping a very keen and
competitive eye on each other’s work, this is about as close-knit and coherent a group as you can expect to find in architecture
today. However, there are clear ideological fault lines.
To various degrees they are all dealing with new forms, but the question is whether it is for form’s sake or in the interest of
performance. At either extreme, you have the seamless curlicues of Díaz Alonso and the performance-focused experimental
structures of Wiscombe. Then there are those such as Patterns and Jason Payne, who are playing with the translucent or tactile
qualities of materials in search of holistic sensory experiences. Finally, on another fringe is the more alternative practice of Ball
Nogues – a slight anomaly here – which uses digital modelling software only as a precursor to a more craft-based sensibility.
Unlike their predecessors, this generation is not honing its skills on extensions and houses. Instead, it creates exhibition
architecture (pavilions and installations), it collaborates on motion graphics projects and produces concept pieces for mobile
phone and car companies keen to keep tabs on the marketing potential of radical design. The difficulty that this generation faces
is making buildings.
It is one of the cliches of both LA’s art and architecture scenes that they possess a Wild West, frontier mentality. And it is with a
clear pride in that attitude that the architects leave themselves wide open to attack. Needless to say, a lot of this work turns
stomachs in the sensitive and “civilised” circles of Europe, where it looks like aesthetic hysteria. By trading typologies for
topographies, is it rejecting an essential human quality in the work? How desirable is an architecture that pushes formal
boundaries but doesn’t care how it relates to the city? Is geometry content? And what will these buildings look like in the flesh?
These are important questions, but they don’t outweigh the feeling that one of architecture’s conceivable futures is germinating in
LA. This group of architects, as the modernists did in the last century, is pushing industrial technology to its logical conclusions –
it’s just that in this case the technology is not coming from within architecture but from industries that are advancing far more
rapidly. Instead of relying on the standardisation of conventional construction, they are forging a world of genuinely customised
architecture. There is no doubting the ambition of the agenda or the work, nor the fact that it is both exciting and scary.
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t… 2 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM Greg Lynn Greg Lynn is the crucial character in this story, and the pivot around which most of the architects in it revolve. As one of them put
it, “He’s the godfather… except he’s too young to be called that.” At 42, Lynn is only five years older than most of this group, and
yet he might as well be another generation – for starters, he taught several of them and it was his example they were following in
migrating from the east coast to LA. He essentially set the pattern for this generation, coming up with the theory and language
they use, and the cross-disciplinary collaborations they engage in.
What distinguishes Lynn from his protégés, for now, is that he is the complete article – everything from theorist, computer geek
and network-maker to built architect and product designer. After working in Peter Eisenman’s office, he set up Greg Lynn FORM in
Hoboken, New Jersey, but several factors attracted him to LA: the art scene, the entertainment industry, the fact that giant
corporate practices are less dominant here than in New York or Chicago. The key motive, however, was the concentration of
aerospace and automotive design studios in the city, and the potential they offered to prototype his digital designs.
“What better place to pursue architecture and its popular implications than Los Angeles? I believe the city is more dedicated to the
popular imagination than to high culture. I mean, this sci-fi dedication belongs here.”
In his studio in Venice, Lynn shows off his CNC router and rapid-prototyping machines. Although it is grounded in complex
geometry and the will to fashion buildings out of curves and continuous surfaces, everything Lynn does is defined by the tools he
uses. Countering standard typologies with freestyle, pliable surfaces, Lynn’s forms have their own logic, stemming from forces and
geometries generated in computer animation. In the late 1990s he coined the term “blob”, or at least applied it to architecture from
computer modelling, where it was an acronym for Binary Large Object (the word also explicitly referenced B movie science fiction).
Since then he has extrapolated a whole lexicon, from “blebs” to “shreds”, but they won’t necessarily help you understand why his
design for the Ark of the World museum in Costa Rica looks like a man-eating plant hiding under a doily. “People call it biomorphic
but I was never that interested in organic design. I’ve always been more interested in popular culture. The Costa Rica thing looks
like a plant but that’s because it’s in a jungle.”
Endowed with a natural experimental streak, Lynn was the first to use aerospace fabrication techniques and to collaborate with
motion graphics studios such as Imaginary Forces – both now regular collaborators with local architects. In one of his current
projects, he is designing an online city for eight billion people to be rendered at cinema quality.
For Lynn, the big debate in architecture is between form designing and form finding – the latter being “parametric” design, based
on feeding statistics into the computer. “I blame it all on Rem [Koolhaas]. The problem is that schools are teaching Rem – even
though Rem doesn’t do what he says he does – and the teachers don’t really understand computers so they encourage students
to just punch in data and design around the [building’s] programme. It’s really limited.” To Lynn, this is a wimpish cop-out, and he
clearly finds some solace in the fact that the LA scene is made up of “designers” and not “form finders”. If he has any criticism of
his younger colleagues it is that they are following too closely in his footsteps. “What I am critical of is that none of these guys has
got their own Imaginary Forces. There are dozens of younger motion graphics companies who would love to be involved with
them, but they’re going with what they know.”
Hernán Díaz Alonso 3 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM Hernán Díaz Alonso looks, talks and acts like a swaggering bandido but designs like a nerdy child prodigy with a science fiction
fetish. His practice, Xefirotarch, represents the extreme end of the work coming out of LA in the sense that his designs are
self-consciously, operatically visual – and he is totally unapologetic about it. “I’m only interested in form. For me, form follows form.
That doesn’t mean that what we do doesn’t function, but function is never a driving force of the work, it’s just something that
needs to be accommodated. I’m interested in how the form reorganises how you would use it.”
Díaz Alonso’s rhetoric is actually very clever, not least because it has made him perhaps the most high profile of LA’s younger
generation, and has attracted a number of conceptual commissions from corporate marketing departments. Although his only built
work is the 2005 installation at PS1 in New York, and most of his time is spent on exhibition architecture and teaching, he does
actually have two clients: one for a house outside Paris and the other for an artists’ community in the Dominican Republic.
Born in Buenos Aires, Diaz Alonso wanted to be a film director but the film school had shut down so he studied architecture
instead, and felt good about the choice when he saw the catalogue for the Deconstructivist Architecture show at MoMA in 1988.
But he maintains that his work has a “cinematic logic” driven by computer animation software, and he frequently collaborates with
motion graphics firm Imaginary Forces. “My influence is more blockbuster movies. Tim Burton is a gigantic influence on me – he
blows my mind – but also Guillermo del Toro, the first Matrix, Bladerunner … I love vampire movies, especially the first Blade.”
This sci-fi aspect is more than an aesthetic, however. Díaz Alonso talks about his designs in terms of species, genetics and
artificial mutation. But, evident in the way that his baroque forms deliberately skirt the grotesque, the painter Francis Bacon was
also a profound influence. Like Bacon, he is comfortable with the uncomfortable, and has the provocateur’s knack of laying claim
to the language you might use to criticise him before you do.
Interestingly, Díaz Alonso has lost competitions for not emphasising his process enough, but again he is unrepentant. “I don’t mind
showing the process, but as an act of god,” he says. A veteran of Enric Miralles’ office, Díaz Alonso has adopted the Catalan
architect’s practice of seeing the process as an “autopsy”. “You do it and then you try to understand exactly what happened to go
to the next one. There’s a certain notion of surrealism that operates in the work. It’s more like the emotional state that you want it
to produce.”
Some of Díaz Alonso’s talk is clearly posturing. Another Columbia graduate and Peter Eisenman apprentice, he is well versed in
conceptual procedures. Furthermore, his designs are buildable (“they just cost five or six time more than clients are willing to
spend”). All Díaz Alonso is missing is some pragmatism. Asked at what point he might compromise for the sake of actually building
something, he replies: “Never! Zaha stuck to her guns, and six or seven years ago she’d only built a restaurant in Japan. Now
she’s taking over the world.”
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t… 4 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM Tom Wiscombe Tom Wiscombe makes architecture by combining the skills of the biologist and the engineer. His work is driven by a concern for
structural performance, but he is not averse to some theatrical form-making. He wants a roof to soar, but in the lightest, most
efficient way possible – and he is likely to find the solution in a dragonfly wing.
Wiscombe founded his practice, Emergent – which, incidentally, is a word that has often been applied to this kind of work because
of its focus on emerging technologies – in 1999. However, his career has been largely shaped by his 12-year, ongoing
collaboration with the Austrian practice Coop Himmelb(l)au, under the mentorship of its principal, Wolf D Prix.
The walls of his small studio on Wilshire Boulevard are pinned with pictures of bat wings, water lilies and even the art nouveau
forms of Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro. But these are just pictures – what interests Wiscombe is not the forms but the underlying
structures. In a recent installation at SCI-Arc, he created a giant aluminium cantilever that mimicked a dragonfly wing’s
composition of long beams connected by a honeycomb membrane. “It’s not attempting to look like a dragonfly wing but operate
like one,” he says. “Biology never has the perfect solution, but engineering plugged into biology does.”
Sometimes called “bioconstructivism”, Wiscombe’s work uses parametric software to find elegant structural solutions, and he sees
the results as a form of natural selection or genetic mutation. “Engineering is no longer about the analogue problem solving, it’s
generative. You can grow populations of solutions and breed them.”
In 2003 Emergent won the PS1 Urban Beach installation – a programme that has proved a launch pad for three of the practices
gathered in this overview. The wing-like creation looked more like the result of aerospace engineering than the biological research
he deals with today. Although this remains its only built work, the practice is increasingly finding itself on major international
competition shortlists, and this year narrowly missed out on winning the Prague National Library.
Despite the Austrian connection, Wiscombe is an obvious product of the LA architectural climate. “My work is global but it couldn’t
be anywhere; the community here has a huge impact on what you’re doing. Teaching together is really important, we all sit in on
each others’ reviews, and by disagreeing with each other we move things forward.” While not critical of any of his LA
contemporaries – the local scene is too mutually supportive for any real dissonance – Wiscombe hints that he finds some of the
work meretricious. “We need to get away from digital work that’s just about surfaces,” he says. What’s more, he is not waiting for
clients’ tastes to catch up with his talent. “I’m not interested in being a provocateur in the architecture community.
I like working in the world. We’re coming to the end of an age now where ego is a driver of the profession – we’re peaking now
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t… 5 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM with Zaha and Gehry. There are new issues that are not about the hero, like sustainability, culture and process.”
Patterns Patterns is the practice of Argentinian-born Marcelo Spina and Georgina Huljich, whose office is on Hollywood Boulevard (above
Marlene Dietrich’s star). The name is misleading at first, since of this group they are perhaps the most interested in the practical
and traditional aspects of architecture as opposed to form-making. The patterns that concern them are the behavioural ones
found, for instance, in repetitive structural systems. These result in weird prototypes that evoke both car chassis and close-ups of
reptile skin. Although they are essentially sculptural – Spina reveals the influence of British sculptors Richard Deacon and Tony
Cragg – a good deal of research goes into them and they have the potential to turn into monocoque structures.
Spina studied at Columbia and then worked for Reiser and Umemoto in New York, while Huljich worked for Thom Mayne’s
Morphosis. Moving to LA to teach at SCI-Arc, Spina was sceptical about the city’s architectural establishment. “Somehow I was
always critical of the LA school,” he says. “As much as I respect the work of Frank [Gehry] and Thom [Mayne], I like work that is
not in your eyes all the time. I’ve always been related more to European practices – Alvaro Siza was very influential to me.”
Patterns’ experimentation with materials expresses one of the practices main concerns. “We’re interested in the physicality of the
object, how you would touch it and what kind of surface you would get – both at the level of proto-architecture and building. We
see the prototypes as work – they carry their own formal message. We also see them as vehicles for exploration and research.”
Resin-based variations of fibreglass, super-plastics and new forms of concrete are cast or vacuum-formed into prototypes that can
serve as both skin and structure. Translucent and sometimes even gelatinous surfaces are exploited to create subtle variations in
experience.
“I like work that is sensation making but not necessarily sensational,” says Spina. “I’m not interested in the new, but in inflections
of things you already understand. Then there’s a deeper sense of effect that can be produced. We’re not interested in creating a
blob, or something ‘other’.”
The practice is currently designing the SCI-Arc cafe, which the architects are merging in a fluid way with the adjacent library’s
bookcases, so that shelves morph into tables and chairs. But more importantly, given the challenges their contemporaries are
facing, the architects actually have a building underway on Sunset Boulevard. The shopfront, which doesn’t fight the fact that the
building is just a box, is panelled in translucent resin-based polycarbonate that torques into a set of gill-like windows, introducing a
voyeuristic aspect that Spina describes as “like looking up a girl’s skirt”.
“Site specificity and context are words that are old-fashioned these days,” he says, tellingly. “In LA you’re not supposed to care,
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t… 6 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM and I totally disagree with that. This is not gratuitous.” Less rhetorically inclined than some of his friends, Spina sees the
constraints of programme and context as invaluable. “The more close we are with that kind of conflict the better the project is in
our view.”
Patterns is also hugely reliant on the local fabrication culture, collaborating with, for instance, Warner Brothers’ set design studio
to vacuum-from the components of the SCI-Arc cafe. “In Los Angeles, especially at SCI-Arc, there is a tradition of fabrication that
forces you to get even closer to materials and certain technicalities of built assembly. The tools are here and the advanced
manufacture companies are here because of the movie industry, the car industry and the remains of the aerospace industry.”
David Clovers David Clovers is another practice that combines the experimental nature of installations with the pragmatics of large-scale
architecture projects. Only founded earlier this year, it is already building 30 houses in Beijing – a capacious job for a couple
whose references would suggest a more arthouse output.
David Erdman was formerly of interactive and multimedia design group Servo, while Clover Lee joined him from LA firm Hodgetts
and Fung. Similarly to Patterns and Jason Payne, their work is preoccupied with sensory effects, whether that involves light, fog
or tactile materials. A proposal for a perimeter screen at the Schindler House in West Hollywood resembles a glowing sea
anemone that spouts water and fog. “We work with this fullness to produce an effect of mysteriousness, adding other orders or
matter into the architecture as a means of making it less legible and more full as an experience and an environment,” says
Erdman.
While they have collaborated with the Warner Brothers workshop and custom car manufacturers, as others have, there is no
sense that this is in any way glamorous. “I see it as very prosaic,” says Erdman. “To call it our interaction with ‘the film industry’
sounds a bit too heroic. It’s really the prop industry we’re working with. That’s why you see a moodiness and drama in the work,
and why it errs on the side of the cosmetic – in a good way.”
The Beijing houses, part of a scheme to create an entire artists’ district, are all variations of one original typology in which most of
the light is funnelled in through the roof. The designs are simple yet inscrutable, and their ambiguity is a quality that the practice
strives for, in distinction to the complexity of some of their local counterparts.
“We don’t necessarily look to architects, because when it comes to integrating multimedia technology other disciplines are a lot
further ahead, such as industrial designers or filmmakers or artists,” says Lee. In fact, the couple cite an unusual list of references,
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t… 7 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM from Matthew Barney to The Talented Mr Ripley (“a character who is entirely translucent and murky”) and Jack Black from the
Pirates of the Caribbean. Somehow these are references that could only be taken seriously in the relaxed intellectual climate of
LA.
That atmosphere has also applied to the sharing of technology – an ethos established early on by Frank Gehry’s use of CATIA
modelling software. “What’s nice about LA is that everybody feels comfortable sharing information,” says Lee. “The East coast is
obsessed with the technology and it’s treated as almost proprietary secrets. ‘I have a fabricator who does this but I’m not going to
tell you about it because then you could do the same thing I can.’ There’s a different attitude about it here, which is: I can still do
something innovative as long as I have a unique idea.”
Jason Payne Jason Payne is operating on the extreme fringe of the digital LA scene. Although he has a similar intellectual provenance to
Hernán Díaz Alonso or Marcelo Spina (he is a former Columbia University graduate who worked at digital architects Reiser
Umemoto and now teaches at UCLA), he has pushed his work away from concerns with the image towards the tactile and sensual
properties of materials.
He says his move from New York to LA was prompted less by the desire to see his designs prototyped than to see how they
would be changed by becoming material. The result is that his interest in curved and complex forms has been overtaken by an
obsession with… hairiness. It all began with computer-generated particle animations that looked like tangled masses of hair. “So
then I thought, wouldn’t it be amusing if I could somehow theorise hair in architecture… We started doing stuff that was in the
beginning organisationally hairy and then ultimately literally sticking hair on projects. What I found was that people were taking it
more and more seriously.”
Payne recently split with former partner Heather Roberge, with whom he ran a practice comically titled Gnuform (the gnu is a hairy
yak-like animal), and set up on his own under the similarly apt rubric Hirsuta. His current projects include a Taurus-shaped house
in Malibu and a house in Utah.
Payne’s most complete expression to date (one of Gnuform’s projects) is a bar and reception area for cable television channel No
Good TV. A total sensual experience, the bar is a curved and folded form in plastic with black rubber mounds for squeezing and
crevices lined with red fur. Beyond sexual allusions to some of the channel’s erotic material, the bar embodies Payne’s interest in
the tactile potential of architecture. “[Professor] Jeff Kipnis called it a new phenomenology but I’m still a bit troubled by the term
phenomenology so I call it sensate work because it’s meant to appeal very directly and overtly to the senses, and especially the
non visual – mostly the tactile but also in some cases smell.”
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 | October 2007 … http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t… 8 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM Ball Nogues Ball Nogues is in some ways the exception on this architectural tour. Although partners Benjamin Ball and Gastón Nogues are
digital practitioners, the two former SCI-Arc students belong to the school’s earlier tradition of making things by hand. Theirs is a
craft sensibility in which the forms happen to be generated by parametric modelling. However, what they have in common with a
number of the practices here is the desire to create a rich sensory experience.
Working out of a graffiti-covered garage in Echo Park, the pair may play the part of the alternative-scene hipsters but this year
they built the annual Urban Beach installation at PS1 in New York, really the only significant platform for young architects in the
US. And while Ball’s background is in set design for the film industry, Argentinian-born Nogues spent ten years working for Frank
Gehry. “What I took away from Gehry was a sense of exploration and discovery through playing – it was pretty amazing watching
him work,” says Nogues. Ironically, Ball does most of the computer modelling.
Ball Nogues’ work draws on an interesting range of references, from the super-light structures of engineer Frei Otto to, naturally,
Hollywood movies. An early work, Maximilian’s Schell (named after the actor), simulated a black hole-like structure out of
translucent golden mylar petals. Like the tent-shaped accretions at PS1 this summer, every piece was unique, calculated on the
computer before being numbered and assembled. The petals sit somewhere between Gehry’s beloved fish scales and village fete
bunting. “Part of that is a reaction against the minimalist surface, that real tiny thin surface of just material, and to create an effect
by the way that the light comes through and filters and reflects,” says Nogues.
Nogues says the language is based on nature but the practice clearly has none of the theoretical pretensions of its local
counterparts. A cardboard installation at Rice University in Houston earlier this year (icon 043) alluded to images from American
landscape painting but was essentially a beautiful climbing frame. “We wanted people to have a very child-like attitude of
exploration, letting them climb all over it.”
Regardless of the computer modelling, it is the collaborative act of building, which they invest with an almost performative quality,
that seems most important. Though still operating at the level of installation architecture, they aim higher. “We both have an
ambition to make buildings,” Nogues says. “We just have to have somebody that wants to make a building the way that we want
to make a building.”
images Monica Nouwens
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Architectural Change in Late
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Circle No. 314 on Reader Service Card 112
peal in their work’s sense of liberation and abundance, spikea
with elements of irrationality and instability.
that its sculptural preoccupation takes precedence over tht
shaping of effective interior spaces. We don’t necessarily want t
carryon our ‘lives inside tilted cones or angular crystalline
forms. Like many other 20th-Century architects, these Santa
Monica architects can miscalculate badly when it comes to inte·
rior proportions, daylighting, or any of the qualities that make
room pleasing to be in. Mayne, Rotondi, and their followers, a
noted, design with more consciousness of interior volumes, bu;
their geometrical order can generate inescapable cagelike ef·
fects. All of the leaders of the school, however, have produce
some interior spaces that are both inspiring and well suited t
their purposes – the dramatic, luminous galleries of Gehry’
Vitra Museum, for instance (PI A, May 1990, p. 94), or the reas·
suring volumes of Morphosis’s Cancer Center (p. 69) .
is that it is self-contained, with little apparent sympathy either
for urban neighbors or for exurb an landscapes. This genera
weakness is obviously related to the setting of the school’s semi
nal works – along with their offices and their principal teaching
posts – in the flat, haphazardly developed portions of L.A .’
Westside. And, rather than asserting their superiority to the re
tail strips and “dumbbell” apartments of this territory, their
them in this school differ from their elders mainly in
not seeing their work as art.
Gehry has found himself working in some settings – notably if”
Paris (PI A, June 1994, p. 27) and in Prague, (PI A, Jan. 1995, p
25) where uncurbed individualism just would not do
has developed some elegant contextual responses, without sub·
merging his formal inventiveness; in other situations, he sti
finds sharp sculptural juxtapositions to be the answer (pages T
and 72). Meanwhile Eric Moss, doing a series of interventions i
an existing fabric has, as noted, worked out an instructive inci·
dent-in-context strategy (page 65 and cover).
members of this group is cited by David Gebhard, the architec·
tural historian who has repeatedly updated his definitive guid
to L.A . Architecture. In contrast to a strong tradition of subtl
indoor-outdoor relationships in the L.A. area – from Greene
Greene through Richard Neutra to the present
Monica stars give only routine treatment of the open spac.
around their buildings, where there is any (in the larger hous
or campus buildings by Gehry, for instance) with virtually nl
porches, courtyards, or any such mediating elements. In their
recent work, however, both Mayne and Israel show substantia.
efforts to nestle their structures into the terrain in ways tha
members of this school have not previously tried.
their political views, their built work shows little evidence of en
vironmental or social concern. Energy (continued on page 114
b opl.’n to qualified swden ts with a first prof ssiun:d
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114
cal in the balmy climate around Santa Monica – even less so
than a few miles inland – but the modest amount of the school’s
work elsewhere exhibits the same kind of convoluted volumes.
There is no question that fragmentation and exaggerated artic
ulation of form are harder to justify in the harsher climate of,
say, Minneapolis, where Gehry has done two substantial build
ings (PIA, Dec. 1987, p. 60, and Feb. 1994, p. 24).
that he has finally landed a subsidized housing commission – in
Frankfurt – but Koning Eizenberg have been applying some ot”
the school’s design principles to a social center, an SRO, and
some fine housing (page 69). Other good housing architects,
such as John Mutlow in the L.A area and Davids Killory in San
Diego, show a free use of form and color that has some sympathy
with the Santa Monica mode, and Midwesterner Joseph Valerio
adapted related forms in a local housing complex (page 66).
work can be tested is the adaptability of their design approach
to other regions. Shorn of their regional connections, his works
look even more ,like overscaled sculpture than they do in L.A. ;
no wonder a faculty member of the Toledo Center for the Visual
Arts (page 72) refers to the building as “a GehrY:’ In his Paris
and Prague buildings, however, Gehry has wedded his design
for the host country.
ing intellectual underpinning for its work _Gehry’s plays on the
psychology of perception have more to do with art that he ap
preciates than with written theory. Mayne and Rotondi make
intellectual documents of their intricate drawings. Only Moss
makes a point of relating his work to theoretical debates in the
world beyond L.A. One could argue that some of the group’s
sado-masochistic imagery of iron hardware and corroded
parts, which peaked around 1990, gave their work more gravity
in academic circles_ Now a formal device of subtle, obtuse
angled folding is seen in new projects by Mayne and Israel; both
refer to this as “Stealth” imagery, as in the military aircraft, but
on buildings these angles look more gentle than menacing.
How then to summarize the contributions of the Santa
environmental, energy conservation, or social concerns; with
some notable exceptions, its buildings are isolated from their
context; it can produce some mean interior spaces. A qualified
advantage: its principles can be adapted brilliantly to distanl
settings, but in very few instances so far – almost all by Gehry
Its clearcut advantages: the approach is adaptable to ordinar~
building techniques and to low-budget commissions.
school verifies that today’s architects can still be inventive, tha
freedom from convention can be positive; its diverse forms ana
textures could be said to express the pluralism of our society
along with the dynamism and the liberation from hierarchy We
would like it to have. Working in a period of doubt and nostal·
gia, these architects have encouraged all of us – architects, crit
ics, and the public – to ponder the potential of innovative form
making to enrich our lives.
The problem that we face in doing architec-
ture and in defining ourselves for ourselves
is, finally, a personal and individual one.
There have been many, over eons of time,
who have attempted to deal with that kind
of fundamental irrationality in a collective
sense, to try to develop an order, an under-
neath, a platform which seems to make the
finitude of the individual a little bit more
palatable and coherent and intelligible, to
define a context which is broader than the
individual and which will support and in
fact ameliorate the problem.8
OF HERETICS
todd Gannon
meaning “choice.” In classical antiquity, the term
o
d
a
n
n
1980.
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
work, most of the architects downplayed
the promotional aspects of their activities.
Howard’s recollections are typical: “…every-
body probably saw it differently. I didn’t do
[drawings] for the P/A Awards. I mean, I did
them and then used them in the P/A Awards,
but I didn’t do them for the P/A Awards.”13
For Howard as for all of the participating ar-
chitects, architecture was much more than a
career. It was a way of life.14
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
Center Tower, Houston,Texas, 1975.
[project], Lugano, Switzerland, 1972-75.
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
It basically grew out of [a feeling that] ‘I don’t
know if what I’m doing here is of any value,
but let me test and see if I can come to under-
stand what I’m trying to do architecturally
in terms of the drawing.’ So the drawings be-
came this incredible vehicle…I would study
them and study them and study them, and
try to invent different techniques to try to
discover the sensibility that I wanted in the
buildings which I wasn’t sure was there. So,
doing those drawings was absolutely pivotal
for me in developing my aesthetic.31
1976.
California, 1973.
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
There is a certain fascination with some-
thing not looking designed. I feel that a lot of
buildings, a lot of architecture, a lot of work,
has that ‘designed’ look—that everything is
in place. I am really trying to get away from
that, to look more like it was less contrived.
Now maybe, in fact, it ends up being more
contrived, but I hope not. 42
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
Kappe, and a group of could-have-been,
wanna-be Case Study guys…they owned the
city. And we were going, “No, we don’t buy
it.” We were going somewhere. It was very
much part of the SCI-Arc dialogue. We used
to have some fantastic, really robust conver-
sations and disagreements about where we
were going, about just what we stood for.47
I was on sabbatical when they put that thing
together. …I came back to kind of a surprise.
“We put together a program with guys who
are doing architecture.” He names the peo-
ple and I said, “I do architecture, why aren’t
I on the list?” So it was a set-up. It was a time
when both Eric [Moss] and Thom were just
starting to move to a new place.”50
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
Record (Aug 1976), appears to be
the lone national publication on the
group.
29 The exhibitions, curated by
Robert A.M. Stern (at the Drawing
Center) and R ichard Oliver (at
the Cooper-Hewitt) showcased a
diversity of work by Charles Moore,
Stanley Tigerman, Michael Graves,
Robert Venturi, John Hejduk, Peter
Eisenman, Coy Howard, and Frank-
lin Israel, among others.
30 See Robert A.M. Stern, ed.,
“America Now: Drawing towards a
More Modern Architecture,” A.D.
Profiles 6 ( June 1977): 383. Local
critics held similar views. The
following year, Anne Luise Buerger
remarked, “When the Modern
Movement appeared as corporate
architecture in the United States,
architectural drawing suffered the
consequences of a corporate spe-
cialization that too often combined
division of labor with division of
spirit.” See “Art and Architecture:
Drawing them Together,” L.A. Ar-
chitect (Feb 1978): np.
31 Coy Howard, interview with the
author and Ewan Branda. Los Ange-
les, 16 May 2012. In a small publica-
tion on the show, other participants
offered their own observations on
drawing. Fisher: “Drawing serves
the two aspects of design: analysis
and synthesis. It facilitates dissec-
tion of a building in abstract or real
terms, and replicates the selective
focus of thoughtful perception.”
Kupper: “Architectural drawings
can serve the direct purpose of
technical communication, but
they can also be an expression of
architectural theory. Architecture
is a potential of the creative spirit,
not another name for real estate or
construction.” Aldriedge: “With
my drawings I am trying to catch a
glance of the moods, emotions, and
ancient memories that may exist
behind the architecture.” Hodgetts
and Mangurian, with tongues firmly
planted in cheeks, flatly stated,
“Drawings are a minor part of our
process.” See “Architectural Views:
Physical Fact, Psychic Effect,” L.A.
Architect (Feb 1978): np.
32 Curved polycarbonate panels
that lay strewn on the floor beneath
the image were in fact a framework
which could be assembled into a
cylinder. The drawing—a 360-de-
gree view of the interior of the
house—could be mounted inside
the cylinder to afford a viewer will-
ing to climb inside an immersive,
kinesthetic preview of the proposed
space.
33 See Thomas Hines, “Coate,”
Progressive Architecture (Aug 1976):
58-61; Esther McCoy, “Everyman’s
Casa,” Progressive Architecture ( July
1978): 76-79; and David Morton,
house,” Progressive Architecture ( Jun
1979): 66-69.
34 See Stern, “40 under 40,” Archi-
tecture and Urbanism 73 ( Jan 1977):
17-142. The issue also included a
synopsis of recent architectural
activities in Los Angeles. See Panos
Koulermos, “Los Angeles,” ibid.,
pp. 11-12.
35 See Michael Franklin Ross,
“Young, Los Angeles and Possi-
bly-Post-Modern, Architects,”
Architecture and Urbanism 90 (April
1978): 83-154. The represented prac-
tices were Chris Dawson & David
Brindle, Ronald Filson, Arthur
Golding, Coy Howard, Charles La-
greco, Douglas Meyer, Morphosis,
Eric Owen Moss & James Stafford,
James Porter, Michael Franklin
Ross, and Helmut Schulitz.
36 Ibid., 84.
37 Ibid., 85.
38 Cf. “Job Center Does its
Job—and Architecture Excels,” Los
Angeles Times (23 Jan 1977), on Geh-
ry’s UCLA Placement and Career
Planning Center; “Pavilion: Crater
with a Stage at Bottom,” Los Angeles
Times (15 May 1977), on Gehry’s
Concord Pavilion; and “An Unlikely
Dash of Exuberance,” Los Angeles
Time (22 Oct 1978), on Moss’s Mor-
ganstern Warehouse. Dreyfuss’ re-
viewed both Stern’s Otis exhibition
and Howard’s LAICA exhibition
in “Architects: Insights into the
Sketches,” Los Angeles Times ( 30 Jan
1978): E1, E5.
39 Eric Owen Moss, interview with
the author, Ewan Branda, and An-
drew Zago. Culver City, CA, 7 Jun
2012.
40 Dreyfuss, “Gehry’s Artful
House Offends, Baffles, Angers his
Neighbors,” Los Angeles Times (23
July 1978).
41 See Sally Koris, “Renegade
Frank Gehry Has Torn Up His
House—and the Book of Archi-
tecture,” People ( 5 Mar 1979) and
Robert Hughes, “Doing Their Own
Thing,” Time (8 Jan 1979).
42 Frank O. Gehry, November 07,
1979. “Frank O Gehry Part One.” In
SCI-Arc Media Archive. Southern
California Institute of Architecture.
16, 2012).
43 Coy Howard saw in Gehry’s
occasional invitations to younger
architects to meet for discussions at
his studio deliberate attempts by the
older architect to insinuate himself
into ongoing conversations among
the younger generation. Howard’s
reaction to the oft-uttered label,
“the Gehry kids,” was unequivocal:
“It’s the other way around. Gehry’s
our kid, in actual fact.” Coy How-
ard, interview with the author and
Ewan Branda. Los Angeles, 16 May
4 4 As Mayne had been involved in
running the graduate program at
SCI-Arc but did not hold a master’s
degree himself, the school granted
him a sabbatical to attend the pro-
gram at Harvard.
45 Thom Mayne, interview with
the author. Culver City, CA, 14 July
2012.
46 Michael Rotondi, interview with
the author and Ewan Branda. Los
Angeles, 13 Jun 2012.
47 Thom Mayne, interview with the
author and Ewan Branda. Culver
City, CA, 5 Mar 2012.
48 Ibid.
49 Thom Mayne, interview with
the author and Ewan Branda. Cul-
ver City, CA, 14 July 2012.
50 Ray Kappe, interview with the
author. Los Angeles, 29 June 2012.
Shelly Kappe was incensed by
Mayne’s move, and in a 2012 con-
versation with the author insisted
that the exhibitions were a renegade
action that should not be considered
official SCI-Arc events.
51 Nearly all the lectures are now
available online at the SCI-Arc Me-
dia Archive. At the time of writing,
only Coate’s lecture and Howard’s
concluding talk have not yet been
located.
52 Eric Owen Moss, interview with
the author, Ewan Branda, and An-
drew Zago. Culver City, CA, 7 June
2012.
53 See “One-Week Shows by 11
Architects” and “Kupper Employs
Dual Process,” Los Angeles Times (11
Oct 1979): C25, 26, 28, reprinted in
this volume on pp. xx-xx.
54 Thom Mayne, interview with
the author. Culver City, CA, 5 Mar
2012.
55 Michael Rotondi, interview with
the author and Ewan Branda. Los
Angeles, 13 June 2012.
56 According to Mayne, the come-
dian and art patron Steve Martin
dutifully checked out the new offer-
ings every Saturday. Martin would
later purchase Coate’s Alexander
House in Montecito. Thom Mayne,
interview with the author and Ewan
Branda. Culver City, 14 July 2012.
57 Dreyfuss, “Gallery Stirs Up
Architects,” Los Angeles Times (12
Dec 1979): E26. Reprinted in this
volume, pp. xx-xx.
58 Ibid.
59 Howard offered this description
to Dreyfuss in a 1979 interview.
Ibid.
60 The best treatments of this
period to date are Charles Jencks,
Heteropolis, op. cit., and John Morris
Dixon’s “The Santa Monica School:
What’s its Lasting Contribution?”
Progressive Architecture (May 1995):
63-71, 112, 114.
61 Complementing this catalog
and the installation at SCI-Arc,
online exhibition of related mate-
rials at the SCI-Arc Media Archive,
including the original 1979 SCI-Arc
lectures, commentary from the ex-
hibition curators, a film by Rebeca
Méndez Design commissioned for
the exhibition, and other items. See
http://sma.sciarc.edu/.
outlines “the hairesis of the philos-
opher, which in antiquity always
includes the choice of a distinct bios
[way of life]” in Gerhard Kittels,
ed., Theological Dictionary of the
New Testament, vol. 1 (London:
Eerdmans, 1964): 180-82. For more
developed discussions of heresy’s
relationship to the construction
of the self, see Eduard Iricinschi
and Holger M. Zellentin, eds., Her-
esy and Identity in Late Antiquity
(Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2008).
On the concept’s relationship to mo-
dernity, see Peter Gay, Modernism:
The Lure of Heresy from Beckett to
Baudelaire and Beyond (New York:
W.W. Norton, 2008).
2 There were several attempts to
bring together these and other Los
Angeles architects under a single
banner in the late 1970s and early
’80s. Charles Jencks claims the
label “L.A. School” was invented by
a group of architects that convened
a series of meetings at the Biltmore
Hotel in 1981. See his “LA Style /
LA School,” AA Files 5 (1983): 90. In
Heteropolis: Los Angeles, the Riots,
and the Strange Beauty of Hete-
ro-architecture (London: Academy
Editions, 1993): 132, n. 9, he lists
the group’s instigators as George
Rand, Gene Summers, and himself,
and participating architects as
Roland Coate, Peter de Bretteville,
Frank Gehry, Craig Hodgetts, Coy
Howard, Eugene Kupper, Tony
Lumsden, Thom Mayne, Robert
Mangurian, Charles Moore, Cesar
Pelli, Stefanos Polyzoides, Michael
Rotondi, Tim Vreeland, and Buzz
Yudell.
3 The twenty years preceding the
Architecture Gallery saw the deaths
of Frank Lloyd Wright (1959), Le
Corbusier (1965), Mies van der
Rohe (1969), Walter Gropius (1969),
Louis Kahn (1974), and Alvar Aalto
(1976). Los Angeles also lost a large
share of notable personalities, in-
cluding A.C. Martin (1960), Welton
Becket (1969), R ichard Neutra
(1970), Lloyd Wright (1978), Charles
Eames (1978), and A. Quincy Jones
(1979).
4 Among the most influential of
these attacks is Jacques Derrida’s
essay, “Structure, Sign, and Play in
the Discourse of the Human Scienc-
es,” delivered as a lecture at Johns
Hopkins University in 1966 and
translated into English in Derrida,
Writing and Difference (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1978):
278-293.
5 Damaging critiques include
Jane Jacobs’ The Death and Life of
American Cities (New York: Random
House, 1961) and Manfredo Tafuri’s
“Toward a Critique of Architectural
Ideology” [1969], in K. Michael
(Cambridge: MIT Press, 1998): 6-35.
6 See Peter Cook, ed., Archigram
(London: The Architectural Press,
1973) which collects much of the
material published in the group’s
eponymous pamphlet from 1961-
70; Aldo Rossi, The Architecture
of the City [1966](New York: MIT
Press, 1982); Venturi, Complexity
and Contradiction in Architecture
(New York: Museum of Modern
Art, 1966); Venturi, Scott Brown,
and Steven Izenour, Learning from
Las Vegas (Cambridge: MIT Press,
1977); Baird, “‘La Dimension
Amoureuse’ in Architecture,” in
Baird and Jencks, eds., Meaning in
Architecture (New York: George
Braziller, 1969); Jencks, The Lan-
guage of Post-Modern Architecture
(New York: R izzoli, 1977); Maurice
Culot and Krier, “The Only Path for
Architecture,” Oppositions 14 (Fall
1978); Rowe and Koetter, Collage
City (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1978);
Eisenman, “Aspects of Modernism:
Maison Dom-ino and the Self-Ref-
erential Sign,” Oppositions 15/16
(Winter/Spring 1979); Libeskind,
““Deus ex Machina”/ “Machina ex
Deo”: Aldo Rossi’s Theater of the
World,” Oppositions 21 (Summer
1980), and Tschumi, “The Architec-
tural Paradox,” Studio International
(Sept-Oct 1975).
7 Carey McWilliams’ classic
study, Southern California: An
Island on the Land [1946] (Salt Lake
City: Gibbs Smith, 2010), provides
an excellent account of such activ-
ities throughout the city’s history.
I offer my own musings about the
peripheral nature of Los Angeles ar-
chitecture in “Downtown” [2007],
Issues-Newsletters, Los Angeles
Forum for Architecture and Urban
Design. http://laforum.org/con-
tent/issues-newsletters/downtown-
by-todd-gannon.
8 Eric Owen Moss. December 05,
1979. “Eric Owen Moss: Armageddon
or Polynesian Contextualism, Part
One.” In SCI-Arc Media Archive.
Southern California Institute of Ar-
chitecture.
9 Ibid.
10 Ray Kappe, interview with the
author. Los Angeles, 29 June 2012.
11 Personal interviews with the
author, Summer 2012.
12 Coy Howard, interview with the
author and Ewan Branda. Los Ange-
les, 16 May 2012.
13 Ibid.
14 Importantly, that way of life was
widely understood to be specifically
architectural. Though Howard
and Frank Gehry both maintained
close ties with and drew significant
inspiration from the Los Angeles art
scene, these and other participating
clear disciplinary boundaries be-
tween art and architecture. Eugene
Kupper and Roland Coate, for ex-
ample, were and remain avid paint-
ers, but they operated for the most
part independently of the Los Ange-
les arts community. While both at-
tempted early on to use the medium
as a way to inform their architectur-
al ambitions, each ultimately saw
painting as a distinct alternative
to architectural practice. Coate, in
the end, chose painting, and closed
his architectural practice in 1983 to
devote himself to painting full-time.
Kupper chose architecture, and
largely suspended painting through
the 1970s and early ’80s.
15 Kappe had wished to cap en-
rollment at 250, but the dean, while
Kappe was away, decided to in-
crease to 350 students. Ray Kappe,
“SCI-Arc History,” unpublished
manuscript, collection of the au-
thor.
16 Architecture Gallery partici-
pants Robert Mangurian, Coy How-
ard, Craig Hodgetts, and Frederick
Fisher also had joined the faculty at
SCI-Arc by the early 1980s.
17 In addition, Shelly Kappe hosted
regular panel discussions at the
school through the 1970s on topics
ranging from “women in architec-
ture” to “the role of the large office”
to the “construction industry gap.”
More speculative topics, such as
“Alternative Architectural Practic-
es” and “Which Way to the Future?”
also were featured. SCI-Arc vid-
eo-taped the lectures from an early
date and the collection recently has
been digitized and made available
online. See the SCI-Arc Media Ar-
chive, http://sma.sciarc.edu.
18 The White position was held
by the “New York Five” (Peter
Eisenman, Michael Graves, Charles
Gwathmey, John Hejduk, and R ich-
ard Meier) and was galvanized in
the influential catalog to their 1969
MoMA exhibition, Five Architects
(New York: Oxford University
Press, 1972). A collection of critical
responses to this work from five
“Grays,” Allan Greenberg, Romaldo
Giurgola, Charles Moore, Jacquelin
Robertson, and Robert Stern, ap-
peared in “Five on Five,” Architec-
tural Forum (May 1973): 46-57. Par-
ticipants at UCLA included Werner
Seligmann, Michael Graves, Peter
Eisenman, Charles Moore, R ichard
Meier, Robert A.M. Stern, Giovanni
Pasanella, T. Merrill Prentice,
Charles Gwathmey, R ichard Wein-
stein, and Jaquelin Robertson, with
Colin Rowe (White) and Vincent
Scully (Gray) each giving lectures.
The event was reviewed in “White,
Gray, Silver, Crimson,” Progressive
Architecture ( July 1974): 28, 30, 32.
A year later, the Japanese magazine
White vs. Gray phenomenon. See
“White and Gray: Eleven Modern
Architects,” Architecture + Urban-
ism (April 1975). Coy Howard was
commissioned to make a film of the
event, but at the time of this writing,
a copy has not been located.
19 Most accounts claim the name
had to do with the slick, glass-and-
steel aesthetic espoused by most
of the group. According to Charles
Jencks, the moniker also had to do
with the fact the each of the archi-
tects drove a silver BMW. (Charles
Jencks, telephone interview with the
author, Los Angeles and London, 30
May 2012.) Hodgetts contested this
assertion in a later interview with
the author.
20 Craig Hodgetts, interview with
the author. Los Angeles, 5 Mar 2012.
21 Eugene Kupper, who ran a small
private practice, stands as a signif-
icant exception to the corporate
character of the Silvers. Frank Dim-
ster left Pereira to set up his own
small practice in 1975.
22 See Reyner Banham, “The Style
for the Job,” New Statesman (14 Feb
1964): 261.
23 These quotations, and Vree-
land’s above, are from Peter Papa-
demetriou, “Images from a Silver
Screen,” Progressive Architecture
(Oct 1976): 70-77. Stirling had given
a keynote lecture to kick off the
April events at UCLA.
24 Cf. Jencks “The Los Angeles
Silvers: Tim Vreeland, Anthony
Lumsden, Frank Dimster, Eugene
Kupper, Cesar Pelli, Paul Kennon,”
Architecture and Urbanism 70 (Oct
1976): 14. Hodgetts offered a similar
assessment in a 2012 interview with
the author.
25 “They might be said to exempli-
fy the highest ideals of the architec-
tural mainstream. Their crusade…
is to illustrate their conviction that
the profession of architecture can
without overthrowing its traditional
values successfully serve the inter-
ests of the marketplace.” Nicholas
Pyle, “Foreword,” in N. Charles
Slert and James Harter, eds., Twelve
Los Angeles Architects (Pomona: Cal
Poly Pomona, 1978): vi.
26 The catalog accounted for this
by dividing the architects into four
categories: The Expressionalists
(Coate, Lumsden, and Pelli), the
Constructionalists (Ellwood and
Kappe), the Rationalists (Dworsky,
Lomax, Miller, Pulliam, and Zim-
merman), and the Experimentalists
(Gehry and Lautner). See Slert and
Harter, Twelve Los Angeles Architects.
27 This inaction drew harsh crit-
icism from Los Angeles Times critic
John Dreyfuss. See his “Comment,”
in Slert and Harter, Twelve Los Ange-
les Architects, iii-iv.
28 “And Then There Were Twelve…
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
conditions of this semi-arid terrain into decorative orders, nor has
largely outside of the realm of the age-old contest
the imposition of alien human form orofthe mediation
conceived of as an artifact at the end of the line, a
technological invention.
while whizzing by the multitudinous complexities of
architectural rebirth, where one can pluck the
a city like any other, where a vast majority of practi
quo through the design of pointless buildings, while a
out how to create an alternative to such a practice.
vices, such as development patterns connected to
is indeed liberating.
government is housed in buildings undistinguishable
‘institutions are broken apart into fragmented,
point – city hall. This modest skyscraper, however, is
major thrust of development and is dwarfed by sur
cracies. The latest government building, the Ronald
through dissolution into multiple towers enmeshed in
space. Even the much-vaunted Pasadena Civic Cen
ter has lost its major axis, while the city hall there is a
is in fact a thin shell wrapped around a courtyard.
pavilions hiding behind a large billboard, while the
There are, however, alternative focal points in
overpasses, pleasure piers, and the Hollywood sign.
meaningless. They are enigmatic results of systems
extraction of something invisible. Large community
only mute scaffolding for the clothing racks inside to
which in cities like New York perform a monumental
decapitated by a law that mandates helicopter land
organized around roads and signs, not solid objects
that indicate the aspirations, memories, or self-image
of a community.
more than make up for the lack of a gTand architec
t ure? Yet it is hard to find a Los Angeles vernacular.
place offacades . That gesture is about as close as the
phy. The remaining elements of -its vernacular are a
fragments of an international style slapped together
is a vernacular in terms of frequently repeated com
economic pressures on them: the dingbat apartment
lar, however glorified by the lovers of the architecture
inhabitants and are generally not specific to their
and are essentially mass-produced . If they are
only negati vely, as the lowest common denominator of
ing evanescence of the man-made landscape is fur
diverse in the world. There are few communities that
grow up, whether under the pressures of develop
The only constant in man-made Los Angeles is
irrigation , electricity, sewage, communication, and
road might recall the memory of an old stream bed, in
is the result of a long forgotten juncture between two
streetcar lines. The availability of water is not com
ture erupts form the only causes for architectonic
are increasingly ringed with castellated commercial
. Valley occasions a grand set of concrete forms cas
substations send out their ganglia of wires from a
installations that ring the Southland create its true
gateways and mark the limits of its growth. Tech
Los Angeles.
does the notion of either monumental form or a
well-worn vernacular. Attempts to glorify the signs
deny the essential character of these enablers of
form . This does not mean that there is no possi
architecture is a solid mediator between individ
climate has already invalidated the latter, while the
road, the haven of exiles, and the dreamland where
What we are left with is a bricolage whose
ment pieced together from cast-off elements. We
the most shoddy materials, and open to continual
soon be the largest industrial base in the country,
whose accumulated wealth has not and will not
identity, but will instead disappear into the ever
left with is a new kind of semidesert, a man-made
landscape so extensive that it deserves that name.
a completely artificial alternative to the natural
world. Here, streams are buried in concrete culverts,
or exchanged for the sluggish rivers of the freeways,
which gather into pools and waterfalls at crucial
intersections. The surrounding mountains, so tall
and absolute as to defy human comprehension,
become a datum line visible only on a few clear days,
and soon they too will only be interruptions in the
sprawl, containing no remnants of castles or pleasure
gardens. Our new mountains are magic ones in
Disneyland, or they are formed by the accumulation
of activity that pushes buildings up in concentric, if
somewhat erratic, rings around freeway intersec
tions. This new landscape is harsh and inimical, a
burrow down or under to discover the sustenance
buried in the rich interiors of homes, stores, or res
taurants. The features of this landscape are hard to
distinguish from the surroundings, and appear
monotonous to the untrained eye, but, as in the
desert, they reveal themselves to the trained eye as
the crucial markers in dangerous terrain. Even the
hues of our pollution mimic the rich ochers, purples,
and browns that build up the subtle palette of
the desert.
c
real to one accustomed to more temperate climates.
They are prickly, hard, and without the kind of grad
ual ascension from base to top that marks a well
rounded tree or plant. They are often deformed by
their specific function or type, and they are extremely
inward-oriented, protecting themselves from all ene
mies and storing up their precious resources. They
are either minute and brightly colored, or vast and
muted. Their spiky forms often take on the appear
ance of armor plating, or of an armory of defen
sive weapons.
plants. The true inhabitants are the nomads, those
who cannot rest in the desert, but must search con
tinually for water or, in the case of Los Angeles, for
future, always out of reach. That future is the very
engine of modernization , that which fuels the rise in
prices, the influx of immigrants, and the physical
sprawl of the city itself. It is symbolized by the Pacific
Ocean, the unconquered West towards which the
multimillion dollar homes that line the coast turn
their plate-glass eyes adoringly: it’s out there, some
where past the sunset, under the water, beyond the
water, beyond the edge. The modern nomads, mean
while, are not quite human anymore. They have been
married to their technological devices. In Los
Angeles, you really need your sunglasses. You really
shouldn’t breathe unfiltered air. You need your air
conditioning. You need your car. The inhabitants of
the Los Angeles deserts are a kind of satyr- half
human, half-machine.
the more amorphous, spread-out character of the city.
Over 50,000 people in Los Angeles live in garages.
Two-story apartment buildings are making way for
four-story condominiums. Downtown is developing
ments should make the city look more urbane. Yet this
replication of the larger grids at a smaller scale and
the filling-out of fraglnentary forms into larger non
almost impossible to create isolated objects. Archi
tecture in Los Angeles, as in most other cities, has
become a question of transforming the laws, regula
tions, and structures of the city. Here the game seems
only more abstract and absurd, given the current and
deracinated nature of the so-called context to be
addressed by the architect. The chaotic nature of the
city becomes more evident, and thus one could say its
destiny as the first city beyond the bounds of reason,
and thus of humanistic urban planning, seems ever
more imminent.
is not to be understood as necessarily bad. In fact,
making value judgments about such developments is
dangerous since it leads to the proposal of the kind of
“solutions” that have pockmarked our cities with well
intentioned disasters. An attempt to understand the
tions established by seventeenth-century rationalism
might be of greater interest, and in fact Los Angeles
could act as a laboratory for the development of
methods of critical evaluation as much as it can create
new and interesting mutations of form. Such an
approach does not absolve architecture, whether as a
drawn or built construction, from its responsibility to
take a political stance, that is, to- participate actively
in the development of the city in such a way as to
prevent the complete abrogation of rights by those in
control of its physical resources. Rather, it is the role
of the architects to create compelling visions of
transformation that can be erected against the purely
destructive forces inherent in the economic and social
Finally, nature always threatens to reassert
near, and periodically send out their warning
tremors. Much of the architecture of Los Angeles is,
in fact, deformed by anticipation of “the big one,” so
that the old role of architecture as a bastion against a
post-Edenic world sneaks in through the earthquake
codes. Less dramatically, water remains scarce, and
the fear of its disappearance gives an edge to those
who wish to place artificial limits on the development
of the metropolis. Yet, to those willing to keep dream
ing, the Pacific once again is the future – an endless
horizon of water waiting to be transformed into sus
Given such a daunting landscape, how are
building on an indigenous tradition. Architects have
been making sense out of the seeming chaos of Los
Angeles. In fact, one might argue that they have
found themselves confronted with processes of mod
ernization before many other cities and, as a result,
have developed a more pronounced modernism. Irv
ing Gill’s reductivist aesthetic – based on the sparse
anonymity of whatever local vernacular was still pre
sent at the turn of the century, and married to the
inexorable logic of tilt-up construction – predated the
more affected form of the Viennese heroes of classical
modernism. Schindler, building on the work of the
Greene brothers, created an architecture expressive
quality of local form. The Case Study program of
the 1950s produced kits of parts that were meant to
integrate architecture into the technological marvel
that had created this modern metropolis out of
defense industries, romantic illusions, and available
land. Frank Gehry later synthesized much of this
city into enigmatic objects that refuse to complete
themselves or to make sense. Most recently, the for
mer employers of many of those whose work is
collected here, such as Thom Mayne and Michael
Rotondi, Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian,
Eric Moss, or Frank Israel, have been struggling to
create an architecture that either draws on
research by artists into the relationship between
artifice and experience, or which transforms itself
into set design at an urban scale. The vitality of
their work is a testimony to the fact that Los
Angeles does produce architecture which at its best
does not look like building, but is an abstract
interruption in the city, a piece of technology honed
for living, or a self-consciously vivid set for modern
The work of the younger generation builds on
sical notions of architecture that these designers,
all but a few of whom grew up and were educated
elsewhere, brought with them to California. Their
visions can be said to oscillate between two ideal
images of man, not including that of the da Vincian
Renaissance hero squaring the circle and thus
resolving the conflict between man in nature in
favor of man’s projective, abstracting capabilities.
Rather, one finds the image of the naked man first
postulated by Schindler, released from nature,
standing naked on the shore of the Pacific. The
inhabitant of the ramshackle beach shack, the
surfer, is the prototype of this new man, and his
undressing is mirrored in the unclothing of
structure started by Schindler and brought to full
flower by Frank Gehry. This new Adam is the
conceptual client of what might be called the
Gehry-schule, an ever-growing group of young
designers who either worked for, or moved to the
city because of the reputation of, “the godfather of
Star Trek motion picture and consummated in what
Elizabeth Diller has called “an architecture of pros
thetics.” This satyr is served by another school, this
of Architecture and the work of Morphosis. Between
these two poles stretch the tentative assemblages of
built and drawn form that are the oeuvre of a new
On one side of the spectrum are the new
movement back to the ranch , back to basics, and back
to materials. Produced by those who assimilated the
teaching of the Italian and South American rational
ists such as Mario Gandelsonas and Jorge Silvetti
during the 1970s and 1980s, and who then applied the
new reductive, memory-driven forms to a perceived
American vernacular, their work relies heavily on
simple, geometric shapes, cubical volumes, unclut
tered planes, and a fondness for concrete, concrete
colored stucco, and concrete block, held together by a
muscular armature of metal trusses, window sur
rounds, and roofs. This is architecture pushed back to
a defensive position, a desperate attempt to make
monuments in a world that does not need them.
Where such work succeeds is in its very anguish. In
Los Angeles, however, such monumental commen
tary often becomes as ironic and wistful as its neo
ern. The stark planes are undercut, float in space, or
are skewed to activate the grand volumes. Architec
ture is reduced to almost nothing, but that small
something threatens to destabilize the whole, and
thus creates an appropriate strategy of subversion.
that are joyfully thin and highly colored. Several of
the young architects working in Los Angeles delight
in the cheapness, mass production, and blandness of
the basic building blocks of architecture here, but
only because the material is so pliable. In the end,
they produce sophisticated gestures without any
content. Their colorful cutoffs are just active partici
pants in the city, except that these actors are stripped
dainty forms all around them. This is architecture for
the brightly colored, well-toned denizens of Gold’s
out to be an “industry” executive writing the script of
his own life.
reliance on the expressiveness of malleable materials,
and the creation of a more muscular, honest dance of
basic forms in a city of affectations are the hallmarks
of the work of many from the Gehry-schule. Working
with the tortured forms and telescoping volumes of
the master, they push his undressing of the basic
forms of the city one step further, creating haunt
ing fragments of drywall, stud walls , roof planes,
and skylights that dance away from convention.
Unadorned and clad in only the most minimal mate
rials, this work starts to take on some of the quick
cut, pan-shot, fast-edit character of a music video.
Beyond Gehry’s sculptural honesty, born in the
Venice Beach culture of the 1960s, lies the poly
morphous perversity so apparent on today’s beaches.
in fact, mixes its metaphors, combining the dance of
perverted forms with an interest in the grids of
technology that can hold it all together. This is indeed
a kind of prosthetic architecture. For many young
designers, Los Angeles is the site of an archaeology
where they find both the kind of abstract, molded
forms of the desert and the mountains, and the mass
produced frames and connections that turn the end
less suburbs into a formless web of technologically
defined habitation. This is work that is ambivalent
about whether it prefers the man-made or the natural
desert, but this indecision seems to vitiate, rather
than incapacitate, the work. Narrative replaces pro
and in these stories architecture becomes the
transformation of what is already there- a landscap
ing job rather than the erection of hopeful new
edifices of human reason. Beyond stripping down
and getting back to Adam, architects here see the
possibility for rewriting the history of The Fall as a
new Genesis.
architects shown here, there are those who have a
more focused notion of the role of architecture in the
city. Those that I would call technomorphists accept
the man-made landscape as a given and merely want
to create the appropriate form for a world of post
humanistic artifice. To them, the world is an uncer
tain and vaguely threatening place where the solace
of good forms has no place. By emphasizing the work
ing of machined surfaces and by mimicking the
human body in their buildings, they make the
creating a mechanized man at the scale of the city.
When they create objects, they are not so much
buildings as giant machines. Ominous and over
whelming, these mechanical beasts have come to
replace the human body with something larger and
more sophisticated, but still imbued with a dream of
conscious control over reality. This is work that
delights in the dawn of a fully technological land
necessary to survive on that seemingly arid plain,
and that actively seeks the disappearance of the solid
forms with which we are so familiar. Gleaming and
comfort, as uncertain as their theories of chaos.
well as that of countless other young practitioners,
stretches between the naked forms of the new primi
tives and the humanoid machines of the technomorph
ists. Nothing ties their work together except that
they live in the peculiar design laboratory of Los
Angeles. Their designs are, therefore, conscious of
the technological deformations of the human land
scape. Their forms are almost all tortured, deformed,
and skewed by this consciousness. They are reso
lutely modernist in their faith in the ability to con
struct an alternative physical framework that both
refuses to accept the constraints of the memory of
tradition and projects us into an unknown future that
validates our current activities. It is an architecture
produced in a city that has invented itself. The work is
local in that it delights in raw building materials that
have never coalesced into either monuments or a
vernacular. Instead, it closes itself into enigmatic,
man-made desert. What is preserved inside these
forms is, as often as not, light. The very abundance
of sun that has created the desert is turned into an
excuse for a concentration on the kind of perceptual
self-consciousness pioneered by the “light and
space” artists of the 1960s, so that the human abil
ity to experience is cultivated even within tech
dark forms of technology, a faith remains that,
beyond the creation of isolated objects, but within
physical conditions in which we live, an architec
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