Out Spoken: Lectures from the SCI-Arc Media Archive
May 15, 2012 - August 12, 2012

Opening Reception: Tuesday, May 15
6-7 PM Curator-led exhibition walk-through
7-9 PM Reception

Schindler House
835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, CA 90069

Admission to the opening reception is free

With Out Spoken: Lectures from the SCI-Arc Media Archive, the MAK Center for Art and Architecture has invited noted architects and scholars to mine the rich history of public presentations hosted by the Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc).

Scheduled to go online Fall 2012, the SCI-Arc Media Archive preserves four decades of talks, events, symposia, etc. from many of the most talented architects and creative thinkers of our time. Out Spoken offers a first glimpse of this important intellectual resource, which so aptly embodies the school’s adventurous, forward-looking spirit.

Organized by MAK Center Director Kimberli Meyer, the Out Spoken exhibition presents Archive selections curated by architects Roger Sherman and Marcelyn Gow and architectural historians Paulette Singley and Anthony Fontenot, educators all.

The Exhibition
Each of the four main galleries at the Schindler House will be devoted to the selections of one guest curator. With “Cook Off,” architect and UCLA professor Roger Sherman focuses on the record 11 talks given over the years by Peter Cook, British architect, pedagogue and co-founder of the revolutionary 1960s Archigram group. Broadcast from a dozen speakers, Cook’s voice is heard in self-dialogue. His professional longevity provides the example of an individual who has made a career as the perpetual outlier, an individual who embraces “the continually new.” Sherman views Cook as a “doppelganger” for SCI-Arc, a voice that is at once a muse and a lens through whom the school may consider its own “alternative” mission and status.

Acclaimed scholar Dr. Paulette Singley, professor at Woodbury University in Burbank, offers “Teasers, Ticklers, and Twizzlers,” a look at performance as a form of architectural research. Highlighting performances by Chris Burden, Rubén Ortiz Torres, Survival Research Laboratory, Doug Michels of Ant Farm, and the queer duo Matmos, Singley riffs on the paradox of permanent change that these videos embody. She sees each as carnivalesque, born of revolutionary practices initiated at times when the normative world order is upset, and emblematic of SCI-Arc’s topsy-turvy history. Responding to theorist Stanley Fish’s work on interpretive communities, Singley asserts that these videos produce a community of thinkers in which architectural meaning seeps through disciplinary boundaries.

“City Talk” is presented by Anthony Fontenot, an architect, historian, curator, and professor at Woodbury University. As a window into the changing views of the discipline of architecture, this project reflects on the way the city has been discussed and theorized over the past four decades at SCI-Arc. The archive material suggests that the interest in the city declines throughout the 1970s, was practically non-existent in the 1980s, made a measured comeback in the 1990s, and has taken on an even greater importance since the turn of the century. With a video monitor dedicated to each decade, Fontenot excerpts talks by Reyner Banham, Charles Jencks, Rem Koolhaas, Mike Davis, panels chaired by Thom Mayne and Ray Kappe, and much more.

Architect and SCI-Arc professor Marcelyn Gow is a partner and founding member of servo los angeles, a design collective. In “Drawn Out,” she explores the role of drawing in the practice of architecture, especially as it has evolved in our era of algorithmic design and fabrication tools. Through talks by, among others, Claude Parent, Bernard Tschumi, Wolf Prix, Zaha Hadid, Eric Owen Moss, and Greg Lynn, Gow probes the many functions of drawing — projective, analytical, inscriptive, descriptive, vectoral and diagrammatic — as a means of engagement with material and informational regimes.

Major support for Out Spoken: Lectures from the SCI-Arc Media Archive was provided by the National Endowment for the Arts.