In the 1970s, architectural historian and cultural theorist Charles Jencks began photographing the exaggerated houses that he encountered driving around Los Angeles, including West Hollywood. At a time when residential architecture in America was becoming increasingly standardized, he called attention to these fantasy houses that had been modified or built to exude personal character and variation.

Daydream Houses of Los Angeles, published by Rizzoli in 1978, includes Jencks’ snapshots of about 60 of these expressive and excessive houses, paired with witty captions and oftentimes an address, so readers could embark on their own house tours.

In this illustrated presentation, a collaboration with the Southland Institute, Aurora Tang will discuss her ongoing rephotography project revisiting Daydream Houses of Los Angeles, considering the informal photograph, the enthusiast, the tour, the changing appearance of our city’s residential neighborhoods, and the significance of Jencks’ book today, over 40 years after its release.

The Architecture of the Unremarkable is a study of the contradictory ways in which space is constituted by the reciprocal materialization of the law. It aims to question how the spatialization of legal loopholes, as the infinite generator of interpretive arguments, may be used to destabilize the governed structure and resist institutionalization. Organized by the Southland Institute, this lecture focuses on Emamifar’s collaboration with WORKNOT!, a collective of artists and architects dedicated to the representation of life and work of today’s cognitarians. Their project, MOSHA (Framing The Common) centers on the study of the shared space in modern apartment buildings in Iran and the legal regulation of such common spaces.

Artist Dina Abdulkarim, in collaboration with the Southland Institute, will discuss her training in architecture and planning to explore themes of home, citizenship, and identity exchange that she presents in her work. She will focus on the visual and cultural influences that have shaped her appreciation of patterns and the institution of their collective meaning. Abdulkarim will describe how, through distinct architecture and specific interiors, the use of patterns, materials and textures form the shared social aesthetics of the very personal space of the home. She will also speak to the experience of living and studying city planning and urban design in the U.S., and how it added a new set of patterns and meanings to her concept of home. In her large-scale paintings, Abdulkarim overlaps different geometries of arabesque motifs and aerial views of suburban communities to represent the cultural, spiritual, and everyday realities of the places that represent home, going beyond the simple distinction of East and West to be complex, organic, and constantly in flux.

Photographer Janna Ireland, in collaboration with the Southland Institute, discussed intersections of photography, architecture, motherhood, race, domesticity, portraiture, class, and documentation in four bodies of work about Greater Los Angeles.