Chilean curators and designers Pedro Ignacio Alonso and Hugo Palmarola join SCI-Arc faculty members Marrikka Trotter (History + Theory Coordinator) and Marcelyn Gow (MS Design Theory and Pedagogy Coordinator) in conversation about the role of cultural and material exchange in architectural history, curation, and design. In 2014, Alonso and Palmarola were awarded the Silver Lion 14th Venice Architecture Biennale for Chile Pavilion, Monolith Controversies. Choreographies, their video diptych that looks at the representation of building construction across the US-Soviet divide, is included in Soft Schindler, now on view at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Moderated by Soft Schindler curator and SCI-Arc faculty member and Alumna Mimi Zeiger (M.Arch, ’98).

This sixteenth iteration of the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series, brings together Christoph a. Kumpusch of Forward-slash ( / ) Architektur and artist Youmna Chlala.

The Austrian Consulate General and MAK Center Los Angeles will be hosting a reception, presentation, and panel discussion on Friday November 22nd from 5:30pm to 8:00pm in celebration of the ongoing exhibition at the Austrian Cultural Forum New York titled Resident Alien: Austrian Architects in America curated by Cal Poly professors Stephen Phillips (SPARCHS) and Axel Schmitzberger (Domaen).

Please join us for a picnic at the Schindler House to celebrate the release of artist Esther Choi’s new art/cookbook, Le Corbuffet: Edible Art and Design Classics. Held in conjunction with the MAK’s current exhibition, Soft Schindler, the event will take place in an installation designed by Laurel Consuelo Broughton of Welcome Projects. Le Corbuffet-inspired nibbles by chef Gina Correll and Casey Dobbins will be on offer, as well as corbooziers courtesy of Yola Mezcal. Books will be available for purchase and signing. Soft Schindler curator Mimi Zeiger will lead a discussion with Choi and Broughton, followed by Q&A.

Soft Schindler, curated by Mimi Zeiger, begins with traces of pink paint on redwood—faint evidence of when in late 1949 Pauline Schindler, estranged from her architect husband but living in half of the house they built together, painted her side of the interior salmon pink. To R.M. Schindler, her intolerable act violated a sanctum of modernism and his desire for honest expression of natural materials. This exhibition, however, interprets her act as softening our canonical understanding of house as manifesto—softness as resistance—and yields to plural narratives that lay interpretive ground for contemporary artworks and architectural installations.

SASSAS is celebrating 20 years of it’s flagship concert series, sound. on September 27 – 29 with an installation of videos and ephemera from the SASSAS Archives at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House. The installation features premieres of full length documentation from concerts by Glenn Branca, Kelan Phil Cohran, Extended Organ featuring Mike Kelley, Joseph Jarman, Pauline Oliveros, James Tenney and more. On Sunday the 29th, a closing event will include a performance of Rod Poole’s Voice of the Bowed Guitar, the first work presented at the Schindler House when sound. relocated from San Pedro in 2000. The closing event is free and open to the public 4PM – 8PM with the performance starting at 7PM.

The MAK Center invites you to attend the opening reception for the final projects of Group XLVIII with Jehee Park, Ovdiu Anton, and Peter Behrbohm and Markus Buehler of Flying Holes.

Norman Klein‘s new collection of essays, Tales of the Floating Class, reveals shared ironies in the arts and urban culture over the past fifty years. It studies the amnesiac effects of globalization upon the narrative structure of television, video, animation, photography and installation art, as well as the shapeshifting that has overwhelmed cities and entertainment spaces. Using Los Angeles and the West as one focal point, various case studies trace the growth of the Floating Class, an expression from the late nineteenth century referring to the outliers who would mill around city parks, crowding the rallies, while listening to rabble-rousing public speakers. These sites were also known as “bughouse squares,” because they sponsored extreme haranguing of all sorts. In earlier centuries, many had been fairgrounds for vendors selling artisanal goods. After 1850, they became a sounding board for the new city, even for avant-garde movements across the arts. Today, the Floating Class exists more internally, for example, in vigilante social networks. Its precarious numbers have grown a hundred-fold. They suffer the mad indignities of a gig economy, and neo-feudal indenture. They try not to feel caught like wild salmon in Trump’s hair. Klein writes in comic flourishes that layer fact and fiction. That is because the line between the real and the imaginary has radically blurred, inside the comic picaresque that defines our history today. Featured are twenty-two essays and fictions that have been reedited from their original published version.

Please join us for the fifth annual MAK Games, a tennis tournament that benefits the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, held at John Lautner’s Sheats-Goldstein Residence.

The tournament features players from the worlds of art, architecture, and entertainment competing in front of a picturesque Los Angeles skyline. The event will also feature cocktails, food, live music, and guided tours of Lautner’s landmark design.

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.

Mies Van der Rohe’s Tugendhat Villa in Brno, Czech Republic, is a modernist icon and a preeminent example of a very early and remarkably innovative modernist design. The Tugendhat Villa was completed in 1930 and designed at the same time as the Barcelona Pavilion. The Tugendhat Villa shares many important design features with the Pavilion such as a free plan, extensive use of glass and steel, chrome-clad columns, and even an onyx wall. The Tugendhat House was designated as a UNESCO World Heritage Center in 2001 and, after extensive renovation, was re-opened to the public in March 2012.

This event is co-hosted by the MAK Center for Art & Architecture and The American Institute of Architecture, and features an illustrated lecture by art historian Daniela Hammer-Tugendhat, a daughter of the original owners, and her husband, Ivo Hammer, a noted conservator who chaired the international expert commission that consulted on the restoration of the House. The restoration is the subject of a documentary by Dieter Reifarth; brief selections will help illustrate the lecture.

This exhibition springs from The House of Dust, a seminal yet under-recognized late 1960s work by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles. Originally called The Play House, this intermedia piece serves as an entry point into contemporary investigation of the relationships between architecture, technology, and performance. In a text titled Shelter or Playground, R.M. Schindler described his house as a “playground” that “grows with its inhabitants” and where “life will regain its fluidity.” Today, the house open its doors to contemporary artists who have been invited to produce site-specific works, responding to both architectures by Schindler and Knowles and translating them into multiple performative forms.

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.

This fifteenth iteration of the Garage Exchange Vienna-Los Angeles exhibition series, brings together Constanze Schweiger and 69.

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.

Thea Djordjadze regularly addresses questions of architecture, design and methods of display through installations that combine everyday objects, unconventional substances, and art and industrial materials. Her exhibition at Sprüth Magers—the artist’s first solo exhibition in Los Angeles—extends the artist’s investigations into the legacies of twentieth-century modernism, and the ways in which context affects the viewing, understanding and experience of art.

Join the MAK Center for Art and Architecture for a panel discussion on 100 years of Bauhaus and the legacy of the institution with Michael Boyd (Furniture and Landscape Designer), Mariestella Casciato (Curator of Architecture, Getty Research Institute), Kurt W. Forster (Visiting Professor, Yale School of Architecture), Lars Müller (Designer and Publisher), and Priscilla Fraser (Director, MAK Center for Art & Architecture.)

The MAK Center invites you to attend the opening reception for the final projects of Group XLVII with Eva Engelbert, Philipp Timischl, and Jenni Tischer.

This exhibition springs from The House of Dust, a seminal yet under-recognized late 1960s work by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles. Originally called The Play House, this intermedia piece serves as an entry point into contemporary investigation of the relationships between architecture, technology, and performance. In a text titled Shelter or Playground, R.M. Schindler described his house as a “playground” that “grows with its inhabitants” and where “life will regain its fluidity.” Today, the house open its doors to contemporary artists who have been invited to produce site-specific works, responding to both architectures by Schindler and Knowles and translating them into multiple performative forms.

This exhibition springs from The House of Dust, a seminal yet under-recognized late 1960s work by Fluxus artist Alison Knowles. Originally called The Play House, this intermedia piece serves as an entry point into contemporary investigation of the relationships between architecture, technology, and performance. In a text titled Shelter or Playground, R.M. Schindler described his house as a “playground” that “grows with its inhabitants” and where “life will regain its fluidity.” Today, the house open its doors to contemporary artists who have been invited to produce site-specific works, responding to both architectures by Schindler and Knowles and translating them into multiple performative forms.