Photo: MANIFEST DESTINY | ‘I didn’t come to LACMA for what it was,’ says Govan, pictured with Michael Heizer’s ‘Levitated Mass.’ ‘Look at the map. Twenty-two acres in the middle of Los Angeles!’

Peter Zumthor, recipient of the Pritzker Architecture Prize in 2009, will unveil his new vision of LACMA in an exhibition opening June 9 called “The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA.” | 

SEVEN YEARS AGO, after Michael Govan quit his job directing New York’s Dia Art Foundation to helm the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, but before his hiring became public, he placed a phone call that he believed would forever change the way art museums engage the public in the 21st century.

The call wasn’t to a renowned artist or billionaire donor, but to an architect: Peter Zumthor, the reclusive Swiss creator of “thinking” buildings such as the Bruder Klaus Field Chapel near Wachendorf, Germany, in which sound and emotional pull are considered as important as physical space. “I didn’t come to LACMA for what it was,” Govan says, citing the museum’s prime real estate and potential for expansion. “Look at the map! Twenty-two acres in the middle of Los Angeles!”

Since arriving in 2006, Govan has established himself at the intersection of the city’s circles of celebrity, arts patronage and financial power. He’s also taken a broader view of what the museum can put on display.

Prior to Govan’s arrival, LACMA’s attempts to reach new patrons included events such as children’s finger painting, held on the museum’s vast terrace far from the actual collections, which remained hidden in a Byzantine maze of buildings and hallways. These days, the LACMA campus is filled with outdoor installations that allow visitors hands-on interaction with the art. It’s also possible to take in museum fare as unexpected as a Tim Burton or Stanley Kubrick exhibit, or a staged reading by director Jason Reitman of the screenplay Reservoir Dogs. For those who wish to stay culturally abreast in L.A., it is, suddenly, very necessary to visit LACMA.

[…]

mobylosangelesarchitecture | MOBY on semiotics | 

now i’m going to put on my low-rent grad student hat for a second. or a minute. or for however long it takes me to write about semiotics and from a low-rent grad student perspective. (oh, to be clear: ‘low rent’ meaning the quality of my writing, not the value of this real estate. i’m guessing this real estate is fairly pricey, as it’s in west hollywood).

so, semiotics.

when i was at uconn and suny purchase i really, really wanted to go brown and study semiotics. why?

1. i love semiotics (before they stopped calling it semiotics…sniff).
2. brown was fancy but progressive.
3. my girlfriend at the time went to brown and lived on thayer st.

but:

1. i couldn’t afford brown.
2. i probably wasn’t smart enough to go to brown.
3. they stopped offering semiotics as a major.

so i was left as a lowly philosophy major at one of two state schools (both of which were great, go team(s)).

now i’ll be pedantic for a second, ok?

you might ask (or not), ‘what is/are semiotics?’ well, and in a very simple and grossly reductionist way, semiotics is/are the study of signs and symbols and the way in which we process them and give them meaning and respond to them. 

most of what we experience is fairly neutral. a flag is really just some dyed fabric stitched together. but it can compel people to fits of rage or joy or loyalty or despair. but it’s just fabric. semiotics is, broadly speaking and applied to just about everything that triggers a reaction in us, the study of why people have emotional and intellectual reactions and responses to something like a flag, which is really just some colorful fabric. 

but i don’t want to go on and on about semiotics (although if you corner me at a party i will talk to you for days about semiotics and they way in which all of our lives are spent (tyrannized, even) having ostensibly hard-wired reactions to things that are not in any way comprised of any inherent meaning).

but: this blog update.

here’s a house. or an almost house. which led me to ask some questions:

1. is it being built or deconstructed?
2. what utility does it have in it’s extant form?
3. when we look at it are we seeing it for what it is or what it represents in terms of potential?
4. how do we overlook what it actually is (a bunch of wood, cobbled together) and only see what it represents (a potentially finished house)?
5. what amazing cognition is involved in extrapolating from a bunch of wood into a finished house?
6. does it have aesthetic merit in it’s extant form, and if so what?
7. etc.
8. see ‘7’.

it’s an interesting challenge, i think, to see this construction for what it is, divorced of any potential infused future utility.

it’s wood. kind of sculptural. defining a space, but without creating a space in a traditional, architectural way. it has no roof, it would be pretty crummy at keeping out bugs and wind. it wouldn’t be great at giving anyone a place to shower or sleep. but it’s still remarkable in and of itself. and can we judge a structure for what it is and not for what it represents and what it triggers in us?

someone might look at this and see a waste of resources. someone might look at it and see egregious socioeconomic inequality.
someone might look at it and see a place to eventually make popcorn and watch ‘30 rock’. or someone might look at it and see some odd post-modern sculptural land-art commentary on our predatory patriarchal rigid society. or none of the above.

ultimately, though, it’s wood. and some concrete. and some nails. but that’s not what i see, or, i assume, what any of us see.
and it’s fascinating that we see what isn’t so much more clearly and easily than what actually is. we see what’s represented far more than what’s actually in front of us.

and yes, that’s semiotics, at least from my perspective. and it can be applied to almost all of our conditioned emotional reactions. so says the college dropout blogger musician who really has no qualifications to be writing about architecture and/or semiotics. except that i like both.

i guess i have a presumptuous request/challenge: try to look at things (like this structure) for what they actually are. and when we
extrapolate and see things for what they represent (flags, republicans, saxophones, houses, globes, etc) it’s potentially interesting
to just become aware of the fact that we’re having a reaction to our own perception, not necessarily to the thing we’re observing or interacting with.

ok, thanks

moby

lacma:

On June 9 we open our next exhibition, The Presence of the Past: Peter Zumthor Reconsiders LACMA. The show looks at LACMA’s complicated architectural history and features projects both realized and unrealized for the museum. (For instance, did you know Mies van der Rohe and Edward Durrell Stone were both strongly considered to build the museum in the 1960s, but were passed over for William Pereira?)

The show doesn’t dwell only on the past. It also looks to the future—in the form of the first presentation of Pritzker Prize-winning architect Peter Zumthor’s proposal for the east side of LACMA’s campus. The proposal (and currently that’s what it is—a proposal) breaks out of the nineteenth-century model for museums and envisions what it means to be an encyclopedic museum today and in the future.

Can’t wait until June 9? Peter Zumthor will be in conversation with LACMA Director Michael Govan on Monday, June 3. Govan and Zumthor have been thinking through this project for many years—this is your chance to hear directly from them both. (Tickets here.)

Then, on June 5, Govan will return to the Bing Theater for another, free conversation with Philippe de Montebello, director emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the future of the encyclopedic museum. 

mobylosangelesarchitecture | 

just got back from coachella (which, i feel the need to state the obvious, was amazing: the weather, the line-up, the audience, the location, etc, etc).

and i posit that these are architectural photos… (or, rather, photos of architecture). in that: they’re photos of a space expressly designed and constructed for a specific purpose. it’s temporary architecture (well, from a broader perspective of impermanence i guess all architecture is temporary), in that it’s erected, filled with technology and people, and then disassembled.

it’s also quite unique, as far as the history of structures is concerned, in that there aren’t too many open-air but enclosed structures designed to hold 25,000 people (the whole festival is around 100,000 people each day, i believe. this is the sahara dance tent, designed to hold around 25% of the festival attendees). it’s also a fascinating structure in that it’s aesthetics are utilitarian but powerful and impactful.

oh, and i just realized that i failed to take a picture of the outside of this gigantic people-hangar… hm. oops.

maybe i’ll try to do that next weekend.

in the meantime: the inside of the sahara tent at coachella.

thanks,

moby