Gateway for 2009–2010 SUPRASTUDIO course, led by Professor Greg Lynn of UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design. The school is holding a discussion series,  “Extreme IDEAS: Architecture at the Intersection” [PDF], from May 22 to June 21. Photo: © Sarah Hearne

Everything is bigger in Los Angeles: the freeways, the sunglasses, the giant boulder sightings… and now Architecture Month. LA’s design fest will still take place from mid-May to mid-June, but this year a slew of exhibitions and events will extend the celebrations to a whopping four months. From April to July, “Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in LA” will overtake the home of Hollywood with boldfacers of sturdier stock and examine the legacies of (who else?) Richard Neutra, Frank Gehry, Thom Mayne, and A. Quincy Jones, among others.

The series encompasses 11 exhibitions at the city’s major museums and dozens more programs and events, supported by grants from the Getty Foundation. It’s the architecture counterpart to last year’s bonanza of LA-themed art programming, “Pacific Standard Time: Art in LA, 1945–1980.” Beyond the starchitect-gazing and museum expos, this archi-thon includes some wonky sideshows, from the Center for Land Use Interpretation’s look at the “invisible architecture” of temporary office trailers to the Huntington-USC Institute on California and the West’s online exhibition about the effect of electricity on urban growth. Here’s a quick photo tour of some of the work you’ll see come spring. Read more!

LAX, Theme Building: perspective view, 1961, by Charles Luckman, William Pereira, Welton Becket, and Paul R. Williams. Image: © The Luckman Partnership, Inc. | a Salas O’Brien Company

Overdrive LA: LA Constructs the Future, 1940–1990
J. Paul Getty Museum
April 9–July 21

As the master of ceremonies of sorts, the Getty is putting on an ambitious show, “Overdrive LA: LA Constructs the Future, 1940–1990,” which bills itself as the first major museum survey of LA’s built environment. Organized into themes like urban networks and the aerospace industry, the exhibition’s photos, models, drawings, and films argue for LA’s street cred as a smart city. “The exhibition will demonstrate that despite its infamous reputation as a chaotic, unplanned accident Los Angeles has long been a laboratory for cutting-edge innovation and planning in architecture and design,” Wim de Wit, head of the architecture and contemporary art department at the Getty Research Institute and one of the exhibition curators, said in an announcement about the show.

Ed Ruscha’s photograph Standard, Amarillo, Texas, 1962, is the basis for the artist’s oil painting Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas, 1963. Courtesy of the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. Photo: © Ed Ruscha

In Focus: Ed Ruscha
J. Paul Getty Museum
April 9–September 29

In a tribute to car culture and the suburban settings that rise up around the automobile, the Getty Museum is also mounting an exhibition of photos that the artist Ed Ruscha shot—from a moving car—while working on some of his quintessentially SoCal photobooks, like 1963′s  Twentysix Gasoline Stations and 1965′s Some Los Angeles Apartments. “What’s exciting about the photography that came out of Ruscha’s documentation of the Sunset Strip is that it really altered the sense of what was possible with street photography, which had always been from the viewpoint of the pedestrian,” John Tain, a Getty Research Institute assistant curator and a cocurator of the show, said in a statement. “Today we have the Google Maps roving fleet of camera cars, but Ruscha was doing this kind of photography more than forty years ago.”

Image Courtesy of CicLAvia. Photo: Gary Leonard

CicLAvia: Modern Architecture on Wilshire Boulevard
Community Arts Resources
Sunday, June 23, 10 a.m. to 3 p.m.

CicLAvia, the largest open-streets event in the U.S., will close Wilshire Boulevard from downtown to Fairfax and give Angelenos a chance to appreciate their architecture from the leisurely speeds of 2–15 miles per hour, without sending a pileup of cars into a honking frenzy. Now that’s an Architecture + Mobility concept we can get behind!

A. Quincy Jones’s Sunnylands in Palm Springs, California. Photography by Julius Shulman and Juergen Nogai, 2007 © Juergen Nogai

A. Quincy Jones: Building for Better Living
Hammer Museum
May 25–September 8

Stephen Prina, As He Remembered It, installation view, Secession Vienna, 2011. The artist re-created modernist architect R.M. Schindler’s built-in furniture in bright pink. © The artist, courtesy Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne and Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York © Photo: Wolfgang Thaler, Wien

Stephen Prina: As He Remembered It
Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA)
April 7–August 4

Kevin Daly, Daly Genik Architects, Palms House, Venice, California, 2011. Photo: © Jason Schmidt

A New Sculpturalism: Contemporary Architecture from Southern California
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA)
June 2–September 2

Wayne Williams and Whitney Smith, Shoreline House for Orange County Home Show, Costa Mesa, California, 1957. © Regents of the University of California

Outside In: The Architecture of Smith and Williams
Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara
April 13–June 16

by Lamar Anderson

posted in Events exhibitions

tagged a+d museum, Architecture Month, getty center, getty museum, hammer museum, LACMA, Los angeles, MOCA, modernism, Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, museums, pacific standard time, ucla

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