Rate this item (0 votes)font size Print Be the first to co.docx

Rate this item (0 votes)
font size Print Be the first to comment!
Greg Lynn
Hernán Díaz Alonso
Tom Wiscombe
Patterns
David Clovers
Jason Payne
Ball Nogues
words Justin McGuirk
Like Be the first of your friends to like this.
ICON MAGAZINE ONLINE | The new LA school | icon 52 |
October 2007 ... http://www.iconeye.com/read-previous-
issues/icon-052-|-october-2007/t...
1 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
The new LA school is a band of digital revolutionaries.
Obsessed with form and technique, this generation of young

architects is
milking the city’s resources – from Hollywood to the aerospace
industry – to redefine how architecture is made.
In 1980, Domus magazine published a feature entitled “The
young architects of California”. Aside from a 51-year-old Frank
Gehry
– pictured on the cover with black hair and an Inspector
Clouseau moustache – the group included Thom Mayne,
Michael
Rotondi, Eric Owen Moss, Robert Mangurian and Coy Howard,
most of whom were in their early thirties. Their edgy
postmodernism, showing the first signs of later deconstructivist
tendencies, was establishing LA as a place that was unafraid of
new ideas. “Historicism and contextualism are empty words in a
city that has no history, no tradition and no context,” said
Gehry at
the time.
A quarter of a century later, both that attitude and that spirit of
adventure have been revived by a group for whom LA is a place
where geometric, biological and pop culture fantasies can be
made real. From the sci-fi baroque creations of Hernán Díaz
Alonso
to the bio-engineering of Tom Wiscombe and the hairy
architecture of Jason Payne, the city is a breeding ground for
experimentalists.

Most are not native to LA, but migrated here from the east coast
or Argentina, many of them after studying at Columbia
University
in New York. They all came for the same reasons and in many
respects they were all following a pattern set by Greg Lynn.
Lynn
saw the potential in the city to start prototyping the kind of
work that he had been designing with computer animation
software.
The workshops that had grown up in LA around the automotive
and aerospace industries, as well as the prop-making and set
design needs of Hollywood, were the perfect resource for
modelling his curved and folded surfaces.
Far more than any local architectural vernacular, this is the
context that the city offers its young architecture pioneers –
hence
sci-fi and blockbuster movie references abound in the work.
Yet, a more specific factor links almost all of the architects
gathered in this round-up, and that is the Southern California
Institute
of Architecture (SCI-Arc), where most of them teach. Invited
there five years ago by architect Neil Denari and critic Michael
Speaks, they have transformed the school into a hotbed of
digital design practice, and the kind of place where students are
almost as likely to leave for careers as 3D animators as they are

as architects.
In the sense that the protagonists are all friends, all exactly the
same age (except for Lynn), and all keeping a very keen and
competitive eye on each other’s work, this is about as close-knit
and coherent a group as you can expect to find in architecture
today. However, there are clear ideological fault lines.
To various degrees they are all dealing with new forms, but the
question is whether it is for form’s sake or in the interest of
performance. At either extreme, you have the seamless curlicues
of Díaz Alonso and the performance-focused experimental
structures of Wiscombe. Then there are those such as Patterns
and Jason Payne, who are playing with the translucent or tactile
qualities of materials in search of holistic sensory experiences.
Finally, on another fringe is the more alternative practice of
Ball
Nogues – a slight anomaly here – which uses digital modelling
software only as a precursor to a more craft-based sensibility.
Unlike their predecessors, this generation is not honing its skills
on extensions and houses. Instead, it creates exhibition
architecture (pavilions and installations), it collaborates on
motion graphics projects and produces concept pieces for
mobile
phone and car companies keen to keep tabs on the marketing
potential of radical design. The difficulty that this generation
faces

is making buildings.
It is one of the cliches of both LA’s art and architecture scenes
that they possess a Wild West, frontier mentality. And it is with
a
clear pride in that attitude that the architects leave themselves
wide open to attack. Needless to say, a lot of this work turns
stomachs in the sensitive and “civilised” circles of Europe,
where it looks like aesthetic hysteria. By trading typologies for
topographies, is it rejecting an essential human quality in the
work? How desirable is an architecture that pushes formal
boundaries but doesn’t care how it relates to the city? Is
geometry content? And what will these buildings look like in
the flesh?
These are important questions, but they don’t outweigh the
feeling that one of architecture’s conceivable futures is
germinating in
LA. This group of architects, as the modernists did in the last
century, is pushing industrial technology to its logical
conclusions –
it’s just that in this case the technology is not coming from
within architecture but from industries that are advancing far
more
rapidly. Instead of relying on the standardisation of
conventional construction, they are forging a world of genuinely
customised

architecture. There is no doubting the ambition of the agenda or
the work, nor the fact that it is both exciting and scary.
2 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
Greg Lynn
Greg Lynn is the crucial character in this story, and the pivot
around which most of the architects in it revolve. As one of
them put
it, “He’s the godfather… except he’s too young to be called
that.” At 42, Lynn is only five years older than most of this
group, and
yet he might as well be another generation – for starters, he
taught several of them and it was his example they were
following in
migrating from the east coast to LA. He essentially set the
pattern for this generation, coming up with the theory and
language
they use, and the cross-disciplinary collaborations they engage
in.
What distinguishes Lynn from his protégés, for now, is that he
is the complete article – everything from theorist, computer
geek

and network-maker to built architect and product designer.
After working in Peter Eisenman’s office, he set up Greg Lynn
FORM in
Hoboken, New Jersey, but several factors attracted him to LA:
the art scene, the entertainment industry, the fact that giant
corporate practices are less dominant here than in New York or
Chicago. The key motive, however, was the concentration of
aerospace and automotive design studios in the city, and the
potential they offered to prototype his digital designs.
“What better place to pursue architecture and its popular
implications than Los Angeles? I believe the city is more
dedicated to the
popular imagination than to high culture. I mean, this sci-fi
dedication belongs here.”
In his studio in Venice, Lynn shows off his CNC router and
rapid-prototyping machines. Although it is grounded in complex
geometry and the will to fashion buildings out of curves and
continuous surfaces, everything Lynn does is defined by the
tools he
uses. Countering standard typologies with freestyle, pliable
surfaces, Lynn’s forms have their own logic, stemming from
forces and
geometries generated in computer animation. In the late 1990s
he coined the term “blob”, or at least applied it to architecture
from
computer modelling, where it was an acronym for Binary Large

Object (the word also explicitly referenced B movie science
fiction).
Since then he has extrapolated a whole lexicon, from “blebs” to
“shreds”, but they won’t necessarily help you understand why
his
design for the Ark of the World museum in Costa Rica looks
like a man-eating plant hiding under a doily. “People call it
biomorphic
but I was never that interested in organic design. I’ve always
been more interested in popular culture. The Costa Rica thing
looks
like a plant but that’s because it’s in a jungle.”
Endowed with a natural experimental streak, Lynn was the first
to use aerospace fabrication techniques and to collaborate with
motion graphics studios such as Imaginary Forces – both now
regular collaborators with local architects. In one of his current
projects, he is designing an online city for eight billion people
to be rendered at cinema quality.
For Lynn, the big debate in architecture is between form
designing and form finding – the latter being “parametric”
design, based
on feeding statistics into the computer. “I blame it all on Rem
[Koolhaas]. The problem is that schools are teaching Rem –
even
though Rem doesn’t do what he says he does – and the teachers
don’t really understand computers so they encourage students

to just punch in data and design around the [building’s]
programme. It’s really limited.” To Lynn, this is a wimpish cop-
out, and he
clearly finds some solace in the fact that the LA scene is made
up of “designers” and not “form finders”. If he has any criticism
of
his younger colleagues it is that they are following too closely
in his footsteps. “What I am critical of is that none of these
guys has
got their own Imaginary Forces. There are dozens of younger
motion graphics companies who would love to be involved with
them, but they’re going with what they know.”
Hernán Díaz Alonso
3 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
Hernán Díaz Alonso looks, talks and acts like a swaggering
bandido but designs like a nerdy child prodigy with a science
fiction
fetish. His practice, Xefirotarch, represents the extreme end of
the work coming out of LA in the sense that his designs are
self-consciously, operatically visual – and he is totally

unapologetic about it. “I’m only interested in form. For me,
form follows form.
That doesn’t mean that what we do doesn’t function, but
function is never a driving force of the work, it’s just something
that
needs to be accommodated. I’m interested in how the form
reorganises how you would use it.”
Díaz Alonso’s rhetoric is actually very clever, not least because
it has made him perhaps the most high profile of LA’s younger
generation, and has attracted a number of conceptual
commissions from corporate marketing departments. Although
his only built
work is the 2005 installation at PS1 in New York, and most of
his time is spent on exhibition architecture and teaching, he
does
actually have two clients: one for a house outside Paris and the
other for an artists’ community in the Dominican Republic.
Born in Buenos Aires, Diaz Alonso wanted to be a film director
but the film school had shut down so he studied architecture
instead, and felt good about the choice when he saw the
catalogue for the Deconstructivist Architecture show at MoMA
in 1988.
But he maintains that his work has a “cinematic logic” driven
by computer animation software, and he frequently collaborates
with
motion graphics firm Imaginary Forces. “My influence is more

blockbuster movies. Tim Burton is a gigantic influence on me –
he
blows my mind – but also Guillermo del Toro, the first Matrix,
Bladerunner … I love vampire movies, especially the first
Blade.”
This sci-fi aspect is more than an aesthetic, however. Díaz
Alonso talks about his designs in terms of species, genetics and
artificial mutation. But, evident in the way that his baroque
forms deliberately skirt the grotesque, the painter Francis Bacon
was
also a profound influence. Like Bacon, he is comfortable with
the uncomfortable, and has the provocateur’s knack of laying
claim
to the language you might use to criticise him before you do.
Interestingly, Díaz Alonso has lost competitions for not
emphasising his process enough, but again he is unrepentant. “I
don’t mind
showing the process, but as an act of god,” he says. A veteran
of Enric Miralles’ office, Díaz Alonso has adopted the Catalan
architect’s practice of seeing the process as an “autopsy”. “You
do it and then you try to understand exactly what happened to
go
to the next one. There’s a certain notion of surrealism that
operates in the work. It’s more like the emotional state that you
want it
to produce.”

Some of Díaz Alonso’s talk is clearly posturing. Another
Columbia graduate and Peter Eisenman apprentice, he is well
versed in
conceptual procedures. Furthermore, his designs are buildable
(“they just cost five or six time more than clients are willing to
spend”). All Díaz Alonso is missing is some pragmatism. Asked
at what point he might compromise for the sake of actually
building
something, he replies: “Never! Zaha stuck to her guns, and six
or seven years ago she’d only built a restaurant in Japan. Now
she’s taking over the world.”
4 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
Tom Wiscombe
Tom Wiscombe makes architecture by combining the skills of
the biologist and the engineer. His work is driven by a concern
for
structural performance, but he is not averse to some theatrical
form-making. He wants a roof to soar, but in the lightest, most
efficient way possible – and he is likely to find the solution in a
dragonfly wing.

Wiscombe founded his practice, Emergent – which, incidentally,
is a word that has often been applied to this kind of work
because
of its focus on emerging technologies – in 1999. However, his
career has been largely shaped by his 12-year, ongoing
collaboration with the Austrian practice Coop Himmelb(l)au,
under the mentorship of its principal, Wolf D Prix.
The walls of his small studio on Wilshire Boulevard are pinned
with pictures of bat wings, water lilies and even the art nouveau
forms of Hector Guimard’s Paris Metro. But these are just
pictures – what interests Wiscombe is not the forms but the
underlying
structures. In a recent installation at SCI-Arc, he created a giant
aluminium cantilever that mimicked a dragonfly wing’s
composition of long beams connected by a honeycomb
membrane. “It’s not attempting to look like a dragonfly wing
but operate
like one,” he says. “Biology never has the perfect solution, but
engineering plugged into biology does.”
Sometimes called “bioconstructivism”, Wiscombe’s work uses
parametric software to find elegant structural solutions, and he
sees
the results as a form of natural selection or genetic mutation.
“Engineering is no longer about the analogue problem solving,
it’s

generative. You can grow populations of solutions and breed
them.”
In 2003 Emergent won the PS1 Urban Beach installation – a
programme that has proved a launch pad for three of the
practices
gathered in this overview. The wing-like creation looked more
like the result of aerospace engineering than the biological
research
he deals with today. Although this remains its only built work,
the practice is increasingly finding itself on major international
competition shortlists, and this year narrowly missed out on
winning the Prague National Library.
Despite the Austrian connection, Wiscombe is an obvious
product of the LA architectural climate. “My work is global but
it couldn’t
be anywhere; the community here has a huge impact on what
you’re doing. Teaching together is really important, we all sit in
on
each others’ reviews, and by disagreeing with each other we
move things forward.” While not critical of any of his LA
contemporaries – the local scene is too mutually supportive for
any real dissonance – Wiscombe hints that he finds some of the
work meretricious. “We need to get away from digital work
that’s just about surfaces,” he says. What’s more, he is not
waiting for
clients’ tastes to catch up with his talent. “I’m not interested in

being a provocateur in the architecture community.
I like working in the world. We’re coming to the end of an age
now where ego is a driver of the profession – we’re peaking
now
5 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
with Zaha and Gehry. There are new issues that are not about
the hero, like sustainability, culture and process.”
Patterns
Patterns is the practice of Argentinian-born Marcelo Spina and
Georgina Huljich, whose office is on Hollywood Boulevard
(above
Marlene Dietrich’s star). The name is misleading at first, since
of this group they are perhaps the most interested in the
practical
and traditional aspects of architecture as opposed to form-
making. The patterns that concern them are the behavioural ones
found, for instance, in repetitive structural systems. These
result in weird prototypes that evoke both car chassis and close-
ups of
reptile skin. Although they are essentially sculptural – Spina
reveals the influence of British sculptors Richard Deacon and

Tony
Cragg – a good deal of research goes into them and they have
the potential to turn into monocoque structures.
Spina studied at Columbia and then worked for Reiser and
Umemoto in New York, while Huljich worked for Thom
Mayne’s
Morphosis. Moving to LA to teach at SCI-Arc, Spina was
sceptical about the city’s architectural establishment.
“Somehow I was
always critical of the LA school,” he says. “As much as I
respect the work of Frank [Gehry] and Thom [Mayne], I like
work that is
not in your eyes all the time. I’ve always been related more to
European practices – Alvaro Siza was very influential to me.”
Patterns’ experimentation with materials expresses one of the
practices main concerns. “We’re interested in the physicality of
the
object, how you would touch it and what kind of surface you
would get – both at the level of proto-architecture and building.
We
see the prototypes as work – they carry their own formal
message. We also see them as vehicles for exploration and
research.”
Resin-based variations of fibreglass, super-plastics and new
forms of concrete are cast or vacuum-formed into prototypes
that can

serve as both skin and structure. Translucent and sometimes
even gelatinous surfaces are exploited to create subtle
variations in
experience.
“I like work that is sensation making but not necessarily
sensational,” says Spina. “I’m not interested in the new, but in
inflections
of things you already understand. Then there’s a deeper sense of
effect that can be produced. We’re not interested in creating a
blob, or something ‘other’.”
The practice is currently designing the SCI-Arc cafe, which the
architects are merging in a fluid way with the adjacent library’s
bookcases, so that shelves morph into tables and chairs. But
more importantly, given the challenges their contemporaries are
facing, the architects actually have a building underway on
Sunset Boulevard. The shopfront, which doesn’t fight the fact
that the
building is just a box, is panelled in translucent resin-based
polycarbonate that torques into a set of gill-like windows,
introducing a
voyeuristic aspect that Spina describes as “like looking up a
girl’s skirt”.
“Site specificity and context are words that are old-fashioned
these days,” he says, tellingly. “In LA you’re not supposed to
care,

6 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
and I totally disagree with that. This is not gratuitous.” Less
rhetorically inclined than some of his friends, Spina sees the
constraints of programme and context as invaluable. “The more
close we are with that kind of conflict the better the project is
in
our view.”
Patterns is also hugely reliant on the local fabrication culture,
collaborating with, for instance, Warner Brothers’ set design
studio
to vacuum-from the components of the SCI-Arc cafe. “In Los
Angeles, especially at SCI-Arc, there is a tradition of
fabrication that
forces you to get even closer to materials and certain
technicalities of built assembly. The tools are here and the
advanced
manufacture companies are here because of the movie industry,
the car industry and the remains of the aerospace industry.”
David Clovers
David Clovers is another practice that combines the
experimental nature of installations with the pragmatics of

large-scale
architecture projects. Only founded earlier this year, it is
already building 30 houses in Beijing – a capacious job for a
couple
whose references would suggest a more arthouse output.
David Erdman was formerly of interactive and multimedia
design group Servo, while Clover Lee joined him from LA firm
Hodgetts
and Fung. Similarly to Patterns and Jason Payne, their work is
preoccupied with sensory effects, whether that involves light,
fog
or tactile materials. A proposal for a perimeter screen at the
Schindler House in West Hollywood resembles a glowing sea
anemone that spouts water and fog. “We work with this fullness
to produce an effect of mysteriousness, adding other orders or
matter into the architecture as a means of making it less legible
and more full as an experience and an environment,” says
Erdman.
While they have collaborated with the Warner Brothers
workshop and custom car manufacturers, as others have, there is
no
sense that this is in any way glamorous. “I see it as very
prosaic,” says Erdman. “To call it our interaction with ‘the film
industry’
sounds a bit too heroic. It’s really the prop industry we’re

working with. That’s why you see a moodiness and drama in the
work,
and why it errs on the side of the cosmetic – in a good way.”
The Beijing houses, part of a scheme to create an entire artists’
district, are all variations of one original typology in which
most of
the light is funnelled in through the roof. The designs are
simple yet inscrutable, and their ambiguity is a quality that the
practice
strives for, in distinction to the complexity of some of their
local counterparts.
“We don’t necessarily look to architects, because when it comes
to integrating multimedia technology other disciplines are a lot
further ahead, such as industrial designers or filmmakers or
artists,” says Lee. In fact, the couple cite an unusual list of
references,
7 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
from Matthew Barney to The Talented Mr Ripley (“a character
who is entirely translucent and murky”) and Jack Black from the
Pirates of the Caribbean. Somehow these are references that
could only be taken seriously in the relaxed intellectual climate

of
LA.
That atmosphere has also applied to the sharing of technology –
an ethos established early on by Frank Gehry’s use of CATIA
modelling software. “What’s nice about LA is that everybody
feels comfortable sharing information,” says Lee. “The East
coast is
obsessed with the technology and it’s treated as almost
proprietary secrets. ‘I have a fabricator who does this but I’m
not going to
tell you about it because then you could do the same thing I
can.’ There’s a different attitude about it here, which is: I can
still do
something innovative as long as I have a unique idea.”
Jason Payne
Jason Payne is operating on the extreme fringe of the digital LA
scene. Although he has a similar intellectual provenance to
Hernán Díaz Alonso or Marcelo Spina (he is a former Columbia
University graduate who worked at digital architects Reiser
Umemoto and now teaches at UCLA), he has pushed his work
away from concerns with the image towards the tactile and
sensual
properties of materials.
He says his move from New York to LA was prompted less by

the desire to see his designs prototyped than to see how they
would be changed by becoming material. The result is that his
interest in curved and complex forms has been overtaken by an
obsession with… hairiness. It all began with computer-
generated particle animations that looked like tangled masses of
hair. “So
then I thought, wouldn’t it be amusing if I could somehow
theorise hair in architecture… We started doing stuff that was in
the
beginning organisationally hairy and then ultimately literally
sticking hair on projects. What I found was that people were
taking it
more and more seriously.”
Payne recently split with former partner Heather Roberge, with
whom he ran a practice comically titled Gnuform (the gnu is a
hairy
yak-like animal), and set up on his own under the similarly apt
rubric Hirsuta. His current projects include a Taurus-shaped
house
in Malibu and a house in Utah.
Payne’s most complete expression to date (one of Gnuform’s
projects) is a bar and reception area for cable television channel
No
Good TV. A total sensual experience, the bar is a curved and
folded form in plastic with black rubber mounds for squeezing
and

crevices lined with red fur. Beyond sexual allusions to some of
the channel’s erotic material, the bar embodies Payne’s interest
in
the tactile potential of architecture. “[Professor] Jeff Kipnis
called it a new phenomenology but I’m still a bit troubled by
the term
phenomenology so I call it sensate work because it’s meant to
appeal very directly and overtly to the senses, and especially the
non visual – mostly the tactile but also in some cases smell.”
8 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
Ball Nogues
Ball Nogues is in some ways the exception on this architectural
tour. Although partners Benjamin Ball and Gastón Nogues are
digital practitioners, the two former SCI-Arc students belong to
the school’s earlier tradition of making things by hand. Theirs
is a
craft sensibility in which the forms happen to be generated by
parametric modelling. However, what they have in common
with a
number of the practices here is the desire to create a rich

sensory experience.
Working out of a graffiti-covered garage in Echo Park, the pair
may play the part of the alternative-scene hipsters but this year
they built the annual Urban Beach installation at PS1 in New
York, really the only significant platform for young architects
in the
US. And while Ball’s background is in set design for the film
industry, Argentinian-born Nogues spent ten years working for
Frank
Gehry. “What I took away from Gehry was a sense of
exploration and discovery through playing – it was pretty
amazing watching
him work,” says Nogues. Ironically, Ball does most of the
computer modelling.
Ball Nogues’ work draws on an interesting range of references,
from the super-light structures of engineer Frei Otto to,
naturally,
Hollywood movies. An early work, Maximilian’s Schell (named
after the actor), simulated a black hole-like structure out of
translucent golden mylar petals. Like the tent-shaped accretions
at PS1 this summer, every piece was unique, calculated on the
computer before being numbered and assembled. The petals sit
somewhere between Gehry’s beloved fish scales and village fete
bunting. “Part of that is a reaction against the minimalist
surface, that real tiny thin surface of just material, and to create
an effect

by the way that the light comes through and filters and
reflects,” says Nogues.
Nogues says the language is based on nature but the practice
clearly has none of the theoretical pretensions of its local
counterparts. A cardboard installation at Rice University in
Houston earlier this year (icon 043) alluded to images from
American
landscape painting but was essentially a beautiful climbing
frame. “We wanted people to have a very child-like attitude of
exploration, letting them climb all over it.”
Regardless of the computer modelling, it is the collaborative act
of building, which they invest with an almost performative
quality,
that seems most important. Though still operating at the level of
installation architecture, they aim higher. “We both have an
ambition to make buildings,” Nogues says. “We just have to
have somebody that wants to make a building the way that we
want
to make a building.”
images Monica Nouwens
9 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM

Social sharing
Read 5099 times | Like this? Tweet it to your followers!
Published in ICON 052 | October 2007
Tagged under icon 052 | October 2007
Latest from
The Icon Design Trail
Centro Niemeyer
Icon at Clerkenwell Design Week
Review: The Pruitt-Igoe Myth
Review: Barbra Streisand: My Passion for Design
Related items (by tag)
Guest Editor: Giorgio Armani | icon 052 | October 2007
Strata
Parasite drawers
A light switch as a coat hook
Rubber brains | icon 052 | October 2007
back to top

10 of 10 9/4/2012 5:06 PM
44
BUILDING
( In )THE By Aaron Betsky
BRAVE NEW WORLD
The landscape of Southern California is all but devoid of monu-
ments in a traditional sense. In the same sense, it is also without
a
clearly defined vernacular. Man has not elaborated the natural
conditions of this semi-arid terrain into decorative orders, nor
has
he built memorials to his achievements in subjugating
it. The architecture of Southern California exists
largely outside of the realm of the age-old contest
with nature that turns building into an act either of
the imposition of alien human form orofthe mediation

of natural forces. Instead, architecture here has been
conceived of as an artifact at the end of the line, a
technological invention.
Such statements, however, can only be made
while whizzing by the multitudinous complexities of
this city. In reality, Southern California is no Eden for
architectural rebirth, where one can pluck the
oranges of a post-Descartian architecture from holo-
graphic trees nurtured by pumped-in intellects. It is
a city like any other, where a vast majority of practi-
tioners affirm the existing social and economic status
quo through the design of pointless buildings, while a
small group of mainly young designers tries to figure
out how to create an alternative to such a practice.
At the same time, the absence of controlling de-
vices, such as development patterns connected to
history, an untainted natural landscape, or objects
that have become cultural and social focal points,
is indeed liberating.
Los Angeles lacks a clear civic architecture. Its
government is housed in buildings undistinguishable
from the surrounding office buildings, its cultural
'institutions are broken apart into fragmented,
almost invisible, pavilions. The so-called civic center

of downtown Los Angeles has only one true focal
point - city hall. This modest skyscraper, however, is
not at the end of any clear axis, but sits outside of the
major thrust of development and is dwarfed by sur-
rounding boxes created in the 1950s to house bureau-
cracies. The latest government building, the Ronald
Reagan State Building, continues this tradition
through dissolution into multiple towers enmeshed in
a globular base eaten out by the requisite atrium
space. Even the much-vaunted Pasadena Civic Cen-
ter has lost its major axis, while the city hall there is a
stage set of civic rhetoric that is essentially hollow:
the tower is empty, and the solid front of the building
is in fact a thin shell wrapped around a courtyard.
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a series of
pavilions hiding behind a large billboard, while the
Museum of Contemporary Art is buried in a parking
structure so as not to obscure the view from the sur-
roW1ding office buildings that paid for its construction.
There are, however, alternative focal points in
the Los Angeles landscape: oil derricks, freeway
overpasses, pleasure piers, and the Hollywood sign.
Yet all of these monumental markers are essentially

meaningless. They are enigmatic results of systems
of communication, of marketing needs, or of the
extraction of something invisible. Large community
foci such as shopping centers turn inward, leaving
only mute scaffolding for the clothing racks inside to
face the adoring sea of parked cars. Skyscrapers,
which in cities like New York perform a monumental
function, are here cut off from the life of the street,
entered through labyrinthine parking garages, and
decapitated by a law that mandates helicopter land-
ing pads on top of all tall buildings. The result is a city
organized around roads and signs, not solid objects
that indicate the aspirations, memories, or self-image
of a community.
But what about the field around these objects?
Wouldn't the vernacular richness of daily experience
more than make up for the lack of a gTand architec-
t ure? Yet it is hard to find a Los Angeles vernacular.
In response to the climate, buildings here have a
tendency to turn inward, leaving lush vegetation in
place offacades . That gesture is about as close as the
city comes to an architectonic response to its geogra-
phy. The remaining elements of -its vernacular are a
grab bag of wholly imported styles, including the

fragments of an international style slapped together
in ephemeral constructions that are either torn down
or remodeled before they can accrue memories. There
is a vernacular in terms of frequently repeated com-
positional patterns that are generated wholly by the
economic pressures on them: the dingbat apartment
block, the fast-food stand, the strip shopping mall.
Yet these building blocks of a Los Angeles vernacu-
lar, however glorified by the lovers of the architecture
during the 1950s, do not reflect the need of their
inhabitants and are generally not specific to their
site. They are created because of economic necessity
and are essentially mass-produced . If they are
expressions of the nature of Los Angeles, they are so
only negati vely, as the lowest common denominator of
design , affordable given the tremendous development
pressures on almost every site in the city. The result-
ing evanescence of the man-made landscape is fur-
thered by the continually changing population of the
Basin, which is quickly becoming the most ethnically
diverse in the world. There are few communities that
do not dissolve before one generation has a chance to
grow up, whether under the pressures of develop-

ment or because of the mobility of its own population.
The only constant in man-made Los Angeles is
technology. Like all cities, Los Angeles is built on
vast and usually invisible systems of infrastructure of
irrigation , electricity, sewage, communication, and
transportation. But where in other cities a bend in the
road might recall the memory of an old stream bed, in
Los Angeles it is the result of the meeting of two
different subdevelopments, and a major intersection
is the result of a long forgotten juncture between two
streetcar lines. The availability of water is not com-
memorated in bridges or fountains, but only in the
greenness of lawns. The places where infrastruc-
ture erupts form the only causes for architectonic
focal points in Los Angeles. Freeway exit ramps
are increasingly ringed with castellated commercial
developments; the arrival of water from the Owens
. Valley occasions a grand set of concrete forms cas-
cading down the Grapevine Pass; and electrical
substations send out their ganglia of wires from a
spider's web of sparkling power. Freeways form
street walls at a larger scale, while the military
installations that ring the Southland create its true

gateways and mark the limits of its growth. Tech-
nology is the preeminent definer of the forms of
Los Angeles.
The result of such conditions is that here,
more than in most cities, the notion of an indepen-
dent architectural object seems slightly absurd, as
does the notion of either monumental form or a
well-worn vernacular. Attempts to glorify the signs
and symbols of technology to turn them into a sys-
tem of monuments and monumental open spaces
deny the essential character of these enablers of
artifice, namely their nature as scaffolding, not
form . This does not mean that there is no possi-
bility for architecture in Los Angeles. It just
indicates the need for letting go of the idea that
architecture is a solid mediator between individ-
uals, or between individuals and nature. The
climate has already invalidated the latter, while the
historical place of Los Angeles as the end of the
road, the haven of exiles, and the dreamland where
manifest destiny can be constructed , has made
short shrift of the former.
What we are left with is a bricolage whose

true symbol is Watts Thwers, a meaningless monu-
ment pieced together from cast-off elements. We
are left with communities parachuted into the
desert, isolated from each other, constructed from
the most shoddy materials, and open to continual
change. What we are left with is a city that will
soon be the largest industrial base in the country,
sprawling into an endless sea of tilt-up sweatshops,
whose accumulated wealth has not and will not
coalesce into any permanent form that will give it
identity, but will instead disappear into the ever-
45
46
spiraling worth of the landscape itself. What we are
left with is a new kind of semidesert, a man-made
landscape so extensive that it deserves that name.
In Southern California, technology has created
a completely artificial alternative to the natural
world. Here, streams are buried in concrete culverts,
or exchanged for the sluggish rivers of the freeways,
which gather into pools and waterfalls at crucial
intersections. The surrounding mountains, so tall
and absolute as to defy human comprehension,
become a datum line visible only on a few clear days,

and soon they too will only be interruptions in the
sprawl, containing no remnants of castles or pleasure
gardens. Our new mountains are magic ones in
Disneyland, or they are formed by the accumulation
of activity that pushes buildings up in concentric, if
somewhat erratic, rings around freeway intersec-
tions. This new landscape is harsh and inimical, a
hostile environment where you have to learn how to
burrow down or under to discover the sustenance
buried in the rich interiors of homes, stores, or res-
taurants. The features of this landscape are hard to
distinguish from the surroundings, and appear
monotonous to the untrained eye, but, as in the
desert, they reveal themselves to the trained eye as
the crucial markers in dangerous terrain. Even the
hues of our pollution mimic the rich ochers, purples,
and browns that build up the subtle palette of
the desert.
c
The progeny of this desert appear slightly sur-
real to one accustomed to more temperate climates.
They are prickly, hard, and without the kind of grad-
ual ascension from base to top that marks a well-
rounded tree or plant. They are often deformed by
their specific function or type, and they are extremely
inward-oriented, protecting themselves from all ene-
mies and storing up their precious resources. They
are either minute and brightly colored, or vast and
muted. Their spiky forms often take on the appear-
ance of armor plating, or of an armory of defen-
sive weapons.
Of course, they are just the buildings or the
plants. The true inhabitants are the nomads, those

who cannot rest in the desert, but must search con-
tinually for water or, in the case of Los Angeles, for
something more ephemeral to keep them going: the
future, always out of reach. That future is the very
engine of modernization , that which fuels the rise in
prices, the influx of immigrants, and the physical
sprawl of the city itself. It is symbolized by the Pacific
Ocean, the unconquered West towards which the
multimillion dollar homes that line the coast turn
their plate-glass eyes adoringly: it's out there, some-
where past the sunset, under the water, beyond the
water, beyond the edge. The modern nomads, mean-
while, are not quite human anymore. They have been
married to their technological devices. In Los
Angeles, you really need your sunglasses. You really
shouldn't breathe unfiltered air. You need your air
conditioning. You need your car. The inhabitants of
the Los Angeles deserts are a kind of satyr- half-
human, half-machine.
First, the densification of Los Angeles is changing
the more amorphous, spread-out character of the city.
Over 50,000 people in Los Angeles live in garages.
Two-story apartment buildings are making way for
four-story condominiums. Downtown is developing
into a dense core. Taken together, these develop-
ments should make the city look more urbane. Yet this
replication of the larger grids at a smaller scale and
the filling-out of fraglnentary forms into larger non-
wholes in fact intensifies the confusion. It is now
almost impossible to create isolated objects. Archi-
tecture in Los Angeles, as in most other cities, has
become a question of transforming the laws, regula-

tions, and structures of the city. Here the game seems
only more abstract and absurd, given the current and
deracinated nature of the so-called context to be
addressed by the architect. The chaotic nature of the
city becomes more evident, and thus one could say its
destiny as the first city beyond the bounds of reason,
and thus of humanistic urban planning, seems ever
more imminent.
Second, this tendency towards post-humanism
is not to be understood as necessarily bad. In fact,
making value judgments about such developments is
dangerous since it leads to the proposal of the kind of
"solutions" that have pockmarked our cities with well-
intentioned disasters. An attempt to understand the
nature of the evolution of humanity beyond the defini-
tions established by seventeenth-century rationalism
might be of greater interest, and in fact Los Angeles
could act as a laboratory for the development of
methods of critical evaluation as much as it can create
new and interesting mutations of form. Such an
approach does not absolve architecture, whether as a
drawn or built construction, from its responsibility to
take a political stance, that is, to- participate actively
in the development of the city in such a way as to
prevent the complete abrogation of rights by those in
control of its physical resources. Rather, it is the role
of the architects to create compelling visions of
transformation that can be erected against the purely
destructive forces inherent in the economic and social
structure of the city.
Finally, nature always threatens to reassert
itself as a defining factor. The earthquake faults are

near, and periodically send out their warning
tremors. Much of the architecture of Los Angeles is,
in fact, deformed by anticipation of "the big one," so
that the old role of architecture as a bastion against a
post-Edenic world sneaks in through the earthquake
codes. Less dramatically, water remains scarce, and
the fear of its disappearance gives an edge to those
who wish to place artificial limits on the development
of the metropolis. Yet, to those willing to keep dream-
ing, the Pacific once again is the future - an endless
horizon of water waiting to be transformed into sus-
tenance for the man-made desert.
Given such a daunting landscape, how are
young architects performing? First of all, they are
building on an indigenous tradition. Architects have
been making sense out of the seeming chaos of Los
Angeles. In fact, one might argue that they have
found themselves confronted with processes of mod-
ernization before many other cities and, as a result,
have developed a more pronounced modernism. Irv-
ing Gill's reductivist aesthetic - based on the sparse
anonymity of whatever local vernacular was still pre-
sent at the turn of the century, and married to the
inexorable logic of tilt-up construction - predated the
more affected form of the Viennese heroes of classical
modernism. Schindler, building on the work of the
Greene brothers, created an architecture expressive
of the lack of a center, static dividers, or the object
quality of local form. The Case Study program of
the 1950s produced kits of parts that were meant to
integrate architecture into the technological marvel
that had created this modern metropolis out of
defense industries, romantic illusions, and available

land. Frank Gehry later synthesized much of this
city into enigmatic objects that refuse to complete
themselves or to make sense. Most recently, the for-
mer employers of many of those whose work is
collected here, such as Thom Mayne and Michael
Rotondi, Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian,
Eric Moss, or Frank Israel, have been struggling to
create an architecture that either draws on
research by artists into the relationship between
artifice and experience, or which transforms itself
into set design at an urban scale. The vitality of
their work is a testimony to the fact that Los
Angeles does produce architecture which at its best
does not look like building, but is an abstract
interruption in the city, a piece of technology honed
for living, or a self-consciously vivid set for modern
living.
The work of the younger generation builds on
these traditions, but is also informed by more clas-
sical notions of architecture that these designers,
all but a few of whom grew up and were educated
elsewhere, brought with them to California. Their
visions can be said to oscillate between two ideal
images of man, not including that of the da Vincian
Renaissance hero squaring the circle and thus
resolving the conflict between man in nature in
favor of man's projective, abstracting capabilities.
Rather, one finds the image of the naked man first
postulated by Schindler, released from nature,
standing naked on the shore of the Pacific. The
inhabitant of the ramshackle beach shack, the
surfer, is the prototype of this new man, and his
undressing is mirrored in the unclothing of
structure started by Schindler and brought to full

flower by Frank Gehry. This new Adam is the
conceptual client of what might be called the
Gehry-schule, an ever-growing group of young
designers who either worked for, or moved to the
city because of the reputation of, "the godfather of
47
48
the Los Angeles avant-garde." The other model is the
man/machine satyr, depicted at the end of the first
Star Trek motion picture and consummated in what
Elizabeth Diller has called "an architecture of pros-
thetics." This satyr is served by another school, this
one focused around the Southern California Institute
of Architecture and the work of Morphosis. Between
these two poles stretch the tentative assemblages of
built and drawn form that are the oeuvre of a new
generation of Los Angeles architects.
On one side of the spectrum are the new
primitives - the Los Angeles branch of a national
movement back to the ranch , back to basics, and back
to materials. Produced by those who assimilated the
teaching of the Italian and South American rational-
ists such as Mario Gandelsonas and Jorge Silvetti
during the 1970s and 1980s, and who then applied the
new reductive, memory-driven forms to a perceived
American vernacular, their work relies heavily on
simple, geometric shapes, cubical volumes, unclut-

tered planes, and a fondness for concrete, concrete-
colored stucco, and concrete block, held together by a
muscular armature of metal trusses, window sur-
rounds, and roofs. This is architecture pushed back to
a defensive position, a desperate attempt to make
monuments in a world that does not need them.
Where such work succeeds is in its very anguish. In
Los Angeles, however, such monumental commen-
tary often becomes as ironic and wistful as its neo-
!'Spanish, stage-set civic centers, except that the
methods of destabilization are here distinctly mod-
ern. The stark planes are undercut, float in space, or
are skewed to activate the grand volumes. Architec-
ture is reduced to almost nothing, but that small
something threatens to destabilize the whole, and
thus creates an appropriate strategy of subversion.
The plot thickens with the emergence of forms
that are joyfully thin and highly colored. Several of
the young architects working in Los Angeles delight
in the cheapness, mass production, and blandness of
the basic building blocks of architecture here, but
only because the material is so pliable. In the end,
they produce sophisticated gestures without any
content. Their colorful cutoffs are just active partici-
pants in the city, except that these actors are stripped
down, muscular, and thus more powerful than the
dainty forms all around them. This is architecture for
the brightly colored, well-toned denizens of Gold's
Gym and Muscle Beach, except that the client turns
out to be an "industry" executive writing the script of
his own life.

This mixture of stripping and acting, the
reliance on the expressiveness of malleable materials,
and the creation of a more muscular, honest dance of
basic forms in a city of affectations are the hallmarks
of the work of many from the Gehry-schule. Working
with the tortured forms and telescoping volumes of
the master, they push his undressing of the basic
forms of the city one step further, creating haunt-
ing fragments of drywall, stud walls , roof planes,
and skylights that dance away from convention.
Unadorned and clad in only the most minimal mate-
rials, this work starts to take on some of the quick-
cut, pan-shot, fast-edit character of a music video.
Beyond Gehry's sculptural honesty, born in the
Venice Beach culture of the 1960s, lies the poly-
morphous perversity so apparent on today's beaches.
Some of the most creative work in Los Angeles,
in fact, mixes its metaphors, combining the dance of
perverted forms with an interest in the grids of
technology that can hold it all together. This is indeed
a kind of prosthetic architecture. For many young
designers, Los Angeles is the site of an archaeology
where they find both the kind of abstract, molded
forms of the desert and the mountains, and the mass-
produced frames and connections that turn the end-
less suburbs into a formless web of technologically
defined habitation. This is work that is ambivalent
about whether it prefers the man-made or the natural
desert, but this indecision seems to vitiate, rather
than incapacitate, the work. Narrative replaces pro-
gram for young architects of a more theoretical bent,
and in these stories architecture becomes the
transformation of what is already there- a landscap-

ing job rather than the erection of hopeful new
edifices of human reason. Beyond stripping down
and getting back to Adam, architects here see the
possibility for rewriting the history of The Fall as a
new Genesis.
Beyond such multiple strategies, many of which
have been adapted at various times by several of the
architects shown here, there are those who have a
more focused notion of the role of architecture in the
city. Those that I would call technomorphists accept
the man-made landscape as a given and merely want
to create the appropriate form for a world of post-
humanistic artifice. To them, the world is an uncer-
tain and vaguely threatening place where the solace
of good forms has no place. By emphasizing the work-
ing of machined surfaces and by mimicking the
human body in their buildings, they make the
machinery of the city into the image of man, while
creating a mechanized man at the scale of the city.
When they create objects, they are not so much
buildings as giant machines. Ominous and over-
whelming, these mechanical beasts have come to
replace the human body with something larger and
more sophisticated, but still imbued with a dream of
conscious control over reality. This is work that
delights in the dawn of a fully technological land-
scape, that glorifies the many machines that are
necessary to survive on that seemingly arid plain,
and that actively seeks the disappearance of the solid
forms with which we are so familiar. Gleaming and
dangerous, their forms promise something beyond

comfort, as uncertain as their theories of chaos.
The work of the design firms shown here, as
well as that of countless other young practitioners,
stretches between the naked forms of the new primi-
tives and the humanoid machines of the technomorph-
ists. Nothing ties their work together except that
they live in the peculiar design laboratory of Los
Angeles. Their designs are, therefore, conscious of
the technological deformations of the human land-
scape. Their forms are almost all tortured, deformed,
and skewed by this consciousness. They are reso-
lutely modernist in their faith in the ability to con-
struct an alternative physical framework that both
refuses to accept the constraints of the memory of
tradition and projects us into an unknown future that
validates our current activities. It is an architecture
produced in a city that has invented itself. The work is
local in that it delights in raw building materials that
have never coalesced into either monuments or a
vernacular. Instead, it closes itself into enigmatic,
surreal, or purely defensive gestures against the
man-made desert. What is preserved inside these
forms is, as often as not, light. The very abundance
of sun that has created the desert is turned into an
excuse for a concentration on the kind of perceptual
self-consciousness pioneered by the "light and
space" artists of the 1960s, so that the human abil-
ity to experience is cultivated even within tech-
nology. Even when such optimism is replaced by the
dark forms of technology, a faith remains that,
beyond the creation of isolated objects, but within
Los Angeles, and through the transformation of the

physical conditions in which we live, an architec-
ture can be found , projected, and constructed.
49
12
tioners had long been developing alternative modes
of inquiry. Theoretical projects, as opposed to com-
missioned buildings, had become widespread vehi-
cles of disciplinary innovation, and a rift had opened
between those committed to viable commercial
practices and those dedicated to seemingly antithet-
ical disciplinary pursuits and personal ambitions.
Much of this latter work addressed what
many understood to be a “loss of center” in the cul-
tural milieu, the apparent result of critical attacks
on the foundational tenets of Western humanism
by proponents of post-structuralist theory and de-
construction.4 Critics from inside and outside the

field called the unifying dogma of Modernism in
question,5 and architects set off in pursuit of wildly
divergent agendas. Simultaneously in the mid-
1960s, the Archigram group attempted to recuper-
ate Modernism’s links to technology, Robert Venturi
waxed poetical about his taste for complexity and
contradiction, and Aldo Rossi sought refuge in sym-
bolic forms and collective memory. Within a few
years, Venturi and his partner Denise Scott Brown
had made their way west to learn from Las Vegas
and other Pop and vernacular phenomena. Taking a
more academic approach to signs and signification,
critics such as George Baird and Charles Jencks
sought to establish a new ground for architectural
production in language. By the late ’70s, Léon Krier,
Colin Rowe, and Fred Koetter had made compel-
ling cases for the appropriation of historical forms
alongside equally impassioned pleas for a renewed

attentiveness to architecture’s irreducible essence
from the likes of Peter Eisenman, Daniel Libeskind,
and Bernard Tschumi, among others.6 Each of these
varied agendas drew strong and devoted followings
whose output atomized the unified approach of
Modernism into an unruly constellation of compet-
ing alternatives for a postmodern world without a
center.
Los Angeles architects of the period were
not immune to this widespread suspicion of ortho-
doxy, and at the Architecture Gallery and elsewhere,
they pursued radical new trajectories. But where
their counterparts on the East Coast and in Europe
tended to characterize the loss of center as a burden
or tragedy, the predominant reaction among South-
ern California architects was a sense of liberation.
Such a response might have been expected in Los
Angeles, which for generations had made a virtue of

its peripheral status with respect to more established
(and establishment) centers to the north and east.7
Since at least the 1880s, Los Angeles architects had
exploited the city’s distance from established cen-
ters to develop idiosyncratic variations on imported
styles, as evidenced by the Newsom brothers with
Queen Anne, the Greene brothers with Arts and
Crafts, and Schindler, Neutra, and the Case Study
group with orthodox Modernism. In the late 1970s,
the city that had perfected the periphery was the
ideal place to speculate on how to organize a world
suddenly bereft of the notion of center.
Concentrating primarily on younger prac-
tices operating outside the commercial mainstream,
the Architecture Gallery showcased fringe mem-
bers of an already peripheral disciplinary culture.
But where like-minded apostates to orthodoxy in
other parts of the world tended to band together in

groups such as La Tendenza in Italy or the Institute
for Architecture and Urban Studies in New York,
architects in Los Angeles eschewed such collective
endeavors in favor of the individual pursuit of per-
sonal and idiosyncratic agendas. In his lecture for
the Architecture Gallery series, Eric Owen Moss
articulated his view of the situation:
The problem that we face in doing architec-
ture and in defining ourselves for ourselves
is, finally, a personal and individual one.
There have been many, over eons of time,
who have attempted to deal with that kind
of fundamental irrationality in a collective
sense, to try to develop an order, an under-
neath, a platform which seems to make the
finitude of the individual a little bit more
palatable and coherent and intelligible, to
define a context which is broader than the
individual and which will support and in
fact ameliorate the problem.8
Though he observed that the Pythagorians
and, later, the Russian Constructivists had man-
aged to find a sense of order collectively, Moss saw
no such option available to his own generation: “It

A CONFEDERACY
OF HERETICS
todd Gannon
A Confederacy of Heretics examines the explosion
of activity associated with the Architecture Gallery,
Los Angeles’ first gallery dedicated exclusively to
architecture. Instigated by Thom Mayne in the fall
of 1979, the Architecture Gallery staged ten exhi-
bitions in as many weeks by both young and estab-
lished Los Angeles practitioners, featuring the work
of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate, Jr., Frederick Fish-
er, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville,
Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi),
Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Manguri-
an), and Eric Owen Moss. Another young architect,
Coy Howard, opened the events with a lecture at the
Southern California Institute of Architecture, which
hosted talks by each exhibiting architect. In an un-
precedented move by the popular press, the events

were chronicled in weekly reviews by the critic John
Dreyfuss in the Los Angeles Times.
Commonly understood today as a set of be-
liefs or practices in conflict with prevailing dogma,
the word “heresy” derives from the Greek αἵρεσις,
meaning “choice.” In classical antiquity, the term
also signified a period during which a young phi-
losopher would examine various schools of thought
in order to determine his future way of life.1 These
inflections neatly capture the ambitions and at-
titudes held by the architects at the center of this
presentation. Some had grown weary with what they
viewed as the stale orthodoxies of the establishment,
and saw their work as a distinct challenge to the
status quo. Others were less strident, and experi-
mented with a diverse range of historical sources
as potential platforms from which to develop their
individual idioms. Others still struck out in bold new
directions, drawing inspiration and techniques from

the art world, literature, and other sources. Such
wide-ranging activities defy any attempt to portray
these architects as members of a coherent group
or “L.A. School.”2 More correctly, the Architecture
Gallery constitutes one of many loose, temporary
confederacies into which these architects entered
during their formative years. Here, the heretics
found strength in numbers, and the impact of their
efforts was felt across Los Angeles and around the
world.
Gathering an array of original drawings,
models, photographs, video recordings, and com-
mentary alongside new assessments by current
scholars, A Confederacy of Heretics aims neither to
canonize the participating architects nor to con-
secrate their unorthodox activities. Rather, the
exhibition re-examines the early work of some of
Los Angeles’ most well-known architects, charts the

development of their most potent design techniques,
and documents a crucial turning point in Los Ange-
les architecture, a time when Angeleno architecture
culture shifted from working local variations on
imported themes to exporting highly original dis-
ciplinary innovations with global reach. Taken to-
gether, the exhibition, symposium, and catalog that
comprise A Confederacy of Heretics offer a unique
lens through which to analyze a pivotal moment in
the development of late 20th century architecture.
The Architecture Gallery opened in October
1979, a time when the continued viability of ortho-
dox Modernism was being contested in Los Angeles
and around the world. Not only had architecture by
then witnessed the passing of most of its Modern
pioneers,3 but the tumultuous socio-political events
of the 1960s had shaken the field to its core. By the
end of the ’70s, architecture’s most advanced practi-

t
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
14
Figs. 5 & 6: Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House, 1978. Parts and
Assembly axonometrics.
will finally be my opinion that any sort of effort, on
a collective level, is, at least for us, at this point in
time, impossible. These kinds of searches have to be
carried out on an individual level.”9
The wide array of approaches on display at
the Architecture Gallery attested to each architect’s
commitment to his own personal ambitions, and

underscores the inability of any collective label to
adequately account for their activities. Nonetheless,
certain shared tendencies can be discerned. Most do
not encompass the entire group, but rather loosely
organize the participants into overlapping clusters
of interest. A majority of these architects, for ex-
ample, shared a distinctly pragmatic frame of mind
and a willingness to take on commissions, such as
garage renovations and small residential additions,
which more established practitioners might have
considered economically unfeasible or intellectually
irrelevant. Several, including Eugene Kupper, Frank
Dimster, and Roland Coate, grounded their endeav-
ors in disciplinary fundamentals such as archetypal
forms, functional performance, and attentiveness
to the exigencies of the building site [Figs. 2-4].
Many, including Frank Gehry, Frederick Fisher, and
Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi of Morphosis,

experimented with vernacular elements and ma-
terials, particularly in their residential projects. A
critical reassessment of disciplinary conventions
also colors much of the work on display. With the
2-4-6-8 House, for example, Mayne and Rotondi
took a small project as an opportunity to perpetrate
a wholesale reinvention of the conventions of con-
struction documentation. In now iconic drawings,
they outlined the building’s tectonic elements and
construction sequence in excruciating detail, care-
fully delineating even the simplest connections in
an almost comically thorough sequence of axono-
metrics [Figs 5, 6]. In this, the architects slid from
reimagining fundamentals to another common
tendency—the expenditure of unreasonable, even
unnecessary, effort. Craig Hodgetts and Robert
Mangurian’s voluminous production of drawings
and models for the South Side Settlement House

are another case in point [Fig. 7], as are many of the
artifacts in the present exhibition. As Ray Kappe re-
Fig 2: Eugene Kupper, Nilsson House, Bel Air, 1979.
Fig 3: Frank Dimster, Kelton Avenue Condominiums, Los
Angeles,
1980.
Fig 4: Roland Coate, Jr., Alexander House, Montecito, 1974.
t
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
16
when the city’s architectural community had been
working diligently to raise the level of public dis-

course and to make its activities known to broader
national and global audiences. Through the 1970s,
architectural exhibitions, lectures, and conferences
occurred in Los Angeles with increasing frequency.
And while many of these early efforts would not
broach significant influence beyond the city limits,
their increasing volume and sophistication brought
important attention to highly original new work,
and would prove a crucial catalyst for the Architec-
tural Gallery.
Events often were sponsored by one of the
three new schools of architecture that recently had
been launched as alternatives to established pro-
grams at the University of Southern California and
Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. The UCLA department of
Architecture and Urban Planning opened its doors
in 1964 under the direction of Henry C.K. Liu, and
from the start took a distinctly anti-orthodox tack.

By the late ’60s, Archigram members Ron Herron,
Warren Chalk, and Peter Cook were teaching in the
program. In 1970, the school launched a Master’s
program directed by Tim Vreeland. Formerly an
associate with Louis Kahn in Philadelphia, Vreeland
brought with him close ties to East Coast architec-
tural personalities and debates. By the early ’70s, he
had recruited Kupper, Hodgetts, and Howard, a re-
cent graduate of UCLA’s planning program, as facul-
ty members. Charles Jencks, at the time a rising star
on the international scene, began making regular
visits to the school in 1974.
In 1968, Ray Kappe was invited to lead
an architecture program within the newly created
School of Environmental Design at Cal Poly Pomo-
na. A victim of his own success (the program grew
from 25 to 200 students in just three years), Kappe
soon came into conflict with the dean over the size

of the program.15 In 1972, Kappe left Cal Poly with
six of its faculty members and roughly fifty of its
students. Twenty-five additional students joined the
group and in September, “The New School,” official-
ly the Southern California Institute of Architecture
(SCI-Arc), was opened in a Santa Monica warehouse.
In addition to founding faculty members Ray and
Shelly Kappe, Ahde Lahti, Thom Mayne, Bill Simo-
nian, Glen Small, and Jim Stafford, Architecture
Gallery participants Eric Owen Moss, Roland Coate,
and Frank Gehry were soon teaching at this unorth-
odox “school without a curriculum.” Michael Roton-
di, who would later assume the directorship of the
school, was a member of the first graduating class in
1973 and joined the faculty the following year.16
These new institutions quickly amplified
the volume of architectural discourse in Los Ange-
les. In 1973, SCI-Arc launched its Wednesday-night

Design Forum lecture series, which drew local as
well as national and international personalities from
the outset.17 The following year, UCLA convened
an important conference designed specifically to
insinuate a West Coast presence into ongoing East
Coast debates. “Four Days in May,” also known
as “White and Gray Meet Silver,” was conceived by
Vreeland in collaboration with Hodgetts, Kupper,
Anthony Lumsden, and Cesar Pelli. The group in-
vited representatives of the well-known ‘White vs.
Gray’ debates, with the five Los Angeles architects
acting as counterparts to the five core representa-
tives of the opposed East Coast factions.18 The Los
Fig 7: SCI-Arc Student Presentations, c. 1974.
marked, “the drawing…almost became a thing in
itself for a lot of these guys. …Robert and Craig
were just drawing the hell out of projects. Obviously,
[this was] not necessary for construction; obviously

not necessary, even, to understand the building.”10
Kappe’s observation is valid, but fails to recognize
the more radical proposition, widely espoused by
younger architects of the period, that buildings were
not always necessary to understand the architecture.
Rhetoric such as this, though part and
parcel to East Coast architecture discourse, was
rare in Los Angeles, where production typically
trumped polemic. Hodgetts, Howard, and Rotondi
later recounted that much of the motivation for their
elaborate drawings and models had to do with the
sheer pleasure of making them.11 Love of the game
notwithstanding, these labor-intensive artifacts
had an additional benefit: they made for arresting
publications. A widely shared ambition among these
architects was a dogged pursuit of local and national
design awards. Particularly prized was recognition
by the P/A Awards, the annual competition held by

Progressive Architecture magazine. Each of the archi-
tects in the exhibition devoted significant effort to
P/A Award submissions, and their projects were
consistently found among the winners from the
mid-1970s onward. Coy Howard later elaborated on
his method:
The way you won P/A Awards is you would
draw like you were a maniac. …All these young peo-
ple were obsessive, and they’re just going to draw
this thing and draw this thing and draw this thing.
They’re so totally passionate about architecture that
[the jury] just has to give you an award.12
As with the theoretical significance of their
work, most of the architects downplayed
the promotional aspects of their activities.
Howard’s recollections are typical: “…every-
body probably saw it differently. I didn’t do
[drawings] for the P/A Awards. I mean, I did
them and then used them in the P/A Awards,
but I didn’t do them for the P/A Awards.”13
For Howard as for all of the participating ar-
chitects, architecture was much more than a
career. It was a way of life.14

**
It is important to recognize that the Ar-
chitecture Gallery did not occur in isolation. More
symptom than cause, the events took place at a time
Fig 7: Studio Works, South Side Settlement, Columbus, Ohio,
1976-80. Posters.
t
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n
18
ments, sensitively knitted to their sites and inflected
by Modernism’s hallmark suspicion of capitalism,
remained the norm, and the radicalism of projects
such as Pelli’s Pacific Design Center, Lumsden’s

scheme for the Lugano Convention Center [Fig.
12], or Kupper’s UCLA Extension Building [Fig. 13]
went unacknowledged. Yet in their abandonment of
traditional part-to-whole coherence for ambiguously
scaled figures and open-ended systems, these proj-
ects signaled far more aggressive moves away from
orthodoxy than concurrent work by Stirling, the
Grays, or even—Eisenman’s and Hejduk’s polemics
notwithstanding—the Whites. Unfortunately, the
Silvers would not continue to meet after the 1976
conference, their later corporate works failed to live
up to the promise of early achievements, and the
episode was soon largely forgotten. Nonetheless,
the Silvers made a lasting impact on architectural
discourse in Los Angeles by generating significant
architectural debate—and whetting an appetite for
further conversation—in a city that previously sim-
ply hadn’t had any.24

The following month, another group of
Los Angeles architects debuted in an exhibition at
the Pacific Design Center. Twelve Los Angeles Ar-
chitects was initiated by Bernard Zimmerman and
organized by students at Cal Poly Pomona. The ex-
hibition featured the work of established local prac-
titioners Roland Coate Jr., Daniel Dworsky, Craig
Ellwood, Frank Gehry, Ray Kappe, John Lautner,
Jerrold Lomax, Tony Lumsden, Leroy Miller, Cesar
Pelli, James Pulliam, and Zimmerman himself. Like
the Silvers, the L.A. Twelve had been assembled as
a local response to out-of-town groups (specifically
the New York Five and the Chicago Seven), and its
organizers saw in the Twelve a similar commitment
to mainstream, as opposed to vanguard, practice.25
With projects ranging from elegant Miesian assem-
blages by Ellwood [Fig. 14] to stripped down com-
mercial facilities by Zimmerman and Lomax [Figs.

15, 16] to exuberant residential projects by Kappe
and Lautner [Figs. 17, 18], there was little formal or
stylistic commonality across the group.26 A series
of twelve monthly lectures was staged at the Pacific
Design Center in 1978, but the group had ceased to
meet regularly the previous year.27 Ultimately, like
the Silvers before them, the L.A. Twelve never de-
veloped beyond a parochial phenomenon.28 While
many of the participating architects continued to
produce significant projects (the bulk of them in an
Fig. 10: Frank Dimster for William Pereira and Associates,
Houston
Center Tower, Houston,Texas, 1975.
Fig. 12: Anthony Lumsden for DMJM, Lugano Convention
Center
[project], Lugano, Switzerland, 1972-75.
Angeles participants, dubbed “the Silvers,”19 did not
present any work at the conference, which focused
on the ideological and stylistic differences between
the neo-Modernist Whites and the post-Modernist

Grays. According to Hodgetts, the event “was more
about putting UCLA on the map, I think, than trying
to identify a group.”20 The Silvers put their own work
center stage two years later when UCLA convened a
sequel with “Four Days in April.” Hodgetts did not
participate, but the group swelled to six members for
that presentation, adding Frank Dimster and Paul
Kennon in his place.
Contrasting their White and Gray coun-
terparts, who pursued highly formalized agendas
through small private commissions, the Silvers
directed their efforts primarily toward large-scale
commercial projects. Major achievements, such as
Pelli’s Pacific Design Center [Fig. 8], Lumsden’s
Manufacturers Bank building, and Dimster’s Hous-
ton Center tower [Fig. 10], for example, each were
completed under the auspices of large corporate
firms (Gruen, DMJM, and Pereira, respectively)

where each architect functioned as design director.21
These and other projects were characterized by slick
glass envelopes reminiscent of recent projects by
Japanese architect Kisho Kurakawa as well as Nor-
man Foster’s groundbreaking corporate facilities for
Willis Faber and Dumas [Fig. 11] and IBM. A vague-
ly English attitude was further signaled by Vree-
land’s invocation of the group’s use of a pragmatic
“style for the job,” a catchphrase previously associat-
ed with the work of James Stirling in the 1960s.22
The Silvers’ unapologetic commitment to
the mainstream brought pointed criticism from
invited respondents at the 1976 conference. Charles
Jencks noted the ironies of what he labeled “sil-
ver-plated capitalism.” Esther McCoy, Charles
Moore, and David Gebhard each questioned the lack
of regional specificity to the work, and John Hejduk
worried that in the presented projects, “high tech-

nology is generally wrapped up in high romanticism,
with the danger that it could lead to totalitarianism.”
Stirling, for his part, saw the work as little more than
“chic packaging,” to which Pelli demurred, “All of
our projects are way below the level of people such
as Stirling.”23
Such criticism, as well as Pelli’s feeble re-
sponse, demonstrates the continued hegemony of
orthodox values over architectural culture in the
mid-1970s. Carefully tailored compositions of ele-
Fig. 8: Cesar Pelli for Gruen Associates, Pacific Design Center,
West Hollywood, 1975.
t
o
d
d
g
a
n
n

o
n
20
unapologetically orthodox idiom), their collective
activities generated little of lasting influence.
Two additional exhibitions warrant specific
mention. In January 1978, Otis College of Art and
Design hosted America Now: Drawing towards a
More Modern Architecture, a condensed re-presenta-
tion of exhibitions held at the Cooper-Hewitt Muse-
um and the Drawing Center in New York the previ-
ous year.29 In a polemical catalog essay, curator Rob-
ert A.M. Stern argued that Modernism had favored
“polytechnicians” over poets and had dissipated the
power and importance of drawing by, among other
reasons, favoring conceptual axonometric projec-
tions over perceptual perspectival renderings. For
Stern, the recent renewed interest in architectural

drawing coincided with a waning adherence to the
tenets of Modernism and signaled a shift away from
“the poverty of orthodox modern architecture” to a
far richer postmodern poetry.30
Though Stern’s critique was baldly tilted
toward his own stylistic predilections, his belief
that architects sought to advance beyond the stric-
tures of orthodox Modernism through drawing was
widely shared. That same January, Coy Howard as-
sembled a collection of drawings by local architects
at the Los Angeles Institute of Contemporary Art.
Architectural Views: Physical Fact, Psychic Effect fea-
tured works by Richard Aldriedge, Frederick Fisher,
Eugene Kupper, Studio Works, and Howard himself
that went well beyond the representation of build-
ings to mine the medium of drawing for untapped
potential. Howard remembered his own motivations
as follows:

It basically grew out of [a feeling that] ‘I don’t
know if what I’m doing here is of any value,
but let me test and see if I can come to under-
stand what I’m trying to do architecturally
in terms of the drawing.’ So the drawings be-
came this incredible vehicle…I would study
them and study them and study them, and
try to invent different techniques to try to
discover the sensibility that I wanted in the
buildings which I wasn’t sure was there. So,
doing those drawings was absolutely pivotal
for me in developing my aesthetic.31
Fig. 14: Craig Ellwood, Art Center College of Design,
Pasadena,
1976.
Fig. 17: Ray Kappe, Kappe Residence, Pacific Palisades, 1967.
Fig. 18: John Lautner, Silvertop, Los Angeles, 1963.
Fig. 16: Jerrold Lomax, ACDC Electronics Building, Oceanside,
California, 1973.
Fig. 13: Eugene Kupper, UCLA Extension Building, Los
Angeles, 1976. Earth and Sky axonometrics.
t
o
d
d
g
a
n

n
o
n
22
bition demonstrated the radical potential of alterna-
tive techniques being developed in Los Angeles.
By the late 1970s, such wide-ranging
activity had begun to draw attention from local,
national, and international audiences, with in-
creasing interest going to younger practitioners. In
addition to coverage in the P/A Awards, projects by
Architecture Gallery participants such as Coate’s
Alexander house, Morphosis’s Villas Florestas, and
Moss’s Morganstern warehouse received extended
reviews.33 Peter de Bretteville, Hodgetts, Mangurian,
and Howard were included among the “Forty under
Forty” list of significant young architects Robert
A.M. Stern compiled for the Japanese journal A+U

in 197 7.34 In 1978, A+U dedicated the bulk of its April
issue to a survey of young Los Angeles architects
assembled by Michael Franklin Ross.35 As with pre-
vious group presentations, this collection was stylis-
tically and programmatically diverse, held together
by little more than a common desire to move beyond
the International Style toward what Ross tentatively
referred to as a “possibly-post-modern” interest in
“indulgent complexity.”36 Unbuilt projects predom-
inated, though recently completed buildings such
as Helmut Schulitz’ high-tech residence in Coldwa-
ter Canyon [Fig. 24], Moss’s Playa del Rey triplex
[Fig. 25], and Morphosis’ small Delmer addition in
Venice [Fig. 26] demonstrated the viability of alter-
native approaches. For Ross, the work represented
Fig. 20: Coy Howard, Scythian Gold, Los Angeles County
Museum of Art, 1976.
An array of techniques was on view at the

exhibition. Studio Works hung a neat row of tiny,
carefully mounted pen-and-ink sketches that clear-
ly enumerated the functional and organizational
elements of their scheme for Nicollet Island in Min-
neapolis [Fig. 19]. Across the room, a series of evoc-
ative collages of their South Side Settlement House,
assembled in part from Mangurian’s meticulous
construction documents, offered little in the way of
technical clarity but an abundance of emotional im-
pact [see plate section]. Howard’s work displayed a
similar breadth of investigation. Two carefully inked
images of his exhibition design for the 1976 Scyth-
ian Gold exhibition at LACMA [Fig. 20] contrasted
an enormous and highly expressive perspective
drawing of his Rinaldi house mounted directly to
the wall with long, dynamically arrayed strips of
masking tape [Fig. 21].32 Kupper hung a series of six
axonometrics of his UCLA Extension project [see

pp._ _ _] as well as ink and colored-pencil studies
of his house for Harry Nilsson [Fig. 22]. Fisher’s
large-scale rendered site plan of his scheme for Ma-
chu Picchu also was fixed directly to the wall with
tape [Fig. 23], while Aldriedge’s careful perspective
drawings in ink and watercolor were fastidiously
mounted. In each case, the work on the wall went
far beyond the mere representation and planning of
a future building to stand as self-sufficient works of
architecture in their own right. Far more emphati-
cally than previous presentations, the LAICA exhi-
Fig. 19: Studio Works, The River and the City, Minneapolis,
1976. Sketches.
t
o
d
d
g
a
n
n

o
n
24
glass, galvanized metal, unfinished plywood, and
chain link. Inside, he stripped away finishes to
reveal the bare studs and lath beneath. Formerly
exterior surfaces were recast as unlikely interior
elements, and typical interior spaces such as kitchen
and dining were placed outside the original house,
with an asphalt floor amplifying the ambiguities of
the new enclosure [see. plate section]. The house
represented a bold departure from both modern and
postmodern orthodoxies and marked a significant
breakthrough in Gehry’s development. With it, the
architect established a line of exploration he would
develop over the next decade.
Gehry also used the house to take aim at

prevailing tendencies on the East Coast. In his lec-
ture for the Architecture Gallery series, he joked
that a model of the house made for a 1979 exhibi-
tion in New York was assembled with a deliberate
lack of traditional craft with the express purpose
of “upsetting the people in New York, who are very
precise about architecture” [Fig. 28]. He went on to
articulate a more serious statement of his personal
interests:
There is a certain fascination with some-
thing not looking designed. I feel that a lot of
buildings, a lot of architecture, a lot of work,
has that ‘designed’ look—that everything is
in place. I am really trying to get away from
that, to look more like it was less contrived.
Now maybe, in fact, it ends up being more
contrived, but I hope not. 42
Gehry’s taste for ‘carefully careless,’ frag-
mentary compositions executed in straightforward
vernacular materials would become a hallmark of
Los Angeles architecture through the 1980s and
’90s, leading many critics to see the architect as a

trailblazer and father figure for the younger gener-
ation. In truth, the relationship was much more of a
two-way street, and Gehry clearly drew off the en-
ergy of his younger colleagues.43 But few would dis-
agree that the house marked a spectacular achieve-
ment for Los Angeles architecture. With it, Gehry
was launched into the international spotlight, and a
parade of onlookers soon descended on Los Angeles’
West Side for a closer look.
Fig.24: Helmut Schulitz, Schulitz Residence, Los Angeles,
1976.
Fig. 25: Eric Owen Moss, Triplex Apartments, Playa del Rey,
1976.
Fig. 26: Morphosis, Delmer Residence, Venice, 1977.
“a restless desire to do something more, something
special, something that isn’t just another repetition
of what has gone before, but in some small way
expands the realm of possibilities for architecture
and for the people who experience it.”37 This widely

read presentation drew significant attention to the
younger generation from outside Southern Califor-
nia, and, despite Ross’s attempts to disprove any
collective ambitions, established the notion of a co-
herent group of young Los Angeles architects in the
minds of many observers in the city and beyond.
By the end of the decade new local journals
such as L.A. Architect, the monthly newsletter of the
AIA’s Southern California Chapter, and Archetype,
an independent effort launched by San Francis-
co-based architect Mark Mack, brought additional
coverage and provided important platforms from
which to broadcast activities and ideas. But it was
the writing of Los Angeles Times architecture critic
John Dreyfuss (1934-2004) that would prove partic-
ularly significant to the Architecture Gallery. Drey-
fuss, the son of the noted industrial engineer Henry
Dreyfuss, joined the Times in 1966 and became its

architecture and design critic ten years later. Of-
ten critical of the city’s Downtown architectural
establishment, he devoted significant attention to
new projects by unorthodox Westsiders in the late
1970s.38 Eric Moss remembers a “genuinely interest-
ed, genuinely supportive guy. …he was open and he
was sympathetic, and he didn’t come with an ideo-
logical perspective. As far as I could tell, he was just
looking for ideas, looking for new stuff, looking for
interesting characters.”39
Dreyfuss took particular interest in the
house Frank Gehry built for himself in Santa Moni-
ca in the summer of 1978, and in a long article in the
Times carefully outlined the architect’s unorthodox
intentions and design process, the house’s basic
organization strategy, and described salient effects
such as the perspectival illusions created by varied
wall heights along the building’s south façade.40

Setting up his readers for a positive response, Drey-
fuss also described a number of skeptical neighbors,
including Santa Monica’s mayor, who had been won
over after visiting the house and learning of the ar-
chitect’s intentions firsthand. Dreyfuss’s article was
the first sustained treatment of Gehry’s house in ei-
ther the popular or professional press, but it was far
from the last. The house was soon featured across
the architectural literature and national newspapers,
and even found its way into People magazine and a
cover story on American architects in Time.41
Drawing inspiration from the work of local
artists Charles Arnoldi [Figs. 27] and Ed Moses,
among others, Gehry wrapped his unassuming
Santa Monica house in a complex assemblage of
Fig. 21: Coy Howard, Rinaldi Residence, Los Angeles, 1978.
t
o
d

d
g
a
n
n
o
n
26
At that time…Bernard Zimmerman, Ray
Kappe, and a group of could-have-been,
wanna-be Case Study guys…they owned the
city. And we were going, “No, we don’t buy
it.” We were going somewhere. It was very
much part of the SCI-Arc dialogue. We used
to have some fantastic, really robust conver-
sations and disagreements about where we
were going, about just what we stood for.47
For Mayne, the Modernist project was ex-
hausted. “The people I studied under, Pierre Koenig,
et cetera, that was the end, that was the last group.
…[ours] was a group that was starting to redefine
things.”48 Soon after Mayne’s return to Los Angeles,
an opportunity to publicly stake out alternative posi-

tions presented itself.
Ray and Shelly Kappe took a sabbatical
during the 1978-79 school year, and remained away
through the summer. By the time they returned,
Mayne had organized the fall’s Design Forum
lecture series. His recollection of exactly how the
events came together is vague: “I can’t remember.
It was my turn or they asked me to do the lecture
series—we took turns doing that.”49 Kappe recalled
something more calculated:
I was on sabbatical when they put that thing
together. …I came back to kind of a surprise.
…I get back and Thom Mayne says to me,
“We put together a program with guys who
are doing architecture.” He names the peo-
ple and I said, “I do architecture, why aren’t
I on the list?” So it was a set-up. It was a time
when both Eric [Moss] and Thom were just
starting to move to a new place.”50
That new place had little room for members
of Kappe’s generation. For the lectures, Mayne
chose younger practitioners with the exception

of Gehry, whose radical new projects aligned him
more with Mayne’s generation than his own, and
Coate, with whom Mayne had collaborated in the
early 1970s. Most were teaching at either SCI-Arc or
UCLA, with Dimster and De Bretteville represent-
ing USC. Mayne drew participants from both the Sil-
vers (Kupper, Dimster) and the L.A. Twelve (Gehry,
Coate), choosing the most idiosyncratic characters
from each previous group. The series’ title, “Current
L.A.: 10 Viewpoints,” foregrounded the individu-
alistic nature of each practice over any notions of
shared methodology. An exhibition to accompany
each of the nine lectures was soon added to the
agenda, with Mayne’s sparsely furnished home and
studio in Venice serving as the venue. Coy Howard,
who would not exhibit his work, was slated to give
two lectures bookending the series. Each of the SCI-
Arc lectures was videotaped, and was screened on a

small black-and-white monitor in the gallery.51
By any metric, it was a heterogeneous as-
semblage, and, despite its lack of approval from SCI-
Arc’s director, it seemed to align with the school’s
experimental mandate. Moss later characterized it
as a natural development of SCI-Arc’s unorthodox
pedagogy—and the failure of its founders to fully
deliver on its initial promise:
If you set something up as a departure and
then try to teach something that was no departure
at all…the opportunity for departure manifests itself.
I would say, in retrospect, that these shows would
be a manifestation—the train had left the station,
you know? First you made the station, and then you
made the train, and then, finally, it took off.52
Howard delivered his opening talk—equal
parts criticism of the establishment and poetic
meditation of the nature of beauty—on October 3rd.

Kupper’s exhibition opened the following Tuesday.
The next morning, two articles by John Dreyfuss
appeared in the Los Angeles Times. The first outlined
the series of exhibitions as a whole; the second of-
fered a specific treatment of Kupper’s installation.53
How Dreyfuss came to write about the
shows is unclear. Mayne recalls the journalist con-
tacting him with a request to see Kupper’s exhibition,
and then insisting, against Mayne’s initial disagree-
ment, that he produce weekly reviews of remaining
shows.54 Rotondi, who worked closely with Mayne to
organize the events, remembers a discussion “to see
if we could get Dreyfuss to write about [the shows],
which he did.”55 Regardless of the motivating cir-
cumstances, Dreyfuss’s contribution was crucial.
With illustrations by Times photographer Mary
Frampton and others, the reviews certainly were
responsible for the steadily increasing—and largely

**
In the summer of 1978, a 34-year-old Thom
Mayne returned to Los Angeles after a year at
Harvard. On the East Coast, Mayne had collected
a graduate degree and “realigned” himself after
a several years of deep involvement at SCI-Arc. 4 4
Michael Rotondi picked him up at LAX and drove
straight to Frank Gehry’s not-yet-completed house
in Santa Monica. For Mayne, “It was just a startle,
I’ll never forget it. I had been in Boston and [it was]
just dead. I was this L.A. kid…it was an enjoyable
year, but there was just no way I could possibly live
in Boston. …I really had a new appreciation for L.A.
and the kind of freedom I had here.”45
Rotondi and Mayne quickly set to work on
two new projects, a garage renovation in Venice and
a small single-family house in Tijuana. In contrast
to the more stringent functionalism of earlier Mor-

phosis projects such as the Sequoia School (which
had begun as Rotondi’s thesis at SCI-Arc) and the
Stirlingesque Reidel Medical Building, the 2-4-6-8
and Mexico II houses were composed of centralized,
symmetrical volumes capped by pyramidal roofs
[Figs. 29, 30]. 2-4-6-8’s iconic progression of four-
square windows was articulated in bright yellow,
blue, and red, with bands of pink concrete block
running through the base. According to Rotondi,
SCI-Arc director Ray Kappe was not pleased with
their swerve away from more orthodox methodolo-
gies: “Kappe was really pissed off at us when we did
that one because it had bright colors. He thought we
were selling out to Aldo Rossi. …Everybody was just
trying things out. And Ray was Ray. He was a Mod-
ernist, but with an open mind—but closed when he
thought we were giving in to Postmodernism.”46
Kappe’s paradoxical stance—open to

change, but committed to orthodox values—was a
key catalyst for the Architecture Gallery. As younger
faculty like Mayne, Rotondi, and Moss developed
their positions, their architecture veered further
from the status quo of Kappe’s generation. By the
late ’70s, a distinctly adversarial relationship had
taken shape. As Mayne recalled,
Fig. 27: Charles Arnoldi, Untitled, 1971.
Fig. 28: Frank Gehry, Gehry Residence, Santa Monica, 1977-78.
Fig. 29: Morphosis, 2-4-6-8 House, Venice, 1978. View from
alley.
t
o
d
d
g
a
n
n
o
n

28
ensuing decades. Rather than categorize works
according to individual architects or projects, we
organize the installation according to specific for-
mal criteria which register the range of projective
geometries through which the architecture of the
period was disciplined. Our method re-contextual-
izes individual artifacts as it echoes the mobilization
of counter-intuitive tactics and productive overelab-
oration in much of the exhibited work. Though our
gambit may obscure some aspects of the exhibited
work (including the architects’ intentions), we wager
that any losses will be more than offset by produc-
tive adjacencies more conventional interpretive
schema would be unlikely to produce. Part Three,
introduced by co-curator Ewan Branda, presents
new critical essays by contemporary scholars which

situate the work in current architectural discourse.
Branda introduces the section with themes by which
the 1979 work might be understood from today’s
perspective, particularly in terms of technology. Joe
Day maps the social and professional networks of
which Frank Gehry was a part, while Kevin McMa-
hon places the video documentation of the lectures
within a wider history of video technology in South-
ern California. Patricia Morton positions the work
in the broader context of postmodernism, paying
particular attention to the Architecture Gallery’s
relationship to the 1980 Architecture Biennale in
Venice, Italy, and Paulette Singley looks at Venice,
California as a new locus of creativity. In keeping
with his critical relationship to the original events,
we also include a new assessment from Coy Howard.
All told, A Confederacy of Heretics gathers
an array of artifacts across a wide spectrum of me-

dia. Collected here, these objects demonstrate the
breadth of tactics with which progressive young
architects experimented in the late 1970s and com-
prise a unique repository of nascent design ideas
which continue to sponsor innovative architecture
in Los Angeles. Not only does this collection show-
case some of the earliest instances of the formal,
material, and technical innovations that would de-
velop into the hallmarks of Los Angeles architecture
in the 1980s and ’90s, it also maps still-potent lines
of investigation to be developed—or contested—by
contemporary designers wishing to exploit the
promise of the periphery to imagine new possibili-
ties for a 21st-century world without a center.
non-professional—traffic in the gallery as the weeks
progressed.56 The articles also changed the tenor of
disciplinary conversation in Los Angeles. For the
participating architects, they afforded a heightened

sense of significance to their ongoing experiments.
For the city’s architectural establishment—many of
whom had close ties with the paper’s owners—the
attention, which meant a corresponding lack of cov-
erage for their own output, was cause for concern.
Dreyfuss soon found himself in conflict with the pa-
per’s editors, and after 1983 architectural reviews in
the paper would be taken over by Sam Hall Kaplan, a
critic who did not share Dreyfuss’s sympathy for the
younger generation.
Nonetheless, the buzz generated by the ex-
hibitions would continue unabated into the 1980s.
As Dreyfuss put it, they “catalyzed a significant seg-
ment of the Los Angeles architectural community,
precipitating a steamy brew of respect, anger, pride,
jealousy, excitement, and interest.”57 Dreyfuss’s con-
cluding article, which appears to respond directly to
criticism he received from establishment architects,

outlined an accurate prediction of developments in
Los Angeles architecture through the 1980s. As ar-
chitects in the exhibition—particularly Gehry, Moss,
and Morphosis—rose in significance, many estab-
lished practitioners indeed were “left by the wayside
in terms of being movers and shakers in their pro-
fession.”58 With the Architecture Gallery, the young-
sters emphatically put the city’s greying establish-
ment on notice, and their “obscure, theatrical, and
trendy” output would soon become synonymous
with cutting-edge architecture in Los Angeles.59
**
A Confederacy of Heretics offers the first sus-
tained look at this crucial moment in Los Angeles
architecture. Our aim is not to reconstruct the orig-
inal exhibitions, but rather to unsettle prevailing
understandings of this work in order to catalyze new
interpretations and debate. Through the 1980s and

Rate this item (0 votes)font size Print Be the first to co.docx

Rate this item (0 votes)font size Print Be the first to co.docx

Recommended

Recommended

More Related Content

Similar to Rate this item (0 votes)font size Print Be the first to co.docx

Similar to Rate this item (0 votes)font size Print Be the first to co.docx (20)

More from catheryncouper

More from catheryncouper (20)

Recently uploaded

Recently uploaded (20)

Rate this item (0 votes)font size Print Be the first to co.docx