"Crossing Over" at Caltech, "Storm Cloud" at The Huntington, Cirque du Soleil at Santa Monica Pier, Peter Shire in Echo Park, a Cold War-inspired workshop at the Wende
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I hope you are all doing well as a tumultuous year comes to an end.
The sense of instability is not only in politics but in the ceaseless pace of technological change, from the growing numbers of driverless cars gliding around our neighborhood to the growing pervasiveness of AI.
So there is something deeply comforting about jugglers, tightrope walkers, and clowns.
By which I mean Cirque du Soleil. The Canadian troupe keeps alive a timeless human tradition, delivered with bravura and extreme body confidence, based on a gazillion hours of practice, that is the opposite of the visual and verbal fast food spat out by AI at the touch of a button.
Read on for more about their return to form in the big tent at Santa Monica Pier.
Then there are exhibitions in lovely places that you may rarely or even never normally visit, like Caltech, above, or The Huntington, below. Read about these and other Design Things to Do this holiday season.
The classical Chinese Garden of Flowing Fragrance at The Huntington. Photo by Frances Anderton.
Win Free Tix to Frieze!
This is the last newsletter of this year, and now 2025 is bearing down on us; which means art fair season is soon to start. Yes, Frieze LA comes to town February 20th–23rd, 2025, and if you donate now to KCRW's winter pledge drive, you will be automatically entered into the Frieze LA Sweeps.
Donate here, and you could win a VIP pass for two, which means early access to the fair, entry to two exclusive events throughout the Frieze Week VIP program, and an invite to the KCRW Champion Party during Frieze. Good luck!
Entrance to Frieze Los Angeles, 2024, at Santa Monica Airport. Photo by Frances Anderton
Design Things To Do
Hoop La La!
Got friends and family in town? Give yourselves a treat and get over to see the Canadian troupe, newly reborn following near economic death from Covid, and back in their big top by the Santa Monica Pier for the first time since 2014.
Kooza by Cirque du Soleil is a spectacle from their early years that, writes Alisa Hayashida, has "everything we all came to love from the beginning; death-defying acrobatic acts, whimsical characters telling beautiful stories, exquisite costumes and design, all set to a soaring, soulful original score." Those death-defying acts go hand-in-hand with visual creativity that should delight DnA fans: a man twirling atop an ever-growing tower of chairs; a woman spinning so many hula hoops that she momentarily becomes a human slinky, and two guys who act like they are just taking a walk in the park, as they skip and jump upon the rotating Wheel of Death.
Hula hooping as high art. Photo by Frances Anderton
Zest for Life Peter Shire Studio Tour hosted by A+D Museum Saturday, December 14th, 11:00 AM 1850 Echo Park Avenue Los Angeles, CA 90026
Support A+D Museum and see inside the creative world of beloved LA artist Peter Shire. On this ticketed tour of Shire's longstanding studio in Echo Park, you will see the process and finished examples of his deceptively cheerful functional art, including furniture, ceramics, lighting, and much more.
Also, support A+D by going to the museum at 170 South La Brea itself, where you can currently view Impossible Drawings, a selection of "2D works" curated by A+D Museum and Thom Mayne and his post-Morphosis creative enterprise Stray Dog Cafe. The goal is to direct viewers "to reconsider spatial assemblage while it is still in the threshold of physical realization." Works are by Bea Martin, Perry Kulper, Bryan Cantley, Neil Spiller, and Peter Baldwin. The drawings are published in Of The Moment, a survey of contemporary LA architecture produced by Stray Dog Cafe, and available in hard copy at A+D Museum.
Crossing Over, Considered Symposia Day, in conjunction with Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020 (on show through January 5th, 2025) Saturday, December 14th, 10:30 AM–9:00 PM Ramo Auditorium, Caltech, Donald E. Baxter M.D. Hall of the Humanities and Social Sciences, 1200 E California Blvd, Pasadena, CA 91125
Former L.A. Times Architecture Critic Christopher Hawthorne and other guests take to the stage at Caltech this Saturday for a day of discussions and screenings reflecting on Crossing Over: Art and Science at Caltech, 1920–2020, the PST ART: Art & Science Collide exhibition of objects (mostly) from the Caltech Archives and Special Collections, that illustrate the "complex interchange between science and the visual arts."
Along with the rare books, paintings, photographs, scientific instruments, and molecular models on display are contemporary installations. Perambulate Caltech's cloistered halls, plazas, and courtyards (by architects including Myron Hunt and Elmer Grey, Bertram Goodhue, Gordon Kaufmann, Edward Durrell Stone), and you can happen upon Shana Mabarii's shiny Spectrum Petals — seven mirrored cylinders echoing "astronomical instruments and the narrow band of visible light on the electromagnetic spectrum" (shown, top of page). Or stop by the fluttery gold-flecked bridge by artist Lita Albuquerque, entitled This Moment in Time, a reference to "the creation of the precious metal and other chemical elements through nuclear fusion reactions within stars."
This Moment in Time, by Lita Alberquerque. Photo: Frances Anderton
Satanic Mills Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis The Huntington, 1151 Oxford Road, San Marino, CA 91108 Through January 6th, 2025
Perhaps one of the most powerful PST: Art & Science Collide shows is Storm Cloud: Picturing the Origins of Our Climate Crisis, a bleak narrative about the merciless industrialization and extraction of global resources, perpetrated largely by the British, that has caused such havoc to climate, flora, and fauna. The curators cleverly tell the story through objects held by the Huntington Museum, such as John Constable’s View on the Stour Near Dedham, and writings,such as William Blake's 1804 poem Jerusalem, both of which juxtapose "England's green and pleasant land" with the “satanic mills” of the industrialized north.
You may be glad to exit into the gentle botanical gardens (that are, ironically, the legacy of another despoiler of land, the rail magnate Henry E. Huntington). It is so pleasant to wander the artful landscapes of plants and buildings, including the classical Chinese garden, named Liu Fang Yuan 流芳園, the Garden of Flowing Fragrance, and the Japanese Heritage Shōya House, a restored, 18th century, residential compound. In the latter, you can see a pure example of the architecture that proved so influential on Los Angeles craftsman and Modernist homes.
Cyanotype Santa Family Holiday Card Workshop The Wende Museum, 10808 Culver Boulevard Culver City, CA 90230 Sunday, December 15th, 12:00–3:00 PM
I have said it before and I'll say it again: I love The Wende Museum. This manageably sized, quirky "museum of the Cold War," with its restful cacti-filled garden, invariably has an interesting show or program that imaginatively extends the Cold War theme, including a family-friendly workshop this Sunday where museum staff will teach the "fun and simple process of printing cyanotype images using the power of the sun and winter floral natural materials or imagery from Soviet-era postcards from the museum's collection." Snacks included!
The workshop takes its cues from the cyanotype prints in the Wende's current East German guardhouse installation, Donde Nace El Agua (Where The Water is Born) by Felix Quintana.
While at the Wende, check out its new Glorya Kaufman Community Center, designed by AUX Architecture, and selected for the LA Times by my friend Sam Lubell as one of the eight buildings that have changed Los Angeles this year!
Click here to sign up for the free public program.
Image courtesy Wende Museum
What I'm Digging
Homes Sweet Homes
Maintaining or producing affordable housing in Los Angeles entails extraordinary patience and skill to navigate and get above-average outcomes from a byzantine system of rules, policies, and funding streams. So huge props to the developers and architects of the projects shown in Awesome and Affordable: Great Housing Now, the year-long survey of affordable housing I have produced with Friends of Residential Treasures: Los Angeles (FORT: LA). November's "awesome" project is Weingart Tower 1, a 19-story tower complex of permanent supportive homes on Skid Row. Watch for December's, coming soon!
I also contributed two stories about housing to Of The Moment, produced by Stray Dog Cafe. Check out OTM to read about liveable, linear housing developments on Lincoln Boulevard, by Brooks+Scarpa, Koning Eizenberg, Patrick Tighe, Lorcan O'Herlihy, and experimental ADUs by Melissa Shin, Ben Warwas, Warren Techentin, Casey Hughes, and Jared Brunk.
It is exciting to see LA's architecture thrive, especially in the realm of housing, our region's thorniest challenge.
The French have joyfully welcomed back the cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris. Meanwhile, a new book celebrates another of their great landmarks, Versailles — as seen from the sky! Versailles from the Sky from Thames & Hudson shows that nothing in Architectural Digest can compare to the pomp and extravagance of the palace built by the Sun King, Louis XIV, while the drone vantage point by palace photographer Thomas Garnier captures the spectacular geometry of the interiors and gardens in ways you can never see from the ground. A sumptuous read for armchair travelers.
Section of Latona's Parterre, part of the expansive gardens designed by André Le Nôtre. Photo by Thomas Garnier
Welcome Blankets
After co-creating the pink-knitted Pussyhat Project in 2017, Jayna Zweiman went on to team up with hundreds of volunteer crafters to make Welcome Blanket. This reconceptualization of President Trump's 2000-mile-long proposed border wall is a "wall" of welcome blankets for new immigrants, each containing a woven story of exile and refuge, from across the world. Now 51 of those blankets have just gone on show at the T7-T8 connector in United's terminal at LAX, sharing their message with an estimated 22,000 passersby. A "welcome" sight if you travel this holiday.
Welcome Blankets at LAX. Image courtesy Jayna Zweiman.
Well, that's it for this week, and for this year. Thank you so much for reading this newsletter. Look out for the next one in early January. And in the meantime, have very happy holidays!
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