Machine Learning Meets Mental Health at the Hammer

Dear DnA friends,

I hope you are doing well despite the local and global turmoil, from which, by the way, even the ultrarich can't hide.

The imminent Bezos/Sanchez wedding in Venice has reportedly had to change locations for security reasons — to the Arsenale, which is where the 2025 Venice Biennale is currently located! Maybe Ivanka, Kim, and Mick will be seen on Foster/Porsche water bicycles (below) at the "future mobility hub" at the Biennale, or resting in MAD Architects' dreamy Chinese Paper Umbrella installation (above), or even taking in exhibits at PORCH: An Architecture of Generosity, at the US Pavilion in the Giardini, which is admired by this publication for conveying a "provocative idea of the United States."

Water bicycles at the Biennial, IMG_3425 Who needs a luxury yacht when you can pedal across the Venice Lagoon? Photo by Frances Anderton.

If you can't get to Venice, Italy, however, there are design happenings aplenty right here, such as the LA Design Festival, a four day bonanza of conversations, design showcases, and performances taking place over four days in four locations — ROW DTLA, Helms Design Center, Culver City, Downtown Long Beach, and ArtCenter, Pasadena. See details in Design Things To Do, below. Then there are the previews of the David Geffen Galleries.

Later this week LACMA will host the press and public for tours of the long-gestated replacement building at LACMA, designed by Peter Zumthor. More member visits take place in early July. Visitors will experience an empty building, enlivened by a performance by Kamasi Washington but devoid of the art that it is designed to enshrine. This may reinforce some people's fears that Michael Govan, who once worked for Thomas Krens, the father of the “Bilbao effect,” is primarily concerned with the building as a piece of art.

However, it will certainly be interesting to see if the meandering, elevated concrete and glass pavilion triumphs as a piece of capital A architecture — and if Govan's unwavering conviction about the project has paid off, in the face of persistent concerns about cost, context, size, siting, program, not to mention ability to achieve the spiritual luminosity and Swiss watch level of craft that are Zumthor's trademarks. Former LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne believes it largely succeeds.

lacma-atelier-peter-zumthor-the-boundary-2x Photo courtesy LACMA

Design Things To Do

LA Design Festival (LADF)
Thursday June 26th–Sunday, June 29th
Multiple locations: ROW DTLA; Helms Design District, Culver City; Downtown Long Beach; ArtCenter, Pasadena

The Los Angeles Design Festival is an annual gathering created by and for design aficionados, who have stepped up with concepts for shows and talks spread over four days in four locations.

This year's outing opens Thursday and you can pick from numerous attractions, including The Money Train: the Last Mile from Track to Table, a speculative design exhibition at Long Beach Acres of Books, exploring how “transit infrastructure can be reimagined to advance food equity and urban resilience,” curated by Kevin Sherrod. Check out Dyed in Emotion: The Color of Connection, an “immersive installation exploring the universal relationship between color, emotion, and cultural identity,” at ROW DTLA.

See how young designers see tomorrow in Slice of the Future – Speculative Scenes from Tomorrow’s World, and Future Tense at ROW DTLA; future mobility at the ArtCenter Transportation Design Student Showcase; and, at Helms, Worldbuilding and the Architecture of What-if with Josh Dawson, and Speed Talks: The Future of Design, at Helms Bakery District, with Nicole Comp, Alvin Huang, Michael Anderson, William Virgil, and others.

Remembering and rebuilding after the Eaton and Palisades fires are the subjects of Resilience in the Ashes at ArtCenter and Straight Talk About Building Back, on Saturday at 2:30 PM, when I'll talk with Altadena homeowner and architect Charles Bryant and landscape architect Gary Lai about "the real constraints and radical opportunities in rebuilding California after the fires."

Click here for all the information about LADF.

Screenshot 2025-06-24 at 3.10.11 PM Still from Cáustico, 2016, a short film by Joshua Dawson.

Small Lots, Big Impacts: An Initiative to Build a Path to a Better Future
Helms Design Center, Adotta Showroom, 8745 Washington Boulevard
Saturday, June 28th, 11:00 AM–5:00 PM

While at Helms during LADF, be sure to stop by the Adotta showroom and check out the entries in Small Lots, Big Impacts. This is the competition conceived by Dana Cuff and her team at cityLAB-UCLA, the think tank that has been stealthily changing the landscape of housing in LA through "gentle density," as in the addition of dwellings in residential neighborhoods at an uninvasive scale. First, they did years of research that led to the legalization of very popular Accessory Dwelling Units. Now they've aimed at slightly higher density, with this competition to elicit innovative, liveable, and buildable designs for small subdivided lots (Gentle Density: Sites A and B) and midrises on larger land areas (Shared Future: Sites C and D).

Spinagu, alley Households, a winning design by Spinagu (Courtesy cityLAB-UCLA)

There are so many designs that jump out, each exhibiting creative ways to balance privacy and shared open space while giving as much access as possible to sunlight and landscape, in addition to deploying the latest technologies, including CLT (cross-laminated timber) and prefabrication, while adding verve with color and form. Even my ever hard-to-please spouse was charmed, remarking about Slim Gim, below, by the firm Forma + Studio Zimm. "Wow, goes the brilliantly pleasing facade! Those five cantilevered counterintuitive, walk-the-plank balconies ambush like a high-functioning Drunk Uncle."

The sites, incidentally, are actual lots owned by the City of Los Angeles, and the next stage of the competition involves the city releasing an RFQ, from which another round of winners will be paired with potential developers to turn some of these concepts into reality.

Given how LA had been marching down the road of building ever larger, blander megamansions, it's a true delight to see these little residential bonbons.

Single Stair Contest

One of the ways in which architects are getting more dwellings and gardens onto small lots is by getting rid of the second staircase, which is currently mandatory in the building code, and now being contested by a vocal cohort in the design and planning world. There is a competition underway right now, sponsored by Livable Communities Initiative (LCI), that specifically seeks housing designs that feature only one staircase. Interested in participating? Sign up here.

SlimGIM_SiteA_Professional_HERO+(1) Slim Gim by the firm Forma + Studio Zimm (image courtesy cityLAB-UCLA)

Why Did I Say Yes?
Exhibition of works by Viraj Khanna
Rajiv Menon Contemporary, 1311 N. Highland Avenue, LA 90028
Opening, June 28th, 6:00–8:00 PM; Exhibition open through August 30th

There is little that can top an Indian wedding for sheer glorious sumptuousness.

So an upcoming show at Rajiv Menon Contemporary gallery of work by Kolkata-based artist Viraj Khanna, son of fashion designer Anamika Khanna, sounds enticing. Why Did I Say Yes? is his examination of the Indian wedding as a "site of aspiration, consumption, and identity-making across South Asia and its diasporas."

Rajiv Menon explains that Khanna has created 20 works, made in collaboration with craftspeople skilled in traditional textile embroidery techniques, for this "fun and funny" show that gently satirizes the "Indian wedding industrial complex."

Click here for information.

VirajKhannaPhotoshootTimePhotoCreditRubenDiaz Viraj Khanna, Photoshoot time. Embroidery on Cotton. Image courtesy of the artist.

Lawrence Lek: NOX High-Rise
Saturday, June 28th–November 16th; Screening, Sunday, June 29th, 2:00 PM
Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Blvd.Los Angeles, CA 90024

An MIT report finds that the brain atrophies when it delegates its muscle work to AI. On the other hand, perhaps there are some tasks we should cede to AI. Waymo users I know repeatedly attest that they feel safer in a driverless car than one helmed by a human.

With that in mind, I'm eager to see the upcoming show at Hammer Museum, an immersive installation by Lawrence Lek, filmmaker, musician, and interactive designer of NOX High-Rise, in which "time-based media and scenography intersect to evoke a virtual world in which AI systems dominate the lives of humans and machines." NOX, short for "Nonhuman Excellence, "is a therapeutic center controlled by Farsight Corporation — a fictional AI conglomerate — where sentient self-driving cars with mental health problems are trained and treated to be put back into service."

On Sunday afternoon, Lek will screen films from his “Smart City” series, which laid the groundwork for NOX High-Rise.

Click here for details and the exhibition, and here for details about the screening.

Lawrence Lek, NOX, 2023, Video still. Commissioned by LAS Art Foundation. Courtesy the artist and Sadie Coles HQ

*Theme* from A *New* Program for Graphic Design
Public Program, Reading Room
Saturday, June 28th, 12:00 PM — 5:00 PM
MAK Center, Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood, CA

As part of the MAK Center’s current exhibition, Reading Room, and Inventory Press’s June Table Residency, Adam Michaels, Daniel Perlin, Dave Harrington, and special guests will perform an extended, improvised rendition of *Theme* from A *New* Program for Graphic Design in the Schindler House patio.

*Theme* mixes up lectures with changing refrains on a Moog synthesizer, and sounds very much in the spirit of the early Schindler avant-garde creative gatherings.

This happening is one of the programs that accompanies Reading Room, an exhibition of commissioned furniture for reading by Los Angeles artist and designer Ryan Preciado, shown along with publications, artists’ books, and printed matter from LA-based practitioners "exploring the intersections of art and design.”

Click here for information and tickets.

Ryan Preciado at MAK Center Ryan Preciado chair at Reading Room. Image courtesy Karma

What I'm Digging

Say Nothing

You may have seen the posters still on hoardings around town promoting the Hulu series, Say Nothing. They are stylish and alluring but say nothing about the show itself, which is a searing, candid drama about the two young Price sisters, IRA volunteers who perpetrate deeds in the name of freedom from British rule that test their souls and savage their own communities. A cautionary tale about the costs of violent rebellion, adapted from Patrick Radden Keefe's book of the same name, brought to life by an amazing cast.

Image courtesy hulu

How Much is that City in the Window?

With a sadly growing number of boarded-up stores on our Main Streets and arterials, it's refreshing to read this paean to storefronts by James Rojas, raised in Boyle Heights and now living in Oakland, about the window displays by small, locally owned businesses around the Rockridge BART station. He even got to create a storefront window himself, filling it with one of his signature city models. "This miniature city is more than just a model," he writes. "It’s an invitation to slow down, to explore, to remember that cities, like dreams, are built one small detail at a time."

Photo by John Kamp

Forget the Bells and Whistles

Fascinating — yes, really — article at Wirecutter about appliances and longevity. “People want super-quick freezing or night modes, and they want eight types of ice,” designer Alex Lobos told the reporter about the increasing computerization of fridges, which leads to more failures. It turns out the luxury brands keep it simple, incorporating "mostly basic features that they know will work and are well used," says appliance expert Jessica Petrino Ball. “It’s purposeful rather than entertainment-driven.” In my household, we love our purposeful, enduring Bialetti coffee maker.

Photo by Frances Anderton

Well, thank you for reading as always, and goodbye for this week.

Yours,
Frances

P.S. Subscribe to the KCRW Design and Architecture newsletter here, get back issues here, and reach out to me at francesanderton@gmail.com.