Should we embrace or deny "new kinds of design platforms, new ways of writing papers, new ways of producing knowledge?"
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Dear DNA friends,
I hope you had a happy Thanksgiving and enjoyed cooking and eating with loved ones.
I emphasize these simple pleasures in light of the big tech story of last week: the game of thrones at OpenAI!
Having largely kept my head in the sand about the implications of artificial intelligence –– perhaps because it’s so bewildering –– once the story became about the people and power plays behind the machines, it became more tangible. It was fascinating to learn about the struggle between “accelerationists” –– Sam Altman and the new board –– and “doomers“ like Ilya Sutskever and the now ejected board members at OpenAI. This conflict appears to crystallize the existential challenge presented by too-clever machine learners.
So it's good that Zócalo Public Square has created a timely program taking place this Tuesday evening; scroll down for details about AI and Creativity in Design Things to Do, or watch later, online. Also, check out this thinkpiece at Zócalo, which compares Big Tech to the onetime British East India Company, a corporation more powerful than kings.
As for AI and creativity, many architecture professionals and schools have deployed digital tools and robotics for years, most overtly at SCI-Arc. Its director Hernan Diaz Alonso, no doomer, curated the 2021 Architectural Bestia exhibition (including architects FreelandBuck, above image) which "acknowledges and propels...the notion (that) authorship itself is in flux," thanks to AI.
Still, educators generally are in a "new age of uncertainty," in the words of Jeffrey Daniels, instructor at UCLA Extension Architecture and Interior Design Programs, even if they don't feel as worried as the writers and actors whose recent strikes centered on the threat from AI. Daniels was among design school leaders at a recent conversation at AIA/LA, led by Heather Barker, a “human urbanist” and Professor of Design at CSULB. The topic was how to integrate AI into their curricula. Opinions range, explained Brett Steele, Dean of the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture: "Across our 14 programs, we have, on one extreme end of the spectrum, an absolute embracing of the technology as the basis for new kinds of design platforms, new ways of writing papers, new ways of producing knowledge. And at the other extreme, I have programs that have absolutely forbidden that as a topic. It's the unpredictability of who might embrace and who might reject that I find so interesting around the topic right now. It's a sort of Rorschach test of 2023. It's a way to articulate one's own set of values and interests, and ideas as much as anything else."
I’ve been doing a little bit of teaching myself recently, and have to say it is unnerving to receive term papers and not know who exactly did the work. Which is why it can be comforting to spend time exchanging ideas IRL, and celebrating creation by hand.
In Design Things To Do you will find people doing just that!
But before you read on, consider supporting the station that brings you this vital info. Double Your Dollars to KCRW on this Giving Tuesday.
Design Things To Do
Is AI the End of Creativity—Or a New Beginning? Live event, Tuesday, November 28, 7:00 PM ASU California Center in Los Angeles, CA + Online Does AI herald the end of humans making art to make sense of the world, or a new key to being and seeing? That’s the question that will be posed Tuesday, November 28, at an in-person and online event hosted by ASU, with Arts for LA, ASU Narrative and Emerging Media Program, and LACMA.
Anuradha Vikram, Art Curator and author of the book of speculative novel Use Me at Your Own Risk, will lead a conversation with LACMA’s Art + Technology Lab program director Joel Ferree, Concept Art Association co-founder Nicole Hendrix, Writers Guild of America AI working group member John Lopez, and interdisciplinary artist Sarah Rosalena.
Questions on the table are: Should tech companies be allowed to use existing art to train AI engines? Who gets credit –– and paid –– for AI-assisted creative work? What do we lose when machine brains take over aspects of our creativity, once a defining feature of humanity? And, tantalizingly, what do we gain?
Attend in person or live online. Click here to register. If you miss the live event, a video will remain available here.
Saving Grace Garibaldina MB Society Clubhouse, Highland Park Tuesday, November 28, 5:00 - 7:00 PM Linda Dishman has led the Los Angeles Conservancy for 31 years, during which time the preservation organization –– founded in 1978 to save the Central Library in downtown L.A. from demolition –– has forcefully made the case that Angelenos care about cultural memory and architectural heritage.
Under Dishman’s leadership, the conservancy saved such classics as the May Company and Herald Examiner buildings, Downey McDonald’s, St. Vibiana Cathedral, the Century Plaza Hotel, and the garden apartment complex Lincoln Place. It advanced the conversion of thousands of offices into homes, with the passage of the game-changing Adaptive Reuse Ordinance in 1999, and made the case for new development that could incorporate, not destroy, historic structures. In this interview with The Planning Report, Dishman reflects on successes and losses (Ambassador Hotel), which has led the Conservancy to work closely with the communities "living and working in the neighborhoods directly around historic sites –– to engage with them about the possibilities."
Now Dishman is retiring, and the role of president and chief executive officer goes to her longtime colleague Adrian Scott Fine. Tonight, November 28, Dishman will be toasted at the historic Garibaldina MB Society clubhouse in Highland Park, complete with "1965 time-capsule ballroom."
Flyer for the reception for Linda Dishman; courtesy LA Conservancy
Dancing With Architects Thursday, November 30, 5:30 - 10:00 pm Los Angeles Theatre, Broadway You don't often see the words "architect" and "dancing" in the same sentence. But disco-level boogieing is promised at this year’s AIA/LA Design Awards ceremony. The ticketed event takes place this Thursday at the sumptuous 1931 Los Angeles Theatre on Broadway (below). Unlike some of the contemporary prize-winners, the theater's architect, S. Charles Lee, embraced maximalism.
In addition to awards for new buildings, an honor also goes to one that has stood the test of time. The Bergamot Station in Santa Monica, by Frederick Fisher and Partners and Pugh + Scarpa, wins the 25-Year Award. Meanwhile, the already iconic replacement 6th Street Viaduct gets the Building Team of the Year Award. I interviewed the designers on both projects. Click here for my Q&As with Joe Coriaty, of FF&P, and Michael Maltzan, architect in charge of the Sixth Street viaduct.
AWAF Holiday Party The fun with architects continues, on Saturday, December 2, when the Association of Women in Architecture gathers to raise funds for scholarships at its AWAF holiday party. I’ll be there, and will sit down for a conversation about community engagement withSade Elhawary, State Assembly candidate, and longtime organizer with the Community Coalition, which is now building its ownnew home in South LA.
Los Angeles Theatre. Photo courtesy Berger Conser Photography/LA Conservancy
From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete Catalog Launch and Talk Saturday, December 9, 3:00 pm Neutra Office Building, 2379 Glendale Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039 Helena Arahuete came to America with an education in organic architecture from a school in Buenos Aires. She then spent 24 years working with the architect John Lautner, becoming his chief architect. Following his passing in 1994, she established her own firm, continuing Lautner projects as well as new commissions that are intended to harmonize with, and amplify, their spectacular sites, in the manner of her great mentor.
Now a show of her work, From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete, is on display at the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara. Next week the Neutra Institute for Survival Through Design will host a talk and launch of the exhibition catalog in the Neutra Office Building in Silver Lake. Silvia Perea will moderate a conversation about the present and future of organic architecture with Arahuete and architectural historians Mimi Zeiger and Alan Hess, who contributed to the catalog.
This event is free and open to the public, but space is limited.
RSVP to museum-events@ucsb.edu to reserve a seat.
View from the interior of the House above the Morning Clouds, by Helena Arahuete, 2009. Photograph by Tycho Saariste
Let’s Talk About Trees ARCANE Space, 324 Sunset Avenue, Unit G, Venice Sunday, December 10, 2:00 PM In my previous newsletter, I mentioned the exhibition Inglewood Cathedral, a series of paintings by Lucas Reiner honoring some under-appreciated LA characters: the street trees of Inglewood. They are not your postcard famous palms, but just lumpy, bumpy, gnarly, knotty tree trunks bearing life-enhancing shade canopies, rendered in small, impressionistic paintings.
On Sunday, December 10, Reiner will sit down with Gustavo LeClerc, with the Urban Humanities Initiative at UCLA’s cityLAB. They will talk about trees –– trees as shelter, trees as inspiration to early architects and engineers, trees as refuge from threatening animals and people, trees as life. Having been fortunate enough to grow up in a city with abundant trees, one of which my friends and I would sit in for hours, I very much look forward to this conversation and hope you will come too.
Can Artists Thrive Without Community? Wönzimer Gallery, Downtown Los Angeles Friday, December 15, 7:00 PM Ann Weber is a San Pedro-based artist who creates large sculptures made of woven strips of cardboard, described by critic and curator DeWitt Cheng as “biomorphic gourd shapes… that synthesize ancient and modern, craft and high art.”
She also works hard at a related project: cultivating a community of artists, which can be a challenge in this vast, dispersed region where it can be just so much simpler to stay in one’s bubble and keep on working.
So Ann and I are going to sit down amidst her first show at Wönzimer Gallery, O What Fools We Mortals Be, and talk about "Art & Community," from the historic groups of friends and rivals in an art movement to places that intentionally nurture artists like art-centered housing; or, simply, networks like the one that Ann has created online and in person. I hope you’ll join us.
Eva Hesse: Film Screening Friday, December 1, 6:00 pm Also at Wönzimer Gallery: the artist and director Marcie Begleiter will introduce a screening of her 2016 documentary about the amazing artist Eva Hesse. Hesse, a German Jew, fled Nazi Germany on Kindertransport as a tiny child and returned with her artist husband to Germany twenty years later. There she developed her “post-minimalist” sculptures made of industrial materials such as rubber, latex, and fiberglass. Back in New York and ensconced in its artistic circle, she worked intensively until her passing of a brain tumor at the age of 34, leaving a powerful and inspiring legacy.
View of “O What Fools We Mortals Be.” Image courtesy Wönzimer Gallery
What I'm Digging
Furry Rat-catchers
Having grown up in the UK, where even domestic cats are mostly indoor-outdoor, I’d always understood that felines have a job to do, in addition to posing adorably: catch mice. Since that’s not so typical here, I was intrigued to read this report about the cats keeping the rats at bay at the L.A. Memorial Coliseum, run by USC. Joe Furin, the general manager of the Coliseum, tells the writer Rachel B. Levin: “We are a giant, outdoor, open-air stadium. The opportunity for rodents can be rather high. You would be amazed at how few critters we have thanks to our cat population.” No toxic rodenticides necessary!
Twinkle posing adorably. Photo by Frances Anderton
For Bird’s Eyes Only
Pursuant to the item above, I’m aware that outdoor cats are a menace to birds, but so too are their pet parents. Our love affair with all-glass buildings is causing an estimated billion bird deaths a year. This recent article in The Atlantic explains the problem and the ingenious bird-safe glass that is making a teeny dent in those numbers. Writer Ben Goldfarb singles out Chicago-based Studio Gang, which is leading the way in designing skyscrapers that deter bird crashes. He notes that influential modernist architect Mies Van Der Rohe believed in the "higher unity" between humans and nature enabled by vast glass facades. "The virtue of glass was that it connected indoor spaces with outdoor ones. The irony is awful: We prize a material that kills birds, because it makes us feel closer to nature."
We face great challenges right now, so the “fracking” of our attention might seem to be a small one, but three members of the Strother School of Radical Attention arguein this New York Times Op-Ed that the extraction of our attention for profit is tantamount to the extraction of labor in the Industrial Revolution. This requires a “new kind of resistance, equal to the little satanic mills that live in our pockets.” Their answer is “attention activism.” Think mindfulness, taken to another level of deep observation and reflection. One "simple exercise" they cite involves sitting at a cafe for three days, taking note of mundane events which, admittedly, may have you screaming for TikTok.
But I am thankful for your attention, since you made it to the end of this week's newsletter!
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