Dear DnA Readers,

Hope you are doing well, and are excited about the tornado of art and design about to be unleashed on us all. 

The Big Bang

PST ART: Art & Science Collide, a multitude of exhibitions exploring the intersection between art and science (800+ artists! 70+ cultural institutions!), opens officially next week, with a bang. At dusk on September 13, the bowl and skies above the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum will burst into light at the WE ARE: Explosion Event. 

This spectacle, presented by Getty and USC, is a new work by artist Cai Guo-Qiang (whose gunpowder paintings you may have seen at MOCA). It sounds rather amazing, involving drones and thousands of "daytime fireworks," made of organic pigments and dyes (see image, above). Tickets are still available, and KCRW has a special ticket giveaway (see below).

That same weekend, a crop of PST ART (formerly known as Pacific Standard Time) shows open their doors and I'll be sure to keep you posted about them. I'll also ask, what does the collision of art and science even mean? Is it artworks about scientific topics, or those produced as a result of technological innovation? Is it a meditation on nature and our impact on it? Will the art touch the soul, or be digital decorative "techno-doodles," per hubby Robin Bennett Stein? Or will it take on sociological and ecological themes and raise awareness?

Which brings me to Wayfarers Chapel...

Interior of Wayfarer's Chapel, photo courtesy wayfarerschapel.org

What Next for Wayfarers Chapel?

There is a building in our region that embodies the nexus of architecture, art, and nature –– the Wayfarers Chapel in Rancho Palos Verdes, designed by organic architect Lloyd Wright (son of FLW) as a memorial to Emanuel Swedenborg, the 18th-century Swedish inventor, natural scientist, philosopher, and mystic.

Wright's "tree chapel" of glass and pointed arches, opened in 1951 atop a hill amidst redwood trees overlooking the Pacific Ocean, is one of the loveliest places in the Southland. Or, it was.

Now the land has beaten back the building. In early July, just months after the chapel was landmarked, the structure had to be disassembled and crated, due to the fast-moving landslides in the area that are tearing houses and businesses apart.

What happens next is unclear, but you can learn more at an online discussion hosted mid-day on Wednesday, September 18th, by the LA Conservancy. At People + Places: The Way Ahead for Wayfarers Chapel, you will “hear from the team who took action, discover the intricate process of disassembly, the plans to re-erect this National Historic Landmark, and how you can help ensure its future.” Click here to register to attend.

What's evident is that the human ingenuity that built the sublime chapel may also have caused its undoing: the NYT reports that, "The Portuguese Bend landslide was activated in 1956, before Rancho Palos Verdes incorporated, when tons of excavated earth was dumped during road construction." More recently, torrential rains (expected to intensify with climate change) have saturated a deep layer of clay below the Palos Verdes Peninsula, making it "slippery enough to speed up the once slow-moving landslides." Right now, geologists are busy figuring out how to drain the water, slow the land movement, and put nature in its place.

Wayfarer's Chapel being dismantled. Photo courtesy wayfarerschapel.org

Ticket Giveaway for WE ARE: Explosion Event!

Calling all KCRW Members! KCRW wants to send you to this exciting art event by Cai Guo-Qiang to launch PST Art: Art & Science Collide. For your chance to attend, respond to this email with your favorite place to experience art in LA. The first two KCRW members to respond will receive invitations for themselves and a plus one. Not a KCRW member? Join today so you never miss out on exclusive invites like these.

Design Things To Do

Objects for a Heavenly Cave
Group show
Marta, 3021 Rowena Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90039
September 7th – October 12th, 2024
Opening Saturday, September 7th, 5:00–8:00 PM

Marta, the Silver Lake gallery specializing in elegant exhibitions of objects at the cusp of art and design, also puts on good parties. So join the crowd this Friday for the opening of Objects for a Heavenly Cave, a group show of bowls and goblets and vases inspired “by the mythos of the grotto, cave-like spaces where the natural and artificial merge.” Grottoes have long been a vibrant site for experimentation with imitation “petrification and decay,” says the curator Krista Mileva-Frank. Take, for example, the extraordinary fake grottoes at Boboli Gardens in Florence or Neuschwanstein Castle in Bavaria.

The objects at Marta include Valentina Cameranesi Sgroi’s borosilicate glass chalices that “evoke water-slicked, riparian creatures, exquisite and dangerous in equal parts,” along with other under-worldly works by the artists and collectives A History of Frogs, Sula Bermúdez-Silverman, Charlap Hyman & Herrero, Lily Clark, F Taylor Colantonio, Emily Endo, Ficus Interfaith, Mr. Liz Hopkins, MT Objects, James Naish, Emma Witter, and Masaomi Yasunaga.

Marta is a Gallery Program Participant in PST ART: Art & Science Collide, the third outing for the regional art spectacular formerly known as Pacific Standard Time.

Click here for information.

Frank Israel Remembered
Salon at the Roberts Residence
Sunday, September 8th, 4:00 PM
Hollywood Hills (address sent on ticket purchase)

One of the most influential architects of the early 1990s in Los Angeles was the late Frank Israel, designer of homes and creative offices that fused eclectic and erudite influences, spatial and formal experimentation, painterly use of color and material, and a slight sense of structural disequilibrium. 

Now you can visit one of his homes, the Randell and Diane Roberts Residence (1989, Frank Israel), on a tour hosted by SAH/SCC, followed by a conversation about the project, a creative remodel of a 1930s house, between Todd Gannon, author of the forthcoming book, Franklin Israel: A Life in Architecture, architect Rob Rothblatt, and Rafael Fontes, creator of this FORT: LA trail of homes by Frank Israel.

Click here for tickets.

Roberts Residence, screenshot from Google Maps.

I’m Your Man
Film + Discussion w/ Author Emma Braslavsky + Translator Holly Yanacek
Goethe-Institut LA Project Space, 1901 W. 7th Street, Suite AB, Los Angeles 90057
Thursday, September 12th, 6:00 PM – 9:30 PM 

Notwithstanding the apparent idiocy of JD Vance's “childless cat lady” remark, culture is responding to the implications of falling birthrates and the rise in solo living. This is playing out in architecture in new ideas about coliving and cohousing with chosen family (see this “coliving” building in Awesome and Affordable), and in the digital realm with the growth of AI companions, and SciFi movies about ever more “real” cyber relationships.

The latter was examined with humor, empathy, and candor in I’m Your Man, a 2021 film directed by the gifted German actress/filmmaker Maria Schrader (Deutschland 83), in which an eager-to-please, handsome robot named Tom (Dan Stevens, the hottie from Downton Abbey) upends the world of Alma (Maren Eggert), an academic grappling with a loveless life.

The script was based on a German novel by Emma Braslavsky, and next week, Braslavsky will sit down with her English translator Holly Yanacek, for a screening of the movie, followed by a conversation about the book. They will discuss “the transformative nature of Art, the delicate art of literary translation, and the challenges of adapting novels into films.”

Click here for details.

Poster for the movie, I'm Your Man (Ich Bin Dein Mensch)

Views of Planet City
SCI-Arc Gallery, and Pacific Design Center Gallery
Openings: SCI-Arc Gallery, Friday, September 13, 6:00 - 8:00 PM; Pacific Design Center Gallery, Saturday, September 14th, 3:00 - 5:00 PM

Here's another SciFi take on a pressing challenge!

Planet City is an immersive, interactive experience created by SCI-Arc professor and world builder Liam Young, depicting a world in which the globe's 10 billion people pack into one giant city, leaving the rest of the planet as a vast green belt, teeming with plant and animal life. The premise for the project comes from the late natural scientist Edward O. Wilson and his “Half-Earth” proposal to dedicate half the surface of the Earth to untouched nature. 

Imagery from the project goes on show in Views of Planet City, two simultaneous exhibitions featuring Young’s Planet City scenarios along with related works by SCI-Arc faculty Jennifer Chen, John Cooper, Damjan Jovanovic, and Angelica Lorenzi.

Views of Planet City is part of PST ART: Art & Science Collide.

Click here for details.

Rendering of Planet City by Damjan_Jovanovic

What I'm Digging 

Operation Under LA

In case scaling the skyscrapers of Oceanwide Plaza was not daring enough, how about descending into LA’s dark, dank network of drainage tunnels to make one's mark? That’s what the Operation Under (OU) collective of graffiti artists, painters and urban anthropologists have been doing since 2017, reports Matt Stromberg in this thrilling story in Hyperallergic.

Stromberg takes a clandestine tour and witnesses the wonders on hidden walls: “elaborate text–based graffiti tags, Aztec imagery, fantastical creatures, references to the natural world, and cartoons."

The artists also immortalize the real creatures that sometimes go boo, like the family of raccoons that greeted them when Stromberg was there. While OU is unfazed by encounters with human authorities, the raccoons are another matter. As they made a hasty retreat, OU member Evan Skrederstu told the author, “I’m not trying to mess with that.”

Detail of raccoon murals by Christopher Brand in the show, Life Underground. Photo by Matt Stromberg/Hyperallergic

Style Wars 

Speaking of buried treasure… how very amusing to read about the hidden letter dissing a design detail by Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, recently found within a column of the National Gallery Sainsbury Wing.

This Wing, opened in 1991, is the extension to London’s National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, and was famously designed in a classically "appropriate" postmodern style by Venturi, Scott Brown and Associates, after Prince Charles eviscerated the first, high-tech design for the Wing (by Ahrends, Burton and Koralek), calling it “a monstrous carbuncle on the face of a much loved and elegant friend."

The building’s donor, the late John Sainsbury, was not so sold on the design by Venturi and Scott Brown either, and snuck a letter into what he saw as a needless, non-structural column in 1990. It was recently found by workers now busy on an expansion of the expansion. "If you have found this note," wrote Sainsbury, "you must be engaged in demolishing one of the false columns that have been placed in the foyer of the Sainsbury Wing of the National Gallery. I believe that the false columns are a mistake of the architect and that we would live to regret our accepting this detail of his design."

The new, airy, more modernist design by Selldorf Architects (responsible for the adaptive remodel of Hauser & Wirth in the Arts District) is, incidentally, opposed by Scott Brown and eight former presidents of the Royal Institute of British Architects, who said it would "turn the Sainsbury Wing into an airport lounge".

NOTE: While on the topic of Venturi and Scott Brown, check out this thinkpiece by my friend Li Wen, using the architect duo’s famed “ducks” and “decorated sheds” framing to consider two American landmarks that enshrine the themes of the presidential election.