coco

CLOUD TOWER

Exhibition Coordinator for MAD Architects

Cloud Corridor is MAD’s concept for future residential typology in Los Angeles, transforming everyday urban experiences, and embodying Ma Yansong’s “Shanshui City” philosophy for architecture to manifest the spiritual essence between people and nature,

Part of Shelter: Rethinking How We Live in Los Angeles co-curated by Sam Lubell and Danielle Rago at The A+D Museum

On the road 5 : the hills

The Hollywood Sign is a landmark and cultural icon positioned atop of one of the most recognizable hillsides in the world. While the city is often portrayed for its horizontality, it is the hills that give LA its unique three-dimensional quality, hillsides whose constraints and potentials have and continue to be a source of inspiration and invention for architects and artists alike. They are sites of tension and play! From Pierre Koenig’s iconic Stahl House/Case Study House 22 to Ed Ruscha’s famed painting The Back of Hollywood, 1977, the sign and accompanying vistas have significantly impacted the cultural and artistic landscape of Los Angeles. On the Road’s fifth program addresses this hillside and the city’s iconic sign from various points of view — front, back, side, partial and oblique — and engage with its varying scale from different positions along the route. No hillside in LA drives imagination and captures desire more. With its strong historical lineage and immediate adjacency to the city, the valley, and the wilderness of Griffith Park, the site will be the starting point for a set of new works designed and developed by a group of emerging practitioners. Six projects, diverse in concept and approach, will be implemented over the course of the day on the way up to Mt. Lee Drive and the backside of The Hollywood Sign.

Participants include Corey Fogel, Nicholas Hanna, Narineh Mirzaeian, Guvenc Ozel, LA MÁS, and Elly Ward/Ordinary Architecture.

On the road 4 : The pool

In Southern California the pool is a pervasive element in the landscape. From Hockney’s Paper Pools to Ruscha’s Nine Swimming Pools, the pool is a site of activation. From projective futures to atmospheres and the sensual, the pleasurable environment has elicited both distinct individual and combinatory design directives. The pool and its surrounding environment has become a pleasure ground of sorts including a spot for both relaxation and leisure. Swimming, floating, sinking, or hovering on the surface, The Amado pool in Palm Springs will host a series of four spatial installations that consider the liquid space of the respective site. Synchronized or drifting, each pool will be a thoughtfully curated installation around various ideas and themes developed and deployed by a group of LA-based architects, artists, and designers. The individual pools will inform specific locales by engaging the vernacular of desert oasis through their collaboration that is both transformative and reinforces the notion of pleasure.

Installations curated and designed by Maura Lucking and David Freeland, respectively, will feature Kate Yeh Chiu, Kathryn Shehan, Matthew Sullivan, Benedikt Groß, Joseph K. Lee; Terry Chatkupt, Mark Lyons, and Peter Vikar.

Participants for the Open Pool installation include Matt Austin, Sarah Blahut, Berenika Boberska, Steven Christensen, Jonathan Crisman, Jia Gu, Casey Hughes, Kim Lagercrantz, Lisa Madonna, Alex Maymind, Cat Pham, Sille Pihlak, Ben Warwas, and Kainoa Westernmark.

on the road 3 : THE HOUSE

Los Angeles is a city developed around and defined by houses rather than large architectural monuments. The singular residential unit is an elastic object, having long nurtured experimental pursuits and critical inquiry. Participants in On the Road 3 have selected an existing house located West of downtown Los Angeles to engage with and respond to through the medium of drawing. The chosen house may be an iconic work of architecture – one that has been overly saturated in the discourse of modern architecture in Los Angeles – or one that is part of the vernacular landscape. The drawing format is a standard 4”x6” postcard reproduced 150 times and placed inside the house’s mailbox. While this container was once an essential component of the house, digital forms of communication have all but rendered the letterbox obsolete. Emphasizing a distribution system outside of the institution, On the Road participants will engage this traditional format of communication. A map is posted online for visitors to navigate the various sites; the public will move at will between some or all of the sites, pulling postcards from the various mailboxes and curating their own collection — simultaneously engaging both the physical and representational object of the house. The day’s event will culminate in a discussion about contemporary modes of communication within architectural production moderated by Ellen Donnelly.

Participants include Andrew Akins; Clark Thenhaus; Heather Flood; Heather Peterson; James Leng; Jessica Colangelo; Mark Ericson; and Wendy Gilmartin.

on the road 2 : the median

Occupying the isolated space of a median and an adjacent courtyard, On the Road‘s second event will take place at Glendale @ La Clede in Atwater Village. Connected by a dialogue of relative distance, a group of interdisciplinary participants (individual, mates, or gangs) are invited to challenge the concept of threshold and boundary through the median as a public site of isolation and the courtyard as a private exterior space. Artists are encouraged to explore and exploit these two distinct conditions of isolation and residual space through artistic medium.

Participants include American Fine Architecture (AFA) - Tyler McMartin, Dale Strong, Paul Trussler, Ben Warwas; Black Magic - The Martist and Corey Taft; and Jasmin Blasco and Pascual Sisto.

on the road 1: the parking lot

On the Road's first event will take place at Temple @ Alameda in downtown Los Angeles as a flotilla of U-Haul trucks turned impromptu galleries. This one day exhibition will present work by 17 studios and individuals, each invited to show-and-tell a project they are currently working on. Participants are exploring intellectually charged ideas through architecture and capturing the experimental spirit of Los Angeles. The projects presented exist in flux and are activated by a high level of conviction, critical thinking, and playful rigor. The intention is to unpack ideas, concepts, and tropes signaling a shift in attitude, conceptual framework, and introduce a new set of hinge points and methodologies that drive the present.

Participants include Andrew Kovacs, Bryony Roberts, Curt Gambetta, Foundation for Architecture and Design, First Office, House of Style, Joe Alguire Workshop, Jonathan Louie, Maxi Spina Architects, Michael Faciejew, Paul Stoelting, Studio Bonner + Stayner Architects, Rowen Studio, T8projects, Vacation Projects, Wedgeworthy, and WELCOMEPROJECTS.

Gallery Attachment

Submission of “Houses for Women” at Jai & Jai Gallery

An exquisite corpse submission for Laurel Broughton and Andrew Kovacs’ 2014 collaborative exhibition as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project. 

Houses for Women includes: Vanna Venturi House (Robert Venturi), Farnsworth House (Mies van Der Rohe), Josephine Baker House (Adolf Loos), White U House (Toyo Ito), and House of the Mother of the Suicide (John Hejduk).

Domus

Installation Team at Materials & Applications

DOMUS is an experiential, anti-seismic architecture installation that challenges our perception and response to earthquakes in Los Angeles. Suspended in the center of DOMUS is a matrix of undulating lights and sounds that create a stunning visual and aural immersive experience, submerging visitors into the sensorial datascape of two historical events: Haiti’s 7.0 earthquake on January 12, 2010 and the 6.3 earthquake in Christchurch on Feburary 21, 2011. The LED chandelier centerpiece suspends from an 18’ tall ceiling as the structural ribs taper into eight points, suggestive of gothic arches. Compositions performed in DOMUS are created by Ryan McGee in collaboration with artist D.V. Rogers, and use seismic recordings to translate waveform data to the compositional data collected by IRIS Wilbur. 

8x 4x 2x 1x

RUMBLE HI-C Exhibition at The Mackey Apartments

Architecture, once considered not merely a generically spatial art but the arbiter of space itself, has increasingly turned its attention to time instead. The most evident symptom of this development is the now ubiquitous presence of moving images of architecture. The static view has all but disappeared as fly throughs, animations, films, and videos have adjusted the tempo of every conceivable aspect of the architectural landscape. Today, all buildings are thought at speed, as unfolding operations and environments. 8x4x2x1x samples an emerging repertoire of gaits, paces, shuffles, and flows that both embed architecture in the broader logics of contemporary culture as well as make architecture more difficult to capture and regulate. The show argues that the deliberate exploration of the proliferating cadences of architecture will convert the increasingly dumb territory of digital representation in to a new era in the field's experimental project.

GOODS USED : An architectural yard sale

Project Team : 2013 at Jai & Jai Gallery

An “architectural yard sale” organized by Andrew Kovacs highlighting an array of bricolage architectural objects and representations.

AIR GARDEN

Fabrication Designer for Ball Nogues Studio

Installation at Bradley West Terminal at Los Angeles International Terminal inspired by the light and space movement.