25 March 2010 – 2 July 2010
Opening Reception Thursday March 25, 2010 5PM – 8PM
Pacific Design Center (PDC) Suite B208 | West Hollywood, CA | 90069

SUPERFRONT is proud to present UNPLANNED: Research and Experiments at the Urban Scale, the first SUPERFRONT LA exhibit of 2010.

Just as the discipline of architecture faces a re-imagination of itself in this era of slow-motion global capitalism, the human population finds itself crossing the threshold to a predominantly urban existence.  Many of the basic tenets underpinning urban planning – Cartesian geometry, programmatic taxonomy, contextualism – have been subject to skeptical investigation and rebellion in architecture throughout the past decade. Yet conventional urban planning continues, the discipline of urban planning operating much as it has since the 1960s (if not the 1860s).  Leveraging an interdisciplinary focus, UNPLANNED: RESEARCH AND EXPERIMENTS AT THE URBAN SCALE boldly presents a collection of radical methods for envisioning and producing space at the urban scale.

A group exhibit with more than twenty participants, UNPLANNED spans architecture, urban design, industrial design, conceptual art, and cartography to present an array of experimental work at the urban scale.  Multi-disciplinary practitioners address emergent urbanism, “wild building”, and other alternatives to conventional urban planning.  The exhibit is curated by SUPERFRONT Founder + Director Mitch McEwen with Associate Curator Cecilia Brock and Gallery Intern Jackie Koenig.

Work is exhibited in multiple formats, from physical models to drawings, animations, software applications, consumer products, and live film.  Dealing with urban situations from derelict construction sites to refugee camps, favelas, temporary housing and other contemporary spatial phenomena, the exhibition confronts the current economic crises and larger issues of globalization.

Participants include architectural and urbanist collectives ae.i.ou (San Juan), Salottobuono (Venice), and Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today (London), as well as Francisca Benitez (New York), Benjamin Cadena (Brooklyn), McLain Clutter (University of Michigan TCAUP), Alex Delaunay (New York/Paris), Johanna Ferrer Guldager and Stine Laurberg Hansen (Copenhagen/ Los Angeles), Dennis Maher (Buffalo), curator Mitch McEwen (SUPERFRONT), Nathalie Frankowski and Cruz García of WAI Think Tank (Beijing), Riitta Oittinen (Helsinki), Hyeri Park (Seoul/Delft), Dubravka Sekulić (Belgrade/Maastricht), Alvaro Urbano (Madrid/Berlin), architects AGENCY (New York), Paul Schuette (Los Angeles), Nina Ilieva (Sofia/Los Angeles), John Briscella (Philadelphia), ZellnerPlus (Los Angeles), Darien Williams with INABA (Los Angeles), an advanced architecture studio at Columbia GSAPP taught by Mabel Wilson, and a student workshop from the Southern California Institute of Architecture directed by Michael Pinto of Project Food / LA (Los Angeles).

UNPLANNED opens March 25th with reception 5pm – 8pm.  On view through July 2nd, 2010.

Alvaro Urbano, “PERFUMING EAST TO WEST MANHATTAN FEBRUARY 2009″, 2009

ae.i.ou, “Appropriated”, 2009

McLain Clutter, “Topography of Urban Potentials,” 2009

Salottobuono, “Manual of Decolonization (Un-Roofing)”, 2008

Paul Schuette, “Fountain of Four”, 2009

John Briscella, “UGNB (Urban Gridded Notebook)” (detail), 2009

Sited on the 5th floor of the Pacific Design Center, Excess | Liquidity presents a survey of recent work by experimental architectural practice X|A, exploring liquid form as architectural vocabulary. X|A deploys film-maker’s special effects software to generate architectural form through animated movement and fluid behaviors. Works are exhibited as physical prototypes, drawings, and animations.

Excess | Liquidity also presents a single work entitled “Fair.”  Los Angeles artist Farrah Karapetian responds to the context of Art Los Angeles Contemporary with a text-based piece that presents the word “fair” as a tin casing lit by embedded fluorescents, but without the customary translucent facade of active signage. The piece evokes at once the urban streetscape and late 20th century conceptual art practices.

The title of the disjointed exhibit evokes the contemporary economic context, which affects both art practices and architectural production. Can liquid architecture be understood as a metaphor for the liquidity of global capital? Can conceptual art practices offer a lens to interrogate the formal movements of architectural production? What is fair between art and architecture, between art dealers and art collectors, between excess and its aftermath? These are some of the questions evoked.

Excess | Liquidity opens January 30th with reception 4pm – 7pm.

Excess | Liquidity is partly enabled by a generous donation from Walter McEwen, Jr.

X|A, “Liquid Sphere”, 2010

X|A is an experimental architecture practice founded in New York in 2007 by Erick Cárcamo and Nefeli Chatzimina.  Their expertise is focused on innovative techniques derived from animation software, scripting and continuous academic research.  The principals teach architecture at Columbia University GSAPP, PRATT Institute and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, die Angewandte.

Farrah Karapetian recently completed a residency with the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War in Los Angeles, where her work dealt with marks of unrest registered on the Western panels of the Berlin Wall. The artist’s work has frequently concerned moments of crisis as they register in architectural space, from foreclosed real estate to the shadows burnt into walls at Hiroshima.  Her process tendentially results in images and forms that are, in the words of LA Times critic Leah Ollman, “more like a metaphor than a record.” Karapetian has exhibited her work in Los Angeles with Sandroni.Rey, at the Aspen Art Museum, and at the Centre d’Art Contemporain, Parc Saint-Léger, France, among other locations.

Farrah Karapetian, “Fair”, 2010

The exhibit features Paul Schuette, an architect and artist who was a fellow at the Whitney Museum of American Art’s Independent Study Program in 2005.  Schuette’s work, Hydroloops, is comprised of living sculptures – live plants and light systems – that generate diagrams of their own behaviors and environment.

Architecture Live! also presents filmic pieces by two young Brooklyn-based architecture practices: Fake Industries Architectural Agonism and Decker Yeadon.  ”Ay Caremelles”, a short live film, documents Fake Industries Architectural Agonism’s subversive approach to a municipal commission to activate a fenced-off square in Barcelona.  ”Smart Screen” by architects Decker Yeadon is a brief painterly video of live footage of the architect’s thermo-responsive screen prototype opening and closing in response to ambient room temperatures.

Architecture Live! opens November 19th with reception 5pm – 8pm.  On view through December 16.

Ay Caremelles!, still image of live film, by Fake Industries Architectural Agonism

Photo of Hydroloops, installation by Paul Schuette

SmartScreen, video of a thermo-responsive screen that opens and closes in response to ambient room temperatures, designed by Decker Yeadon

photo of Caracas, courtesy "Landscapeofaztlan's Weblog"

The call for entries is closed.  Thank you for submitting.

SUPERFRONT LA’s first exhibit of 2010 will address the urban scale.  The group exhibit will span architecture, urban design, and urban planning to present emergent urbanism, “wild building”, and other alternatives to conventional modes of planning cities.  Dealing with urban topics from derelict construction sites to refugee camps, favellas, temporary housing and other contemporary spatial phenomena, the exhibition will confront the current economic crises and larger issues of globalization.  Work will be exhibited in multiple formats, from physical models to drawings, animations, video games or experimental formats.

Call for entries – please submit work for consideration in any format.   By email: submit links, text description, or attached files no larger than 2 MB to unplanned@superfront.org . By hard-copy, submit to SUPERFRONT BK, 1432 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11216.  Please do not send original work.  If you want your materials returned, include a self-addressed stamped envelope.   For consideration, all materials need to be received by November 30th.

Architects, urban designers, and planners selected for exhibition will be notified December 8th.

Unplanned will open at SUPERFRONT LA at the Pacific Design Center in February 2010 (exact date TBA) and will be on view for 3 months

Please post any questions as a comment to this page, rather than emailing.  Thank you.

projector at SUPERFRONT LA

Calling architects and urban designers – submit your DVDs to SUPERFRONT for consideration in Architecture Live!, an exhibit opening at SUPERFRONT LA next month (mid November – exact date TBA)

Submit DVDs showing your own animations or live film of your own work in architecture or urban design – from a few seconds to 10 minutes.  The work may be animation or live film, but should address contemporary architecture at this moment.  The work may involve material experiments, color, time-lapse or other themes that relate to the medium of film and animation.  Highly rendered fly-through animations of complete projects will not receive much attention.  The focus is on experimental work.

Two DVDs will be selected for exhibition for 6 weeks at SUPERFRONT LA at the Pacific Design Center.  The architects or urban designers chosen for exhibition will be announced on the SUPERFRONT website November 3rd. 

To submit your work for consideration, please send one DVD for consideration, formatted to “auto-play” and labelled with your name and contact information to:

SUPERFRONT BK, 1432 Atlantic Avenue, Brooklyn, NY 11216

If you wish the work returned, include a self-addressed stamped envelope.  Please do not send DVDs to the Los Angeles location.   

Deadline for receipt of DVDs is October 27th.  Please post any questions as a comment to this page, rather than emailing.  Thank you.

photo of the Maison Martin Margiela store facade in Beverly Hills, which Karapetian compares to Hall’s work

Perry Hall

Painting, Time, and Material Intelligence

by: Mitch McEwen, Director of SUPERFRONT

Perry Hall: Painting, Time, and Material Intelligence presents the work of artist Perry Hall as an ongoing interdisciplinary – perhaps, even, antidisciplinary – project.  The exhibit collects paintings and digital films produced from paint in order to expose the artist’s exploratory process.  Hall handles paint like an alchemist, exploiting potentials of its liquidity, surface tension, color and luminosity.  Ironically, it is his fluency with this process of material exploitation, the sophistication of his material experiments, that has made his work relevant to a generation of hyper-digital architects.

Hall’s work is rigorously agnostic with respect to discipline.  It is all about the paint.  Paint dried on a panel, paint moving in response to sound, paint mixing with other chemicals, paint bubbling up in an experiment on photo-paper.  Paint becomes not a medium to depict something – a figure, a field of color, or even a concept – but rather a medium deployed to investigate its own behaviors.  In the artist’s oeuvre, paint is both the laboratory and the experiment.

No wonder, then, that some of the most ardent practitioners of 21st century digital architecture have collaborated with Hall in academia, exhibition, and design.  Whether in appropriating animation software or adopting the tactics of software programming for building design, architects at the forefront of digital experimentation have explored the digital as material.  Until the advent of digital fabrication, this exploration demanded that the subject of the investigation – digital processes – also perform as the medium of presentation.  Like Hall, designers at the van-garde of this moment have worked with digital matter as simultaneously system and subject.

The work included in this exhibit spans physical paintings and filmic works that Hall has produced over the past 6 years.  The Decalcomania series of acrylic on board explores a range of movements recorded in thick paint.  Despite emerging in the 18th century as a term for the ‘mania’ around the trend of ceramic pattern transfer, the term and practice of Decalcomania was brought into the realm of conceptual art in the first half of the 20th century.  The surrealist artist Oscar Domínguez referred to his work as “decalcomania with no preconceived object” – a material transfer with no prior form.

Hall’s series of Decalcomania takes this game of the decal one step further, where the decal emerges as the material effects of the act of making the decal.  This produces a decal of force itself – of the gesture of twisting or pulling – and a decal of the properties of paint – its stickiness and luminosity, color and consistency.

The groups of digital film pieces – Livepaintings and Sound Drawings – continue this concern for discerning the properties of paint through movement.  Hall’s first experiments in films of live paint began after his work in Hollywood for special effects in film (“What Dreams May Come,” starring actor Robin Williams).  From this experience, Hall created his first Livepaintings. A selection of this series is projected in this exhibit.  Recorded in real time and edited without digital manipulation, this series of time-based paintings captures what the artist calls ‘the self-organizing nature of paint.’

In the artist’s experiments, certain behaviors of paint are prioritized and examined at close range.  Liquidity and movement produce a kind of special effects of surface tension.  The high definition renders excessive details of surface effects, such that the digital camera acts as both microscope and aesthetic strategy.

The apex of the exhibit is the digital film piece entitled Material Study. Created as a teaching tool for a 2006 workshop with architecture students at SCI-Arc, this work casually stages revelatory moments of the artist’s methods and subjectivity.  In the reflection of dark undulating surfaces and bubbles, the viewer catches glimpses of the artist’s studio space.  Magnified and distorted, appearing at the center of the frame and abruptly disappearing from view, the reflection of the artist’s studio is revealed in the paint, itself.  An image of the artist appears – alone, looking into his camera, framed by the distorted backdrop of an indoor space with high ceilings and generous windows.  With this piece, the spell of perfection is broken.  Here, the beautiful phenomenological study of paint bleeds into a more humanized possibility of masterpiece-making.

If it is an epistemological position that affiliates the artist with a certain generation of architect, then this exhibit might offer a moment for reflection on the state of architecture, as well.  After at least a decade of studies in the powerful design possibilities offered by the computer, architects find ourselves in a moment of crisis.  This may be true whether one practices as an architect of buildings or of cities, of financial systems, communities, or simply one’s own home.  Perhaps, we might find in Hall’s work a reflection of our own seductively beautiful and obsessive experiments, and the aperture of self-awareness that emerges in moments of failure.

Educated at Simon’s Rock College of Bard, Berklee College of Music, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, Perry Hall is a musician and a visual artist. The artist has taught architecture students in workshop format at the Southern California Institute for Architecture (SCI-Arc) and lectured at other architecture programs, including the Columbia Graduate School of Architecture Planning and Preservation (GSAPP). His collaborative work with architecture collective SERVO has been exhibited at the Cooper Hewitt Design Museum. He has shown his paintings at the Jamaica Center for the Arts (New York), Artists Space (New York), the Kitchen (New York), the American Museum of the Moving Image (New York), and the Williams College Museum of Art.

The exhibit “Perry Hall: Painting, Time, and Material Intelligence” is partly enabled by a generous donation from Lee Ping Kwan.