Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.
Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., an initiative of the Getty, is a collaborative celebration of Southern California’s lasting impact on modern architecture. It includes exhibitions and accompanying programs presented by seventeen area cultural institutions from April through July 2013. Designed to continue the momentum and collaborative spirit of last year’s successful Pacific Standard Time: Art in L.A. 1945–1980, Modern Architecture in L.A. is the first in a series of smaller-scale Pacific Standard Time Presents programs.
While Los Angeles’s modern residential architecture is world renowned, less well-known is the innovative nature of L.A.’s infrastructure and urban planning, commercial and civic buildings, housing experiments, and other architectural forms. This initiative offers a reconsideration of the city as a whole— from iconic modernist homes to the vast freeway network that defines our unique megalopolis—as well as the forces that shaped these mid 20th-century developments. Modern Architecture in L.A. promises fresh insight into the contributions of Los Angeles architects and the city’s ongoing global impact.
The J. Paul Getty Museum will present Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940–1990, an overview of the period organized by the Getty Research Institute, and In Focus: Ed Ruscha. Nine other exhibitions are presented by LACMA, MOCA, the Hammer, A+D Museum, UC Santa Barbara, Cal Poly Pomona, MAK Center and SCI-Arc. Initiative partners consider a range of building types and a diverse group of practitioners, from internationally-known figures such as Richard Neutra and Frank Gehry, to others who have been critical to shaping Southern California’s distinctive profile, such as A. Quincy Jones and Eric Owen Moss. From the re-examination of Thom Mayne’s influential 1979 Architecture Gallery to a survey of the radical forms of the last twenty-five years, the Modern Architecture in L.A. exhibitions cover an array of topics.
To further explore the history of L.A.’s development and consider its future, there will be numerous lectures, panel discussions, films, tours, performances and a CicLAvia event, all organized by the nine participating exhibition venues as well as by eight additional programming partners—The Center for Land Use Interpretation, Community Arts Resources, The Huntington Library, Los Angeles Conservancy, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Machine Project, Pasadena Heritage, and the UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Most programming will be concentrated during L.A. Architecture Month, mid-May through mid-June 2013.
Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. How the city was made Modern.
April through July 2013.
http://pacificstandardtimepresents.org
Images (top to bottom): LAX, Theme Building by Pereira & Luckman, Welton Becket & Associates, and Paul R. Williams, 1958Pencil, watercolor, and gouache on boardUnframed: 76.5 x 101.6 cm (30 1/8 x 40 in.)From the Alan E. Leib Collection Image courtesy of and © Luckman Salas O’Brien
Eastland Shopping Center by A. C. Martin and Associates, about 1957Photo by David M. MillsImage: 14 x 8.9 cm (5 1/2 x 3 1/2 in.)Chris Nichols Collection
Dorothy Chandler Pavilion by Welton Becket & Associates, ca. 1960Watercolor on paperImage: 50.2 x 94.2 cm (19 3/4 x 37 1/16 in.)The Getty Research Institute© J. Paul Getty Trust
