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Architecture of dislocation: the L.A. school - Los Angeles, California, architects - includes bibliography
Art in America, Feb, 1994 by Jayne Merkel
Their work emphasizes joinery--that is, it italicizes the points where different construction materials come together. The example of the Italian architect Carlo Scarpa, whose designs raised joinery to the level of art, is important. (In his introduction to Eric Moss's monograph, Philip Johnson observes that "Scarpa could have been Eric Moss's grandfather.") But the Californians also draw on Cubism, Russian Constructivism, Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism and the work of sculptors like David Smith and Mark di Suvero.
Like the postmodernists, Morphosis, Israel and Moss are concerned with context but treat it less deferentially. Their sites tend to be car-scaled and either sparsely covered with low-rise industrial structures or open to dramatic natural views, rather than the postmodernists' typically urban, gridded, high-rise, historically layered sites. And though the Californians share the postmodernist's interest in history, their sources are usually modern and local--Rudolph Schindler, Richard Neutra, Frank Lloyd Wright in L.A., Irving Gill-- rather than European and classical. Unlike the Venturis, who found the Strip naughty and exotic, the Californians take its characteristics for granted and subvert them without any qualms. Of course they, too, reject the modernist obsession with function and purity and unabashedly espouse an architecture of complexity, contradiction, irony and playfulness. But their inspiration is more likely to come from the act of building or from abstract art than from architectural history.
Southern California architecture, with its dynamism, skewed geometry, shifting planes, overlapping grids and nod to modernism, resembles certain aspects of the diverse body of work associated with Deconstruction. Of the architects included in MOMA's 1988 "Deconstructivist Architecture" show, Gehry is obviously the most important figure for the Californians. But there are also similarities between their work and that of Coop Himmelbau's Wolf Prix, who now works in LA part time. On the other hand, they share little with Peter Eisenman, whose architecture is more theory-driven. The work of Morphosis, Moss and Israel is typically down to earth, rather than theoretical in its sources; it often seems to grow directly out of the needs of construction because these are architects who began building early in their careers, were able to build fairly often and usually built on a small scale. What also distinguishes their work is its acceptance of the contemporary city as it exists in Southern California (and most of America) now. Their buildings neither look backward nostalgically nor forward to an ideal.
Of the group, Morphosis was the first to achieve recognition. It has won an exceptionally large number of Progressive Architecture design awards and was the only American finalist in last year's gigantic (835 entries) international competition for a new parliament center in Berlin Spreebogen. Morphosis: Buildings and Projects traces the firm's work chronologically from 1973 to a few years ago, starting with a mechanistic Educational Research Center in Santa Monica and a spare low-rise housing complex in Tijuana, and moving through a series of increasingly expressionistic small office complexes, shops, restaurants, and houses--structures that are frequently in beach communities and often covered with asphalt shingle or metal cladding. Morphosis: Buildings and Projects, Volume H picks up where the first left off. Using more dynamic and complicated graphic design and imagery, this hook features recent buildings and projects all over the world, including the now completed Crawford House (which appears as an unbuilt project in the first volume).
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