“˜Living’ exhibit re-examines domestic space

  PATIL ARMENIAN/ Daily Bruin Senior Staff Wes
Jones’ "This End Up" is a model of a post-atomic family
home which illustrates the Pro/Con Package Home System’s ability to
expand and re-orient to meet the changing needs of the family.

By Andie Dingman

Daily Bruin Contributor

It’s the House of the Future. Sound interesting? Even
before the Jetsons graced our television screens, we’ve been
obsessed with predicting the future’s effect on our
architecture and life.

The current exhibit at the Armand Hammer museum in Westwood,
“Live Dangerously,” dares visitors to suspend their
current thoughts of the function and aesthetic of the house today
and imagine the many possible directions architecture might take in
the future.

Sylvia Lavin, the curator of the exhibit, is also the chairwoman
of the UCLA department of architecture. She earned her doctoral
degree in architectural history from Columbia University.

“The goal of the show is to try to suggest the kinds of
things that we’re doing now in the department and to
emphasize the kind of experimentation and research that can be done
in architecture in the context of the university,” Lavin said
of the exhibit.

Four prestigious architects who are also faculty at UCLA worked
with UCLA graduate students to produce the four projects in the
show, “Domesticity,” “This End Up,”
“The Embryological House,” and “(A View to the
Other Side).”

The show’s title deals with the danger of disturbing the
sentimental view of the home so prevalent in American society,
particularly since the 1950s.

“Since at least the Victorian age, the home has been a
kind of storehouse for many nostalgic, sentimental values,”
Lavin said. “To live dangerously is to try to release the
house from those nostalgic and sentimental values and permit
instead a kind of critical, experimental and innovative style of
living.

  UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design This is
one of various student projects currently showing in the "Live
Dangerously" exhibit at the Armand Hammer Museum.

“It’s always dangerous to give up things that you
know,” Lavin said.

“Domesticity,” the project led by Dagmar Richter,
began as a research project investigating the ways in which people
today have in effect spread the rooms of their homes all around the
city and world, from using Starbucks as their breakfast nook to
using a local hotel as a guest room.

The team then constructed an air map and model of the
“house” of a family on Highland Street, which spread
all over Los Angeles.

“We looked at how the house actually spilled entirely into
the public realm and also how the public itself started to
domesticize more or less its space,” Richter said.
“They turn (public places) into a domestic aesthetic in the
sense that they diminish themselves, make themselves small. For
example, you don’t go to one large super-restaurant, but you
go to millions of little tiny McDonald’s each of which looks
like a dinner room.”

After showing how few activities are exclusive to the
traditional home, “Domesticity” showcases the house of
the future as serving the exclusive purposes of displaying material
possessions in the front and performing very domestic activities in
the secluded “backyard.”

The prototypes for Richter’s house are colorful, rounded
computer images like something out of “Star Trek,” with
bubbles for the neighbors to see what things they don’t have.
Gone are the kitchen table, living room couch, and all of the
normally cozy aspects of homes.

However, while the nostalgic and traditional functions of the
home are abandoned in “Domesticity,” both Richter and
Lavin see benefits in the change.

“There’s a lot more exchange going on between the
blocks and between the buildings and within the city, and people
meet each other again at Starbucks,” Richter said. “So
there are new units which are not just lost, but there’s a
recombination where the local neighborhoods become the
house.”

While “Domesticity” looks at how people adopt the
city into their lives, “This End Up” looks at how they
adapt their homes to their own unique personalities. “This
End Up,” produced by Wes King, is an amusing model of a
do-it-yourself home that one would buy online.

The houses are constructed of 20 foot storage containers
resembling boxcars that are already used as emergency housing in
developing-nations. The compartments are stacked and fitted
together like Legos, allowing one to have a mass-produced, yet
customized home.

“It comes from a tradition of thinking about the house not
as a piece of architecture filled with appliances, but rather as an
appliance,” Lavin said. “You don’t get
sentimental about your washer-dryer.”

The billboard-like corporate logos on the outside of the homes
are evidence of the fact that everything now has become part of a
corporate, global culture, as well as an ironic commentary on
consumerism.

“You yourself, are advertising your allegiance to these
companies,” King explained, “You’re basically
saying, that you are a Nike family, for example … so, if
you’re Soloflex, the neighbors might be Nike, and you start
to have this kind of dialogue that otherwise would be
hidden.”

Similar to “This End Up,” “The Embryological
House,” is a mass-produced yet customized house. The project,
supervised by Greg Lynn, has already been chosen to represent the
United States at the Venice Bienalle festival, a prestigious event
held once every six years.

“The Embryological House” throws out the traditional
rules of building, using rounded shapes, bright colors, plastic
shingles, “soft ball rooms” resembling bean bags, and
an X-ray wall system.

“A bean bag is interesting because every bean bag looks
exactly the same when it comes out of the factory. When you sit on
it, it’s always different,” Lavin said. “So
it’s customized in that sense; it’s both standard and
custom, all at the same time.”

“(A View to the Other Side),” led by Thom Mayne, is
concerned primarily with the blurred line between public and
private. A normal room is given four telescope spaces that allow
the outside to look in.

“It’s mostly about the undoing of privacy,”
Lavin said. “If you think of a window as a flat screen that
allows a certain amount of transgression between inside and
outside. He’s got four enormous window spaces that you can
occupy, and it’s like, “˜What would it mean to live
inside a window?’

“You’re neither inside nor outside,” Lavin
continued. “People outside are sort of invited in. It
produces this whole in-between zone that really confuses the
relationship between inside and outside and therefore between
public and private.”

However, just as the Jetsons never turned out to be our future,
the projects in “Live Dangerously” probably won’t
be the exact representation of our future homes.

“The house of the future is not really a utopian
projection into the future, because, of course, nobody can tell
what the future is, and if you try you fail,” Lavin explains.
“But thinking about the house of the future is a way of
making a superconcentrated version of the house of
today.”