OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, March 29, 7pm
EXHIBITION DISCUSSION: Friday, April 5, 7pm
With curators and SCI-Arc Director Eric Owen Moss
SYMPOSIUM: Friday, June 14, 3-9pm & Saturday, June 15, 10am-4pm
DWELL ON DESIGN DISCUSSION: Saturday, June 22, 4:30pm

The first exhibition to open in the Getty-initiated Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A. series, A Confederacy of Heretics examines the pivotal role played by the temporary gallery held in the home of architect Thom Mayne for several weeks in 1979.

Los Angeles’ first gallery exclusively dedicated to architecture, the Architecture Gallery staged ten weekly exhibitions on both young and established Los Angeles practitioners, featuring the work of Eugene Kupper, Roland Coate Jr., Frederick Fisher, Frank Dimster, Frank Gehry, Peter de Bretteville, Morphosis (Thom Mayne and Michael Rotondi), Studio Works (Craig Hodgetts and Robert Mangurian), and Eric Owen Moss. Opened with a lecture by another young architect, Coy Howard, public presentations by architects to accompany their exhibitions were hosted at SCI-Arc, then located on Berkeley Street in Santa Monica.

An immersive showcase of spectacular models, drawings and media will be mounted in two spaces located on the SCI-Arc campus, the main gallery and the Kappe Library Gallery. The exhibition will present a collection of models, drawings, and other materials shown during the original 1979 exhibitions, including drawings and models of Eric Owen Moss’ Morganstern Warehouse, Pinball House and Pasadena Condominiums; multimedia studies of Frederick Fisher’s Caplan House and Observatory; large-scale models and drawings of Studio Works’ South Side Settlement House and Nicollet Island project; Prismacolor renderings of Roland Coate’s Cabo Bello project; drawings of Eugene Kupper’s UCLA Extension Building; and additional projects representing each of the participating practices. These objects were executed across a wide spectrum of formats and media, and many of them have not been exhibited since 1979.

Boasting photographic documentation, video recordings, and important commentary from the period by Los Angeles Times critic John Dreyfuss, this exhibition aims neither to canonize the participating architects nor to consecrate their unorthodox activities. Rather, these rarely seen artifacts will provide a unique lens through which to re-examine some of Los Angeles’ most well known architects at a pivotal moment in the development of late 20th century architecture.

A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice, 1979 is part of Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., an initiative celebrating Southern California's lasting impact on modern architecture through exhibitions and programs organized by seventeen area cultural institutions from April through July 2013.

Major support for A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice, 1979 is provided by the Getty Foundation.

Additional support is provided by the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, The Vinyl Institute and the Pasadena Art Alliance. The publication is underwritten in part by Furthermore: a program of the J. M. Kaplan Fund. Archival images provided by the Los Angeles Times Photographic Archive, Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA.

SCI-Arc exhibitions and public programs are made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs

SCI-Arc Gallery
October 11–December 1, 2013
October 11, 7pm: Exhibition Opening Reception & Symposium
With Hernan Diaz Alonso, Christoph a. Kumpusch, Dwayne Oyler and Alexis Rochas

Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype, SCI-Arc, 2013

Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype includes an exhibition in the SCI-Arc Gallery and a public art installation in the Arts District's Bloom Square, both aiming to demonstrate the fearless nature with which the late visionary architect and draftsman created. It is assembled by an exhibition team including SCI-Arc graduate programs chair Hernan Diaz Alonso, Christoph A. Kumpusch, and design faculty Dwayne Oyler and Alexis Rochas.

Three blocks away from its campus in downtown Los Angeles, SCI-Arc will complete Woods’s Earthwave, an “inhabitable drawing” originally designed, but never built, for the 2009 Biennale of Architecture and Art of the Mediterranean in Reggio Calabria (BaaM), Italy. Earthwave was initially designed by Lebbeus Woods and Christoph a. Kumpusch in collaboration with Adam Orlinski, and is based on a Lebbeus Woods drawing from 1997. It is an installation that proves to a new generation that there is a fine line between "unbuilt" and "unbuildable." The temporary 18’x 18’, two-and-a-half-ton steel structure built by SCI-Arc is set to be unveiled on June 28. It includes four parallel steel frame “swarms,” each frame penetrated by a dense field of steel vectors, using the urban Arts District as a backdrop for Woods’s dystopian vision. The public will be invited to conceptually inhabit the sculpture in a 1:1 scale, giving the piece a new dimensionality and relating back to the 2-D and 3-D nature of the project.

The site of the project—a busy walkable intersection in downtown L.A.'s Arts Distric—will free it from being perceived as an object to be viewed from a distance and transform the structure into a metric of urbanity meant to be freely moved through.

The SCI-Arc Gallery component of Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype, opening October 11, will include several original, rarely seen Woods drawings from private collections, and most notably, recently uncovered video footage from a 1998 interview recorded in Vico Morcote, Switzerland, then part of a SCI-Arc European campus program. The video articulates Woods’s philosophy and the forces and influences which shaped his thinking, including the work of Heinz von Foerster and the systems-thinking theory of Cybernetics. A public symposium on opening night will feature a panel of young architects who will discuss Woods’s influence on their generation.

Installation Team
CaK_LAB is the experimental arm of Forward Slash (/) the multidisciplinary, New York-based office headed by architect Christoph a. Kumpusch. Within this domain, the office investigates technology and material effects on form and tectonics. The office is both a design and publishing outfit, producing a number of essays, books, exhibitions, podcasts, and films. Kumpusch holds a Ph.D. in Architecture and Technology from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. He is a Professor of Architecture at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP) and at Pratt Institute. The recently completed Light Pavilion at the Sliced Porosity Block by Steven Holl Architects in Chengdu, China, is one of several projects in over a decade of collaboration between Kumpusch and Lebbeus Woods.

Project team
Adam Orlinski, Ali Fouladi, Ryan J. Simons, William Orlando, Carlos Rodriguez, Cecil Barnes, Joe Jacobson

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Support for Lebbeus Woods is an Archetype provided by Angel City Brewery. Additional assistance provided by the MAK Center Los Angeles, LADADspace and LARABA.

SCI-Arc exhibitions and public programs are made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles, Department of Cultural Affairs.