Architecture and Design Museum (A+D)
The mission of The Architecture and Design Museum is to celebrate and promote an awareness of progressive architecture and design in everyday life through exhibits, educational programs and public outreach.
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ReveaLALA
ReveaLALA is a series of interventions that highlight and reframe important visual depictions of Latino culture in Los Angeles. From public sculptures and iconic buildings to road signs and street vendors, each element will literally be'reframed' with a simple color panel placed behind it – momentarily taking the piece out of its surroundings and allowing the viewer see it afresh and to rethink its meaning.
Never Built: Los Angeles
Never Built Los Angeles is a rare and unprecedented exhibition: A gripping collection of civic projects that never came to be yet teach us new ways to think about the city's future.
The show assembles for the first time original drawings, new and old models, large scale installations, videos, and interactive media to portray visionary works that had the potential to reshape Los Angeles. From buildings and civic plans, to parks and freeways, the show reveals exquisite ideas and the dreams behind them. No other show, focusing on this unique and unexplored history of Los Angeles, has ever before been mounted.
On public view for the first time will be such sweeping proposals as the Olmsted and Bartholomew "Plan for the Los Angeles Region," which if it had happened would have turned the entire coastline of Los Angeles into a public park, and criss-crossed the basin with thousands of acres of new parks and landscaped parkways. Never before on display will be Frank Lloyd Wright's hand-drawn images of his "Doheny Ranch," which would have turned the slopes of Beverly Hills into a collection of one-of-a-kind Wright houses clustered in a landscape of dramatic terraces and ravines. Visionary architect John Lautner's Griffith Park Nature Center, also buried for decades in an archive, will be among the more than 30 groundbreaking works never built and almost never seen.
Great cities rise around these kinds of ambitions, usually written in sticks and stone, and steel and glass. Then there is Los Angeles, always the exception. The city is a mecca for architects, home to two Pritzker Prize winners (Frank Gehry and Thom Mayne) and a roll call of modern architecture's most famous talents. The entertainment hub of the United States, if not the world, it is a magnet for ingenuity, individuality, and imaginative ideas. Yet Los Angeles largely lacks the grand gestures of urban innovation. The gap between Los Angeles's genius for design and its public output is what Never Built Los Angeles hopes to span. The exhibit is a lesson plan, based on a 100-year backlog of unbuilt proposals. By putting on view a catalogue of virtuoso drawings and renderings that, on a visceral level ignite the imagination, an unmistakable picture of a city that might have been – and still could be – emerges. Never Built treats this hidden past as something not complete but still unfolding. So, this is less an exhibition than a way of seeing the future of Los Angeles.
Typically architecture exhibitions explore the subject from a very narrow perspective; an academic and aesthetic exercise catered largely toward experts in the field. Our show is meant to demonstrate the relevance of the built environment to every citizen of our city and well beyond. It begins with anyone who is interested in Los Angeles, in the turbulent arc of urban development, and in the widest possibilities of the imagination. The projects will have a far reaching appeal to anyone who cares about Los Angeles and who has ever dreamed of something different: from a floating airport to giant skyscrapers to massive swaths of connected parkland.
The show and its accompanying book will become standards for the deeper study and understanding of Los Angeles. Not just for academics and architects, but for students and tourists and urban dwellers. The audience isn't just a local one, it's both national and international, not only because of the ingenious, alluring proposals, but because Los Angeles--a cultural nexus that defies all the rules of urban placemaking-- never fails to capture peoples' imaginations.