Los Angeles Without a Car, the project of Anke Freimund and Alex Dworschak, was inspired by Thom Andersen’s documentary Los Angeles Plays Itself (2003). Scrutinizing the urban myth that a car is unavoidable in L.A., the Viennese architects used only public transportation as they conducted walking tours throughout the city. In the exhibition, they presented a visual diary of their experiences. In seeking a guidance system for their research, they selected the official city signs that designate neighborhood names as waypoints. In their photographs documenting their experience, however, they eliminated common landmarks, allowing the places to speak for themselves.

Inspired by a quote from Frank Stella that compares the affect art can have on a viewer to that of a home-run hit out of the park, artist Julien Diehn researched these increasingly rare baseball moments. Diehn presented a radio interview from 1964 entitled New Nihilism or New Art?, moderated by Bruce Glaser which featured Dan Flavin, Donald Judd, and Frank Stella discussing contemporary art. Diehn layered this radio broadcast with a projection of a television series that ran from 1959-1960 called Home Run Derby which featured a series of filmed home run contests between two sluggers and was filmed at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles.

Referencing Schindler’s quest to develop an architecture that both embodies and incorporates nature, Berlin-based artist Nine Budde built a clay miniature of the Mackey Apartments. Continuing a theme in her work that contemplates destruction and its positive results, Budde submitted the model to the force of a strong earthquake. The structure first became the subject of a photograph, and after it was “ruined” became the nurturing “soil” for Japanese seeds. Much as Schindler explored and expanded the meanings of interior and exterior, the model served alternate functions. The model in bloom was the subject of a second photograph.

Architects SPAN (Matias del Campo and Sandra Manninger) explored spatial, formal, and technological innovation through digital production. By using software created to mimic the growth of organic tissues such as plants and veins, they examined the ways this rule-based software can be applied to architectural design. In the Final Projects exhibition, they presented models produced in collaboration with the Advanced Technology Center at Saddleback College. A second group of objects was the result of SPAN’s ongoing research into digital fabrication in the Los Angeles area that illustrated the possibilities for novel models of architectural design. SPAN also screened a video of a panel discussion they organized, Synthetic Ecologies, featuring Hernan Diaz Alonso (Xefirotarch), Benjamin Bratton, Marcelyn Gow (servo), Neil Leach, and Jason Payne (GnuFORM).