WEST HOLLYWOOD, CA.- Ushering in the one-hundred-year anniversary of the landmark Schindler House in West Hollywood, the
MAK Center for Art and Architecture presents Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making. The four-month exhibition and programming series celebrate the pivotal first century of the landmark modern house in Los Angeles by Austrian-American architect R.M. Schindler.
Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making emphasizes acts of making, unmaking, and remaking carried out by artists, architects, historians, writers, organizers, and cultural practitioners that have constituted the house and its mythos over this century. Designed and built by 1922, the house was in its first instantiation a radical proposition for modern collective dwelling in a minimal existencea campsite enclosed by concrete, glass, and redwood. But the house was also constantly in flux, painted, carpeted, curtained, dismantled, reconstructed, excavated, and reimagined. The houses experimental promise, first put forth now one hundred years ago, lives on today.
Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making guides visitors through Schindlers cooperative dwelling for two couples, built for himself, his wife Pauline, and their friends Clyde and Marion Chace. Each studio hosts a gentle timeline of landscape and property, construction and maintenance, guests (invited and unwanted) and domesticity, and preservation and pedagogy. Thematic topics are uncovered by various contributors, including historical and archival documents from Reyner Banham, Bernard Judge, Esther McCoy, and Rudolph Michael (R.M.) Schindler from the collections of the UCSB Architecture & Design Collections, Los Angeles Times, Long Beach Press Telegram, UCLA Young Research Library Special Collections, UCLA Department of Architecture & Urban Design, The USC Historic American Buildings Survey (HABS) collection at the Library of Congress, National Parks Service, Southern California.
Institute of Architecture Media Archive, Architectural Association Photo Library, and USC Undergraduate Architecture Program. Artists and contributors include:
Carmen Argote, Fiona Connor, Julian Hoeber, Kathi Hofer, stephanie mei huang, Andrea Lenardin Madden, Gala Porras-Kim, Stephen Prina, Rudolph Michael (R.M.) Schindler, Jakob Sellaoui, Peter Shire, amongst others.
With an emphasis on process over finality, the exhibition incorporates a rotating vitrine which accommodates the display and interpretation of new materials that emerge during the run of the show.
Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making is co-curated by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu, and historians Gary Riichirō Fox and Sarah Hearne, with support from the curatorial team Allie Smith, Ann Basu, Stratton Coffman and Tristan Espinoza. The centennial exhibition and public programs are made possible with support from the California Arts Council, City of West Hollywood, Consulate General of Austria in Los Angeles, Graham Foundation for the Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, LA County Arts Commission, Taiwan Academy, the MAK Center Centennial Council and the MAK Center Patron Program.