Exhibition: November 9 – November 30, 2013
Opening: Saturday, November 9, 7-9 PM

Assembly® and Orhan Ayyüce present Glen Small: Recovery Room, a selection of the architect’s proposals. 
The show is on view from November 9 through 30. Opening reception is Saturday, November 9, 7-9 pm. 
Exhibition hours are Wednesday through Sunday, noon-6 pm. Assembly is located at 2045 S. La Cienega Blvd. Ample parking is available in the lot adjacent to WSS Shoe Warehouse at the same address.

“When he saw the Green Machine, he said, ‘we're going to build this thing.’”  – Glen Small quoting Los Angeles city planner Calvin Hamilton

Oregon and Nicaragua-based architect Glen Small’s mid-career proposals still inspire radical reconsideration of our notions of environmentalism, housing, and urban development.From the 1960s-80s, a body of visionary yet mostly unbuilt designs placed Small at the center of key discussions of architectural experimentation and ecological consciousness in California, and studying alongside him was an assumed part of one’s education during the founding decades of the Southern California Institute of Architecture.His ingenious

Green Machine (1977-80), a sustainable, low income residential community using stacked Airstream trailers as interchangeable living modules, was nearly realized before funding disappeared with the start of the Reagan era. A series of further professional disappointments soon followed. 

Thirty-plus years later, his proposals still exist as such - not as suggestions for monuments, nor as “paper architecture,” but as thoroughly worked out architectural propositions. Projects like Turf Town (1983) are made all the more relevant by comparison with contemporary commercial development projects. Details of a work like Biomorphic Biosphere Megastructure (1969-77) may be elegant, but these qualities are never separate from a primary function as architectural program. The flickering ethos of early SCI-Arc lies at the heart of his work,though Glen Small still represents positions often considered too experimental in the current state of education and emerging practices. With this exhibition of original models, drawings, published material, and a series of events, Assembly® revisits and hosts anew the conversations and methodologies Small has sustained throughout his career.

On display:

Green Machine, an almost constructed vision from the late 1970s for a sustainable, low-income residential community using stacked Airstream trailers as interchangeable living modules, sited for the median on Venice Boulevard in Venice, now home to the public library branch.

Turf Town (1983), a four-block high-density complex for downtown Los Angeles that masterfully demonstrates both the potential of solar power in urban development and the benefits of a radical blending of public park space and private housing.

Biomorphic Biosphere Megastructure, Small’s dream, begun in 1969, to contain and corral the development sprawl of L.A. County into a glass and steel closed eco-system that would both return the Los Angeles Basin to its natural state, and redefine modern urban living as one of a technologically advanced symbiosis with nature.

Hong Kong Peak, a cliff-side scheme for a 1982 competition that utilizes cargo containers and a series of pools for rainwater collection in a sequence of elegant arches and publicly accessible vistas of Hong Kong.

Detroit Trilogy, a series of fantastic revisionings of downtown Detroit, published by the Detroit Free Press in the late 1960s. As well as recent designs for an Eco Village in Nicaragua


Events:
Saturday, November 9, 7-9 PM
Exhibition opening reception

Friday, November 22, 7:30 PM
Glen Small lecturing at East LA College

Assembly® is currently looking to schedule a screening of Lucia Small’s film My Father, The Genius (smallangstfilms.com) during the run of the exhibition, amongst other programs.

As today closes out the Solar Decathlon of 2013, we look at the changes and evolution Architecture has progressed throughout its entity. When once, what was considered the simplicity of creating a space where one can call home, it has become more complicated and advanced. Where we place a board and call roof to stay dry and safe, now is also the place to collect its source of energy for the dwelling. Instead of just studs and insulation, also contains pipes where water runs throughout the whole unit. As society blames technologies being the cause of greenhouse effect on the world, we witness technologies working to solve the same problem. Twenty teams, two years in the making, schools throughout the world compete to show sustainability along with architecture to the thousands of people that visited the competition.

Under the blazing hot weather, nineteen teams (Tidewater Virginia withdrew from the competition) placed their design side by side in the Great Park of Orange County in Irvine, California. People coming from all over the world, waited in line for each individual team, to tour each unit, and explore each team’s effort to create the most sustainable house.  Each team enthusiastically explained their engineered technologies along with planned developed ideas of space to design a net-zero house that one can comfortably live in.

Walking through each team’s homes, we thought of the practicality compared to its innovative design. Though green and sustainable design has been around for decades, it caught momentum in the past few years and has evolved to a major aspect of architectural design today. Still some ways from perfect, we witnessed many teams pushing the limit of modern technologies and even inventing its own along with their engineering partners to find the best way to save energy, and in many cases creating extra energy, to design the best house within the ten competitions ran throughout the two weeks.

At its twelve year, the Solar Decathlon announced its winner for 2013 for Team Austria: Vienna University of Technology. Their house, “LISI” topped the other eighteen competitors in contest of: Architecture, Market Appeal, Engineering, Communications, Affordability, Comfort Zone, Hot Water, Appliances, Home Entertainment, and Energy Balance. With the sun setting down, the “LISI” house sits with its curtains flowing with pride, claiming the winner of Solar Decathlon 2013, as it prepares to set sail back to Austria. Until next year. 

Posted by: Ivan Hu

"From prehistoric hunter-gatherers to modern Kyrgyzstan nomads, humans move to be in places where these resources are. Deserted company towns in America are emblematic of how contemporary populations are increasingly moving to where resources — particularly jobs — are located. This has resulted in a wasteful form of urbanism that is left behind once populations relocate such as the plethora of abandon buildings currently in Detroit.As energy resources have greatly diminished and remaining supplies are often found in remote places, Manuel Dominguez’s proposes a fascinating adaptation: Nomadic City. Mobilize our cities so they can move to places where energy sources are abundant.

The implications of a nomadic city to harness energy are many. Dominguez’s work features cities carried on tank wheels with reconfigurable characteristics. Residential units resembling cargo boxes fit into a matrix grid. Helicopters and blimps can land on and off the moving island. The Nomadic City compacts the lofty needs of resource extraction into a portable format."


The Petropolis of Tomorrow is a design and research project, which examines new Petropolises — cities formed from resource extraction — associated with offshore oil extraction in South America.

Posted by: O.A

"You may have seen some of the beautiful maps of building ages that have been cropping up around the internet. I first noticed an amazing one of Portland, and then another great one of Brooklyn. I decided I wanted to try to make one of San Francisco, but, as I still know very little about making maps, I knew I’d need help.
So I called up Thomas Rhiel of the independent journalism site BKLYNR.com. Rhiel was willing to help, and it turns out he was just the right person to advise me. His map of Brooklyn building ages was his first foray into mapmaking, so he had just muddled his way down the same path I was about to navigate.

I’m going to tell you exactly how I made this map. I hope that people with little or no experience making maps will be able to use this as a guide to getting started on a map of their own hometown. And I also hope expert mapmakers will chime in to tell us how we can improve our maps."

If you are an expert and want to skip directly to the spots where your help is needed most, look for red italics, or go to the very end (Step #8) where I’ve listed some of the known issues that I need help with. (Also, thank you so much for your help!)
More at maplab

posted by O.A

Journey through a three-dimensional landscape of striking architecture in this career-spanning exhibition of Moshe Safdie’s work. Global Citizen: The Architecture of Moshe Safdie surveys the renowned architect’s career from his formative period in the 1960s and early 1970s to his recent projects around the world, exploring his aesthetic language of transcendent light, powerful geometry, and iconic forms. Using sketches, models, photographs, and films of twenty-five projects, the exhibition portrays Safdie's architecture not only as visual art but as a medium for advancing social, political, and cultural goals.
October 22, 2013–March 2, 2014 
Skirball Cultural Center
Info

Posted by O.A

Investigation of contextual, cultural, and life cycle flows offers a critical filter for visualizing innovative future housing strategies. Established in 2010, the annual d3 Housing Tomorrow competition has grown to become a leading voice in alternative residential architecture and one of the most notable awards in speculative, performance-based housing design. Recently published in London-based Wiley-Blackwell AD journal's theme issue 'The New Pastoralism: Landscape into Architecture' as a leading example of ecological design innovation, the d3 Housing Tomorrow competition recognizes exemplary ideas that redefine housing through the implementation of advanced programs, technologies, materials, and social interventions that engage the broadest innovations in housing.

The d3 Housing Tomorrow competition for 2014 invites architects, designers, engineers, and students to collectively explore, document, analyze, transform, and deploy innovative approaches to residential urbanism, architecture, interiors, and designed objects.

The d3 Housing Tomorrow competition allows designers freedom to approach their creative process in a scale-appropriate manner, from large-scale master planning endeavors, to individual building concepts, to notions of the interior realm. Although there are no restrictions on site, scale, program, or residential building typology, proposals should carefully address their selected context.
Bustler


posted by: O.A