Machine Project's Oddball Take on L.A. Architecture, From a Helicopter Experiment to the Spirit of Whitney Houston

Kamau Patton was having a drink at the BonaVista Lounge, the rotating bar atop the 34th floor of the Bonaventure Hotel downtown, when he realized he'd been looking at architecture all wrong. The New York–based artist had spent the day driving around the city, scouting locations for a new performance piece exploring the relationship among L.A.'s buildings. "Sitting up in this rotating bar, seeing the entirety of these forms up high, it just clicked. That's what these buildings are all about," he says. "On the flight back to New York, things all started to gel: How do I get that perspective? It was one of those moments — a helicopter!"

On May 26, Patton boarded a four-seat Robinson R-44 at Van Nuys Airport with cameraman Jimmy Fusil and Bennett Williamson, event producer at the art collective Machine Project. As a crowd gathered at Machine Project's Echo Park storefront to watch a live video stream of the event, the helicopter headed to Bunker Hill for a choreographed fly-by of the buildings that have held the title of tallest in Los Angeles.

The livestream ended up petering out, but Fusil captured high-definition video of the project, which Patton named The Sky Above: a woozy, epic journey over downtown at sunset, its jaw-dropping, full-frontal skyscraper shots blending with Patton's experimental soundscape, the chatter from the helicopter's radio and the passengers' own commentary.

Photo by Ian Byers-Gamber

Getting ready for The Sky Above event, which combined an experimental soundscape with video of the L.A. skyline taken from a helicopter

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Machine Project

1200-D N. Alvarado St.
Los Angeles, CA 90026

Category: Art Galleries

Region: Echo Park

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More About

• Kamau Patton
• Bennett Williamson
• Matt Au
• Visual Arts
• Design

"We had these super-sexy Michael Mann shots with a cool soundtrack, and on the other end we were like Huell Howser — 'Look at these buildings, this is so amazing!' " Williamson recalls with a laugh.

That's the sense of discovery Williamson hopes to deliver with Machine Project's Field Guide to L.A. Architecture (part of the Getty's Pacific Standard Time Presents initiative), which is getting audiences up close and personal with L.A. buildings using artist-initiated experiences. "We want to introduce people to sites they've never been to, and give them a fresh perspective on what they know," he says.

Founded in 2003, Machine Project has become well-known for staging exhibitions and happenings in its storefront gallery. In the last few years it has branched out into more traditional venues, with a residency at the Hammer Museum and another field guide–type project at LACMA. But this initiative represents perhaps another era for the nonprofit. "We're starting to think of ourselves as a citywide organization," says Machine Project founder and executive director Mark Allen. "That's thinking about how to do programming that's outside of our storefront but not necessarily inside of an institution."

Experimenting with this intersection between performance art and architectural history is a natural fit, Allen says. "What I like about site-specificity is that it gives you a place to start your work but it also gives you the opportunity to expand how we might understand something."

Displaying architecture in a museum is notoriously difficult. Machine Project's signature hands-on, tongue-in-cheek approach might be a better way to understand — and appreciate — L.A.'s urban landscape.

Starting in March and through Aug. 15, 30 artists are engaging with different architectural works at events and performances across the region. The onion-shaped dome of the Sepulveda Unitarian Universalist Society in North Hills served as the backdrop of a performance by Emily Mast and Hana van der Kolk, featuring six very pregnant women. Extended-technique opera singer Carmina Escobar used alternative singing methods to turn people's bodies into resonant instruments by the Korean Bell of Friendship in San Pedro. As a grand finale, Machine Project will screen a compilation film featuring video taken at every project.

To launch the field guide project, Allen tapped architect Matt Au to draw up a list of potential sites — buildings that fit the initiative's roughly 1945-90 timeline but likely wouldn't be featured elsewhere. "I tried to think of buildings that I know nothing about as a way of researching their history," says Au, who organized them into groups like "Underrated Anomalies by Corporate Firms." He also explored the lesser-known works of PSTP-celebrated designers like William Pereira, who designed LACMA but also the weird pyramid-shaped Braille Institute on Vermont, or Welton Becket, whose firm did the iconic Capitol Records building and also the horrific Beverly Center. “Everybody recognizes them but no one really knows who designed them,” Au says.

One of Au's picks was the Glendale Municipal Services Building, a 1966 cement block that appears to hover over a sunken plaza. It was this plaza that Sara Roberts chose for Clump and Whistle, her participatory performance based on theories of group dynamics. Roberts liked the space for its acoustics — a large fountain in the center turned out to create a "cavelike sound" — but also because the large public plaza was designed as a place for assembly. "A lot of the people had never been there before and they said, 'I want to come back here and have a picnic,' " she says.

Jay Platt, a planner for the City of Glendale who works in the building, says it soon will be nominated for Glendale's Register of Historic Resources, and any exposure helps residents to understand why it should be preserved. "It turns out we have a really nice collection of cutting-edge modern architecture, and this is one of the hidden gems of Glendale."