A more well-known Modern gem was explored in Asher Hartman's sold-out play Glass Bang, staged in a sleek, glass-walled, R.M. Schindler–designed house in Laurel Canyon. In the play, the audience of about 20 people become guests at a party while interacting with characters who are confronting issues around debt. "There's so much desire when you look at a home like that, how you want to live and what possessions you buy and your relationship to nature — and these all come up very subtly in the play," Hartman says. "It makes you think about home and home ownership and the way a residence affects a person psychologically."
The 1936 house is open to the public once a month as a don't-touch experience, but in Hartman's performance it was transformed back into a residence, with guests drinking wine in the kitchen and at one point all lying on the bed together. That's an intimate experience you won't get on the docent-led tour.
"The thing about architecture in L.A. is so much of it is so hidden," says Kimberli Meyer, director of the MAK Center, who collaborated on the project. "It's important to activate the many modern houses we have in these ways."
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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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And that's the other strength of Machine Project's series: Architecture is interpreted through the perspective of its users. "One of the best ways to find out about L.A. is through personal histories," Williamson says. "The way people's experiences are layered over the city gives it a lot of depth."
Williamson himself will stage two projects around one of his favorite urban icons, the Happy Foot/Sad Foot sign in Silver Lake, to see if the sign's two-sided message indeed has the ability to predict a good or bad day. Then there's a performance of The Odyssey, staged by Johanna Kozma inside a Honda Odyssey minivan while traversing L.A.'s monumental freeways, taking place nightly July 10-17. And San Francisco artist Cliff Hengst will lead what is certain to be the most surreal of the performances, on June 29: a tour of the Miracle Mile by the "spirit of Whitney Houston," as the guide will morph into the famous diva (that's all we know). It begins, fittingly, outside the Beverly Hilton.
That last one seems like a stretch until you realize Machine Project excels at posing a question and then enlisting its audience on an adventure to figure it out together. Much of the city's conversation about architecture during PSTP is confined to museum installations and panel discussions — far removed from the structures they celebrate, and hierarchically dictated by a curator or institution. Machine Project is, in a way, using art and architecture to challenge a set of theories about L.A., and anyone can participate. The only way to find out the answer is to go along for the ride.
THE MACHINE PROJECT FIELD GUIDE TO L.A. ARCHITECTURE | Various locations around L.A. | Through Aug. 15 | machineproject.com/projects/fieldguidela
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