Photographer Unknown, “Construction of the Schindler House using the Slab-Tilt process,” 1922. Courtesy of Art, Design & Architecture Museum, University of California, Santa Barbara
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 existence—a campsite enclosed by concrete, glass, and redwood. But the house was also constantly in flux, painted, carpeted, curtained, dismantled, reconstructed, excavated, and reimagined. The house’s experimental promise, first put forth now one hundred years ago, lives on today.
Schindler House: 100 Years in the Making guides visitors through Schindler’s cooperative dwelling for two couples, built for himself, his wife Pauline, and their friends Clyde and Marian Chace. Each studio hosts a gentle timeline of landscape and property, construction and maintenance, guests (invited and otherwise) 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 R.M. Schindler from the collections of the UCSB Architecture & Design Collections, Los Angeles Times, Long Beach Press Telegram, UC Berkeley Collections, UCLA Young Research Library Special Collections, UCLA Department of Architecture & Urban Design, Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution, Southern California Institute of Architecture Media Archive, Architectural Association Photo Library, and USC Undergraduate Architecture Program.
Artists and contributors to the exhibition include:
Carmen Argote,Fiona Connor,Julian Hoeber,Kathi Hofer,stephanie mei huang,Andrea Lenardin Madden,Renée Petropoulos,Gala Porras-Kim,Stephen Prina,Jakob Sellaoui, Peter Shire
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. Materials on display 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, 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 will be on view.
The exhibition is complemented by summer-long programming and events including seminars, lectures, reading groups, benefit events, edible performances, in-person curator-led tours, and asynchronous audio tours.
SAT, MAY 28, 2022- SUN, SEP 25, 2022
