EXPO

April-June 2005

SCI-ARC CEILING

Something of the wallflower as a building material, felt absorbs light, heat, and noise in places we rarely notice. So when Ming Fung of L.A.’s Hodgetts + Fung received a $100,000 grant from the Keck Foundation to design an overhead baffle for the reverberant main space of the Southern California Institute of Architecture, Fung decided it was time for felt to take a bow. The designer of several high-profile acoustical design projects at the Hollywood Bowl and Egyptian Theater, Fung wanted a material that neither simulated nor defied gravity, but genuinely responded it.

“I was interested in something that would appear both massive and light, where there would be a kind of tension between the different readings,” says Fung.

Suspended by an aluminum truss and attached with vinyl buttons, slits in the material allow the ceiling to undulate and heave overhead, creating an air pocket to dampen reverberations. The affordability of the material and its easy installation – SCI-Arc students themselves constructed the ceiling – have inspired Fung to consider it for future projects, possibly as a horizontal partition. “In some ways it’s better than formed plywood,” Fung says. Call it felt’s breakout role.

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SUPREME SKATE BOWL

The flipside kick, the nose blunt, the impossible, the fakey: through these creatively-named maneuvers, street skateboarders have assumed the role of guerilla designers, wresting new possibilities from the concrete and asphalt around them. Rarely, however, do skaters graduate from reinterpreting architecture to producing it. With that ambition, Chicago-based skater/artist collective Simparch installed a large indoor wooden skate bowl last September inside L.A. skate shop Supreme.

Supported by a series of rust-colored steel stilts and intricately ribbed, the bowl occupies Supreme’s entire width, resembling an unfinished ship hull seen from underwater. Climbing a galvanized mesh staircase, the sense of immersion reverses: the peanut-shaped hull becomes an empty swimming pool whose grained plywood panels suggest light refracted through water. A cement coping lines the rim of the pool, adding a suburban touch of authenticity to the otherwise industrial space. New York-based designer Harry Allen preserved the building’s original curved ceiling rafters as an echo of the wooden concavity below.

The key for all the designers involved was site-specificity, says Simparch member Steven Badgett. Los Angeles, bowl skating’s birthplace, was the perfect location. “We wanted to take on leisure culture, this icon that was a great forum for skating, and reproduce it as a formal piece of minimal sculpture,” says Badgett. Having produced similar bowls for New York’s Dietch Projects and Chicago’s Hyde Park Arts Center, Badgett says the process was neither minimal nor leisurely, however. To produce the bowl’s challenging compound curves, he had to recruit a physicist and fellow skateboarder from the University of Chicago to create full scale paper templates; even then, much of the design evolved in situ.

“We were interested in the mind-body building experience that’s now absent with prefabrication,” says Badgett. As your average Supreme customer might put it, sometimes you gotta just roll with it.

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MAKE MAGAZINE

The first surprise of newly launched DIY technology magazine Make is that enough tech-geeks exist to support a 45,000 circulation magazine devoted to soddering circuitboards and hacking your own PDA. The second surprise is that you might just be one of them.

At a hefty 192 pages, only six reserved for advertisement, Make’s premiere issue dispenses advice ranging from the esoteric to the empowering to the quite possibly illegal. Need to know how to attach an aerial camera to a kite or makeover your car in urban camoflauge? Dying to build a magnetic swipe card reader or send a Wi-Fi signal through concrete barrier? Make may not have the mainstream appeal its publishers hope, but the magazine’s agenda – applying the hacker mentality to entire environments – is something even the most tech-phobic designer will get.

Editor Mark Frauenfelder says he helped model the magazine after the tome-like Popular Mechanics issues of the 1950’s, a time when technology remained accessible to the casual tinkerer. “It was a neat time because most households had a little shop that let people be makers,” says Frauenfelder. “That was something we lost in the late 70’s, but people are starting to rediscover the joy of making stuff.”

And stuff, thankfully, includes the packaging. An upcoming article discusses silicon molding for encasing electronics. Another explains how to convert an old Atari 2600 video game console into a stylish retro DVD player. “To me if a project is ugly, I won’t want to run it,” says Frauenfelder. If Make’s revolution succeeds, neither will the rest of us.

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DRIVING THROUGH FUTURES PAST

The aspirations of today’s automakers tend to be pragmatic: squeezing out a few extra miles of fuel efficiency from last year’s model, or building a better upholder. But Driving Through Futures Past, an exhibition running from April 16 to September 11 at Los Angeles’ Petersen’s Automotive Museum, explores the industry’s wild-eyed youth, when car designers proudly derived their vision from pulp science fiction.

The show includes four fully realized automobiles: the 1936 Scout Scarab, a predecessor to the mini-van; the 1933 Chrysler Trifon, precursor to the first streamlined automobiles; the 1948 Tucker, equipped with such revolutionary safety features as seatbelts and disc breaks; and a 1956 Pontiac Bonneville, sporting a plexiglass top and gull-wing doors. Most of the 70 sketches and renderings, featuring cars propelled by rockets, turbines, and atomic power, were outlandish even by the optimistic standards of the forties and fifties. Still, the art reveals its creators’ vision of history. “One of the first pieces is a Zeppelin on wheels,” says museum curator Leslie Kendall. “It was dreamt up back when zeppelins were going to revolutionize air travel.” Another example: auto designer Syd Mead’s 1960 Ford Gyron, whose resemblance to the futuristic flying cars of Blade Runner is scarcely coincidental. After designing cars for Ford, Mead went to work for Hollywood and conceived the look of such sci-fi masterpieces as Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Aliens, and, of course, the Gyron-esque hovercraft of Blade Runner.

“The designers’ approach was the sky was the limit – the car will go just by wishing it will happen,” says Kendall. “They would conceive all these ideas and believed the technology would catch up.” In most cases technology never did, but as pure fantasy, their vision has more horsepower than ever.