Exhibitions building toward brighter future

Perloff Hall has been overwhelmed with an outpouring of
architectural creativity ““ evident through models, diagrams
and photos ““ as two architecture exhibitions opened Monday.
The UCLA Department of Architecture and Urban Design will display
“Currents: Winter ’06″ and “Critical Mass
at the Fringe” with opening receptions for both tonight from
6 to 8.

“Currents: Winter ’06″ features through April
21 the best graduate student work from winter quarter chosen by
department faculty. The exhibition showcases varied and fascinating
designs and plans for architectural projects.

Featuring diagrams, blue prints and scaled models, the
exhibition includes prototypes for many different settings,
including car showroom floors and water areas subject to floods.
The exhibition also provides unique plans for housing, such as a
decorous orchid house.

Shawna Krantz, a second-year architecture and urban design
graduate student, developed a steel house with an unusual
structural design. She chose to build it using steel with the idea
that the house’s structure could prove useful.

“The idea behind it is that you think of a steel frame as
being a pretty prominent thing, and this would be a much more
flexible thing,” Krantz said. “Spaces inside of it
““ like kitchens and bathrooms and closets, things that get
remodeled frequently ““ would be built with regular wood
constructions within the steel frame, and those things could be
torn down and rebuilt relatively easily within the frame over the
lifetime of the house. So the house could expand, it could shrink,
whatever the home owner desires over time.”

This flexibility of a steel structure when combined with wood in
specific places gives the design a unique versatility for
homeowners. Krantz hopes that visitors will appreciate this use of
steel.

“I would like them to recognize the advantages of building
in steel as opposed to wood, the sustainability and also the
flexibility in building in steel as well. And you could still
achieve that same level of coziness that I think people expect of a
wood-built house,” Krantz said.

Though the plans are conceptual studio projects, not actually
implemented, they show an impressive assortment of possibilities
and innovations in various types of architecture.

The architecture department’s second exhibition,
“Critical Mass at the Fringe,” though only a few steps
from the other exhibition, features a very different theme. A more
modern and practical installation, it displays drawings, diagrams
and photographs of students and faculty who took part in the
department’s research studio. Their work is displayed in the
main hallway of Perloff Hall until May 12.

The research studio investigated the urban typologies of heavily
populated towns to develop potential prototypes in architecture and
design for future housing plans.

Amalia Gonzales, who graduated last year from the department
graduate program and now works for the architectural firm Johnston
Marklee & Associates, was a member of the research studio last
year under Mark Lee’s supervision.

“The students went to Tijuana, San Diego and Mexico City,
but the site that the students researched and used as the basis for
their projects was in Tijuana itself,” Gonzales said.

Tijuana, Mexico, was given special attention because it has
passed the threshold of critical mass. This means the horizontal
development common in North American suburbs will prove impossible
for Tijuana. The city is instead forced to practice the alternative
of a hyper-dense, low-rise model in order to meet the demands of
such a huge population.

The department’s research spanned from 2004 to 2005, with
fall and winter seminars devoted to the examination of the
Tijuana’s development. The visits to Tijuana and Mexico City,
Mexico, provided more extensive study of the rapid
industrialization and urbanization and ways to develop housing
strategies to regulate this massive urban rise. The spring studio
then worked on providing alternative solutions to the urban housing
problem in Tijuana.

“We were looking at two different communities in Tijuana.
There were the regular settlements and then things that are called
invasion or irregular settlements. Those are communities with
people that don’t own the property but build ad hoc for
themselves, producing very dense neighborhoods with little
infrastructure and the use recycled materials,” Gonzales
said.

The exhibition and installation provide pictures, diagrams and
plans that went into the research studio’s work, along with
compelling visuals accompanying it to illustrate certain
statistics. The exhibit includes startling facts on Tijuana’s
progress, such as the fact that it grows on average 7.5 acres a
day, an area four times the size of a soccer field.

A vast array of bottles filled with varying levels of neon-green
liquid spanning across the wall in five rows serves as a visual
representation of Tijuana’s statistics.

“The bottles and the use of the recycled material with
that kind of informal installation is a reflection of the nature of
the irregular settlements. The liquid levels within the bottle
represent statistics such as the fact that over half of the
population in Tijuana reside in these invasion settlements,”
Gonzales said.

These methods of presentation further reflect the unique
approach the research team has taken toward the situation of
housing in border towns of critical mass, providing viewers with
more insight into the architecture and the general conditions of
high-density border towns.

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