A Shape-Shifter Explores Design

Michael Jantzen has seen the future and it is flexible. And fearlessly fantastic and slyly funny.

A small portion of Jantzen’s forward-thinking architectural vision--most of it modular, movable or mutable--is presented in “Dwelling Places,” an exhibit that explores futuristic housing through fanciful conceptual models and photographs. The show is on view through Aug. 26 at Grand Central Art Center in Santa Ana.

Most of the designs on display, including a structure made from automatic garage doors, a winery that looks like six fermentation tanks, a monorail-traveling sleeping capsule and “Solar-Powered House with Automated Lawn Mowing Appendage,” are playfully speculative.

“I’m presenting ideas about how we might think differently about how we live,” Jantzen, 53, said recently. “I’m actually not an architect but an artist-designer who is interested in architecture and technology,” he said. “My work is often called functional sculpture.”

Several of Jantzen’s more practical pieces exist elsewhere as full-scale, functional prototypes. Jantzen and his wife Ellen, who live in a conventional apartment in Valencia, sometimes spend weekends in his snug, severely angular, modular “M-house” in Gorman. The small, shape-shifting structure has moveable walls.

Jantzen’s equally angular and transformable “M-velope,” a kind of futuristic gazebo, stands in a backyard in Tarzana. But mostly Jantzen dreams about issues larger than mere modular form. “Dwelling Places” includes a videotape of Jantzen’s hypothetical “Elements” project for a futuristic, interactive digital media theme park.

The structures in the park would be made of video technology.

“This is projecting into the future when sound and images become the spaces we inhabit,” he said.

One intricate model details a computer workstation that is itself a kind of live-in, computerized sound and image system. The wired space feels ceremonial, an architectural shrine to the Internet.

Two bold yet whimsical designs use visually projected dreams as mutating spatial elements.

“Really, a house should be a kind of organism, a consciousness-raising device that could literally be conscious or intelligent itself and expand the consciousness of its occupants and not be just some dumb structure sitting there,” Jantzen said.

“As soon you say that a house has got to look like a house you limit the methods, technology and manufacturing available. If you can give up that notion, I think you can create much more advanced shelter systems.”

One eye-dazzling domicile incorporates a good bit of satirical social sting. The exterior wall of Jantzen’s “Malibu Video Beach House” is composed entirely of video monitors that display seductive beach scenes.

“This is partly a social comment about why only the rich get to build their houses on the beach,” Jantzen said.

Of course the Malibu Beach House is taking it to an extreme, he said. This life’s-a-beach house also dissects the medium of television and notions of reality.

“As technology improves, increasingly it’s harder to see what’s the TV image and what’s the real image,” Jantzen said. “But it’s also a question of at what point does it matter whether it’s real or synthetic? At some point the technology will be so good that there won’t be any line. And we’ll be creating environments more and more with digital information and less and less with physical components.”

An admirer of futurist Buckminster Fuller, Jantzen has taught design courses at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena. He has developed structural and other design projects for corporate and private clients. His work has been published widely. In June he created the nonprofit Human Shelter Research Institute to seek grants for research into alternative small-scale shelter design, engineering and manufacturing. The institute’s goal is to build an experimental shelter park where visitors can spend the night in innovative environments.

“In the future, the world will be a very interesting place to live--as long as we don’t pollute the planet too much or blow ourselves up,” Jantzen said. “I’m optimistic about the future but I don’t want to just do nothing about it. I like to stir all kinds of things together. I want to plant a lot of seeds.”

“Dwelling Places,” architectural designs by Michael Jantzen. Grand Central Art Center, 125 N. Broadway, Santa Ana. (714) 567-7233. Through Aug. 26. Tuesday-Sunday, 11 a.m.-4 p.m. Free.