Grand Designs in Mind

Irene Lacher is a Los Angeles-based freelance writer.

If life really did imitate art, you could call this moment “curator descending a staircase.” Brooke Hodge, the Museum of Contemporary Art’s first curator of architecture and design, is rushing downstairs to meet the billboard designers who will help promote her first exhibition here, “What’s Shakin’: New Architecture in L.A.,” which opens today.

The meeting is set for MOCA’s intimate satellite at the Pacific Design Center, which is showcasing projects by architects Frank Gehry and Madrid’s Jose Rafael Moneo. But Hodge has already decided that the billboards won’t tout the usual suspects. She wants “What’s Shakin”’ to shake up L.A.’s view of itself by opening its eyes to other important, cutting-edge projects under construction in its own backyard, such as Eric Owen Moss’ exploding “Pterodactyl” office and garage complex in Culver City.

Naturally, Moss was delighted to hear it.

“It’s funny,” Hodge says with an appreciative laugh. “He’s 50 years old and he said, ‘Can we have [a billboard] in Hollywood so my mother can see it?”’

Moss’ mother should be happy that Los Angeles finally has its first museum curator devoted exclusively to architecture and design, one of only a handful across the country. Hodge’s arrival and her closely watched debut exhibition signal MOCA’s growing interest in architecture. The city’s first impression of Hodge will be formed by the choices she made in “What’s Shakin’,” which focuses on eight significant public buildings under construction. The show, which straddles two MOCA sites--the mini-museum at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood and the Geffen Contemporary downtown--includes projects by Rem Koolhaas, Michael Maltzan, Leo Marmol and Ron Radziner, Greg Lynn and Gary Paige.

“What’s Shakin”’ celebrates L.A.’s belated but ripening appreciation for excellent design in its civic and commercial buildings. And as the city continues to shed its tear-down mentality in favor of creating landmarks befitting a world capital, Hodge’s influence is expected to reach beyond MOCA’s walls to affect the city’s changing skyline as it moves into the 21st century.

“I think Brooke will make architecture accessible and part of the discussion of the future of this city,” says Moss, who worked with Hodge during her recent 10-year stint on the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design. “When the political arm of the city and the development arm of the city begin to see that architecture can contribute to the quality of life, the role for architects will substantially increase and she can be instrumental in that.”

MOCA director Jeremy Strick says that Hodge joins the museum at a perfect time for Los Angeles. “It’s taking architecture more seriously, and so it’s absolutely an appropriate moment for MOCA to have this position, and I would say also that that’s a point that’s emphasized in ‘What’s Shakin’.’ Because what has been most significant in the architectural history of Los Angeles in the past 50 years has been domestic architecture, and now we’re seeing a real expansion in the areas of commercial and civic architecture.”

Indeed, Hodge knows that her first show since her appointment in January will be closely watched by the architectural community, but even she gasps a bit when she hears how influential some expect her to be. “That’s a big bill to fill,” she says softly. “It would be exciting because L.A. is a city of possibilities because it’s big and it’s not completely built up yet. I’d like to see corporations not be complacent and go for corporate architects, but take a risk and look at the best architects out there. Corporate architecture isn’t bad, but it’s an easy thing to do.”

At the moment, Hodge is sitting upstairs at the design center at a table covered with drawings for Gehry’s highly anticipated Walt Disney Concert Hall. Behind her, a large blown-up photo of an undulating Disney Hall model has been wallpapered to the wall. Other walls display computer renderings of interiors and photos of cranes and structural skeletons of under-construction buildings, looking like so many roller coasters towering above downtown.

Hodge’s idea for the show sprang from her daily trek from the Arco Building garage to MOCA, across the street from Disney Hall’s continually evolving profile. A block away, Moneo’s massive Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels has also been taking shape.

When Hodge arrived at MOCA, she was immediately given a seven-month deadline for her first exhibition. Her first thought was to rule out Southern California’s residential architecture.

“People already kind of know about that and it gets published all over. It’s happening on a smaller scale and these are things that impact the city more....Those were the first two that really struck me, but I knew it should be broader than that. There’s a lot more happening than I was able to include in the show, so I don’t want it to be thought of as definitive, that these are the only new projects in town, but these are the projects I consider to be the most significant.”

Hodge visited building sites and architects’ offices around Los Angeles to cobble together a collection that reflects her sensibility. “I’m more interested in architecture that’s more challenging than straightforward, but I also like a certain simplicity in a project. Challenging architecture is not a one-liner, it doesn’t reveal itself to you the first time you see it. You have to think about it and think about the details. To me, the use of unusual materials is really interesting too.”

Moneo’s luminous cathedral appeals to Hodge in part because it defies expectations that it be built of stone. “The fact that it’s colored concrete is more interesting to me because it’s a contemporary material,” Hodge says. “It’s a really beautiful building and the site is really interesting. Moneo has compared it to Notre Dame on the island in the Seine in the sense that it has the freeway on one side and Temple Street on the other, and how you see it [changes] from different vantage points in the city. It’s very plain, but it has this kind of austerity and warmth at the same time.”

The cathedral’s neighbor at the Pacific Design Center is Gehry’s much-discussed, kinetic new home for the L.A. Philharmonic. “Los Angeles is finally getting the Frank Gehry building it deserves,” Hodge says. “It’s too bad it wasn’t built before [the Guggenheim Museum in] Bilbao was, just for the sake of Los Angeles.”

Hodge installed those high-profile projects at the center in part because she quickly picked up on a fact of life on the Westside. “When I first got here, people would say, ‘You mean the concert hall is already under construction?’ And it was clear that a lot of people in the Westside never went downtown unless they went to the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion.”

The Geffen downtown will showcase six more buildings, as well as a separate, unrelated exhibition of work by Scottish video artist Douglas Gordon. The exhibition embraces schools, commercial buildings and arts spaces, among them Koolhaas’ 20,000-square-foot store for Prada in Beverly Hills, which will be a hybrid space for shopping and performance. Also featured are Paige’s designs for the Southern California Institute of Architecture’s new campus within an abandoned freight depot downtown; Marmol Radziner’s Accelerated School in South-Central L.A., which is being built as an “urban village” of classroom, administrative and play spaces; Lynn’s loft-like renovation of Uniserve’s corporate headquarters next to the L.A. Public Library; and Maltzan’s transformation and expansion of the UCLA Hammer Museum’s “difficult” space in collaboration with landscape designer Petra Blaisse and graphic designer Bruce Mau.

Moss credits “What’s Shakin”’ with breaking new ground in the L.A. museum world. “The intention for this show is to illustrate what’s coming and what architecture can do that’s promising for the future of the city,” he says. “I don’t think the city has ever done a show like that. It’s easy to do a show of something that’s historical or celebrated. It’s easy to do a show on Mies [van der Rohe],” Moss said, referring to this summer’s concurrent exhibitions at New York’s Whitney Museum and Museum of Modern Art. “He’s important and legitimately so. It’s much more interesting and much more dicey for Brooke to pick work which is about to be built.”

Hodge’s mandate also includes various types of design, particularly as they overlap. She’s planning an exhibition on car design as well as one four years hence examining the crossover between architecture and fashion. “It’s about their commonalities, that they’re both shelter and they’re both based on the dimension of the human body,” she says.

Hodge was born in Vancouver, Canada, the daughter of an urban planner father and a mother descended from a line of landscape painters in England and Switzerland. As an undergraduate at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, she first set out to become an art historian. But a professor with a passion for historic British architecture in the former Canadian capital infected her with his enthusiasm. So she went on to the University of Virginia to earn a master’s degree in architectural history with a certificate in historic preservation.

A 1984 internship at the American Institute of Architects’ Octagon Museum in Washington enticed Hodge into museum work. When the Canadian Centre for Architecture opened in Montreal in the mid-’80s, Hodge joined the staff as an assistant to the curator of exhibitions and publications, and later ascended to exhibitions coordinator. There she met important architects, such as Peter Eisenman. After organizing a retrospective of Eisenman’s unbuilt projects, she left in 1991 to join the architect’s office, where she met Greg Lynn. But that job was cut because of the grim economy, and later that year she joined the faculty of the Harvard Graduate School of Design as the director of exhibitions and publications. In 1999, she assumed the additional title of adjunct curator of architecture and design at the Harvard University Art Museums.

There, Hodge worked with many of the important architects and historians who passed through Harvard as visiting or tenured professors, among them Koolhaas, who led students on a tour of his projects in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and in Paris. She produced elaborate publications of work by a broad cross-section of design icons: Philippe Starck, Robert Wilson and Commes Des Garcons as well as Moss.

Maltzan, who taught at Harvard during that period, praised Hodge’s exhibitions for exploding the boundaries of design and connecting it to a larger cultural context. “What was important was the influence of architecture was shown through those exhibitions to be more broad in terms of architecture’s and design’s influence on the outside world,” Maltzan says.

Of course, it’s quite a distance from the rarefied realm of academia to the real world of urban museums.

“The world is much messier than Harvard,” Moss says, “and I think Brooke has jumped into something which is more complicated and more diverse and with different kinds of pressures. And to show architecture in that forum successfully is more challenging but also more promising. It allows a level of influence as opposed to a more inbred discussion, which is the Harvard discussion.”

Indeed, MOCA is counting on it.

Says Strick: “The results are something one sees long-term rather than immediately, but I would certainly hope that five, 10, 20 years from now, we’ll be able to look back and say Brooke and MOCA had an influence and played an important role.” *

“What’s Shakin’: New Architecture in L.A.,” MOCA at the Geffen Contemporary, 152 N. Central Ave., Los Angeles, and MOCA at the Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Opens today. Hours: Tuesdays-Wednesdays and Fridays-Sundays, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Thursdays, 11 a.m.-8 p.m. Admission is $8 for adults; $5 for students with ID and seniors; free for MOCA members and children under 12. Admission to MOCA at the Pacific Design Center only, $3. Through Dec. 30 in West Hollywood, Jan. 20 in L.A. (213) 626-6222.