Seeing the mirrored images

WHEN he designed his dream house, Rudolf Schindler was faced with a thorny problem.

The house was to be not just for him and his wife but also for another family, the Chaces. The two couples wanted to live semi-communally, socializing and entertaining together while maintaining their privacy.

There would be one garage and one kitchen, but everything else had to come in pairs: two fireplaces, two grassy patios, two open-air sleeping porches. The private areas had to feel truly private yet not be segregated by great distances, because the house would not be big.

Schindler solved the two-of-everything problem by employing a symmetry that is not readily apparent at ground level but is best examined with the aid of a blueprint or aerial photograph. The design is often likened to a pinwheel, with two spokes -- three, including the guest wing -- radiating from the same midpoint.

The Schindler House, on North Kings Road in West Hollywood, is regarded by architectural historians as one of the great works of the 20th century. Completed in 1922, the house was more than just an ideal space for two-family living -- it revolutionized architecture with its concrete slab construction and melding of indoor and outdoor space.

It is now the headquarters of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, L.A. -- a branch of the Austrian Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art -- and lends its concrete walls and intimate lawns to art shows and outdoor concerts.

The current exhibit, called “Symmetry,” examines the various facets of a concept that was at the core of Schindler’s design and underlies much of visual art, whether as an abiding principle or as something to rebel against. Los Angeles-based artists created all the works in the exhibit, which was curated by MAK Center director Kimberli Meyer and guest curator Nizan Shaked and runs through May 7. (The two will lead a walk-through tour at 1 p.m. Saturday.)

“We started thinking deeper about the meaning of symmetry, how this house is symmetrical and why that resonates so strongly,” said Shaked, a visiting art history professor at the University of La Verne. “We looked for work that explored the relationship between symmetry and meaning.”

As a result, some of the works have symmetries that are not readily apparent, because they are conceptual symmetries, not visual ones.

Stephanie Taylor’s piece, “Chop Shop,” takes the Woody Guthrie song “Riding in My Car” as a starting point for a new song that rhymes with the original but otherwise has little in common with it. In “Landlord Vigilante: LA Invstr,” a chaotic ride through the mean streets of Los Angeles with a taxi-driver-turned-slumlord, the symmetry is between the real world and the video game universe the characters inhabit.

But many of the show’s works bear an obvious debt to traditional notions of symmetry -- even if they sometimes use those familiar forms to express ideas that would seem quite foreign to the ancient Greeks, who revered symmetry as a moral good.

Sandeep Mukherjee’s multi-panel work, mounted on the front wall of what was originally Pauline Schindler’s studio, employs the most symmetrical of all shapes: a circle. Yellow-greens and splotchy browns are meant to evoke spring growth and leaf-strewn forest floors. In between the work’s panels are glimpses of real nature, with Schindler’s vertical slit windows offering peeks at the garden outside.

“I wanted to do something really simple. I was interested in the idea of pulse, something that has both centripetal and centrifugal forces. The house is like a pinwheel, with arms that rotate around the center,” Mukherjee said. “I was also interested in bringing the garden inside the house. Inside the house, sometimes you want to run out. I wanted to reverse that and have the outside come in.”

Brandon Lattu’s two sets of paired photos show L.A. scenes from different angles at different points in time. That dichotomy, he says, “allows you to look at something twice and understand more of it,” as with his photographs of the Los Angeles Theatre, one taken at sunrise and one at sunset, that evoke the passage of time while the viewer is inside watching the show.

The work that has prompted the most visitor feedback, according to the curators, is a faux Oriental rug by Amy Sarkisian. The rug has the telltale designs and color schemes of an Oriental rug, but it was made with a crude latch hook technique rather than the painstaking process that renders real Oriental rugs objects of beauty. Symmetry, it seems, is an essential quality of an Oriental rug, since this one is still recognizable as a knock-off, even with other important markers stripped away.

“People ask, ‘What the hell is this?’ It’s a copy of a copy of some sort of Persian rug, a low-resolution version of a rug. It’s the idea of a rug. When you start with beauty and corrupt it several times, it’s a really subtle horror,” MAK director Meyer said.

THE domestic idyll that Schindler envisioned at Kings Road didn’t last long. The Chaces moved out two years later and were succeeded by the Neutras, but the working relationship between Richard and Rudolf, the two iconic Austrian-born architects, soured. Schindler and his wife, Pauline, divorced.

In 1949, Pauline returned to live at the house. The design that Schindler had intended for two families who were the best of friends now managed to contain a divorced couple who weren’t even on speaking terms. The duplicate bathrooms and lawn areas, the wings that branched in opposite directions to afford privacy, made it possible for the two to live under one roof until Rudolf Schindler’s death in 1953.

Pauline had begun making alterations to her half of the house and continued after she moved back in. The carpets and pink or mint green walls so enraged Rudolf that he fired off angry letters -- his only means of communicating with her, even though they shared the same house.

But thanks to thorough restorations in the 1980s, the carpets and garish colors are gone, and the two halves are once again mirror images -- just as Schindler himself would have had it.

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‘Symmetry’

Where: MAK Center for Art & Architecture at the Schindler House, 835 N. Kings Road, West Hollywood

When: 11 a.m. to 6 p.m. Wednesdays through Sundays

Ends: May 7

Cost: $7; $6, students and seniors

Info: (323) 651-1510, www.makcenter.org

Also

What: Curator-led walk-through

When: 1 p.m. Saturday

Cost: Free with admission