Craig Hodgetts, "Playmaker"

Ace Gallery presents an exhibition exploring work produced in the 1960s and 70s by one of LA’s architectural radicals, Craig Hodgetts – a leading figure in the LA community of experimental design, curated by Sylvia Lavin, Director of Hi-C, a UCLA based group of young designers and scholars committed to advancing the public consideration of architectural culture. CRAIG HODGETTS, PLAYMAKER presents six innovative projects by Hodgetts and collaborators produced between 1965 and 1978. The range of objects in the exhibition includes vacuum-formed models, storyboards for environmentally themed movies and cardboard furniture. Together, these widely varied projects explore a set of issues that have become urgent for architecture once again, from new materials and technologies, prefabrication and housing, to mass media and entertainment. The exhibition dramatizes the playful excitement that drove one of the most inventive periods in American architectural and design history and brings to the fore the period’s many surprising resonances with contemporary architecture. Craig Hodgetts is the co-founder and Creative Director of Hodgetts+Fung Design and Architecture. Since 1984, Hodgetts’ architectural practice has been in partnership with equally acclaimed architect Hsinming Fung, currently the Graduate Program Director at SCI-Arc. They reside and work in Los Angeles. Hodgetts has received numerous awards including the Architecture Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Chrysler Award for Innovation in Design, and the 2006 Gold Medal from the AIA Los Angeles. Hodgetts was a founding Dean of the California Institute of the Arts and currently is a professor of Architecture and Urban Design at UCLA. The curator of this exhibition, Sylvia Lavin, is Professor and Director of Critical Studies and M.A./PhD programs at UCLA’s Department of Architecture and Urban Design. Lavin has recently launched Hi-C, a program in which UCLA doctoral and design students collaborate on exhibits, symposia and publications that establish a forum for wide discussion of experimental work in architecture. Lavin’s forthcoming books The Flash in the Pan and Other Forms of Architectural Contemporaneity (MIT Press) and Kissing Architecture (Princeton University Press) will be released in 2010. http://www.acegallery.net/live.php (T: 323.935.4411) http://designandarchitectureonkcrw.vox.com/library/post/playful-craig.html http://www.artnet.com/Galleries/Exhibitions.asp?gid=423775681&cid=175290 Ace Gallery, 5514 Wilshire Blvd. Los Angeles, CA 90036