SAH/SCC Film & Talk: The Spirit in Architecture

Saturday, July 31, 2PM SCI-Arc, 960 E. 3rd Street, Los Angeles, CA 90013 A special screening of The Spirit in Architecture: John Lautner Presented by the Society of Architectural Historians/Southern California Chapter The film journeys into Lautner's world with footage from his apprenticeship with Frank Lloyd Wright at Taliesin, extensive documentation of his extraordinary buildings, interviews with historians, critics, collaborators, and clients, and engaging footage of Lautner himself. Following the screening, SCI-Arc hosts a panel discussion with award-winning filmmaker Bette Jane Cohen; architect and film co-writer Tom Marble; co-producer Evelyn Wendell; author, historian, and architect Alan Hess; and Lautner scholar Jon Yoder. The event is open to the general public; admission is $15 for SAH/SCC members, $30 for non-members and FREE for SCI-Arc students and alumni. For more info or to buy tickets, visit the SAH/SCC page. Panel Speakers: Bette Jane Cohen Bette Jane Cohen is an award-winning filmmaker and film editor. She has produced, written and directed the film entitled, "The Spirit in Architecture: John Lautner", portraying the life and work of the visionary architect John Lautner. She is currently working on a documentary film on the life and work of architect Albert Frey "In Search of a Living Architecture". She is an Advisory board member on the John Lautner Foundation. Bette has worked as a Film Editor, Assistant Editor, Visual FX editor, and Photographer for many directors such as James Cameron, Steven Spielberg, John Cassavetes, Richard Donner, Elaine May, and many others. Bette has been a film editor on feature films and television production such as: "The Lady in White", "Mother," "The Sleeping Car," and "Creature," and she has edited various documentaries and commercials. Tom Marble A native Angeleno who earned architecture degrees from UC Berkley and Yale, Tom Marble, AIA, is co-writer of "The Spirit In Architecture: John Lautner." After working for firms as diverse as Morphosis and SOM, Rios Associates and The Irvine Company, Tom opened his own practice, Marble Architecture in 2001. Focusing on the design of buildings, cities, and stories, Marble Architecture is concerned as much with what buildings mean as how they are built or function. Tom's book, "After the city, this (is how we live)," a romantic comedy about architecture and urbanism, was published by the Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design in 2008. Evelyn Wendel After receiving her BA from UCLA, Evelyn Wendel worked at Paramount Pictures for 10 years, five in feature film development and five in the marketing department of National Advertising. She worked as story editor for the Zucker Brothers and co-produced "The Spirit in Architecture." Wendel designed and marketed a line of children clothing that sold through the country and taught art for 4 years at a LAUSD school. She recently joined the Board of Trash for Teaching, a growing nonprofit organization that provides valuable castoffs and art curriculum to schools throughout California. She has worked with the CA Governor and First Lady Maria Shriver's Woman's Conference on green convention and water issues and regularly joins the environmental and political debate. She and her husband are raising two children in Pacific Palisades, California. Alan Hess As a practicing architect and historian, Alan Hess documents and critiques the emerging suburban metropolises of the West. He has served as architecture critic for the San Jose Mercury News since 1986, and was a consultant and interviewed in "The Spirit In Architecture: John Lautner". His books include: "The Architecture of John Lautner" (Rizzoli), "The Ranch House" (Harry Abrams), "Forgotten Modern: California Houses 1940-1970" (Gibbs Smith), and "Googie Redux: Ultramodern Roadside Architecture" (Chronicle). His latest book is "Casa Modernista: Brazilan Modern Houses" (Rizzoli, fall 2010). He has also written "Oscar Niemeyer Houses," "The Other Modernism," "Julius Shulman: Palm Springs," and "Frank Lloyd Wright: Mid-Century Modern." Hess has taught at the Southern California Institute of Architecture (Sci-Arc) and UCLA. Jon Yoder Jon Yoder is a designer and scholar whose work on vision and visuality focuses on modern architecture within an expanded field of visual culture that also includes cinema studies, art history, and visual media theory. He is currently preparing his UCLA doctoral dissertation as a book titled, "Widescreen Architecture: The Immersive Visuality of John Lautner," which takes Lautner's ocular-centric buildings as lenses through which to focus on issues of experiential and projective vision. Yoder's essays have been published in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, ArcCA, Modern Painters, and Thought Matters II: UCLA Research Studio Works, and his design work with Pei Cobb Freed, ZGF Partnership, and SPF:Architects has been published widely. He has presented his work in numerous forums, including the Society for Cinema and Media Studies, Rice University, the Hammer Museum, Kyoto Seika University, the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture, UCLA, the College Art Association, Yale University, and the American Film Institute. Yoder teaches architectural design and theory at Syracuse University. SCI-Arc