11 architects reform the BUST in a group exhibition, opening in L.A.'s Jai & Jai Gallery 8/29

The upcoming BUST exhibition at the Los Angeles-based Jai & Jai Gallery brings together 11 busts that were designed by 11 established contemporary architects and practices. Guest-curated by William O'Brien Jr — principal of WOJR, co-founder of Collective–LOK, and associate professor at the MIT Department of Architecture — BUST will open to the public at Jai & Jai this Saturday evening, August 29.

Based on traditional notions of the architectural façade and its formal elements, the group exhibition presents an engaging series of re-interpretations and it further explores the intersection between art and architecture.

Read on for more about the exhibition with details from Jai & Jai.

"BUST brings together eleven established architects and firms to reconsider the relevance of a seemingly anachronous means of evaluation for a work of architecture:  the façade. The exhibition displays a spectrum of leanings on the role of characteristics associated with the traditional façade such as frontality, proportionality, anthropomorphism, zoomorphism, figuration, and symmetry within contemporary architecture and art. The distinct attitudes of these eleven architecture firms in regards to these formal tendencies is demonstrated through the design and making of a series of eleven busts.

As a formal and historical precedent, the bust provides a charged framework that acts as a register to compare and contrast form-making agendas. In this context, an abstraction of a bust can be seen as a proto-architectural object that arrives in a non-neutral state, one with pre-existing biases about orientation and hierarchy within the realm of contemporary art and architecture."

Look out for exhibited works by:

• Andrew Kovacs
• Bureau Spectacular (Jimenez Lai)
• CODA (Caroline O'Donnell)
• First Office (Anna Neimark + Andrew Atwood)
• MILLIØNS (John May + Zeina Koreitem)
• MOS Architects (Hilary Sample + Michael Meredith)
• Norman Kelley  (Carrie Norman + Thomas Kelley)
• PARA Project (Jon Lott)
• Pita + Bloom (Florencia Pita + Jackilin Hah Bloom)
• SO-IL (Florian Idenburg + Jing Liu)
• WOJR (William O'Brien Jr.)

"With each bust, the exhibitors articulate their positions and their interpretations by the ways in which they reaffirm, undermine, or disregard such conditions. Because a bust is traditionally articulated through a subtractive process rather than an assembled construct, the various alternative methods employed by each exhibitor in the production of their bust suggests more general positions regarding architectural form.

In a broader context, the spectrum of invited architects/artists will exhibit a wide breadth of representation and fabrication  techniques that is currently permeating the trans-disciplinary discourse of art and architecture through the inspiration of the classical bust."

More event info.