View of L.A.T.B.D. models produced by Smout Allen. Photos of the L.A.T.B.D. installation by Stonehouse Photographic.
LA is currently undergoing a structural metamorphosis: the vast urban blob long-defined by conspicuous fossil fuel consumption and sprawl is looking to become a real city. Local voters approved a 25-year tax increase in 2008 that transportation officials have used to expand the metro system generously, adding several new lines with more to come. Mixed-use buildings and their attendant gentry are sprouting like weeds across the parched landscape. And LA’s only true town square, Uber, is not only thriving, but finally goes to LAX.
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The Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne dubs this contemporary epoch the “Third Los Angeles,” an era defined by an attempt to converge and mitigate LA’s two prior eras of dense urbanism and rampant suburbanization, respectively, into a coherent future. LA is suffering from a cayenne cleanse-level identity crisis and its denizens are struggling to redefine their place in the city.
At the intersection of this heady milieu, we find 2015 Universit of Southern California Libraries Discovery Fellowship recipient and prolific blogger-theorist Geoff Manaugh and his collaborators, London-based designers Mark Smout and Laura Allen of Smout Allen. Their exhibition at USC, L.A.T.B.D. allows viewers to enter into an adventure-style board game populated by hypothetical visions for an as yet unrealized Los Angeles. Guided by a pamphlet designed by local designer David Mellen, participants follow along with Manaugh as he combines the themes of speculative fiction, seismology, and astronomy to envision a way forward for this chapparal metropolis.
Manaugh’s fellowship was established in 2011 to promote interdisciplinary collaboration vis-a-vis the school’s archives. The exhibition utilizes these to mine the city’s past for its provocative futures. By bringing to light some of the seminal forces that have shaped Los Angeles throughout its history, from the coastal ecologies on its western shores to the freeway system circulating throughout the city and even, the interlocking web of alternative religions practiced across the Southland, the exhibition follows in the footsteps of Reynard Banham and the tradition established in his book Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies of using LA’s complicated physical history as a way of framing it’s present and future.
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One such hypothetical future includes a series of newly proposed seismographic planetaria atop the old Chavez Ravine. Proposed on the site of an impoverished Hispanic neighborhood erased away by 50s urban renewal efforts to make way for Dodger Stadium, the scheme would allow visitors to peer vast distances, up into the galaxy and down into the Earth’s crust. In a related project, giant pendulums below city streets help to offset the shaking from earthquakes. Another proposal harnesses the region’s ring of mountaintop observatories to reveal the history of modern astronomy. Another project still grafts entrance gates, large frames, and architectural markers onto the region’s infamous freeway system in order to align the grain of the city with solstices, stars, future constellations, and other celestial happenings.
These provocations are expressed through smartly rendered architectural models by Smout Allen. They use their established vocabulary of 3D drawings and architectural techno-futurism to bring Manaugh’s provocations to life. Using robotically milled medallions of lime wood that have geological strata and fault lines carved into their facets, the models complement the paper-based graphic material and ephemera showcased throughout the rest of the exhibit. These lobotomized geographies are populated with components made from a wide variety of materials and techniques including 3D printing, milled polyurethane tooling board, sprayed and mirrored acrylic, and laser-etched crystal resin.
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