SANTA BARBARA, CA.- The Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara is presenting two new exhibitions for the fall 2023 season. The lead exhibition, From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete, is the first retrospective survey dedicated to the life and work of Argentinian, Los Angeles-based architect, Helena Arahuete. Presented in commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the Museum’s Architecture and Design Collection (ADC), the show meticulously traces Arahuete’s significant contributions to organic architecture by focusing primarily on her domestic projects. The Museum will also open the exhibition, Please, Come In…, which offers a critical intervention into conventional museum period rooms through a selection of works from the AD&A Museum’s permanent collection and loaned objects.
EXHIBITIONS
From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete
September 23 – December 17, 2023
Amidst the pressing environmental concerns arising from the construction industry today, From Within shines a spotlight on the architect Helena Arahuete (b. Belgium, active in Los Angeles), whose work engages the natural world in an exceptionally sensitive manner. One of the few practitioners who still adheres to the original principles of organic architecture, introduced by Louis Sullivan and Frank Lloyd Wright over a century ago, Arahuete brings this tradition into the 21st century, integrating it with current discourses on sustainability.
Organic architecture rejects codified styles. Instead, it fosters a creative process that, much like nature itself, evolves from within, engendering structures with profound beauty. Besides addressing functional needs and environmental conditions, this process of building seeks to harmonize all elements, or “organs,” of a project among themselves as well as with their surroundings. Design strategies ensuring this cohesion range from defining a building’s volume through geometries inspired by natural forms, to including water, vegetation and rocks in interiors, or using large spans of glass in exterior walls and locally sourced materials all throughout. As a result, organic structures boast robust, yet fluid profiles that often blur the boundary between architecture and landscape.
Arahuete’s interest in organic architecture dates back from her student years in Argentina. After graduating from the School of Architecture of the University of Buenos Aires, she further embraced the organic creed during a 23-year tenure at the office of renowned architect John Lautner in Los Angeles, where she eventually rose to the position of Chief Architect and Associate. Following Lautner’s passing in 1994, Arahuete established her own firm and continued to work according to organic principles, while adapting them to evolving technological resources and her own values.
Ever since, she has produced a unique body of work that not only responds to her clients’ requirements and the environmental conditions of her projects’ sites but also elevates experiential, environmental and structural design.
As the first retrospective of Arahuete’s career, From Within traces her significant contributions to organic architecture by focusing on her domestic projects, which prevail in her practice and afford a holistic glimpse of her innovative spirit. As such, the exhibition expands the scholarship of this chapter of architectural history, traditionally centered on the work of male practitioners.
The exhibition showcases a collection of 225 objects, ranging from original drawings and photographs to ephemera, models and videos. Mirroring Arahuete’s organic design approach, the installation harnesses the combined expanse of two galleries to arrange a series of 10-foot-tall wooden frames in a radial pattern. These unadorned frames, in addition to paying homage to the construction of domestic spaces in the United States, symbolize the principles of integrity, transparency and fluidity that define Arahuete’s architectural vision.
From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum and is curated by Silvia Perea, Curator of the Architecture and Design Collection. The exhibition is made possible thanks to the generosity of Mr. Ron Burkle and the AD&A Museum Council. Accompanying it is a scholarly monographic catalog published by ArtEZ that is slated for release in December 2023.
Please, Come In…
September 23 – December 17, 2023
This exhibition is an invitation to reimagine how spaces such as discos, dive bars, living rooms, and bathrooms can be critically considered through queer placemaking—a practice fundamental to reworking and rethinking conventional narratives by engaging with stories of care, kinship, and intimacy. In each corner of the AD&A Museum’s Moir Gallery, four spaces overlap and blend together to evoke a different environment. A living room features artworks that express being comfortably undone and compositions that reimagine family and friendship dynamics. A bathroom brings together objects that suggest transformation and express interiority or collectivity. A dive bar, considered in its capacity as a space of intimacy and activism, includes objects and images that signal collective engagement. Lastly, a discotheque showcases the ephemeral by displaying the textures and rhythmic qualities of discos’ material culture.
These environments are not mirrors or recreations, they are evocative traces that follow accounts shared by queer communities and emphasize how central these sites are to their histories.
Generally, placemaking is the act of assigning meaning to one’s environment. However, “queer placemaking” emphasizes relationality and community. Queer placemaking creates places of validation and encourages dreaming about different worlds that reject conventional binaries or traditional relationships to oneself and one's social groups. Spaces formed through queer placemaking are relational, ephemeral, and performative. These spaces are rarely engaged within larger historical narratives and are commonly used as background. Centering queer narratives is an effort to honor communities and ideas that exist, love, and care outside normativity.
To apprehend and make visible these often-intangible qualities—relationality, performativity, and ephemerality—the curators approached this exhibition through theoretical and primary sources on queer lives, experiences, and spaces. The curators define “queer” as embracing difference, an embrace demonstrated by communities such as those in the documentary Paris is Burning (directed by Jennie Livingston in 1990); in the words and images of author Larry Mitchell and illustrator Ned Asta; the music and photographs of discos, and in the stories shared by historians Jafari Allen and Stephen Vider. These accounts have offered a way to visualize a world of splendor, community, and radical joy. The methodology of approaching the intangible as material evidence and embodied experience follows literary scholar Saidiya Hartman’s use of “critical fabulation” as an imaginative narrative tool to make the absences within the archive visible. It is also activated by queer theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of a “queer act” which considers ephemerality as nodes of experiences to stand as evidence of “queer lives, powers, and possibilities.” The artworks and objects on display evoke and bring to light these characteristics that tend to be ever-fleeting but fundamental to queer placemaking.
Artists and creators included in the exhibition include: David Bandy’s slide collection, Nayland Blake, Paul Cadmus, Nell Campbell, Willie Cole, Howard Finster, Les Gundel, Channing Hansen, Lyle Ashton Harris, Peter Hujar, Robert Lazzarini, Peter Meller, Keith Puccinelli, Mel Ramos, Do-Ho Suh, Marc Swanson, Andy Warhol, and performers at Finocchio’s Club in San Francisco.
This exhibition is organized by the Art, Design & Architecture Museum at UC Santa Barbara and is curated by Sylvia Faichney and Graham Feyl, both UCSB History of Art & Architecture Ph.D. students.
