Photo by David Wing

Jef Raskin with building blocks he designed, on view at the MAK Center

This week, footage about a high-energy collaboration between artists, architects and Pepsi plays at the MAK Center, one artist leads people on a hunt for truth and other intangibles at the Getty and another turns cough syrup into something of a tribute.

5. Art, lies and hashtags
A green vinyl sign above the security desk at the Getty Center asks, "Is a museum for everyone?" Another sign affixed to the floor in the rotunda at the top of the main stairs asks, "Is a museum fun?" These and other questions are part of L.A. artist Sam Durant's #isamuseum project. The idea is that visitors will answer, either on Twitter on their phones, later on the website or by going up to the info desk. You see the question "Is a museum truthful?" while winding down the stairs from the painting galleries, and one visitor answered no because "Truth has nothing to do with art." 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood; through July. (310) 440-7300, gettycenter.org.

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MAK Center

Curator Sylvia Lavin introduces her exhibition to a packed Schindler House

This is the third installment of our Pacific Standard Time Presents diary, tracking modern architecture happenings all over the city. Check out our previous entries:
*The Getty's Big, New Exploration of L.A. Architecture
*SCI-Arc's Gala and a Concert at Jackie Treehorn's House

High temperatures might be bad for art, but they're great for museums. The past week's blistering heat wave drove many an Angeleno into the air-conditioned respite of their local cultural institution -- I spotted Getty curator Christopher Alexander leading a particularly large tour through "Overdrive" on a steamy Saturday. Even when it's not serving as an escape from the heat, the show is an excellent destination, and a few hours wandering the exhibition filled me with a renewed sense of civic pride. In fact, I had a hard time seeing the "thoroughgoing urban mess" as described by one bitter East Coast reviewer in his description of the show (or maybe L.A. in general?) last week.

On another night, it was the promise of warm spring air -- and not a lick of air conditioning -- that packed the Schindler House for the MAK Center's "Everything Loose Will Land" opening. The al fresco vibe extended to the art: Sylvia Lavin -- in a snappy molecular-looking statement necklace -- admitted that she rather enjoyed curating an exhibition outside of a traditional museum, even though mounting a show in the drafty duplex is "pretty much like installing an exhibition outdoors."

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Stefanie Keenan

SCI-Arc's glitzy gala designed by Alexis Rochas celebrated 40 years of training design heretics

This is the second installment of our Pacific Standard Time Presents diary, covering the Modern architecture extravaganza that's blanketing the city. Go here for the first installment: *The Getty's Big, New Exploration of L.A. Architecture.

Who would have guessed that with just the right amount of booze, architects can be so much fun? On a warm April night I headed to SCI-Arc for its 40th anniversary gala, which also provided a peek at the PSTP show "A Confederacy of Heretics: The Architecture Gallery, Venice 1979." The exhibition traces a series of shows held in architect Thom Mayne's Venice home in 1979 featuring a dozen architects who would come to put L.A. on the map. One could mill about the show then step into the other room and see those grinning heretics wearing the same smiles 30-odd years later (and in a few cases, I think, wearing the same clothes).

As guests dined on softball-sized orbs of short rib, Frances Anderton and Tom Gilmore tried their best to emcee the event over dicey acoustics and chatty guests, but the room paid full attention and rose to its feet when honoring the school's founder and first director, Ray Kappe, looking adorable at 85.

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HNTB

The design for the new 6th Street Bridge, one of many upcoming developments in the Arts District

This week's L.A. Weekly profiles the one of the city's hottest neighborhoods: the downtown Arts District. Check out the other stories in our series:
*Tyler Stonebreaker: Curator of the Downtown Arts District
*How the Arts District Got Its Name
*5 Best Places to Eat in the Downtown Arts District

The Arts District is undergoing major developments that are not only changing the face of the neighborhood but also are indicative of larger trends in the city related to transportation, public space and sustainability. These six projects are intended to add residents and businesses to the area, deliver much-needed green space and connect the neighborhood to communities across the river.

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Photo courtesy David Scott / Little Landers Historical Society

A postcard of the detention center

L.A.'s Cultural Heritage Commission met at City Hall Thursday morning to determine whether to designate Tujunga's Verdugo Hills Golf Course a historic-cultural monument, not because it's a golf course, but because it was the site of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station, Immigration, and Naturalization Service -- a World War II internment camp where 90 percent of the detainees were Japanese.

But the Los Angeles Department of City Planning's Staff of Historic Resources recommended against the designation, precisely because the site is now a golf course -- and has been one for more than 50 years. And the Commission agreed.

A group of passionate speakers voiced their support for historic designation, including Japanese-Americans with personal ties to the site, and David Scott, whose grandfather, Merrill H. Scott, was a guard at the internment camp. They were just a few of the representatives from the community who have been trying to preserve the golf course after Snowball West Investments bought the property in 2004 for over $7,500,000, with plans to turn it into a housing development.

It's been a complicated and contentious debate for both those in favor and against historical designation, but at least everyone agreed on one thing: the site is very rich in history.

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Ryan Miller/Capture Imaging

Charles Phoenix gives a SoCal Modern architecture slideshow at the Getty's press event

"The San Andreas is not Los Angeles' only fault," cracked architectural historian Thomas Hines at the kickoff to Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A.. Hines didn't really mean it -- he was quoting a joke that people from, say, San Francisco might make -- but the quip hit just the right tone for the Getty's new initiative, the infinitely more accessible and laid-back architectural sequel to the serious and self-important art world extravaganza Pacific Standard Time.

Also, unlike Pacific Standard Time, Pacific Standard Time Presents -- which some people have taken to calling PSTP, even though it sounds like something one might want to clear up with a few doses of Valtrex -- has a much more manageable number of exhibitions and events. This intimate scale makes for overlapping and quite personal portraits of these post-war practitioners, many of whom are still working and popping up in person at events around the city. Where, with free champagne in one hand and my iPhone in the other, I plan to stalk them for the next few months.

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Courtesy Richard Telles Fine Art

Dan Finsel's E-thay Inward-Yay Ourney-Jay

See also:
*Getty's Pacific Standard Time Series on L.A. Architecture: A Preview
*Our Calendar Section, Listing More Great Things to Do in L.A.

This week, a panel of architects and a performance at a science fiction conference imagine a high-tech future L.A. and an artist uses Pig Latin to title the work in his half-biographical, half-fantastical show.

5. Home for a wayward shopping cart
The lot on Traction between Third and Fourth Street, in Little Tokyo, used to be a gas station. Recently, it has become a pop-up art spot for street artists. Right now, there's a reshaped shopping cart angling up off a concrete slab at the center of the triangle and an eagle at the top of a found-object totem pole along the outskirts. Traction Avenue, between Third and Fourth streets.

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Steele10 on Voice Places

Frank Gehry's Disney Hall

See also:
*Thom Mayne, Frank Gehry & the L.A. Architects Who Changed Everything
*Schindler House's Exhibit About How We Travel
*Moby: L.A. Architecture's New Mascot

Neutra, Gehry, Schindler, Eames -- they're all included in the Getty's initiative Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., starting this month and rolling into the summer. But this PST series is no checklist of well-known designers. Even die-hard architecture wonks might be surprised to discover Peter Jon Pearce and his clear-plastic, bubble-clustered Curved Space Playground Structure (1975), which borrows its geometry from a diamond molecule blown up 8 billion times, or Machine Project's presentation of a dance troupe of very pregnant women in a domed Unitarian church in the Valley.

Modern Architecture in L.A., unlike last year's PST series, Art in L.A. 1945-1980, looks at the city outside of the museum box, in actual places we drive by, play in, sometimes look at but usually ignore each day.

The Getty's anchor exhibits, "Overdrive: L.A. Constructs the Future, 1940-1990" (April 9-July 21) and "In Focus: Ed Ruscha" (April 9-Sept. 29), uncover less of the famous residential architecture of the region and more of its civic buildings, infrastructure and experiential aspects. 1200 Getty Center Drive, Brentwood; getty.edu.

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Still from Moby's video for the Getty's upcoming architecture initiative

See also:
*Fugly Buildings: Our Series on the Most Hideous Buildings in L.A.
*5 Artsy Things to Do in L.A. This Week
*10 Best L.A. Art Galleries For Partying

Those hoping for Moby to launch into the lyrics from "Extreme Ways" in this video might have been surprised to see him riffing on L.A.'s "baffling, Byzantine" built environment instead, as part of a campaign promoting the Getty's upcoming Pacific Standard Time Presents: Modern Architecture in L.A., a slightly scaled-down version of Pacific Standard Time exclusively focused on the city's post-war architecture.

But this isn't the first time Moby's been trotted out to talk buildings. In the last year, he's been featured in no less than three videos where he waxes poetic about L.A.'s perplexingly complex landscape. Plus, he's got a Tumblr, Moby Los Angeles Architecture Blog, where he documents the weird and wonderful structures of Los Angeles -- with nice original photography to boot. And he's become a fixture at architecture events of late, making him a darling of the local design scene.

Dare we say Moby is L.A.'s new architectural mascot?

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Wendy Gilmartin

See also:
*More Fugly Buildings

Road-weary tourists and business travelers know it's hard to find an affordable place to get some shut-eye in this town, which is why visitors to the Best Western Plus "Royal Palace" Inn & Suites are fair to judge the rooms here as they are: fine, quiet enough and clean enough, for the low price tag in this high-rent zip code of West Los Angeles. Apparently, the free continental breakfast is not too bad either. But take a step out on to the street and it's a different story.

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