ACT XXI

Too much geek for one architecture student.

Last night was the first night that I have taken advantage of living in L.A.; well, close to L.A. anyway. I went with a group of kids from school to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA, as the locals/art geeks call it, a group of which I am now a proud member) to listen to a panel discussion between Richard Marquis, Clifford Rainey, and Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter moderated by curator Howard N. Fox on "glass artists and artists who work with glass" - apparently two very different things.

Ingalill Wahlroos-Ritter was by far the most interesting of the three designers, in my opinion anyway, probably because she is not only an architect, but the assistant Dean of the architecture department at Woodbury. (Yeah, I'm biased.) She just redesigned the Corning Museum of Art using lots of plate glass as a structural building material, something which most architects and engineers are terrified to do because not only is glass a physically fragile material but it is also visually unsettling to see heavy loads supported by glass and is therefore not a very popular building material. She did some pretty amazing things with it, though:


She showed better pictures at the lecture, but none of them are coming up in Google Images, so take my word for it.

I don't have any particular interest in working primarily with glass, but it was a fascinating lecture regardless.

posted by Jess @ 8:20 PM