A miniature billboard pokes up above the neatly trimmed hedge in the garden of the Schindler House in Los Angeles, as if a roadside ad had blown in from nearby Sunset Strip. Cantilevered from a chunky steel column, strapped to a base of pink concrete blocks, it is a startling arrival on the grounds of this hallowed modernist sanctuary. It’s particularly strange as the hoarding in question is not advertising injury law or a Hollywood movie about a coked-up bear, but a 1970s public housing project in the Mexican city of Guadalajara.
“The billboards are trying to make trouble,” says Mimi Zeiger, co-curator of an exhibition here about the work of Mexican-Austrian architect Alejandro Zohn. She gestures to a range of hoarding structures scattered around the garden of the famous house, like fragments of a more brash urban realm impinging on the quiet oasis, each displaying an image of Zohn’s work. “It’s a way to bring the scale of the city into the more secluded, domestic space, creating a bridge between Guadalajara and LA.”
The bold signs are a provocative addition to the West Hollywood sanctum built by Austrian émigré architect Rudolph Schindler in 1922 and often regarded as the Ur-monument of southern California modernism. The house was designed after Schindler and his wife spent the summer in a cabin in Yosemite national park, and it embodies his desire to channel the sense of camping out in nature in the form of a bohemian shack.
