This research-based initiative looks to the 2022 centennial of R.M. Schindler’s house and studio as a starting point for a curatorial inquiry into the aftereffects of modernist legacy-making. Beginning with the radical proposition that the house on Kings Road might be taken at once as exceptional and generic, the project understands the home as a potent register of broader forces, obscured existences, and incidental events that shape and structure the estate today. The program series convenes a network of scholars, curators, and practitioners to ask how MAK Center’s institutional home, a historic house, can respond to contemporary historiographical re-readings of “masterworks.”

Gary Riichirō Fox is an architectural historian and guest curator at the MAK Center. He is a visiting faculty member at Southern California Institute of Architecture (SCI-Arc) and has curated exhibitions at the Getty Research Institute. His ongoing doctoral research in History of Architecture at University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) considers histories of environmental governance and aesthetics and the law. Gary holds a bachelor’s in architecture from Yale University and a master’s in history of architecture from the Architectural Association.

Jia Yi Gu is director and curator of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. From 2015–20, she served as executive director of Materials & Applications, a Los Angeles-based project space for experimental architecture. In 2016, she cofounded the architecture research and design studio Spinagu with Maxi Spina. She is an architectural historian and visiting faculty in architecture at the California College of Art.

Sarah Hearne is an architectural historian and guest curator at the MAK Center. She holds a doctorate in architectural history from the University of California Los Angeles, with a research focus related to questions of architectural working procedures including media, design instruments, and the professional structures around authorship. Her recent curatorial work includes associate curator on Architecture Itself and Other Myths of Postmodernism (Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2018), and as associate curator of the 2017 Chicago Architecture Biennial.

The MAK Center is a contemporary, experimental, multi-disciplinary center for art and architecture headquartered in architect Rudolph M. Schindler’s House and Studio (1922) in West Hollywood; operates a residency program and exhibition space at the Mackey Apartments (R.M. Schindler, 1939); and runs more intimate programming at the Fitzpatrick-Leland House (R.M. Schindler, 1936). Unique in its role as a constellation of historic architectural sites and contemporary exhibition spaces, the MAK Center develops local, national, and international projects exploring the intersection of art and architecture. It seeks out and supports projects that test disciplinary boundaries. Acting as a cultural think tank for current issues, the MAK Center encourages exploration of practical and theoretical ideas in art and architecture by engaging the center’s places, spaces, and histories. Its programming includes exhibitions, lectures, symposia, discussions, performances, music series, publication projects, salons, architecture tours, and new work commissions. It collaborates frequently with guest curators, artists, and architects.