This fall, curators from three Los Angeles-based organizations come together as part of World Wide Storefront, a Storefront for Art and Architecture project, to present Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles. This series of exhibitions and events is a collaboration between Big City Forum, Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design, and theNeutra VDL Research House.

Host: Natural Histories for Los Angeles explores the multivalent meaning of “host” though spectacle, parasitic opportunism, and domestic landscapes. The Neutra VDL Research House serves as the site of these investigations and the house, embedded with spatial effects—mirrors, screens, and pools of water—heightens and confuses the relationship between the domestic interior and the exterior.Host features a penthouse exhibition by Medellin-based architect and landscape architect Luis Callejas that exploits environmental connections between his practice and the Neutra VDL Research House. Big City Forum will host a talk between Callejas and Wonne Ickx of Mexico City’s Productora.

Host includes LA Forum’s Out There Doing It series. Select emerging architects, designers, and writers present work and reflect on Southern California’s cultural landscape. The OTDI series concludes with a potluck curated by Jia Gu of Supper Studio. The 2014 OTDI participants represent expanded architecture and design practice. Their work ventures, sometimes organically and sometimes parasitically, into extra-disciplinary territories and includes film, gaming, publishing, and narrative.

2014 OTDI Participants:
Erin Besler and Ian Besler
Laurel Consuelo Broughton and Andrew Kovacs
Jose Sanchez, Plethora Projects
Katya and Alexei Tylevich, Friend & Colleague
Host curators are Mimi Zeiger (Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design), Leonardo Bravo and River Jukes-Hudson (Big City Forum), and Sarah Lorenzen (Neutra VDL Research House).