Tour: PST ART: Crossing Over: Art & Science at Caltech, 1920-2020

Saturday, December 14th 2024

The Los Angeles Forum for Architecture and Urban Design is pleased to offer you this members and students only event.

Please choose one of two tour times offered.

Tim Durfee, exhibition designer of Crossing Over, with graphic designer Jennifer Rider

Crossing Over, Caltech’s sprawling contribution to the 2024 PST ART theme Art and Science Collide, is a network of installations across the Pasadena campus that puts the university’s historic archive in counterpoint with works by contemporary artists including Helen Pashgian, Shana Mabari, Lita Albuquerque, and Lia Halloran – all while guiding visitors through spaces usually inaccessible to the public.

Installing a complex exhibition within the functioning spaces of a university, and not in a flexible gallery, introduced significant challenges: existing walls could not be touched, existing lighting could not be used, and daily teaching and research activities could not be interrupted.

The response to these constraints was to view the staging as a temporary, alien occupation of the campus. Each structure is autonomous, self-supporting, and self-illuminated. Interior elements barely touch the ground, and skirt past existing walls. Form corresponds to highly specific delivery of curatorial narratives, rather than architectural context. Materials follow internal, pragmatic logics, with the same material shifting from structure to substrate to finish in the same object. Crossing Over’s foregrounding of the exhibitionary apparatus is part of an ongoing experiment in new ways of conceiving a future for architecture in the information and AI age, where content and the flow of “users” determines form. It is a consideration of the interface as a public and cultural phenomenon.

Tickets:

Student tickets: $5.00

Member tickets: $10.00

Complimentary Ticket

Become a member today and receive a reduced membership of $65 (regular $85) and student membership of $15 (regular $25) in addition to a complimentary ticket to this event.

Limited availability.

Independent curator: Claudia Bohn-Spector

University Archivist: Peter Sachs Collopy

Coordinator: Bailey Westerhoff

Exhibition Design: Tim Durfee Studio

Graphic Design: Jennifer Rider

Photography: Joshua White