Competing Utopias: An Experimental Installation of Cold War Modern Design from East and West in One Context
Poster Design:
David Hartwell, 2014
at Neutra VDL Research House
2300 Silver Lake Boulevard, Los Angeles, CA 90039
July 13 - September 13, 2014
Public Opening: July 12, 2014 6-10 PM
Visiting Hours:
Fridays: 6-10 PM
Sat/Sunday: 11 AM - 3 PM
Admission is $10 on Saturdays, when there are docent-led architecture tours of the house. The suggested donation on other days is $10. Related events are free with donation to the VDL House.
Competing Utopias is a design collision that should never happen. But somehow, in Los
Angeles, in 2014, twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, it will.
This installation is a ‘mash-up’ in the most provocative sense of that word.
Its force comes from the collision of two design cultures that have been kept
apart but have been visually connected in ways yet unexamined. What we propose
is an experimental installation that presents Cold War modern design from East
and West in one context.
Competing Utopias is organized by two Los Angeles institutions: the Neutra VDL
Studio and Residences and the Wende Museum and Archive of the Cold War, each a
different type of museum. The Neutra House is an iconic Los Angeles mid-century
modern house museum, designed by Austrian born American architect Richard
Neutra. The Wende Museum is the largest archive of Cold War artifacts in the
world. Both ‘institutions’ originated in German speaking Europe, both
subsequently landed in Los Angeles. Their collections embody two forks of a
Cold War history.
The Cold War was fought not just with guns, but also with art, design, and
culture. Who would formulate the vision for the future of humanity? Twenty-five
years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, historians, curators, and artists are
investigating the divisions between East and West in their visual expressions
of modernity — how were they different and how were they similar? Form knows no
political boundaries or foreign languages — in this most basic sense the
‘cultural Cold War’ was a truly global competition of ideas and ideals.
The strength of this installation comes from its simplicity; that a cultural
disruption is arranged by just a few simple acts. All of the objects from the
Neutra House will be removed and Cold War objects from the Wende collection
will repopulate the home: chairs, tables, lamps, phones, pictures, books,
cooking utensils and even Stasi surveillance equipment, to be stand-ins for the
removed originals. While the installation will not have any physical labels in
order to provoke an unimpeded conversation about the contrasts and similarities
of modern design, digital information will be available online and on
site-specific iPads provided for further research and exploration.
The installation is meant to ask more questions than it could possibly answer.
Why do design objects from the East fit so seamlessly, often invisibly, into a
high design mid-century home from the West? Is Cold War design from West and
East so different after all? And how has Los Angeles as a place of this
cultural collision altered the meaning of these design histories?
Competing Utopias will challenge and broaden our understanding of Cold War
design and will compel us to reflect upon an entirely new context for these
histories that is the installation itself.
Special events will be presented in conjunction with the installation,
including lectures and summer dinner parties with luminaries in architecture,
design, film, as well as screenings of ‘rediscovered’ DEFA technical and
zoological documentary films from East Germany.
