The Big Atlas of L.A. Pools + Linear City

The LA Forum’s summer exhibition features the work of Lane Barden and Benedikt Groß & Joseph K. Lee to illustrate two distinct ways of seeing our sun-drenched metropolis through infrastructure, water resources, and habitat. Linear City and The Big Atlas of L.A. Pools will be on view at WUHO Gallery in Hollywood June 19 through August 3, 2014 with an opening reception on Thursday, June 19.
Los Angeles-based photographer Lane Barden captures the entire length of the L.A. River, the Alameda Corridor railroad trench, and Wilshire Boulevard in Linear City. The fifty-foot-long aerial image operates as evidence of an alternate urbanism. His photographic fieldwork records the dynamic qualities of the city’s infrastructure as it cuts through the urban fabric.
Speculative and computational designer Benedikt Groß (Stuttgart, Germany) in collaboration with cartographer/geographer Joseph K. Lee (San Francisco Bay Area) deploy geo-mapping techniques in The Big Atlas of L.A. Pools to remotely document the synthetic oasis of backyard swimming pools. Their work utilizes databases and digitally generated images from secondhand sources. By bringing a crowdsourced publicness to the domestic sphere, the self-proclaimed “army of two” tests the emerging role of non-domain research to display Angelino’s perverse resistance to native ecologies.
Each crafts a remarkable visual survey that juxtaposes the generally unremarkable and often overlooked with the overwhelming and too-big-to-figure-out spatial qualities of this illusive metropolis’s domestic and urban landscapes.
Paired in the gallery, the work by these artists through entirely different methodologies and representation provokes questions about the role of design in relationship to urbanity, infrastructure, and ecology.