Franka Diehnelt / Group IX, Nov 99 - Mar 00

I WISH I WAS IN L.A.

4/14/00 to 4/17/00

MAK Center at the Mackey Apartments, 1137 - 1141 South Cochran Avenue, Los Angeles, CA

German architect Franka Diehnelt and Austrian architect Karoline Steeruwitz presented two projects they created in partnership. With "makes a living of dreaming," the architects examined the Westward movement of American expansion and its conclusion in Los Angeles. The work questioned what happened to the dreams that fueled these journeys when they reached their end. Using fragments and panoramas, pictures and objects, names and stories gathered throughout the city, Steeruwitz and Diehnelt evoked and dismantled both the utopia and nostalgia they encountered. In "every bump, rise and stretch," the partners looked at the American journey and its search for a lost sense of home. Inspired by Jack Kerouac's On the Road, they presented a panoramic collage of landscape that included houses and texts from the back roads of the U.S.