'Viral urbanism'
PREDOCK AND Frane, both 40, graduated from Harvard and the University of Texas, respectively, and in recent years have taught at Tulane and Berkeley. They were inspired to focus their interest in scale and site on the Inland Empire by Rebecca McGrew, the curator of the Pomona College Museum's "Project Series," a program promoting exhibitions by Southern California artists.
"I like their idea of tying works of art to a specific locality," she says. "And our 'Project Series' also aims to give artists an opportunity to create a work they wouldn't normally do."
As in all their commissions, be they art pieces or buildings for clients, the two began with an intense investigation of the site -- in this case, the Inland Empire's vast expanse, which was formed by what Predock refers to as "viral urbanism." "The area has become, without any formal planning, a fairly disorganized accumulation of small de-centered cities," he says, "but there is still some deeper intelligence afoot, which tells you, and residents, how it all works."
What they found was a range of buildings, from the giant warehouses to regional distribution centers for goods, big-box stores, mini malls, apartment buildings and houses. It's this hierarchy that's represented in their installation, which resembles an inverted pyramid, with the warehouse at the top and a 4-by-4-inch house at the bottom.
Installing "Inland Empire" was no easy task. It took six weeks, with up to eight people working at one time, to place the 750 nylon strings against the walls of the gallery, then hook them up to the series of hanging models.
Although each string was numbered and the installation "pre-designed" on computer, there were instances in which the lines of string intersected. "It was a little like weaving," says Predock, who notes that he and his partner like to mix up the high technology of contemporary design practice with traditional techniques espoused by craftsmen of earlier times.
For the highly conceptual architects, these strings play a significant role. "They stand in for all the things that connect the buildings: freeways, roads, sewers, sidewalks and so on," Frane says.
Some viewers follow the strings and see their intersections as freeway interchanges. Others see them as power lines.
"We want people to project themselves into a space and start seeing relationships between buildings they might not see on the ground," Frane adds. If they do, they are asking questions of architecture they might not otherwise. Very much like the architects themselves, they would be expanding their boundaries.
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"Inland Empire," Pomona College Museum of Art, 330 N. College Way, Claremont. Ends Oct. 19. (909) 621-8283.
