Pacific Design Center

As construction workers laid steel posts from which a bright red building will rise at the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, architect Cesar Pelli inspected the progress and talked about how buildings had changed since the great Blue Whale first went up in the 1970s. Even the new structure's color -- a blaring, fire-engine red -- would have been a shock in those days, when most buildings were modernist and spare.

Through a series of landmark exhibitions in the 1960s and 1970s, Eudorah Moore blurred the boundaries between art, design and craft - and helped introduce the concept of California design to the wider world. In choosing to present fine wood furniture and pottery alongside such surprising pieces as a bus stop bench or jewelry that functioned as body sculpture, she championed a message of mixed-media inclusiveness. As she cast her eye outdoors, Moore helped cement the notion of design as lifestyle by highlighting the region's fascination with recreation by displaying such items as a canoe, skateboards or a portable cabana.

More than 55 notable galleries will showcase some of their best artists at Pacific Design Center's Art Los Angeles Contemporary fair, so it's the perfect way to tap into cutting-edge global art trends. Pacific Design Center, 8687 Melrose Ave., West Hollywood. Today to Sun. Hours and ticket prices vary. (323) 851-7530. www.artlosangelesfair.com.

An artist who mines the visual excesses and verbal tics of teenagers in the ADHD age of instant messaging, Ryan Trecartin has had important early shows in L.A., but MOCA's announcement of new acquisitions Thursday marks the first time his work is entering a museum collection here. With funds from its acquisition committee and from museum director Jeffrey Deitch, MOCA is buying "B: Settings," an over-the-top installation consisting of four rather manic videos and four "sculptural theaters," which look like makeshift arrangements of odd lounging furniture.

Arts advocate and attorney Andrew Ian Wolf has been named president of the Pacific Design Center. Wolf has previously worked with the Gallery at HERE, part of the nonprofit SoHo Arts Center in New York, as well as the National Trust for Historic Preservation, Design Industries Foundation for AIDS and Volunteer Lawyers for the Arts.

Murray Feldman, a one-time furniture wholesaler who became the moving force behind the successful Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood, has died, several months after undergoing cancer surgery, a spokesman for the center said. Feldman, who was 64, died Sunday at his Hollywood home.

The Pacific Design Center, West Hollywood's wholesale home furnishings mart, is broadening its horizons. Beginning this fall, 300,000 square feet on four floors of the center's green building will be made into wholesale fashion showrooms. Andrew Wolf, president of the Pacific Design Center, said Wednesday that 80 fashion companies have signed letters of intent that will be converted into leases. Who are his intended?

West Hollywood's landmark Pacific Design Center has new owners--a group headed by Charles S. Cohen of New York and a real estate investment fund managed by Cheslock Bakker & Associates, based in Stamford, Conn. The new owners plan to retain the 16-acre PDC's original Cesar Pelli-designed "Blue Whale" structure at Melrose Avenue and San Vicente Boulevard as a home furnishings mart catering to the trade, but they will convert the adjacent Center Green building into traditional office space.

When the Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood made its debut in 1976, there was little thought that it would ever grow beyond its original concept--that of a home furnishings and contract furnishings industry mart. Nor was it anticipated that some day the vibrant blue structure might be joined, side by side, by two equally bold entities--one a brilliant green, another a rich burgundy.

Design Loves Art. Say what? For some L.A. art dealers, the contemporary art program opening Thursday at the Pacific Design Center is rent-free space in a different part of town. For those who have lost galleries to the recession, it's a chance to go public again. For artists, it's an opportunity to do something big or be seen by a new audience at the enormous Melrose Avenue building known as the Blue Whale. And for the PDC -- which started the whole thing as part of its new fine arts mission -- the six-month project is an attempt to forge connections between art and design while filling empty spaces intended for the interior design trade.

For someone not yet thirty, the Turkish-born artist Refik Anadol has been remarkably prolific in the wrapping of large-scale cultural institutions - museums, university buildings, historical landmarks - with technologically formidable digital video projections. He's created civic-scale digital installations and performances in Turkey, Germany, Austria, Canada, and New Mexico, often generating imagery based on musical scores or field recordings. He is currently at work with Frank Gehry's architectural firm on a plan for next year to wrap the Disney Concert Hall with a kinetic visual composition based on Gustavo Dudamel's movements over the course of a performance.

No one embodies the spirit of Mod quite like Peggy Moffitt, L.A.'s own 1960s-era muse. Moffitt, model and collaborator with modernist designer Rudi Gernreich, appears in a number of memorable images from the period, including this black-and-white gem from "Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?" the 1966 cult French film by director and photographer William Klein that is a satirical send-up of the fashion industry. Seated at the far left, Moffitt, plays herself. She appears in only two scenes in the film, including this one, depicting a group of young models dressed in stripes, against a backdrop of stripes, applying their Kabuki-like makeup.

Can a hole be moved? Is a hole that's brought from, say, Detroit to Los Angeles the same void or a different one when it gets here? Is the void already just everywhere, merely awaiting an identifying contour? That and other philosophical conundrums are the heart of Richard Haley's engaging if occasionally erratic show (his third) at Another Year in L.A. Some of the 22 Conceptual works could be tighter. But, mostly using winningly casual materials, "Holes, Voids and Other Descriptive Terms for Blankness" is an ambitious, frequently captivating meditation on serious subjects - decay, death, decomposition and emptiness.

Amanda Ross-Ho makes art that engages in nonstop translation - ephemeral drawings morph into solid rooms, miniature sizes balloon into maximum magnitudes, magazine advertisements turn into gold-finished jewelry, childhood scribbles change into grown-up philosophical musings. She's the Babel fish of contemporary art. "Amanda Ross-Ho: Teeny Tiny Woman," her wry and seriously playful show at the Museum of Contemporary Art branch at the Pacific Design Center, is large in ambition and generous in rewards.

Following its group shows of area painters and sculptors, Another Year in LA now presents "Drawing (Los Angeles). " Featuring five artists (plus a cameo appearance by non-local Stephen Kaltenbach), the show is a sampler more than a survey but manages to convey, with a good deal of verve, how elastic the category of drawing has become. Materials matter less than manner of approach -- a certain rawness, directness, immediacy. John Knuth's word paintings spelled out using emergency road flares and Christopher Russell's scratched and spray-painted "Framing Exercises" are all tactile energy.

The jewelry from seven husbands. The wardrobe of a '60s jet-setter. The memorabilia of a Hollywood icon, including a love poem by Bob Dylan that he scrawled on a framed publicity poster of himself and dedicated to "Elizabeth, Sweetheart, Dream angel, Queen-of-the world. " These are among more than 2,000 objects that belonged to Elizabeth Taylor and are being auctioned by Christie's in mid-December in New York. They have already been on display in London and Moscow and will travel to other capitals of wealth.

Pacific Design Center in West Hollywood will celebrate its 10th anniversary at its traditional Westweek, a conference and showcase for the design and home furnishings industries scheduled Wednesday through Friday. About 22,000 architects, designers, dealers and executives from around the world are expected to attend, officials said. Westweek will include panel discussions and a show of German furniture designs assembled by Design Center Stuttgart.

In a move that will provide a prestigious Westside showcase for the downtown-based Museum of Contemporary Art and give the Pacific Design Center an attractive new tenant, the museum has agreed to take over the center's Feldman Gallery. The five-year agreement, announced Wednesday at the opening of the center's WestWeek design festival, will allow the museum to expand its architecture and design exhibition program in a setting that welcomes adventurous ideas, MOCA director Jeremy Strick said.

The new West Hollywood Library, set to open to the public Saturday on a curving stretch of San Vicente Boulevard across from the Pacific Design Center, is a building that offers a freewheeling tour through centuries of architectural history. Explicitly or implicitly, it points back to the work of Charles Moore, Pierre Koenig, Frank Gehry and even Michelangelo. The library includes long expanses of floor-to-ceiling glass, in the great California midcentury tradition, as well as bands of marble and generous helpings of architectural ornament.

Spray tans are everywhere these days. It's like the entire nation has been lightly toasted. Soon, there will be an app for that. Hold your smartphone directly to your face. Click. The other day, my wife, Posh, got her car spray-tanned, a discretionary expense that a lot of people might frown upon. Not me. "For all I care, you can spray tan the house," I told her. "Really?" "Spray tan whatever you like," I said. "The dog?" "The kids. " "The luggage?"