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Two distinct trends stand out in Southern Californian architecture today. One deals with the issues and constraints which have led to a quality of formal restraint, pushing architecture to a keener intelligence. The other trend is not site specific, that is, it is a larger, global issue: the architect's role in society.
Architecture in Balance, a recent exhibition held at the Amory Center for the Arts in Pasadena, California, highlighted the residential work of some of the younger practitioners. At first glance, the formal sensibilities of this rather loose aggregate of seven' firms would seem to indicate an abrupt break from those of their big-budget, high-profile, expressionistic predecessors (and in many cases mentors): aesthetically, a more subtle palette of materials, a simpler vocabulary of forms. As the title of the show suggests, form is one tool among many in calibrating a canvas for human experience. Light, space and attention to the site are being investigated again, gladly, as poignant architectonic elements. They lead to `transformative' architecture, curator Richard Corsini wrote in the exhibition's catalogue, to enrich life in daily ways'.
Then, the work is not a break with the patriarchy of Frank Gehry et al so much as a selective absorption of the lessons of his early work, which demystified construction by peeling away surfaces and critiqued the banality of wood stick/stud construction. As critic Aaron Betsky observes in an essay he wrote for the catalogue, Gehry ' ... sought to make an architecture out of simple, readily available building materials so that the resulting construction...