At Home with Nature

In launching its fall academic season, UCSB’s Art, Design & Architecture Museum turns a respectful and propitious spotlight on the third medium in the AD&A equation. The attention, built around the fascinating new exhibit From Within: The Architecture of Helena Arahuete, also reflects the 60th anniversary of the university’s widely acclaimed Architecture and Design Collection, founded by the late architectural historian of note David Gebhard. It was the richness and depth of that collection that led to the museum’s institutional identity and title switch many years ago, expanding beyond the realm of just fine art.

Other factors give the new show added significance, not the least of which is the fact that it’s the first retrospective of the Belgian-born and Los Angeles–based Arahuete, a rare woman working diligently and creatively in a field that is still male-dominated. Silvia Perea, curator of the collection, has assembled a portrait of the architect via models, her elaborate drawings, photography, and other artifacts, cleverly laid out in a main gallery partitioned with wood frames into airy “rooms.”

The sum effect of the exhibit nicely relays the story of a free-thinking proponent of “organic architecture,” who was an assistant to famed John Lautner for 23 years before breaking out on her own in 1994. While Arahuete is a modernist by nature and impulse, rather than adhering to specific styles or “-isms” within architecture, she has clung to processes and philosophies concerning a more “organic” approach to the practice.