Gibbs Students Collaborate on Installation for Upcoming “Outré West” Exhibition

While first planning upcoming exhibition Outré West: The American School of Architecture from Oklahoma to California, the curators had a bold idea: to recreate at full scale architectural fragments of projects documented in the show. The exhibition opening this August at the Oklahoma Contemporary Arts Center is curated by OU faculty Angela Person, Stephanie Pilat, and Marco Piscitelli.  

It celebrates a group of six architects educated in the 1950s at the riotous, iconoclastic school built by Bruce Goff and his contemporaries who all went on to cultivate radical architecture practices in California in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Projects by Mickey Muennig and Donald MacDonald were selected to be mocked-up at one-to-one scale. 

Organized as a studio and independent study course instructed by Ken Marold, students undertook the challenge of drawing, fabricating, and assembling these installations. For a number of reasons both practical and conceptual, students designed these structures entirely in plywood.  

This architectural language produces an effect like that of an architectural model; these maquettes rendered form in a unified material, allowing these disparate fragments of buildings from different contexts to be read as a whole. The largest of these installations recreates Muennig’s first structure in Big Sur in total, his 1972 studio. This twenty-foot round “teepee” as he once called it was his home for two decades. Students not only had to reconstruct this from scant documentation—mainly photographs—they had to design it to be economical, structurally sound, modular, and easily demountable.  

Additional student involvement included an architectural model of Violeta Autumn’s 1965 Cliff House in Sausalito and redrawn plans of John Marsh Davis houses. Outré West opens August 22, 2024 at the Oklahoma Contemporary.