Gustavo Leclerc

Architecture
Visiting Assistant Professor, Architecture
Storrs 243
704-687-0111

Gustavo Leclerc is an architect and an artist currently earning a Doctorate candidate in Architecture at UCLA. He is a partner and founding member of the multidisciplinary collective ADOBE LA (Artists, Architects, and Designers Opening the Border Edge of Los Angeles). He was a fellow at Harvard University in the prestigious Loeb Fellowship program during the 1999-2000 academic year. In 2000, he co-chaired the ACSA National Conference in Los Angeles, titled Heterotopolis: Immigration, Ethnicity and the American City. He’s been involved in several art exhibitions as a curator, artist, and exhibition designer such as Mixed Feelings at the USC Fisher Museum of Art; Revelatory Landscapes at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Facades: Architecture, Urban Space and The Moving Image at the Long Beach Museum of Art; House Rules at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Urban Revision: Current Projects for the Public Realm at the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. He co-edited Postborder City (Rutledge, 2003), Urban Latino Cultures: La Vida Latina in L.A. (Sage Publications, 1999), and Hybrid City/Ciudad Hibrida: The Production of Art in Alien Territory, (SCI-Arc Public Access Press, 1998).

For him, the relevance of contemporary architectural design is intrinsically dependent upon it’s being in-step with the aesthetic and spatial sensibilities of its time. In his dissertation, he speculates on the emergence of an architectural hybridity autochthonous to Los Angeles informed by a theoretical framework termed the Spanglish Turn. The development of this framework begins with an analysis of visual arts, and material and popular culture in Los Angeles. This strategy aims to ‘stretch’ the relationship between architecture and specific forms of popular and material culture by speculating on the behavior informing them. Then guided by a formulation of this emergent spatial logic, it looks for tangential inroads and alternative patterns to begin to articulate a new ‘grammar of translation’ for LA’s popular and visual culture into the realm of Architecture.

He is currently collaborating with a visual artist and a musician in a project called, Codex LA Manifesto: There is Not Time…a soft Manifesto for our Epoch. There are three forces that shape and affect all aspects of life: Time, Space and Motion. In the Codex LA Manifesto, the focus is on Time, because Time relates to change. Recently physicists, theorists and philosophers of science have speculated that Time really does not exist, only sequences of interconnected events and actions that provoke change. Mr. Leclerc sees the Codex LA Manifesto as a part of a series of interconnected events that will provoke change.

He lectures throughout the United States and Mexico on art, architecture, border culture, new cosmopolitanisms, (im)migration, and cultural criticism.