In a new exhibit, Wayne Thom’s photographs examine buildings as ‘functional sculptures’

Upon entering the USC Pacific Asia Museum, you’re met with the most unwieldy contraption of a camera, a Sinar 4x5 C-series, once helmed by a man who documented one of the most iconic periods of architecture in California. “This decade we’re in right now marks the 50th anniversary of the 1970s, which is the period Late Modernism is really coming to the fore,” says Emily Bills, architecture historian and the exhibit’s curator. The first room celebrates some of Thom’s earliest works of the late 1960s, which were commissioned by former dean of USC School of Architecture and “a doyen of California Modernism,” A. Quincy Jones. “But Wayne considers the developing process the heart of photography as an art.” “Mirror glass building is a nonexistent building,” Thom asserts in one of the exhibit’s video clips. “The time period, historically, is also quite significant in terms of transitioning urban landscapes.” While the exhibit commemorates the serpentine arches of the Arena at the Anaheim Convention Center, the way natural light illuminates the surface of the Bonaventure Hotel interior’s soft edges, and the Walt Disney Concert Hall adorned by a crescendo of steel — and other Late Modern works throughout the western United States — the combined efforts of everyone involved presents a larger conversation.