Props to Predock Frane and Jorge Pardo

Props to Santa Monica based architects Hadrian Predock and John Frane for their “Luminous Passage” installation, left, this past weekend at Santa Monica’s GLOW. Judging by the buzz at the…

Props to Santa Monica based architects Hadrian Predock and John Frane for their “Luminous Passage” installation, left, this past weekend at Santa Monica’s GLOW. Judging by the buzz at the event, this beautiful, temporary “tunnel” made of slender strands of electroluminescent wire was the popular favorite at the event — if you don’t count the spontaneous performance art provided by the guys spinning on rings, wrapped in bands of glowing tape, and luminous make-up.

Props also to artist-designer Jorge Pardo, for garnering one of this year’s lucrative MacArthur “genius” prizes. Among many projects, Pardo designed the exhilarating Pre-Columbian Art galleries at LACMA (exhilarating in part because they break so confidently from the standard gallery bare white walls), mentioned on this month’s DnA.

One of the attributes cited in recognizing Pardo was his ability to span the worlds of art, design and architecture, a crossover approach that could also be ascribed to Predock Frane, one of a number of LA firms that has chosen to resist being confined to a professional camp, and that was made explicit in the carefully wrought but poetically inclined Luminous Passage.