2003 - 2017
In 2003, Materials & Applications began with the idea that creative experimentation should take place in public space. Since then, M&A has produced more than 20 site-specific installations — each of them inscribed into the landscape of Los Angeles. These installations are always free, unscripted and unsupervised. All of this work happens through a non-commercial, non-profit organization run by volunteer directors, artists, and architects. M&A is only able to continue with the support of our community, friends, and family.
If you support our mission of experimentation and risk-taking made public, please join us as on November 11 as we celebrate our spectacular past and usher in a new vision for M&A’s future.
The Common Field Convening assembles 350+ arts organizers from across the country to share values, and exchange practical resources and knowledge.
Collective Correctives is a new public program presented in the form of an exercise. The exercise invites guests to present their work through the activity of collective editing. Our first guests, On/Off, is a Berlin-based architectural collective founded in 2012 as an experiment in collective practice. Using internet, meetings, emails and Skype, ON/OFF is now based in no-place and works everywhere.
Please join Materials & Applications, Los Angeles Poverty Department and Rosten Woo for a round of mini-golf! “The Back 9” is a playable educational golf course about zoning and redevelopment politics in Downtown LA. Each hole of the course explores a different aspect of zoning and its political implications. The course in particular connects with the planned Downtown Los Angeles 2040 rezoning which will have dramatic effects on Skid Row.
M&A and 2426 SET present Scenarios and Simulated Environments, a one-day presentation by artists Kelly Loudenberg and Richard Wheeler, whose work and research focuses on simulating simulations. From violence to surveillance, their separate artistic practices investigate, re-articulate, and stage the exercises and environments that result from an increasingly militarized world in which new environments are manufactured and new genres of spaces are constructed
Los Angeles Department of City Planning's Bryan Eck and Tal Harari present the City's vision document and plans-in-progress for rezoning downtown with an emphasis on Skid Row. A special opportunity to learn more about what the City has planned so far and give input to the process.
Who does it serve and why should you care? Zoning law regulates land use across the city, and shapes buildings, blocks, and whole neighborhoods. It can be a tool for preservation or for rapid physical and economic development. But how does it work? And why is it so controversial? This hands-on workshop will use games and activities that Rosten Woo has developed with The Center for Urban Pedagogy (CUP) and Dr. Pop to teach zoning fundamentals and explore the technical and ethical questions behind the laws of the land.
In this workshop, we’ll go over some of the fundamental elements, which make up our culturally and socially enforced understanding of property rights in America: property rights as ownership, the mortgage, and property taxation.
What does community control look like? In the new Trump Era, cities like Los Angeles, New York, and San Francisco have rushed to reassure that their governments intend to oppose new restrictive federal immigration policies and to reinforce these cities' status as Sanctuary Cities. But as homeless sweeps and evictions continue to endanger communities of working class and people of color in these cities, we have to ask what does "sanctuary" mean in the era of rampant gentrification?
In and Out of Pictures is the closing event for the installation The Kid Gets out of the Picture. The installation is a collaboration between four practices that were given the taskof re-creating the seminal elements of an English picturesque garden: a hill, a rock, a hut, and trees. The purpose of the symposium is two-fold: first, to propose a sustained parallel between the contemporary architectural moment and early 19th-century landscape design; and second, to sharpen the distinctions between varieties of practice that would include picture-making as a significant component of architectural labor.
From Above | Looking Down is a series of improvised scores that explore how to move with and through comfort. Drawing upon the performers' personal histories with their dance and movement practices and our political present, the piece shifts between the kinetic and the metaphoric, the individual and the collective, searching for ways to offer and receive comfort, care, and support.
The Live Screening features a live screening of Episode 3 of Rad, Bad and Sad, a show about architecture in LA, starring Joseph Adam Dunn and Ben Warwas.
The Reading Group features a seminar-style discussion on the topic of the Picturesque, hosted by M&A, Los Angeles Design Group, and invited participants.
Join M&A and Los Angeles Design Group for Sunday treats at the Oyster Gourmet, where M&A Directors and the architect team will share their favorite moments of the design and exhibition.
The Kid Gets Out of the Picture is a contemporary update on the aesthetic principles of early 19th century English landscape architecture. By the early-nineteenth century, practitioners of the English picturesque had invented a catalog of objects (follys, ha-has, viewpoints) that worked to produce the pictorial effects of landscape painting within real space. Lumps, clumps, and masses made it possible, in a sense, to occupy the picture.
Due to a ridiculous bout of vandalism Friday night, we regret to announce that TURF: A Mini-Golf Project is closing two days early (July 30) and our finale event is postponed.
TURF will transform into an in-stereo mini-golf course on Saturday, July 16th beginning at 7pm. Play a round of putt-putt then take an auditory tour of TURF: A Mini-Golf Project with artist George Jensen for HEAR L.A.: An Audio Document of Los Angeles. Each TURF hole will feature a unique multi-channel sound installation documenting pockets of Los Angeles as they pertain to the individual obstacles and the city.
You love pop up pocket-parks and neighborhood putt-putt. You rock at mini-golf, love the smell of astroturf, and crave the sweet taste of victory. Most importantly, you care about critical and experimental architecture in Los Angeles and want to support M&A's unique public programming.
Join us for our public launch of TURF: A Mini-Golf Project as we tee-off with a night of play. Free rounds of mini-golf, cash bar and the public unveiling of nine miniature projects by our architecture teams! TURF: A Mini-Golf Project explores the meaning of terrain and territory in Los Angeles through the architecture of mini-golf. The mini-golf course becomes a playful trope of the city of Los Angeles, articulated through artificial terrains, winding territories and fantastical architecture.
TURF: A Mini-Golf Project explores the meaning of terrain and territory in Los Angeles through the architecture of mini-golf. The mini-golf course becomes a playful trope of the city of Los Angeles, articulated through artificial terrains, winding territories and fantastical architecture.
The TURF models will travel to four local Los Angeles libraries for exhibition from March 15-April 12, 2016. Each participating library will host one workshop for all ages to explore TURF-related themes.
M&A announces the Spring Preview of TURF: A Mini-Golf Project. The Spring Preview features nine models by the winning architectural obstacles selected for installation in a public and playable mini-golf course set to open in Summer 2016.
M&A and Big City Forum presents “After Hours” a series of monthly gatherings that merge the art, design, and architecture communities of Los Angeles. After Hours invites exceptional individuals to engage in intimate conversations with a select audience.
TURF: A Mini-Golf Project asks architects, designers and artists to design a single architectural obstacle that investigates a contemporary Los Angeles condition—including topics such as drought and lawns, parking and traffic, nature and neighborhoods, housing typologies and identity—in the form of the miniature and the absurd. Both pleasure and obstacle are par for the course.
DOMUS is an experiential, anti-seismic architecture installation that challenges our perception and response to earthquakes in Los Angeles.
Staging Construction is a call for projects that explore construction as both a practice and a performance. Construction can seem a rather dry affair for a public installation. After all, logistics, staging, industry standards, manual labor are not the seductive tools of design. Yet recent attention to participatory design processes, preoccupation with industrial readymades, satirization of DIY building culture, archeology of building sites, and competitions around demolition suggest that our cultural field is attending to these unseen endeavors intrinsic to the production of architecture. Materials & Applications seeks proposals that investigate the act of construction as both an act of building and as a form of industry.