Privacies Infrastructure explores the physical, social, and embodied structures of privacy and privatization in the residential landscape of East Los Angeles by inviting four artists and designers: Besler & Sons, Tanya Brodsky, Fiona Connor, and Gwyneth Shanks, to observe, respond, and activate through public installation, performance, publication, and programming.
The Common Field Convening assembles 350+ arts organizers from across the country to share values, and exchange practical resources and knowledge.
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 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.
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.
DOMUS is an experiential, anti-seismic architecture installation that challenges our perception and response to earthquakes in Los Angeles.
La Cage aux Folles explores the craft of pipe bending in architecture and joins form, computational procedures, and fabrication processes.
Project S’More challenges the utility of the non-functional decorative skins that are prevalent in contemporary parametric architecture with a stunning yet economical confederacy of form and function.
Bloom is a towering shade structure supported by a self-organizing cellular panel system of laser cut custom fabricated sheet metal.
‘Light Frames’, an installation by Los Angeles architect Gail Peter Borden, will transform the exhibition space with two complementary towering structures.
“Squid Capsule”, an installation by the Los Angeles design studio Layer, will transform the outdoor courtyard into a weather island that isolates and amplifies subtle changes in Los Angeles’ summer climate.
The aim of the project "Fat Fringe" is to explore techniques for large scale, high volume paper cutting. A die-cut paper canopy has been developed by participants in a series of weekend workshops led by designers Lisa Little and Emily White of Layer.
Eddy Sykes’ Yakuza Lou was a site-specific installation that uses the relationship between the natural and mechanical notions of landscape, to create a unique garden with pushing and folding topographic surfaces and a robot cloud that floats overhead which created a volume in constant pseudo-natural flux.
This installation hypothesizes that in zero-gravity, one can rotate (in) architecture and treat all elevations as plans – i.e., walls, ceilings and floors. Without gravity, all surfaces can be occupied. In essence, the distinctions between orthographic drawings become obsolete.
Density Fields is an “extreme cantilever” built from aluminum and polypropylene rope will hover over the courtyard of Materials & Applications
A dome-shaped construction of bamboo and industrial felt is an outdoor installation by Danish artist Anja Franke, architect John Southern, and lead fabricator Nick Blake.
Bubbles installation is a spatially adaptable pneumatic environment at an urban scale that consists of large air-bags or “bubbles” that inflate and deflate in reaction to visitors pushing or bumping the lower inflated volume of each pair.
The Here There Be Monsters installation explores the challenges of synchronizing the aesthetics and intrinsic characteristics of natural materials into a built environment completed with the latest computer aided design tools and embedded control system technologies.
The installation is designed to warp the flow of an outdoor space with a feather-weight rendition of “the deadliest force in the Universe” constructed in tinted mylar resembling stained glass.
Serial Departure represents a starting point, with respect to research, towards a responsive and possibly reactive architecture.
Land.Tiles, an articulated contoured topography consisting of 140 concrete cast and textured blocks manufactured through a process of CNC milling and vacuum formed plastic.
Inspired by the wrapped buildings of Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the stretch fabric interiors of Gisela Stromeyer, this facade presented a reverse unveiling of the new architecture and landscape research center, Materials & Applications.
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
Please join Materials & Applications and FOAM DAO for a short workshop that explores alternate financial systems for land ownership.
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? 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.
Join author, Erick Lyle, for an overview of recent radical municipalization and mutual aid projects from around the world that offer inspiration and concrete tactics that might be of use in the new anti-Trump resistance.
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.
Storm Madsen and Gwynn Shanks’s collaborative project presents a series of simple scores that investigate what it means to explore, traverse, and view the body.
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.
Join us Saturday October 15th from 6-9pm for the public opening of The Kid Gets Out of 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.
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”.
We’ve teamed up with De-Lab for a special night of cocktails and (mini golf) clubbing. Join us on July 7th at 6pm for a Director’s Walkthrough with Jia Gu and Courtney Coffman.
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 experimental architecture in Los Angeles and want to support M&A's unique public programming.
Free rounds of mini-golf, cash bar and the public unveiling of nine miniature projects by our architecture teams!
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.
M&A Catalogue Launch for Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful.
VIS-Á-VIS is a four part performance series that activates La Cage aux Folles every Saturday night in August.
Currently on display at the University Art Museum is a retrospective of M&As body of work from 2002 – 2013, which, in an of itself, represents a nexus of some of the most progressive thinkers and makers in the fields of architecture and fine arts design in Los Angeles and beyond. To explore those who’ve helped shape our local landscape with structure, spaces, ideas and objects, we’ll be taking a tour of some of Long Beach’s historically most prominent modern architectural work.
UA has begun to partner with other groups in Los Angeles county who are responding to multiple civic needs by developing community-engaged projects that interpret local environmental infrastructure improvements and include area residents in hands-on experiences that promote deeper understanding in and ownership of their immediate environment.
The public is invited to join the architect Warren Techentin and team as the final coats of paint are put on the “big birdcage” at Ramirez Ironworks in South LA and it is then delivered and reassembled at M&A.
Materials & Applications: Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful: projects, 2002-2013; opens at theUniversity Art Museum at CSULB on January 25th! Installations, models, prototypes, rare images and much more will cover the past, present, and future of M&A with new work from M&A’s blight-busting team, Urban Applications, workshops, and a symposium to unfold over the coming months of the exhibition.
As part of Wildflowering L.A., a native wildflower seed planting initiative conceived of by artist Fritz Haeg, the USPS Eagle Rock Station is one of fifty sites throughout L.A. County that will become home to a diverse, seasonal landscape full of blooms and bugs.
The final S’More workshops are this weekend, 8/10 & 8/11 at M&A. Help us assemble the final panels, shore up the foundation, and install the hardware.
Please join Materials & Applications, Los Angeles Poverty Department and Rosten Woo for a round of mini-golf at The Back 9.