Strat Coffman & Adam Miller, A Box for Hiding in Plain View, 2025. Courtesy of Strat Coffman & Adam Miller.
Trade Safe Chastity Box is an interactive architectural device that serves as an event platform, open August 7 - October 2, 2025, at the Materials & Applications Storefront in Los Angeles. The Box invites visitors to play with various intimacies while on public display, remixing architectures of surveillance.
Los Angeles is a city built to watch itself. The imaged body–idealized, fragmented, glowing—circulates endlessly on screens from the theater to the security control room. Beyond the screen, the city can be a hard place for the irl body. We must navigate a landscape engineered to repel and police. Defensive design structures public experience: Benches with spikes. Empty lots fenced off. Cameras that pierce everywhere.
Strat Coffman & Adam Miller, Cameras That Don’t Report, 2025. Courtesy of Strat Coffman & Adam Miller.
Trade Safe Chastity Box mimics these logics of surveillance and alienation. But instead of policing the body, the installation invites the body in—to flicker on a screen, to bump into another pulse. Surveillance devices typically deployed to police our public places—like CCTV cameras, floodlights, peepholes, and safety mirrors—are instead deployed as media for collective hiding and revealing, transforming M&A’s street-facing venue into a performative alleyway that gestures toward the city’s buried histories of cruising, of glances traded in plain view. Within Trade Safe Chastity Box, bodies are neither surveilled nor a spectacle. Visitors perform for cameras that don’t report, only reflect—they flicker and glitch, uncontainable and alive to each other.
Strat Coffman & Adam Miller, A Body Uncontainable, 2025. Courtesy of Strat Coffman & Adam Miller.
The installation serves as a dynamic set piece for a series of public programs that engage topics of queer identity, public space, and contemporary politics, in partnership with regional cultural organizations.
Summoning ghosts of intimacy’s past, the Box will recontextualize and feature selected archival materials from significant local archives of queer history. Please stay tuned for program announcements.
All events at the Box, taking place between August 7 and October 2, will be free and open to the public. The Box is additionally open by appointment.
Strat Coffman is an architectural designer and researcher who examines how design discourses, codes, and materials train the body, and how the embodied subject in turn agitates this training. Their work traverses built and speculative projects of various scales, from body furniture to scenic design to architectural installations. They currently practice in Los Angeles and have taught at the University of Southern California School of Architecture and the University of Michigan. They were the 2022-2024 Architecture Fellow at University of Michigan and hold a Master of Architecture from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they were awarded the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Medal. They are a recipient of the 2024 Architectural League Prize and their work has appeared at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Log, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Goethe Institut.
Adam Barrett Miller is an architectural designer and educator whose work explores taste, power, and embodiment with application to and on the margins of architecture. Adam’s work invites play and transgression across disciplinary boundaries and scales. Adam directs PNEU STARS and teaches architecture at UC Berkeley, holding an M.Arch from UC Berkeley, and B.A.'s from Cornell University. From 2021–2023, Adam was the Muschenheim Fellow at the University of Michigan and twice held the Race & Gender in the Built Environment Fellowship at UT Austin. Since 2014, Adam has led stage design for the Mosswood Meltdown music festival hosted by John Waters in Oakland, CA. Adam practices in Oakland with residential projects under permit. Recently completed work includes interaction design for Lawrence Hall of Science The Future of Food exhibition; Under Pressure, an immersive inflatable at Woodbury University; and I Want to Be a Person, a room-scale automata and extended reality piece at University of Michigan.