M_A is excited to present Melting Soundscapes, a performance by sound artist Martancho (Martín Velez), inside the Day/Dream installation. Melting Soundscapes is a live, generative sound piece exploring ice as a sonic material, creating intricate textures as it melts, cracks and transforms.

Doors will open to visitors at 7:30 PM. The performance will begin at 8:00 PM.

Melting Soundscapes is free to attend. We will be accepting material drop-offs for HEAT AID during the program, so please bring items to donate! A list of recommended items is here. 

Born in Bogota, Martín Velez (AKA Martancho) lives in the Los Angeles area. Martín’s work combines music, sound, science, and technology into single interactive experiences that aim to cultivate social consciousness and self-awareness within audiences at a personal and environmental level. His installation works have been presented in Los Angeles and Bogota. Martín holds a Bachelor of Music in Music Theory and Sound Engineering from the Pontificia Universidad Javeriana in Bogota and a Master in Fine Arts from the California Institute of the Arts. 

Thank you for joining us for an evening gathering in the shadow of Black — Still on its closing day, September 10th as we raised a toast to our 2023 summer projects and recognized the generosity of our community across LA that is critical to sustaining a vibrant landscape of cultural production in architecture.

Present Continuous, a celebration of our past, present, and ongoing commitment to experiments in public space, featured a taco bar, drinks by Amass, Health-Ade, Topo Chico, and Sanzo, donuts from Trejo’s Donuts, music by Boneless Pizza, ceramics by Vincent Yung, florals from Muddy Heaven, and goodies sponsored by Capsule Parfumerie, Fly by Jing, Plunge, and Vacation.

Photography by Christopher Lee

Many thanks to our Host Committee: Benjamin Ball, Honora Shea, Jia Yi Gu, Mira Henry, and Mimi Zeiger; and our M&A Board of Directors: Abigail Smith, Kimberli Meyer, Mishal Hashmi, Warren Techentin, and V. Mitch McEwen.

This event was ticketed to cover costs and provide support to M_A as we develop our upcoming exhibitions and public programs.

Join us for a celebratory penultimate afternoon at Black — Still among stalls and stands featuring Black-owned art, craft, and cultural businesses.

Vendors include Bless the Theory, Brookai, Creations by Hellena, Epiphany Soaps & Blends, Jade Vine Jewelry, Junie Bees Butta, Lucas Pincer-Flynn, Otts & Kulcha, Paige René Body Essentials, SampleHAUS, and Soul Food Company.

Food is provided by Crenshaw Coffee Co., D. Lo’s Kitchen, and Vurger Guyz with DJ sets by feeemz + Professor X.

RSVPs are encouraged; this event is free and open to the public.

12pm-1:30pm: Workshop with the Center for Restorative Justice Works
2pm-3:30pm: Meditation with Jylani Ma’at

At 12pm, the afternoon kicks off with a workshop presented by the Center For Restorative Justice Works introducing how people at an individual level can become involved in compassionate activism. The workshop will include an introduction to restorative justice, non-violent and healthy communication and conflict resolution, and the importance of community and relationships in the role of healing.

All ages are encouraged to attend this workshop.

Following the workshop, at 2pm, Jylani Ma’at will lead groups in meditation. In Ma’at’s words, Black still*ness is an opportunity to sit in and with many B/blacknesses via an exploration of the senses. Ma’at will guide visitors in exercises of simple embodiment and presence toward a sense of peace and well-being.

There will be multiple meditation sessions, each limited to 10 participants.

These workshops are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

Join us at Black — Still for an evening of ambient and experimental sound from boundary-pushing artists and performers algorythm.code, 6999, and Kelman Duran featuring Harmony Holiday.

Black — Still will be activated with a set of site-specific soundscapes, creating a heightened engagement between visitors and the installation. The interior of the installation will be reserved as a space for guests to immerse themselves in deep listening, with the surrounding courtyard acting as a space for connection and conversation. Together, the space becomes an environment for introspection and communal engagement around the radical possibilities of Black space and sound. 

Doors will open at 4:30pm, and performances will begin at 5:30pm.

RSVPs are encouraged.

Deluge is a music performance series that seeks to explore the depths and outer reaches of ambient, experimental, and avant-garde sound. The series aims to create environments for deep listening and discourse around innovative work with a focus on BIPOC artists, building upon the rich landscape of ambient and experimental music performance in Los Angeles with a socially and critically engaged approach.

12pm-1:30: Storytelling with A New Way of Life
2pm-3:30: Affirmations with BEAM

At noon, A New Way of Life shares their “Testif-i | Storytelling for Change” platform, which empowers formerly incarcerated women and their children to share their truth, trauma, and triumph. This day’s Testif-i session will be offered by moderator Pamela Marshall and by Evie, a member of the 2022 Testif-i cohort. Attendees will first listen to Evie's 2022 Testif-i testimony and then join them in an intimate conversation and learn more about their experiences with mass incarceration and reentry.

As this will be an intimate event, participation is limited to 20. While children are not discouraged, this workshop is best suited for adults. Content may be difficult and emotional, but also empowering and uplifting.

The afternoon continues with the Black Emotional and Mental Health Collective’s (BEAM) “Dear Black People” affirmation project, designed to disrupt public space by providing messages of radical love for Black people. Each affirmation speaks to some of the unique challenges that different Black communities face, and provides reframing dialogue that serves to combat narratives of self-hate rooted in patriarchy, sexism, transphobia, and homophobia. BEAM is, additionally, a resource that may provide guidance on mental health services, events, tools, etc. to support folks on their healing journeys. 

Participation in BEAM’s workshop will be limited to 20.

These events are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

Schedule

12pm-1:30
Yoga with Sonya Om

2pm-3:30
Movement with Ajani Brannum

The afternoon will begin at 12pm with a yoga session for all ages led by Sonya Om. The session will feature classical yoga practice for all levels and include postures, breathing practices, deep relaxation, and meditation. Anyone can join, and modifications will be offered. 

The afternoon concludes 2-3:30pm with a workshop with movement artist Ajani Brannum. What can our bodies teach us about liberation? Better yet, what do they remember about it? In this workshop, we'll talk about, reflect on, and move with "the fullness of [our] depth of feeling" (to quote Audre Lorde). This session will be an invitation to practice right relation with ourselves, other beings, and the land that holds us. 

Brannum’s movement workshop is most appropriate for folks ages 18 and up. Participants are encouraged to bring something to write with and on. This workshop will be limited to 15 participants.

These events are free and open to the public. RSVPs are required.

Join us for the opening of Black – Still.

The afternoon begins as designers Megan Echols and Dana McKinney White of enFOLD Collective present an opening-day talk and walkthrough of the M&A summer installation in the M_A x Craft Contemporary Courtyard. 

The walkthrough is followed by an immersive sound bath experience offered by Dr. Kischa Campbell. By utilizing a number of instruments, including crystal chakra sound bowls, chimes, and drums, we will combine our energies to create an environment of healing.

The sound baths are recommended for adults and kids over the age of 10 (and younger, if they can be still for an extended period of time). Sound bath participants are encouraged to bring a yoga mat/seating cushion, comfortable clothing, and other comforts such as an eye mask.

This event is part of a series centering health and wellness, taking place throughout Summer 2023 in our installation, Black — Still, designed by artists enFOLD Collective. Read more about Black – Still here.

Join M_A for the culmination of the Gathering Tides Dreaming Workshop Series. Through this series of workshop sessions guided by artist Sara Suárez, participants have generated a collective dream journal interweaving our nighttime wanderings, visions, and sensations. This shared archive will shape a collaborative installation by Suárez and architect Regina Teng in the M_A Storefront project space.

In this live group reading of our collective dream journal, we will explore, reflect on, and give voice to this “reservoir” of dreams and create voice recordings that will be included in the sound composition and installation designed by Suárez and Teng. 

The group reading will start at 3:30 pm. Stop by anytime between 3-6 to contribute and discover dreams, create voice recordings, and meet new friends.

The event is free to attend and all are welcome. We would appreciate it if you could RSVP here.

Join M_A for a fourth workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in Spring 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is part of a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023. 

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors. 

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides is a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M&A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

Join M_A for a workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in Spring 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is part of a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023. 

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors. 

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides is a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M_A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

Join M_A for a workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in Spring 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is part of a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023. 

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors. 

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides is a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M&A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

Join us for the Los Angeles launch of Disc Journal’s second issue, which takes up the theme of intimacy.

Commissioned by Disc Journal, the design collective Office Party was invited to develop two events, one hosted in New York City and the other in Los Angeles, that explore opposing models of intimacy unique to two common party environments: the dance and the dinner party. The respectively loud and quiet spaces of each gathering calibrate the terms of interpersonal engagement—how close do you need to be to speak with someone, what kind of body language is appropriate, what can other people see you do, and what can slide unnoticed, masked by the distractions of the party. 

The quiet launch event, hosted at the Materials & Applications Storefront in Los Angeles, converts the noise of the gathering’s Sunset Boulevard venue into the polite silence of a dinner party through the installation of a horizontal, 4-by-8 ft acoustically-engineered table. Sound-absorbing panels on the surface of the dinner table and the surrounding walls deaden ambient noise, bringing the conversation of guests, the sounds of eating, and the percussion of utensils to the fore. The remaining noises are recorded by conspicuously-placed microphones that sit as centerpieces on the table, making diners aware of how their voices and actions might be transmitted across the space of the party.

The remnants of the launch party will be left in place for display in the M_A Storefront, leaving traces of the evening’s activities. Recorded sounds of the event will be made available for remote listening, reactivating the guests’ conversations and discussions of the publication.

Disc explores the entanglements between architecture, media, and technology. Each issue has a different theme, form, and design. Disc is editorially independent and para-institutional.

Office Party is an international research and design collective specializing in the production of temporary events, installations, and exhibitions. With an attention to sustainable material systems and community resource-pooling, the office critically examines the role of parties and similar ephemeral spaces as the origin of complex social and material networks with urban, political, and environmental effects. Office Party further investigates the ways that parties provide insight into the development of architecture as a temporary and responsive mode of space-making through written and editorial work.

Join M_A for a workshop that ventures into the mutable, evolving landscape of sleep and dreaming. Through artist-led dream sharing, collective writing, and conversation, our night-time dreams become an abundant and generative resource that shapes a collaborative installation concept by artist Sara Suárez and designer Regina Teng for the M_A Storefront opening in 2023. 

This 2-hour workshop, guided by Sara Suárez, is the first in a generative series that aims to produce a “reservoir” of dream content. Participants will explore new forms of vulnerability and intimacy that reframe collective dreaming as an open, plastic space that may reveal and cultivate radical modes of relationality, community care, and futurist speculation. The installation that will take shape from this shared archive of images, sensations, symbols, and stories will complement HEAT AID 2023.

With permission, materials generated in this workshop will be incorporated into the physical space, opening in spring 2023, and participants will be credited as project contributors.

Participation is free. This session will take place virtually (via Zoom), and a Zoom link will be circulated following your RSVP.

Gathering Tides I is the first in a series of workshops held in the winter of 2022-2023. These workshops will explore interconnectivities and relationalities vis a vis dream-sharing workshops, each uniquely sited across Los Angeles or online. An installation at the M&A Storefront will emerge from the collection of shared dreams. This orientation around dreaming situates the M_A Storefront in the past, present, and future, all the while reflecting on the necessity of resource-sharing, mutual aid, and material reuse as embodied by its coexistence in the space with HEAT AID.

Sara Suárez is a filmmaker and interdisciplinary artist working across experimental film, sound composition and social practice, interested in sensory and spatial perception, shared spaces and landscapes, collective memory, and co-creative processes. 

Her works include visual and sonic landscape studies that incorporate audio collage, electronic composition, and analog film processes. She is currently developing a collection of work considering the physical and social experiences of darkness, sleep, and dreaming, and the forces that degrade these essential needs. Her work has been featured by LA Filmforum, Slamdance, Alchemy Film Festival, ICDOCS, Chicago Underground Film Festival and other venues. 

Suárez is also the co-founder of virtual care lab, an interdisciplinary project platform and creative community interrogating issues of care, solidarity, co-creation, and trust in virtual space. She completed her MFA at CalArts and works in Los Angeles.

Regina Teng is an architectural designer and founding principal of GINAA. Her work focuses on the atmospheric intersections of environment, nature, and culture. A native Angeleno, she has worked and exhibited internationally, including in Tokyo, Sydney, Zurich, Shanghai and the UK. Regina’s current research examines the potential for optic caustics, the reflection, refraction, and projection of light through materials, to operate as part of a passive thermal strategy.

She is also Adjunct Assistant Professor at Columbia University GSAPP, and has taught previously at USC, UCLA, and Princeton University. 

Materials & Applications is happy to announce the public launch of M&A Radio, Los Angeles’ only terrestrial architecture radio program, on 96.7 KGAP-LP FM. We are now broadcasting on 96.7 KGAP-LP FM and streaming online, here.

M&A Architecture Radio publishes audio issues of contributions --podcast episodes, field recordings, interviews, experiments, etc-- about the built environment. We publish two issues on air each year, with each broadcasting via 96.7 KGAP from our terrestrial tower in Burbank for six months out of the year. Over the air, these works are played on a random loop, so listeners encounter found and coincidental audio. Listeners may also tune in from this website to find a curated archive of projects that we are broadcasting via our radio tower, as well as works that are exclusive to our website due to profane content.

About K-GAP 96.7

KGAP (96.7 FM) is an architecture radio station run by Materials & Applications and broadcasting from the hills of Burbank, California. KGAP partners with Los Angeles-based radio network Lookout FM to share critical and curated programming centering on architecture, art, and critical practices.  

About Lookout FM 

LOOKOUT FM is a new independent FM radio network in Los Angeles. Broadcasting in Burbank on 96.7FM KGAP and Hollywood on 99.1FM KZUT, LOOKOUT FM is an observatory: curated audio programming with a wide outlook: varied perspectives on the world expressed through music, documentaries, lectures, poetry, and discussion.  Partnered with voices from the indigenous community, the music community, the arts community, and the academic community, LOOKOUT FM offers long-term perspectives on that which lasts: nature, and the arts.

On the occasion of Veil Craft, Materials & Applications with Craft Contemporary presents a conversation between practitioners across art and architecture on the topic of textiles and fibers. Veil Craft draws upon the materiality of a city under constant construction, transforming the debris netting that adorns building sites into a meditative pocket park that gestures toward cultures of maintenance, histories of gendered labor, and the presentation of the body. Threads convenes a community formed through practices committed to woven, soft, tactile material to explore connections between and beyond.

PARTICIPANTS

Ahree Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist working in video, new media, and textiles. Lee received her BA from Yale University in English literature and a MFA in graphic design from Yale School of Art. Her commissions include the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco, Los Angeles Municipal Art Gallery, the 01SJ Biennial, the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art, and the Sundance Channel. Her honors include an artist residency at Santa Fe Art Institute and a Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Award nomination, and her work has been written about in Hyperallergic, Metropolis, and Fast Company.

Casey Baden is a multidisciplinary artist working with textiles, text, natural dye, sun-lit photographic exposures, painting, weaving, clay, and installation. Born and raised in Houston, TX, she completed her BFA at New York University, 2014, and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Combing craft (the handmade, embodied knowledge, enduring labor) with figuration, intimate personal experience, and the domestic, Baden attempts to foster the critical space of emotion and create opportunities for immersion and embodiment. Presently she is the co-founder of an artist-run space and arts fabrication project called Full Service Creative and the co-founder of an up-and-coming fiber resource center, Textile Resource LA.

Current Interests is a Los Angeles-based architectural design studio founded by Matthew Au and Mira Henry. As a creative collaboration, Current Interests’ built work is grounded in notions of material specificity, color relationships, assembly details, and an engagement in critical cultural thinking. Matthew and Mira are design faculty at Southern California Institute for Architecture and have visiting faculty appointments at Princeton University and Harvard Graduate School of Design.

Felecia Davis’ work in computational textiles questions how we live as she re-imagines how we might use textiles in our daily lives and in architecture. Computational textiles are textiles that respond to cues in the environment or use the changeable properties of the material itself to communicate information, thereby transforming how we communicate, socialize, and use space. Davis is interested in developing computational methods and designs in relation to specific bodies in specific places, engaging specific social, cultural, and political constructions.

Figure is a San Francisco-based architecture collective led by James Leng and Jennifer Ly, RA. Their work explores relationships between art, architecture, and community. Their current interests include unexpected materials, dollhouses, and rocks. James and Jennifer received their architectural education from Harvard Graduate School of Design and the University of California, Berkeley. They have received numerous fellowships and awards, and have been published in The Architectural Review, Log, and CLOG, among others. They are also lecturers at UC Berkeley.

Minga Opazo is a fourth-generation textile crafter who explores the relationship between climate change, contemporary textile production, and Chilean textile history and design. Born in Chile, Minga immigrated to Los Angeles at the age of 16. She completed her BFA at University of California, Berkeley in 2016 and her MFA at California Institute of the Arts, 2020. Opazo has exhibited works internationally including at the Museum of Visual Art, Santiago, Chile, CAM Gallery, ACRE, the Architectural Foundation of Santa Barbara, MAK Center for Art and Architecture, and CalArts. She has been awarded various residencies including at the Banff Centre, ACRE, Haystack Mountain School of Craft, The REEF, Anderson Ranch Art Center, and MASS MoCA. She recently had her work published in Artforum and Lumzine.

A unionization workshop with The Architecture Lobby and the MOCA Union

The last year has been a strange one for workers. Will there be layoffs? What is really expected of us? Are we being treated equitably? Can we have a say? Crisis can reveal and make more urgent the questions we’ve had all along.

Even before the global pandemic, workers in building and creative industries struggled to pay off student debt, support their families, and maintain their own well-being. A professional culture that celebrates genius and undervalues labor complicates matters. What can be achieved when we recognize that we are all part of the same, precarious labor force?

M&A celebrates May Day this month by learning about unions: what they are, how to establish your own, and who they empower. Join us for a workshop with Architecture Lobby organizers Keefer Dunn and Shota Vashakmadze, plus a presentation from Olivia Leiter of the MOCA Union. Together we’ll work through the pragmatics and aspirations of labor organizing for architects, students, and scholars alike.

SPEAKERS

Keefer Dunn is a licensed architect based in Chicago, Illinois. He is a sole practitioner, an adjunct assistant professor at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the host of a radio show about architecture and politics called Buildings on Air. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby and has previously served as the group’s National Organizer.

Olivia Leiter is an artist living in Los Angeles. She has had recent screenings and exhibitions at the California Museum of Photography, Riverside, Echo Park Film Center, Los Angeles, and Human Resources, Los Angeles. She is on the organizing committee of the MOCA Union.

Shota Vashakmadze is a PhD student at UCLA and an organizer with UAW 2865, a union representing 19,000 student workers in the University of California system. He is a member of the Architecture Lobby and helps coordinate its unionization working group.

At Work is the first event of Material Realities, a series of workshops and conversations about the positions we hold within a multitude of material circumstances. While we may be "architects" and "designers," we are also workers, tenants, kin, and allies. Material Realities explores our intersectional subjectivities to understand how we may collectively better our conditions.

Material Realities: At Work was organized by Aubrey Bauer, Kate Yeh Chiu, Mateus Comparato, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, and Dana McKinney.

In collaboration with the SCI-Arc Student Union, Why Not Us? will explore non-traditional and critical modes of architectural practice and organizing, and speculate on how architecture can learn from mutual aid. The workshop is oriented towards identifying harmful systems present in traditional practices and internships, and will serve as a platform to brainstorm how students can instead build their own mutual aid networks and social infrastructures to flatten leadership in architectural production.

Are you a student organizer interested in participating? Email info@materialsandapplications.org for more info.

About STUN

The SCI-Arc Student Union (STUN) is a student-led organization at the Southern California Institute of Architecture. They administer student activities and help to support the student community at SCI-Arc by funding and organizing student events, built work, exhibitions, and publications. STUN organizes a monthly gathering open to the entire school that allows the SCI-Arc community to discuss and meet informally each week called Fridays@5, of which this program will be a part of.

Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

The architectural profession has long understood itself as a service providing for society’s most basic needs—shelter, community. In practice, the architects’ work is often structured by hierarchy and profit, filtered through contracts and laws. As architects, we have failed to erect the most basic systems of care for our own collective needs, and instead have invested in a service profession premised on harmful systems, including excessive student debt, transactional service models, exploitative labor conditions, and an extractive economy dedicated to clients holding the highest capital. When collective needs aren't being met, what can we do to address them now? 

In conversation with educator and activist Dean Spade, we will consider how mutual aid can challenge the organizational logic of professional practice. These networks focus on immediate forms of care rather than categorical solutions. What might architecture gain by moving away from transaction and toward care? Join us in reading and discussing a short chapter of Spade’s forthcoming book, Mutual Aid: Building Solidarity During This Crisis (and the next), with the author and with each other. Register now to receive future updates, materials, and resource guides.

BIO

Dean Spade has been working to build queer and trans liberation based in racial and economic justice for the past two decades. He works as an Associate Professor at Seattle University School of Law. Dean’s new book is forthcoming from Verso Press in October, 2020.

Registration for this Event is Closed. Check out the recording of the session below!

Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

Shade is a crucial yet criminalized resource in Los Angeles. City sidewalks, parks, bus stops, freeway underpasses, and the LA River are all sites in which the presence of shade is problematized and often explicitly made illegal. Motivations for criminalizing shade range from bureaucratic mismanagement to surveillance to issues of profit and beyond. More often than not, however, the lack of shade is a situational consequence with serious repercussions. Facing rising temperatures and impending heat waves, LA residents don't have many options for escaping the deadly heat. The lack of shade affects so many of us — walkers, bikers, and runners; children playing in parks; city transit takers; residents who are housed and those experiencing homelessness — and yet by no means does the illegalization of shade affect us all equally. Join us for six stories about shade and its criminalization in Los Angeles. Moderated by Sam Bloch, this session will address the complications of heat and shade through the topics of homelessness, the LA River, street vending, tree canopies, and public transportation. Speakers include Genevieve Liang from SELAH, Mark Vallianantos from LA Metro, Jessica Henson from LA River Project, and Lyric Kelkar from Inclusive Action, among others.

SPEAKERS

Sam Bloch is a journalist in New York. A staff writer at The Counter, a nonprofit newsroom, he has also written for The New York Times, L.A. Weekly, Art in America, CityLab, Artnet News and others. He is currently at work on his first book, a work of narrative nonfiction for Random House that expands upon his Places Journal article "Shade." The book will be a surprising, urgent exploration of this underappreciated natural resource, which reveals deep inequalities in society and just might hold the key to mitigating climate change and make living with it bearable in the meantime. A graduate of the Columbia Journalism School, he used to live in one of Los Angeles’s shadiest neighborhoods.

Genevieve Liang is a clean technology strategist whose primary work focuses on decarbonizing the primary industrial sectors contributing to climate change. Three and half years ago, she began a deep dive into the homeless services ecosystem in Los Angeles via volunteer roles as executive director of Cardborigami, an emergency shelter product nonprofit; serving on the board of the SELAH Neighborhood Homeless Coalition; and as a co-chair of her neighborhood council's housing and homelessness committee. Along the same vein as the community-scale, distributed energy resource projects that she has led commercial teams in realizing, she believes that geographically distributed and locally originated resources need to be intentionally integrated into the framework of local social services delivery.

Jessica Henson is a landscape architect at OLIN where she is currently the project manager for the 2020 Los Angeles County LA River Master Plan. At OLIN she has developed numerous planning and design projects that seek to create socially and environmentally resilient infrastructure including the LA River Index and the Rio Hondo Confluence Area Project. Jessica’s other significant projects include the SELA Cultural Center, Chicago’s Vista and Willis Towers, a new residential precinct at the University of Washington in Seattle, and the new U.S. Embassies in London and Brasilia. Jessica teaches at the University of Southern California and is the co-editor of the recent book Fresh Water: Design Research for Inland Water Territories.

John Yi is the Executive Director of Los Angeles Walks. Prior to joining LA Walks in 2019, John was the Advocacy Director for the American Lung Association in California, where he worked on strong tobacco control and air quality policies. At the Lung Association, John also served as a lead organizer by training tobacco control coalitions throughout the state. He helped bring smoke-free ordinances to over a dozen different cities, fighting back against secondhand smoke and Big Tobacco's efforts to target low-income and communities of color. John also served as the interim National Director for Parent Revolution, an education and social justice non-profit. In this role he led parent organizing campaigns in Texas, Oklahoma, Indiana, and Ohio. He received his master's degree at Georgetown University and his bachelor's degree at the University of Michigan. He is a brother of Pi Alpha Phi, speaks Korean and Russian, and loves to cook.

Kara Holekamp is a landscape designer and project manager at Terremoto. She earned a Master of Landscape Architecture from The University of Texas at Austin and has a background in Geography. Since moving to Los Angeles, she has had the opportunity to work on a variety of project types, including high-end residential, commercial, and office spaces. As part of the Terremoto team, she has taken on several adventurous projects and is inspired daily by her radically talented team. Terremoto is a ‘formally and conceptually ambitious’ landscape architecture studio with offices in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California.

Lyric Kelkar is a Senior Associate of Policy and Research at Inclusive Action for the City, where she leads policy advocacy for better access to government systems and protections for underserved communities across LA. Her current projects include moving work forward for the LA Street Vendor Campaign, Healthy LA Coalition, and SPARCC LA table. Pulling from her Masters in Design and Urban Ecologies, she applies a design-thinking approach to research social challenges in the built environment and drives equitable policy and community development solutions to counteract exclusion within the field of urban planning.

Mark Vallianatos is Executive Officer in the Office of Extraordinary Innovation at LA Metro, where he works to implement the agency's strategic plan and staffs its COVID-19 recovery task force. Mark previously taught urban and environmental policy at Occidental College, co-founded Abundant Housing LA, and serves on the City of LA's zoning advisory committee. He is interested in the policy history of LA 'building blocks' like food trucks, single-family houses and low-rise apartments. Mark is the co-author of The Next Los Angeles: the Struggle for a Livable City. He received his BA and JD from the University of Virginia.

Registration for this Event is Closed. Check out the recording of the session below!

Heat Aid was organized with M&A Program Board members Aubrey Bauer, Mateus Comparato, Gary Riichirō Fox, Jia Yi Gu, Jesse Hammer, Alyssa Lopez, Kendall Mann, Dana McKinney, and Sage Roebuck

6° is a single-day virtual symposium bringing together six L.A. non-profit art organizations. Through dynamic, individually presented programs from the viewpoint of each institution, we aim to begin a collective and open conversation addressing how to dismantle and identify systemic racial inequalities in the art world. Where can we start?

Find more details at 6degrees.la and tune in Saturday, September 19, 2020 from 10 AM - 5 PM PST!

6° Program:
10 AM – Materials & Applications Organizing as Architectural Labor
11 AM – Art + Practice Making L.A. Arts Education More Equitable
12 PM – NAVEL This Must Be The Place: Practicing Divestment, Investment, and Sharing Power
2 PM – The Underground Museum Building Community Within Our Community
3 PM – Craft Contemporary To the Past, Towards the Future 
4 PM – ICA LA Support for Coalitions / Coalitions for Support

All times PST and subject to change due to live events. Visit 6degrees.la for all the details!

Real estate development in the United States has long been driven by the qualitative: by rules of thumb, insider knowledge, and the gut instinct of risk-taking developers. All that is changing in the age of “big data”. Real estate sales data, amounting to hundreds of millions of data points each year, is inducing a paradigm shift in construction and development comparable to that currently sweeping the sciences. This avalanche of numbers has made the fortunes of tech giants such as Zillow and Redfin, and is reorienting present practice in the development industry towards computational methods. Design and construction teams are following suit, using real estate sales data as the basis for optimizing building characteristics.  

This presentation will explore the rise of “big data” in the real estate development and construction industries; will examine the ways in which this data is being put to use by investors, developers, construction companies and design teams today; and will survey the emerging field of “prop tech”: the loose network of research labs, startups, coders, and entrepreneurial academics searching for innovative uses for this new source of information.

Tommy Shay Hill is an urban planning scholar and PhD candidate at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He holds a Masters in Urban Planning from Harvard and a B.A. in Urban Studies from Columbia University. Tommy’s current research focuses on the use and misuse of “big data” for the built environment; “smart city” technologies; and the history, theory and practice of urban simulation. Tommy’s professional background is in data analytics for the construction and real estate development industry in New York City. Tommy’s work has been published in the Journal of Urban History, Environmental Research Letters, and Metropole.

About Staging Construction

Staging Construction is an exhibition and public program by Materials & Applications that explores construction as both practice and performance. The winter program includes Scoring, Building, an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside performances, lectures and participatory workshops by Neil Denari, Alex Maymind, Tommy Hill, and yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu with support from the Contemporary Council of M&A (CCMA).

Recycling Day is an event centered on collective building and sharing. Operating in the space between a gravel pile and a building, yyyy-mm-dd presents a new instantiation of their ongoing research into textile forms that become structural when filled with loose aggregate. Sand, gravel, and small rocks account for 75% of concrete's composition, and their binding, via cement, yields 8% of total annual global carbon emissions. As the dissolution of twentieth-century structures reminds us of architecture's inclination to nonetheless settle, Recycling Day proposes alternative modes of gathering through (and within) a temporary assemblage of loose matter.

Drop-in participatory workshop on Saturday, April 11. RSVP to info@materialsandapplications.org for location and time. 

yyyy-mm-dd ︎ is a collaborative project of Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin.

About Staging Construction

Staging Construction is an exhibition and public program by Materials & Applications that explores construction as both practice and performance. The winter program includes Scoring, Building, an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside performances, lectures and participatory workshops by Neil Denari, Alex Maymind, Tommy Hill, and yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu with support from the Contemporary Council of M&A (CCMA).

The history of shotcrete's aesthetic and technical progress points to two sharply contrasting ideologies: "radical" architects working directly with the material in a handicraft mode that often necessitates extreme methods to produce the formlessness they had envisioned, what could be called a resistance to standardization; and architects who mobilized shotcrete as a technical readymade and as an infrastructural material as an unlikely means to achieve plasticity. This presentation looks at similarities and convergences between these two groups, using the material history of shotcrete as a lens through which to ask questions about construction’s durational aspects and potential effects on experimentation today.

Alex Maymind (b. Riga, Latvia, 1984) is a designer, teacher, and PhD candidate in history and theory of architecture at the University of California, Los Angeles. He holds a Master of Architecture degree from Yale University School of Architecture, and a B.S in Architecture from Ohio State University’s Knowlton School of Architecture. He has taught architecture in various roles at SCI-Arc, UCLA, University of Michigan, Cornell University, and Yale University. His writing, ranging from a genealogy of the free section to an exploration of globalization’s clichés, has appeared in a number of journals including Log, Pidgin, Thresholds, Offramp, Dimensions, and Clog. His work has been exhibited in Rome, New York City, Chicago, Cambridge, Ann Arbor, and Los Angeles.

About Staging Construction

Staging Construction is an exhibition and public program by Materials & Applications that explores construction as both practice and performance. The winter program includes Scoring, Building, an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside performances, lectures and participatory workshops by Neil Denari, Alex Maymind, Tommy Hill, and yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu with support from the Contemporary Council of M_A (CCMA).

Scoring, Building is a new installation by architect Michelle JaJa Chang that investigates architecture as allographic work. The installation is scored in three recursive “iterations”, each one accompanied by a public program.

Iteration III (of III) takes place on February 29th, 7pm - 9pm at the Mackey Apartments with a closing party. Iteration III will host the public program The garage will do by MAK Architect-in-Residence Jakob Sellaoui.

Iteration III | The garage will do
The garage will do is a spatial intervention in the backyard space of the Mackey Apartments by current architect-in-residence Jakob Sellaoui, with invited talks by LA-based artists, architects and writers. The project draws upon a quote by Frank Lloyd Wright referring to R.M. Schindler’s buildings as well-designed, but badly executed. He nevertheless concludes that so far none have fallen down. 

The intervention reassesses assumptions surrounding the way things are made— or ought to be made. Departing from constructional shortcomings, not-quite solutions and average arrangements, the proposal explores crudeness and make-do, not as lack of finesse or quality, but rather as a form of resilience and robustness— perhaps not because they are ‘well made’, but because they are just ‘good enough’. 

In a series of talks, the invited participants are asked to contribute stories that mark out a way of rethinking the notion of deficiency not as a disadvantage, but possibly as a virtue. Making a building or telling a story is never an exact or definite process. Details might be left out and characters forgotten. Things get lost in translation. Nevertheless they persist. At least most of the time.

About the Project

Scoring, Building is a new installation by architect Michelle JaJa Chang that investigates architecture as allographic work. The project is a temporary and durational intervention in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments. The project proposes an architectural instantiation from the basis of a score, written by the architect, which is then translated into instructions for the construction of the installation itself. The project is action-based, slowing down and reframing the activities of conventional drywall construction to focus on-site preparation (marking); framing construction (stacking, ordering, assembling), and drywall installation (scoring, affixing, finishing). The installation is scored in three recursive “iterations”, each one accompanied by a public program in order to unpack the ideas of the physical piece. Alongside the physical installation, the project is distributed through a live audio feed of the on-site construction and documentary photography by Tag Cristof. Scoring, Building is commissioned by Materials & Applications as the winning project of an open call for projects in 2018 and is produced in partnership with the Mak Center for Art and Architecture.

The installation is scored in three recursive “iterations”, each one accompanied by a public program:

Iteration I takes place on February 1, 7pm - 9pm with guest appearance and electronic music performance by Neil Denari.

Iteration II takes place on February 15, 7pm - 9pm in conversation with CCMA. 

Iteration III takes place on February 29 with a closing party. 

On Scoring: The score is written from the language of material specification guidelines, a techno-material language of standardized material products. Such language challenges the architectural capacity for invention as well as control. For example, dimensional measurement is always described in the language of product units (i.e. “two panels” instead of “eight feet by eight feet”). While dimensions offer a one-to-one translation between numbers, such language is open to wider interpretation when it comes to manual labor, which will undergo loss or change depending on the experience and skill of its executor. The project aims to unpack the ways product standards influence legibility and form with their application procedures. The score itself will be presented on-site in the form of a self-published booklet (11”x17” bi-folded), with further information about the program. 

On Building: Scoring, Building operates with a standard building system, wood framing and sheathing, and extends the duration of the building act by repeating a set of instructions for a set length of time. Over the duration of the two months, the architect, contractor team, and volunteer group will work together to execute this series of instructions that are translated from the score. Unlike traditional architectural drawings (i.e. specifications), which tend to describe the arrangement of materials in physical space, the scores devised by Chang emphasize the activities of manual labor itself, which is tied to the more durational aspects of time, transition, and perhaps even skill.   

About Michelle JaJa Chang

Michelle Chang directs JaJa Co and teaches architectural design. She founded her independent practice in 2014 after working in offices in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Her design work experiments with the overlaps between and among film, installation, music, teaching, and building.

Chang holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD and a Bachelor of Arts in international relations from Johns Hopkins University. She is a former MacDowell Colony Fellow, Wortham Fellow, and a recipient of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers.

In her research, Chang studies the techniques and histories of architectural representation. Specifically, she investigates how optics, digital media, and modes of cultural production influence translations between design and building. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD and previously taught at Rice, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and Northeastern University.

About Staging Construction

Staging Construction, an exhibition and public program by Materials & Applications that explores construction as both practice and performance. The winter program includes Scoring, Building, an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside performances, lectures and participatory workshops by Neil Denari, Alex Maymind, Tommy Hill, and yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu with support from the Contemporary Council of M_A (CCMA). Special thanks to the Mak Center for Art and Architecture for their generous support and partnership of the project.

Scoring, Building is a new installation by architect Michelle JaJa Chang that investigates architecture as allographic work. The installation is scored in three recursive “iterations”, each one accompanied by a public program.

Iteration II (of III) takes place on February 15th, 7pm - 9pm at the Mackey Apartments with a special program by CCMA.

About the Project

Scoring, Building is a new installation by architect Michelle JaJa Chang that investigates architecture as allographic work. The project is a temporary and durational intervention in the courtyard of the Mackey Apartments. The project proposes an architectural instantiation from the basis of a score, written by the architect, which is then translated into instructions for the construction of the installation itself. The project is action-based, slowing down and reframing the activities of conventional drywall construction to focus on-site preparation (marking); framing construction (stacking, ordering, assembling), and drywall installation (scoring, affixing, finishing). The installation is scored in three recursive “iterations”, each one accompanied by a public program in order to unpack the ideas of the physical piece. Alongside the physical installation, the project is distributed through a live audio feed of the on-site construction and documentary photography by Tag Cristof. Scoring, Building is commissioned by Materials & Applications as the winning project of an open call for projects in 2018 and is produced in partnership with the Mak Center for Art and Architecture.

The installation is scored in three recursive “iterations”, each one accompanied by a public program:

Iteration I takes place on February 1, 7pm - 9pm with guest appearance and electronic music performance by Neil Denari.

Iteration II takes place on February 15, 7pm - 9pm in conversation with CCMA. 

Iteration III takes place on February 29 with a closing party. 

On Scoring: The score is written from the language of material specification guidelines, a techno-material language of standardized material products. Such language challenges the architectural capacity for invention as well as control. For example, dimensional measurement is always described in the language of product units (i.e. “two panels” instead of “eight feet by eight feet”). While dimensions offer a one-to-one translation between numbers, such language is open to wider interpretation when it comes to manual labor, which will undergo loss or change depending on the experience and skill of its executor. The project aims to unpack the ways product standards influence legibility and form with their application procedures. The score itself will be presented on-site in the form of a self-published booklet (11”x17” bi-folded), with further information about the program. 

On Building: Scoring, Building operates with a standard building system, wood framing and sheathing, and extends the duration of the building act by repeating a set of instructions for a set length of time. Over the duration of the two months, the architect, contractor team, and volunteer group will work together to execute this series of instructions that are translated from the score. Unlike traditional architectural drawings (i.e. specifications), which tend to describe the arrangement of materials in physical space, the scores devised by Chang emphasize the activities of manual labor itself, which is tied to the more durational aspects of time, transition, and perhaps even skill.   

About Michelle JaJa Chang

Michelle Chang directs JaJa Co and teaches architectural design. She founded her independent practice in 2014 after working in offices in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Her design work experiments with the overlaps between and among film, installation, music, teaching, and building.

Chang holds a Master of Architecture from Harvard GSD and a Bachelor of Arts in international relations from Johns Hopkins University. She is a former MacDowell Colony Fellow, Wortham Fellow, and a recipient of the Architectural League Prize for Young Architects + Designers.

In her research, Chang studies the techniques and histories of architectural representation. Specifically, she investigates how optics, digital media, and modes of cultural production influence translations between design and building. She is currently an Assistant Professor of Architecture at Harvard GSD and previously taught at Rice, UC Berkeley, California College of the Arts, and Northeastern University.

About Staging Construction

Staging Construction, an exhibition and public program by Materials & Applications that explores construction as both practice and performance. The winter program includes Scoring, Building, an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside performances, lectures and participatory workshops by Neil Denari, Alex Maymind, Tommy Hill, and yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu with support from the Contemporary Council of M_A (CCMA). Special thanks to the Mak Center for Art and Architecture for their generous support and partnership of the project.