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).