All Programs
M_A Catalogue Release Party
6:00PM Public Discussion with Benjamin Ball, Anthony Carfello, Jimenez Lai, Ingallil Wahlroos-Ritter and Mimi Zeiger [Moderator] with Jenna Dider, Jia Gu and Courtney Coffmann
7:00PM Summer Dance Party DJ set by Jasmin Blasco, Dublab and COCO&SVELT
The M_A Catalogue Launch Party celebrates the publication of Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful, a collection of M_A’s past twelve years of projects and installations, produced with the University Art Museum, CSULB. Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful covers over a decade of art and architecture experiments, workshops, parties and performances at Materials & Applications, with special focus on the installations produced by M_A collaborators Ball & Nogues, Jimenez Lai, Layer LA, PATTERNS, Gail Borden, Doris Sung, and founding director, Jenna Didier and director emeritus Oliver Hess. The release party will be the first time the M_A catalogue will be made available to the public.
Panel Discussion on Architecture on Exhibition with Benjamin Ball, Anthony Carfello, Jimenez Lai, Ingallil Wahlroos-Ritter and Mimi Zeiger [Moderator] with Jenna Dider, Jia Gu and Courtney Coffmann
Given that exhibition-making is also a practice, how does the architectural work become transformed by the exhibition? How and why do we exhibit architecture? How do we extend possibilities of publicness in an architect’s work with the work as foreground? How can we inscribe an interaction between a “public” and architects that is different than the container forms we already know (exhibitions, monographs, etc)? In a public conversation, each of the speakers speakers explore their own roles related to exhibition-making, whether in categorical divides (“artist," curator, instigator) or through diverse genres (installation, exhibition as container, total environments, public platform).
Sponsored by HAN Spirits.
Phalanstery Module
This installation grew from the hypothesis 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. To this end, the installation is a large, constantly rotating structure which visitors can approach and use differently every time.
exhibition images
The installation is inspired by a comic book Lai created to assert commentaries regarding the Broadacre City– a 1932 Frank Lloyd Wright vision of a Utopian city where each family own a one-acre agrarian plot and commutes by private automobile. Wright never really took into account that space and natural resources are limited. We witness such an impact today. Wealthier citizens have fled cities for sprawling suburban sub-divisions. Downtown cores are left to the poor, and cities are becoming increasingly ineffective in controlling energy consumption. Lai takes Broadacre City to outer space. He signifies the finite resources by flipping it on its side and making it an Ark. "It is a world where every man [gets] a dwelling unit and every man [gets] a pointlessly boring job… until the citizen dies.”
Phalanstery Module was designed by Jimenez Lai, a designer, a comic book author and currently is the LeFevre Fellow in the Knowlton School of Architecture at Ohio State University.