Los Angeles-based Materials & Applications (M&A) has announced its Fall installation program, The Kid Gets Out of the Picture, due to open October 15th at the M&A Courtyard in Los Angeles’s Silverlake neighborhood. The project, guest curated by Los Angeles Design Group (LADG), consists of a collaborative installation by the curators and a group of architectural offices (First Office, Laurel Broughton/Andrew Kovacs, and Hirsute) that aims for a “contemporary update on the aesthetic principles of early 19th century English landscape architecture.”
The group installation will focus on the component parts, or “catalog of nouns,” deployed to achieve a cohesive whole in traditional English gardening design. The three-month long installation will work within the language of these landscape components—follies, berms, viewpoints, and walls—in an effort to “extract the qualities of [these] images and literalize them in the real world” and will be directly installed in M&As Courtyard space, where the non-profit, experimental public architecture group typically holds its exhibitions.
Describing the still-in-the-works project, Kovacs and Broughton told The Architect’s Newspaper in a joint statement, “We are super excited to be part of the project with the LADG, Hirsuta, and First Office. We think the collaborative format that includes all the work overlapping in the Materials & Applications courtyard is unique and will certainly produce strange and potent juxtapositions.”
Support for the project has been provided by the Los Angeles County Arts Commission, Pasadena Art Alliance, Graham Foundation, University of California, Los Angeles School of Architecture and Urban Design and the Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs. The Kid Gets Out of the Picture follows M&A’s earlier and more mobile installation from earlier this year, TURF: A Mini-Golf Project, which saw a constellation of young designers take on the design of individual holes for a mini-golf installation on a vacant plot of land adjacent to L.A.’s Echo Park.
