
Posts tagged with "Materials & Applications":


Materials & Applications brings experimental architecture to the L.A. public through mini golf
Materials & Applications (M&A), a Los Angeles–based nonprofit dedicated to building a public culture of experimental architecture, recently took over a vacant lot in L.A.’s Echo Park to install the products of a year-long competition for its latest initiative, “TURF: A Mini-Golf Project.” The open-to-the-public mini-golf installation features contributions from a wide slew of young, creative practices, all focused on designing compelling golf holes. They are the result of a lengthy competition, selection, and fabrication process aimed at citing contemporary L.A.’s partisan development battles within the complicated terrain of a mini-golf course.
M&A executive director Jia Gu explained the premise behind its work: “In a way we are trying to bridge two worlds that don’t intersect very often—public audiences and experimental architecture. We use the term “to build a public culture” quite literally—we are about producing built projects that can contribute to expanding and provoking public conversations around architecture. To a certain extent, M&A’s history has always been to resist the “gallerification” of architecture by producing projects that exist outdoors, in open air, and in the public—whether this space is publicly or privately owned.”
Typically, M&A’s installations take place in the courtyard of its Spanish-revival bungalow court, but for TURF, M&A partnered with local developer Hillcrest Company to bring a soon-to-be-developed, but vacant, parcel of land into public use. Gu explained further, “On our end, we’re constantly thinking about how to bring value to interim-use spaces that are owned by developers but are not yet under development. There is a lot of opportunity in this city for these types of empty lots to be returned back to the public for a short interim use, allowing spontaneous and surprising moments of leisure, play and collective inactivity.”

Constructivist Playground by Warren Techentin Architecture
An interactive installation reconsiders the definitions of enclosure and openness.
Warren Techentin Architecture’s digitally-designed La Cage Aux Folles, on display at Materials & Applications in Los Angeles through August, was inspired by a decidedly analog precedent: the yurt. “Yurts are circular,” explained Techentin, who studied the building type as part of his thesis work at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. “That began the idea of using small-diameter rods and taking software and configuring sweeps with some special scripts that we found online.” But while the yurt’s primary function is shelter, Techentin’s open-air installation, built of 6,409 linear feet of steel pipe, is a literal and intellectual playground, its form an investigation of the dualities of inside and out, enclosure and openness. Once the architects became familiar with the scripts, which allowed them to manipulate multiple pipes simultaneously, they found it easy to generate designs. The hard part was settling on a final shape. Then an off-hand observation narrowed their focus. “Somebody made a comment about, it looks like a crazy cage,” said Techentin. “We realized, ‘Oh, there’s this cage component. What if we imagine spaces inside spaces?’ That’s where these interiorized conditions came through, kind of creating layers of inside and outside.” Technical constraints further influenced the form. “We had to jump out of the digital world and decide how this was made in reality,” said Techentin. To minimize materials costs, the architects decided to work with schedule 40 steel tube, which is available in 24-foot lengths. Returning to Rhino, they broke apart their model and rescripted it accordingly. They modified their model again after learning what radiuses their metalworking contractor could accommodate. “It was kind of a balancing act between hitting these radiuses, the 24-foot lengths, and repetition—but how do you get difference and variety,” said Techentin.- Fabricator Ramirez Ironworks, Paramount Roll and Forming
- Designers Warren Techentin Architecture
- Location Los Angeles
- Date of Completion April 2014
- Material Schedule 40 steel tube
- Process Rhino, scripting, bending, cutting, sleeving, welding, bolting, painting

On View> Cage Dancing At Los Angeles' Materials & Applications Gallery

On View> Materials & Applications: Building Something (Beyond) Beautiful

First Ever Igloo In LA


