Architecture News

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity

By Carren Jao

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
With an eye towards melding architecture and digital technology, Miles Kemp of Digital Physical / Variate Labs has developed a beta software that allows users to virtually walk through their own 3D-designed environments. In this piece, visitors can walk through Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye while sitting at a retro-looking desk. “It’s an incredible experience,” says MCASB Executive Director and Chief Curator Miki Garcia. “It also points to the inextricable relationship of the past with the future.”
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
Environments change; why doesn’t architecture adapt along with it? Doris Kim Sung of DO/SU Studio Architecture is primarily engaged in research. Her continued investigations of thermo-bimetals (alloys made of metals with different coefficients) result in works that bend, curve, and morph according to the heat in the environment.
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
A detail of DO/SU Studio Architecture's commissioned thermo-bimetal work. “It’s like a sculpture by itself,” says Kouo. ”But as an architect, I can see that sculpture as being a piece of building skin. It’s like a mock-up of a section of a façade.”
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
In protest of mass production, Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues have filled a gallery with the ambient glow of paper-mached toilet paper lamps in abstract shapes, some more than six feet tall. Due to the handmade production process, each lamp’s churning form is never replicated.
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
Playing with the conventions of what goes up and what comes down, Design, Bitches created an environment where concrete sacks float, blue painter’s tape showers the ground, and clouds fall like boulders. The installation mirrors Design, Bitches’ philosophical concerns, says Garcia. “It plays with traditional notions of what we expect something to be like.”
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
What may look like a blank canvas loosely hung on solid frame is Amorphis’s challenge to be more mindful and questioning. Created with designer Matthew Au, the slouched canvases reflect the slight differences in wall colors that surround the gallery. “Each of the surrounding walls are painted a slightly different hue,” says Garcia. “To differentiate each piece, viewers are forced to slow down and to really be in the space.”
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Atelier Manferdini's <em>Eye Candy</em> is a playful, pop piece that comments on mass culture’s superficial obsessions with age, gender, media, consumption, and delight. Best of all, visitors ca — Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
Atelier Manferdini's *Eye Candy* is a playful, pop piece that comments on mass culture’s superficial obsessions with age, gender, media, consumption, and delight. Best of all, visitors can take a seat on it.
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity
Catherine Johnson and Rebecca Rudolph of Design, Bitches once again remind audiences not to take architecture too seriously with these black and white photographs riffing off iconic poses in architectural history.
Photo courtesy Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara

Ball-Nogues Studio's paper-mached toilet paper lamps at the Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara in California.

Gone are the days when emerging architects were confined to building houses. Opening this Sunday at the recently re-branded Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara (MCASB), Almost Anything Goes: Architecture and Inclusivity highlights the many ways a studio can practice in the new century. "We wanted to show a broad sample of all these disparate types of practices," says visiting curator Brigitte Kouo, a designer with a background in architecture and graphics.

Co-curated by Kouo and MCASB Executive Director and Chief Curator Miki Garcia, the show aims to expand the definition of what it means to be an architect today. "[Architects] today are invested in research, in theory, in technology, and in hand-built things. It isn’t just this monolithic career," says Garcia. "I don’t think the general public going to MCASB really has that kind of understanding yet. Or maybe they do, but it’s great to have them see architecture in its most progressive forms.”

The show features mostly newly commissioned and site-specific works from six innovative Los Angeles studios, each with one foot in architecture and another in a separate field. On exhibition is work by Amorphis; Atelier Manferdini; Ball-Nogues Studio; Design, Bitches; DO/SU Studio Architecture; and Digital Physical / Variate Labs. Almost Anything Goes runs through April 13, 2014. Click on the slideshow above for more.