Materials & Applications Winter 2020 | Staging Construction

Opens Saturday, Jan 18, 5 pm; exhibition runs through April 11

Through its messy web of relations, construction practices draw architecture into the orbit of other systems, including technical procedures, bureaucratic governance, and negotiated temporalities. Staging Construction invites architects and designers with research-based practices to present new work that investigates construction as both an act of building and as an expression of industry. Drawing on seemingly disparate topics, including material specification, material history, aggregate sourcing, and data systems, the winter program asks how architecture’s entanglement with technical systems is evidenced in the preliminary acts of building, rather than its finished form. Staging Construction takes the form of an experimental installation by Michelle JaJa Chang, alongside an electronic music performance by Neil Denari, lectures by Alex Maymind and Tommy Hill, and a participatory workshop that explores building without binding by yyyy-mm-dd (Kate Yeh Chiu and François Sabourin), amongst others. Staging Construction is curated by Jia Yi Gu, and is produced in partnership with the Mak Center for Art and Architecture with support from the Contemporary Council of M&A (CCMA).