Material Acts

Material Acts, a new exhibition and book curated by Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu has just opened at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles. The exhibition is gorgeous and tactile, and is organized around five “material acts,” Re-Fusing, Stitching, Animating, Disassembling, and Feeding, which each draw on vanguard techniques and new, nature-derived materials in contemporary architecture practice.

From the exhibition literature:

“[Material Acts] examines the role of nature as a starting point for material experimentation in the domains of architecture, craft, and science. While nature has often stood in as a model, metaphor, or resource for designers, the recent global upheavals in climate, ecology, and technology are driving intensified understandings of nature’s tangible and imagined substrate. The exhibition examines how contemporary design practices mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter.”

The gorgeous Material Acts book and accompanying media was designed by Becca Lofchie Studio.

I spent time with architect Ronald Rael—well-known for his 3D printed adobe, Borderwall as Architecture and Earth Architecture projects—at his family home in Conejos County, Colorado. Several prototypes and early experiments in varying stages of decay dot the windswept land, and I watched Rael worked bare parts of land with a backhoe. It’s a true rarity to meet an architect who can also handle a 10-ton tractor.

I grew up just 90 miles south of here. This is the northernmost region where the distinctive, though sadly dying New Mexico Spanish dialect of my mother’s family is spoken. Although it felt like home, the flat, windswept land gives the area a dramatically different energy than the languid, rolling high desert landscapes around Santa Fe. Up here, it feels remote and frontierlike, and the people and architecture are hardier and more stoic.

I also visited Frontier Drive Inn, in Center, Colo., which is the site of Rael San Fratello’s “Skylos.” Out of pure coincidence I had photographed the site years earlier for T38 Studio, when it was still an abandoned midcentury drive-in, prior to its conversion to the contemporary hotel and gathering place it has become.

Big thanks to Jia Yi Gu (Spinagu), to Mr. Rael for having me, and to the staff of Craft Contemporary. Huge congratulations to Kate and Jia on the fantastic new project, and props to Becca Lofchie for a gorgeous design well-realized.

All book images courtesy Becca Lofchie Studio.

Photographs made with a Nikon Z8 and Voigtländer APO-Lanthar lenses.