The outdoor exhibit space at Materials & Applications is similar to a gallery in that the space is open to the public for viewing. On most days, one can walk in through the gate and see the current installation. Even when access to the space is closed, the exhibit is still visible from the street, allowing even casual passersby to get a sense of what goes on here. Project durations vary, the goal at M&A is to allow six months for a project's on-site lifetime, starting from the time installation begins until it is cleared to make room for the next. In this way, structural, surface, and vegetation conditions can be monitored for effectiveness over a certain extended duration of time.

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Serial Departure:

Transformative Fabrication

An Installation by: Rob Ley

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With your fingers, squeeze your laptop screen. That disturbed pressure pattern you see represents the contact point between multiple parallel planes, an interruption of coexisting systems. Where your fingers squeeze, the exterior plastic layer is compressed against the liquid crystal strata, and a new condition is created. Serial Departure explores the space of this phenomenon by applying pressure to typical construction processes to see if they can create unexpected ripples of new possibilities. Architecture has always been based on a logic of stacking and assembly, but how does bending, as an operation, change our understanding of shingling and framing? Serial Departure capitalizes on the notion of modulation and distortion beyond design metaphor and concept. Through both the surrogate use of molds and more interestingly, by applying forces directly on the materials through a variable jig, techniques of material coercion, teasing, and manipulation are integrated with the grid of aggregation, creating new effects in both the visual and the spatial.