TAKK Architecture, Wax Stool, 2022.
Assembling: Props for Learning is a 3-day hands-on building workshop where participants are invited to work side by side with Barcelona-based architecture studio TAKK. The workshop assembles a series of props specially conceived to accommodate activities for the first iteration of Subject Studies: Reorientations. Participants engage in a convivial and communal atmosphere within the exceptional domestic space designed by R.M. Schindler while assembling milled formwork, foam sheeting, chicken mesh, and wax paraffin into new furniture: the Isolation Daybed, the Reading Corner, the Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools. Dining, digesting, and discoursing run in parallel to the activities of assembling and building, with morning and afternoon collective meals and communal care provisions.
Part building-workshop, part pilot program, Assembling: Props for Learning proposes architectural assemblies that encourage new formats for exchange and co-inhabitation. Participants are invited to come ready to experiment with a new ethos for architectural production with the design duo — exploring new technologies, materials, assembly systems, hardware, and off-the-shelf items. Contributors explore TAKK’s architectural attitude through embracing effusive materials, supply chain technologies, otherworldly shapes, textures as ornament, and saturated colors. Participants will be building: an Isolation Daybed, Reading Corner, Biodiversity Lamp, and several Wax Stools, and are invited to use the props during the run of public programs for Subject Studies: Reorientations.
ABOUT TAKK
TAKK is a space for architectural production focused on the development of material practices in the intersection of nature, culture, technology and politics, with particular attention to the challenges raised by the age of Anthropocene. TAKK’s architectural experiments are test sites for exploring critical architecture that aims at building more open societies. While TAKK’s choices of materials and forms can seem at odds with the idea of an ecologically aware practice, the studio sources from regional supply chains and off-the-shelf supplies as a means of localizing and customizing. Much of their design work is also invested in a disassembly process after the facts of use, in which the afterlife of objects and materials are considered with the same intention and scrutiny as their assembly. Finally, working in the specter of modernism, the use of colors and ornament become overtly political gestures for TAKK.
The locations for programs vary and will be disclosed upon RSVP.
SUBJECT STUDIES
Subject Studies is a new annual series offering practical and non-practical public engagements, initiated by the MAK Center for Art and Architecture. Its inaugural theme, Reorientations, developed by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu and Rosario Talevi, directs questions towards institutional habits, routines and practices through perspectives of care, repair and transformation.
This program is supported in part by the California Arts Council Recovery Grant, Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles (DCA), PICE AC/E's Programme for the Internationalization of Spanish Culture, and Thomas Mann House.
Image Credit: TAKK Architecture.
Related
Program
SUBJECT STUDIES: REORIENTATIONS
December 06, 2022 – December 11, 2022
