The lecture will address Materials & Applications history and its current moment as a public space for the display of architecture. Putting architecture on display is one of the most widely enacted and fundamental aspects of critical contemporary form of production. As a practice, display makes public (and sometimes evident) architecture itself, including its meanings and definitions, but it also produces other architectures: the house museum, the white modernist cube, the full-scale mock-up, and in the case of M&A, the site-specific installation, the temporary pavilion, or the one-to-one architecture. The lecture will present M&A’s most recent history of architectural projects alongside a reflection of its work as an organization dedicated to building a public culture of architecture.

Jia Yi Gu is the Executive Director and Curator of Materials & Applications, a Los Angeles-based non-profit cultural organization dedicated to presenting new ideas in architecture and art through built experiments and critical programs. 

She is an architectural historian, curator, and designer whose work is focused on display and exhibition-making practices in architecture. She holds a Master of Architecture degree from the University of California Los Angeles where she graduated with distinction, and is currently a doctoral candidate in UCLA’s Ph.D in Architecture. 

Since 2016, she is a co-director of the architecture studio Spinagu with Maxi Spina. She teaches History/Theory as Visiting Artist at the California College of Arts and is the 2019 D. Kenneth Sargent Visiting Critic at Syracuse University. Her projects and exhibitions have been recognized and supported by UCLA, Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts, Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs, Los Angeles County Arts Commission, and Pasadena Arts Alliance.