Edward Cella Art + Architecture (ECAA) announced the installation of a permanent sculpture-like workspace designed by Ball Nogues Studio in its newly relocated gallery across from LACMA and adjacent to new location of the A+D Museum on Wilshire Boulevard. The undulating functional object was crafted by hand from assembled layers of laser cut cardboard and Koskisen plywood, and it is manifest of ECAA's commitment to presenting important renderings and projects by 20th and 21st Century architects. The installation is timely given that the Los Angeles based architectural firm is preparing for a solo exhibition entitled Feathered Edge at MOCA Pacific Design Center set to open July 26, 2009.
Seeking to affect the white cube space of the gallery with the minimum of materials, Ball Nogues utilized the surging repetition and pattern created with stacking two shapes of pre-cut cardboard designed and calibrated on computational software. Suggesting movement and vitality, the reception counter acts as a fluid yet intermediary object between the public space of the gallery and the gallery's workspace. Fabricated by the architectural firm's collective team, the workstation reflects the gallery's emphasis on craftsmanship and execution. Embracing the post-gilded age economy, the design's humble materials does not shy from seeking new, dynamic forms.
Ball-Nogues Studio is an integrated design and fabrication practice that creates experimental built environments to enhance and celebrate the potential for social interaction through sensation, spectacle, and physical engagement. To achieve these results, principals Benjamin Ball and Gaston Nogues work with unusual materials, develop new digital tools, and apply architectural techniques in unorthodox ways. The partners share an enthusiasm for the fabrication process as it relates to the built object both physically and poetically-they let the properties, limitations, and economic scenarios associated with materials, guide the structure's ultimate form while developing methods to extend the intertwined boundaries of a material's aesthetics, physical potential and lifecycles.
Photos: Farshid Assassi