Taubman College Assistant Professor Laida Aguirre’s architecture practice, stock-a-studio, has installed a temporary gym called [ a kit of these some parts ] x budget gym ] in the Materials & Applications storefront, an art and architecture exhibition space in Los Angeles. It serves as a functional gym, as well as a demo kit for an architectural kit rental initiative.
[ a kit of these some parts ] x budget gym ] is a temporary architecture in-service of the activity: in this case, the activity of working out. Co-opting the formulas of rentable event-tents and trade show booths, where poles, panels, tension straps, and tarps complete otherwise generic structural frames, the project intertwines custom elements with generic ones and images with budget materials to provide a set of parts that come together to form a functional gym.
As a physical work of architecture, the project is burdened by the fast metabolism of aesthetics and the excessive production of sheer stuff created by the accelerated loop between culture and commodity. The project draws material tactics from DIY culture, where low-budget materials are constantly re-aestheticized and re-assembled to serve new purposes. Repainting the same structural pole over and over here becomes part resourceful approach to aesthetic renewal and part environmental tactic. Materiality, in this context, relies on one’s immediate network of resources and the perpetual reimagining of our physical world through surface manipulation, reassembly, and aesthetic layering in order to extend an object’s lifespan.
The project proposes assembly, rather than construction and refinish, rather than remake as ways of creating a rentable and reusable architectural kit that considers its own futurity. As a series of components that come together through provisional mechanisms: trough tape, tension straps and bolts. Impermanently tied together, objects to objects and objects to place. Only existing together for the duration of the program, these strappy, interim methods are equal parts necessity and sensible approach to architecting.
In its iteration as [ x budget gym ], the exhibition has several components. The project will serve as a meeting point for exercise-based activities, such as weight-lifting, trainer-led workouts and as a hydration station and meet up point for hiking and biking groups. The installation runs from October 19, 2019, to February 15, 2020, and the public is invited to use the gym for personal fitness at any time by emailing info@materialsandapplications.org for an appointment. Additional programs and performances are forthcoming.
[ a kit of these some parts ] also includes a [ x video game ] where one can customize a future version of the architectural kit by inhabiting the catalog of parts. Though here a gym, the architectural kit adapts to many scales and uses, from furniture to party tent to temporary stage set. For rental inquiries and information on quotes and customization go to someparts.parts.
Learn more about the M&A installation here.
