The Open Workshop: Malleable Monuments

Malleable Monuments is a solo exhibition of the architectural design practice, The Open Workshop, which brings together the first three years of the office’s work. The exhibition presents a grouping of transcalar design experiments that test how to empower the role of architecture within the transforming, evolving, fluctuating, and indeterminate conditions of the city, it’s public sphere, and it’s ecological context. Two large installations oscillate between lightness/heaviness, figure/field, territorial network/local object, and the natural/artificial. A series of taxonomy drawings classify the design experiments into four categories—Frameworks, Living Archives, Articulated Surfaces, and Rewiring States. These projects share a goal of reconciling and choreographing how the human and environmental subject and their individual, transforming, ephemeral, and often contradictory characteristics continuously recompose a permanent work.

Program

Opening
March 16, 6:30–8:30pm

Panel: Living Archive
March 21, 6:30–8pm
Associated with an approach to experimental history, the concept of the Living Archive questions, critiques, and formats permanent forms of historical readings by inserting the contemporary subject into the making of the archive. 
Introduction: Neeraj Bhatia (The Open Workshop)
Presentations by: Jenny Odell (digital artist / Stanford University) and Rick Prelinger (UC Santa Cruz / Prelinger Archives)

Screening: Rewiring States
March 23, 7–8:30pm
Rewiring States inserts architectural form in precise relationship to various states—time, temperature, materiality, form—of processes—logistical, industrial, and infrastructural. The aim is to "rewire" these processes through leveraging how design can adapt, transform, and impact territorial organizations and add new socio-political actors to these systems.
Introduction: Neeraj Bhatia (The Open Workshop)
Film screening of Petropolis by Peter Mettler (43 minutes)

Panel: Frameworks
April 4, 6:30–8pm
Frameworks are structures that accommodate and engage indeterminate human and environmental factors. These fluctuating subjects are able to transform, adapt, or occupy these structures in novel ways. Frameworks unpacks the relationship between control and choice afforded by design.
Introduction: Neeraj Bhatia (The Open Workshop)
Presentations by: Neyran Turan (UC Berkeley / NEME Studio) and Brian Price (CCA / Price Studio)

Closing
April 6, 5:30–7:30pm
 

The Open Workshop  is a licensed architectural practice (OAA) founded by Neeraj Bhatia that examines the intersection of the politics of landscape, infrastructure, and urban design. Based in Toronto and San Francisco, the practice was founded in the conviction that new forms of landscape and urbanism are required to support the symbiotic rewiring of ecology, civic participation, and industrialization. The work of the office has been exhibited internationally and recognized in several competitions. Recently the office was awarded the prestigious Architectural League of New York Young Architects Prize and the Emerging Leaders Award from Design Intelligence. 

Project Team: 
Neeraj Bhatia, Hayfa Al-Gwaiz, Jared Clifton, Jeremy Jacinth, Shawn Komlos, Cesar Lopez, Bella Mang, Shirin Monshipouri, Nicholas Scribner, Blake Stevenson, Laura Williams