Image:“Your Restroom Is a Battleground”, 2021, Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galan, Ivan L. Munuera, J. Sanders. Photograph by Natalia Guardia
Entourage presents the work of contemporary architects who confront and expand the ways bodies serve as units of measure for architecture. The exhibition centers research-based practices and projects across multiple sites: in people drawn by architects, within the political space of restrooms, and through the commercial fixtures of our daily lives. The exhibition presents works and documentations by MOS (Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample), Your Restroom is a Battleground (Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, Joel Sanders), and Strat Coffman.
Alongside the radical visioning of buildings, architects have also re-envisioned the index of people, bodies, figures, and actors that populate their buildings. In Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures, Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample of MOS indexed over 2000 people found in architectural drawings, collages, sketches, and renders. “It is impossible to represent architecture without representing the human,” writes MOS. Their accompanying work Selfie Curtain is an interactive textile work that gathers these bodies into a playful procession.
Your Restroom is a Battleground (YRIAB) is a collaboration between Matilde Cassani, Ignacio G. Galán, Iván L. Munuera, Joel Sanders examining bathrooms as sites of protest. Originally exhibited as a dioramic model in conjunction with the Restroom Pavilion in the 2021 Venice Biennale, YRIAB presents seven stories of bathrooms as contested spaces around the globe. Rather than treat restrooms as glorified utility closets, the project insists on acknowledging the entanglement of policy, finance, race, gender, ability, health and environment in those spaces. By examining toilets as technological sites, YRIAB show how design and policy deny, exclude, or overdetermine certain bodies that need to excrete.
Erotica Generica is an ongoing research project by Strat Coffman that examines commercial fixtures and standard codes of architecture as sites where bodily elements such as bacteria, oils, and heat are transferred. Queering our understanding of generic fixtures, Coffman explores how everyday objects such as stair handles, doorknobs, and grips can be re-envisioned as intimate sites of transfer between one body to another. By accommodating acts of touching, architecture relishes in, rather than represses, its capacity to open pathways for anonymous contact.
Curated by MAK Center Director Jia Yi Gu, the exhibition takes place in the Schindler House, an early modernist experiment that married the body to the natural environment. By centering new definitions in bodily rights, experiences, and forms, the exhibition brings contemporary practices working on the architectural governance of the body into conversation with early modernist ideas at the Schindler House.
Artists
MOS
MOS is a New York–based architecture studio, founded by principals Michael Meredith and Hilary Sample in 2005. An internationally recognized architecture practice, MOS was the recipient of the 2015 Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum National Design Award in Architecture, the 2010 American Academy of Arts and Letters Architecture Award, and the 2008 Architectural League of New York Emerging Voices Award. Individual works have similarly received numerous awards and distinctions, most notably: the 2015 Global Holcim Award for sustainable construction (Asia-Pacific Region) for Community Center No. 3 (Lali Gurans Orphanage); the cover of Abitare and an AIA NY State Award of Excellence for School No. 1 (Krabbesholm Højskole), the 2014 accession of both the firm’s modular, off-grid House No. 5 (Museum of Outdoor Arts Element House) into The Museum of Modern Art, Architecture and Design Collection; the acquisition of House No. 3 (Lot No. 6/Ordos) into the permanent collection of The Art Institute of Chicago; and the selection of Pavilion No. 4 (Afterparty) for the 2009 MoMA PS1 Young Architects Program. Recent work includes: House No. 10, a private residence in Upstate New York; an all-aluminum open-air school for children in Versailles, France; and the Laboratorio de Vivienda, a 9-acre master plan and welcome center in Apan, Mexico. Recent and forthcoming publications, both products of and surveys on MOS’s work, include MOS: Selected Works (Princeton Architectural Press, 2016); El Croquis No. 184 (2016); An Unfinished Encyclopedia of Scale Figures Without Architecture (MIT Press, 2019); and Houses for Sale (CCA/Corraini, 2019).
YOUR RESTROOM IS A BATTLEGROUND
Your Restroom Is A Battleground builds upon the collective experience of the four participating teams. Matilde Cassani addresses toilets in the framework of her interest in the spatial implications of everyday multiculturalism in the contemporary Western city. Ignacio G. Galán considers the relationship of architecture and politics and frames the study of restrooms in response to assimilationist and technocratic ideologies —following his work on nationalism and migration and his interest in critical access and anti-ableism. Ivan L. Munuera explores the intersection between culture, technology, politics, and bodily practices, understanding restrooms as collective embodiments, challenging their materiality to understand them as both infiltrating and being infiltrated by technologies, beings, regulations, and policies. The contribution of Joel Sanders, principal of JSA/MIXdesign is informed by Stalled!, a cross-disciplinary design/research project consisting of toolkits and prototypes for safe, accessible public restrooms that meet the needs of differently embodied and identified people regardless of age, gender, race, faith or disability.
STRAT COFFMAN
Strat Coffman uses the multi-facing tools of architecture to explore how capital, institutions, and design discourses conspire to produce material, social, and epistemic bodies. They were a 2022-2024 Architecture Fellow at University of Michigan. They hold a BA from Wesleyan University and M.Arch from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where they received the Imre Halasz Thesis Prize and the AIA Henry Adams Medal. They have also received the 2024 Architectural League Prize. Their work has appeared in Log, the MIT List Visual Arts Center, and the Multimedia Anthropology Lab at University College London. They were previously an editor of Thresholds 48: Kin, a fellow at the MIT Transmedia Storytelling Initiative, and a 2023 artist-in-residence at the Goethe Institut.
Entourage is made possible, with generous support from the Los Angeles County Department of Arts and Culture and the California Arts Council
