DEMO DEMO

Year: 2021

cityLAB’s "Demo Demo" (Demolition, Demonstration) exhibition features new work on housing, open space, resilience, and material transformations from our initiatives and the projects of UCLA AUD faculty.

Demolition and demonstration. Placed together, these terms resonate with architecture’s recent history and its future possibilities. Innovative architectural design can be broadly characterized as demolishing constraints while demonstrating ways to shape new worlds. As a discipline, the emphasis on material construction blinds us to the intrinsic destruction in our practices, until the models we advance lead to demonstrations of resistance. No wonder that demonstration and demolition are watchwords that characterize movements as disparate as modernism, urban renewal, and civil rights. 

Given the contemporary intersecting crises of climate and affordable housing, innovative architecture is a political formation, inspiring this exhibition. Now, when architecture can demonstrate how to address the crises through innovative prototypes, our work more than ever relies upon collective action. DEMO DEMO combines works by cityLAB and architecture faculty to show AUD’s disciplinary spectrum. At cityLAB, the ethics of spatial justice, community engagement, and design research produce architectural demonstrations ranging from full scale prototypes to state policy. Projects by faculty leverage design to transform materials, sites, and cities, demolishing conventions to advance aesthetic and ethical goals. The exhibition itself demonstrates where architecture meets the urgent issues of the day, and demolishes any ideas that we can separate public purpose from formal operations.