While the 3D printer has gained considerable attention in the past few years, for just one day in December, the backyard of an unassuming house in L.A.’s Koreatown became a pop-up aluminum foundry, sending sparks into the air and breathing fire and life into piles of discarded metal scraps. What Katya Tylevich described in Domus as a ‘post-apocalyptic bonfire’ was originally scheduled to take place in a white-walled gallery, until insurance problems popped up days before the event, not unexpectedly.

Tada Ryvola and Michael Sandstrom of United Environment Architecture, the firm behind the DIY blast furnace operation, took their conviction in ‘local’ architecture and design to heart and transported the architecture show to the backyard of a house. There, the team churned out sculptures, figurines, house numbers, hardware and custom-made lamps. More after the jump.

As Tylevich put it, such an unconventional architecture show was a bold attempt to strip the ‘fourth wall’ between architect and user by turning the process of design—not the design itself—into a performance. Crowds gathered as recycled car parts turned into bright red molten metal and then into designed objects that shined with their exposed seams and matte exteriors instead of gloss or paint applied en masse. The spectacle attracted an audience of some five dozen, sending some home with souvenirs and all with the notion that architecture can inspire visceral connections.

The project was a salient reminder of why the DIY movement has been elemental to these times, reminding us of the makeshift hacker spaces of the Occupy movement. As Ryvola told Domus: “[W]hen you can pack an aluminum foundry into the trunk of one car, there’s no excuse for young architects not to be practicing today, however small scale their projects. To think otherwise is stupid.”

[All photos via Domus]

by Kelly Chan

posted in New Projects news

tagged aluminum, Blast Furnace, design, DIY, Foundry, materiality, metal

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