Alloy Design and Technology, the name Los Angeles-based designer Liz Martin chose for her one-woman practice, is a telling indication of her approach. “An alloy is a mixture of different metals,” Martin says, “and that mixture makes it stronger.” Martin views her wide range of activities—as a curator, writer, teacher, musician, social activist, and architect—as part of her practice of architecture. She is interested in crossing boundaries, finding connections, and sparking dialogue, all in an effort to bring the outside world to bear on architectural design.
Throughout her childhood, Martin studied at the Manhattan School of Music Preparatory division and, as a result, has always seen the creative process through the eyes of a musician. She credits her childhood experience as a violinist with shaping her desire to connect with the world outside of traditional architectural practice. When she decided not to become a professional musician and instead to attend architecture school, receiving a B.Arch. from Tulane and a Master’s degree in Architecture from SCI-Arc, Martin immediately understood the similarities between a music education and a design education. Her thesis project at SCI-Arc investigated the dual processes of design and composition through an analysis of music, allowing her to have one foot firmly planted outside the sphere of traditional architectural practice. Profoundly influenced by John Cage, Martin corresponded at length with the avant-garde composer during her thesis research. The resulting thesis, published in the Pamphlet Architecture series, brings together ten projects by musicians and architects that explore the language, philosophy and character of both disciplines.
Martin’s subsequent position as the founding director, and de facto curator, of L.A.’s first museum of architecture, A+D Architecture and Design Museum, allowed her to continue to expand her field of engagement. The Museum’s mission was to enable people of all ages, backgrounds, and interests to appreciate and understand architecture and design. Through multiple exhibits, many designed to attract a non-architecture audience, Martin was successful in involving the general public with issues of design, landscape, and public space.
The recent Soft Boundaries installation, a project she spearheaded during her year as Paul Rudolph Visiting Professor at the School of Architecture at Auburn University, is a good example of Martin’s praxis. Martin and the students in her Curatorial Studies seminar sent 5 x 7–inch wooden boxes to 100 Mexican, Canadian, and American artists. They asked the artists to create, within—or with—that container, an artwork that addressed the topic of boundaries, as articulated in an essay composed by the students. In order to exhibit the resulting artworks, in the gallery of the Art Department across campus, the seminar students collaborated with students from Martin’s fourth-year architectural studio to create an installation; the studio students fabricated and installed topographical landscape mounds using industrial felt and nontoxic gelatin that hardened into a form similar to plastic or resin. Already at this point in the project, barriers between academic departments had been breached and national boundaries had been transcended. Perhaps more importantly, connections had also been made: the curatorial team who wrote the statement on soft boundaries established a dialogue with the artists who responded in tactile form, and the studio and seminar students had developed a working relationship.
After the exhibit, the students auctioned off the boxes and donated the money to the Camden School of Art and Technology, a secondary school in poor, rural, and predominantly African-American Wilcox County, Alabama. The Auburn students themselves voted on Camden to receive the funds, establishing a link between a respected architecture program at an undergraduate university populated by students of relative privilege and a fledgling technical school that is aiming to provide its disadvantaged students with something more than vocational training. Architectural education became communication, fabrication, collaboration, and social activism, rather than simply the making of beautiful things.
Giving back, finding connections, breaking boundaries. While many might see all these activities as detracting or leaching valuable time from her architectural practice, Martin sees them all as a part of a balance. Her most recent commission proves the point: she has been asked to design a house on the hillside i n historic Hollywoodland and to simultaneously compose a companion musical piece. Design, research, exhibition, teaching: all elements of Liz Martin’s dynamic metallic amalgam.
Author Nina Lewallen, Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at Auburn University, is an architectural historian specializing in eighteenth-century France. Her most recent project investigates family life within Regency town houses.
Originally published 2nd quarter 2005, in arcCA 05.2, “Other Business.”
