Elastic, a retrospective of MMA’s work, was installed at the Rhode Island School of Design’s Bayard Ewing Building Gallery in the spring of 2016. The exhibition design employed five intersecting walls to create a sequence of irregular rooms within the existing gallery.  Comprised of exclusively digital media, 14 videos demonstrated the motivations, processes, scales, and environments that MMA has developed since its founding in 1995.  Featured projects include Inner-City Arts, Sixth Street Viaduct, Pittman Dowell Residence, Star Apartments, One Santa Fe, Ovitz Family Foundation, New Carver Apartments, Victoria & Albert Museum Exhibition Road Competition, Hammer Museum John V. Tunney Bridge, and St. Petersburg Pier.

While the discipline of architecture possesses an extraordinary capacity for specialized knowledge, as an architect I am more interested in architecture’s ability to cover territory, to expand the context, types, and forms of its work. In the  presence of complex social, political, and physical contexts like those found in Los Angeles, I have come to believe that architecture possesses a broad range of capacities and abilities that allow it to be impactful at the level of a building but also at the level of the discipline.

In that sense, I am interested in contemporary form, but I am even more interested in the form of contemporary practice and its potential for elasticity, especially as it relates to pressing questions around urbanism. Our cities continue to change politically, socially, and environmentally as the form of the city evolves in response to shifting economies and increased demands for density and mobility. Traditional urban planning models cannot adequately accommodate the needs and forms of the future city. I believe instead in the potential for the scale of architecture to curate new forms of anticipatory urbanisms.

– Michael Maltzan