Matthew Mazzotta works at the intersection of art, activism, and urbanism, focusing on the power of the built environment to shape our relationships and experiences. His community-specific public projects integrate new forms of civic participation and social engagement into the built environment and reveal how the spaces we travel through and spend our time living within have the potential to become distinct sites for intimate, radical, and meaningful exchanges. Through his process, each project starts by creating temporary public spaces for listening—‘Outdoor Living Room’—as a way to capture voices from local people that might not attend more formal meetings. Stemming from this approach are experiences that involve people from a range of backgrounds working together to create new models of living that contribute to local culture beyond the economic realm.
Matthew Mazzotta’s public projects have received international art and architecture awards such as the Architizer A+ Award, Azure’s AZ Award, The WAN Award, and six of his projects have been recognized by the Americans for the Arts. Last year, in particular, he won four of the major international Architecture awards, as well as, “Architecture Project of the Year” by the Dezeen Awards at the Tate Modern in London. Matthew’s work has been featured on CNN, BBC, NPR, The Huffington Post, Discovery Channel, and Science Magazine to name a few, and presented at the Cooper Hewitt – Smithsonian Design Museum in NYC. Mazzotta received a BFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, a Masters of Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Program in Art, Culture and Technology, a Loeb Fellowship from Harvard University, and is currently a Guggenheim Fellow and a TED Fellow.
Media Gallery
“HOME” gives time and space for travelers to take a deeper look at the bird whose image is all over Florida. The scale of the flamingos puts these birds in focus, and puts us in awe as they tower above us, reminding us that we all share the same home.Designed as a spectacle to restore the interaction missing from this area of the airport, HOME draws people into an immersive experience, where they will find themselves posing with giant birds and enjoying being together in this otherworldly atmosphere.A Unique rain harvesting system. Sitting in the rocking chairs triggers a pump that brings the collected rainwater up into the ‘cloud’ to drop onto the roof.
A unique event space that transforms Main Street into an outdoor theater by using an abandoned freestanding storefront wall. With the push of a button, two hydraulic pump arms fold down the awning and false front over the sidewalk into seating space.
A structure in downtown York, Alabama that is disguised as a house, but transforms into a 100 seat open-air theater, free for public use. The theater uses materials reclaimed from an abandoned house, and is built upon the plot of land where it stood.
This table travels the country to serve food made of plants and natural resources of the local area that will be in major decline or extinct over the next 20-40 years due to the changing climate.
