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The Project
When the Los Angeles Design Festival announced their 2025 programming theme “Design Futurism,” Phil Goodin, managing director at Autex Acoustics®, envisioned an immersive exhibition celebrating sustainability, circularity, and material innovation. To meet the theme, they conceived Waves of Change: Exploring Material and Design Innovation in Built Environments, an exhibition that reimagined how acoustic materials can transform space through storytelling.
Project Team
Anthony Maladra and Adrian Carrillo
Austin Hansen
Phil Goodin
Project Details
Events
Los Angeles
Waves of Change: Acoustics, Art, and Adaptation in an Immersive Exhibition
Drawing inspiration from Southern California’s natural beauty and cultural rhythm, the final exhibition, hosted in The ARTium in Downtown Los Angeles, featured six custom installations that showcased the creative range of Autex Acoustics products as sculptural elements. The showcase used 1109.5 lbs of recycled PET—the equivalent of 50,722 16 fl oz water bottles or the annual recycling output of 1,221 households—and featured design and furniture by HOK, Open Range Artmakers, and BASK. It was celebrated with an exhibition party with Dezeen and sustainability-forward events across the LADF weekend.
“The goal for our exhibition was to showcase our commitments to sustainability and beautiful design with a full experience,” Goodin said. “In the end, Autex products became the medium for several gorgeous design contributions, and showed just how versatile our materials are across creative disciplines.”
Customizing Acoustic Materials for Spatial Storytelling
From the inception of the project, Goodin and the LA-based team envisioned an experience that invited visitors to explore the power of biophilia, thoughtful design, and sustainable materials in shaping built spaces. “We wanted to marry the beauty of the California landscape with the built environment,” Goodin said. “The goal was to create an experience that ‘brought the outside in’ while showcasing our recycled materials as both high-performing and customizable.”
The final installations—which include both classic applications of Cube™ and Groove™ panels in addition to several one-of-a-kind iterations of Frontier™ (both classically applied and wall-mounted), precision-cut Cascade™ suspended Screens, and custom-printed surface finish murals—are a testament to both the versatility of the products and the technical ability of the design team at Autex Acoustics.
“Having a solid platform and a wide, flexible product range gave us a lot of freedom,” Anthony Maladra, lead design consultant at Autex Acoustics, said. “We had to design something that could actually be produced, but what stood out most to me was how cohesive and immersive the whole exhibition felt. In the end, it felt like more than a showcase—it felt like an experience.”
Acoustic Solutions to Complex Problems
From the onset of the project, the primary challenges were spatial and time-centric constraints. In addition to addressing the technical challenges of building large, freestanding structures, the exhibition was moved to the suite across from the Autex Acoustics showroom just four weeks ahead of its debut, which meant translating existing designs to an entirely new space.
“From the beginning, designing this exhibition meant we needed to figure out how to hang our product in a completely open space,” Maladra said. “We had to rethink everything we usually do—from layout to product flow—and deliver on an incredibly tight timeline.”
In the end, the design team created multiple spaces—first for Row DTLA, and later for the suite in the ARTrium, following a location change just four weeks before the exhibition launch. While both spaces were unfinished industrial locations, the final exhibition utilized scaled versions of the original designs of the Row space, challenging the team to deliver one-of-a-kind installations.
“On most jobs, we’re just cutting standard products to size, but this was a full-blown customization,” said Adrian Carrillo, design consultant at Autex Acoustics. “It wasn’t just about function either—it had to look good and align with the exhibition theme.”
A Triumph of Teamwork and Design
The final exhibition, which reimagined several standard Autex Acoustics products, was showcased during three events—an exhibition party attended by hundreds of members of the LA design community, a sustainable jewelry making event with House of Spider, and a panel on the future of sustainable workplace design—included not only custom built elements, but acoustic experiences curated straight out of the minds of the designers.
“While the changes to location were stressful, that change also gave us the opportunity to add a hallway installation—a kind of last-minute idea that turned into a real highlight,” Carillo said. “We were able to pivot and translate the existing designs to the new space. Anthony and I both made revisions, updated the 3D environment, and gave you something you could visually walk through and sign off on.”
In the end, the work of both the wider Autex Acoustics team and their external partners led to one of the most successful events in Autex Acoustics US history. “The pivot showed how flexible our whole team could be under pressure,” Maladra said. “Everyone stepped up. It was a huge team effort, and honestly, a great example of what Autex Acoustics can do when we collaborate across departments.”
Andrews, who spoke to several Autex Acoustics’ partners over the course of the exhibition weekend, agrees. “We ran into several challenges in the six months it took to complete this project, but they all felt worth it when we got to see the final exhibition in totality,” she said. “I’m deeply grateful for all the hard work the entire team put into making this exhibition and the events that were part of it.”
