The industrial revolution brought about an explosion of mass produced goods, including standardized building materials. Relying on the relative predictability of this ubiquitous material palette, one of the underlying assumptions of practicing architecture today is that materials come in knowable shapes and sizes and that they will indeed arrive from somewhere when ordered. Though in some ways standardization is a great boon to material efficiency, material standardization is predicated on extractive practices that pull material from one place and trash it in another, typically out of view from those who benefit from its use during the building lifecycle. Materials are harvested, often from far-flung places relative to the building site, shaped into a product, and assembled into a building only to be dismantled and sent to the landfill mere decades later. Architecture demands materials new and neutral.
In this studio, we will operate under an emerging material paradigm based not in extraction but rather reinterpretation of what is already existing. This paradigm takes advantage of advances in 3D scanning and computation to manage the complexities of working with nonstandard materials. This new material paradigm demands a new tectonic sensibility based on irregularity and three dimensionality in contrast to the homogeneity and flatness of the standardized material palette. Rather than working with materials through the abstraction of CAD software, in this studio we will accrue libraries of specific pieces of material gleaned from local waste streams. We will develop computational design and digital fabrication strategies based on direct responses to material shape, density, flexibility, etc.
- Instructor: Arthur Harsuvanakit
- Instructor: Gil Sunshine