Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design

Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design examines the role of nature as a starting point for material experimentation in the domains of architecture, craft, and science. While nature has often stood in as a model, metaphor, or resource for designers, the recent global upheavals in climate, ecology, and technology are driving intensive understandings of nature’s tangible and imagined substrate. The exhibition will examine how contemporary design practices mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter.

The exhibition is organized around five material acts, “Re-Fusing”, “Stitching,” “Animating”, “Disassembling”, and “Feeding”. Each of these terms operate as thematic clusters illustrating key events in a material’s production, from the fusion of sedimentary grain such as sand with plastics, to the intentional dismantling of a stone column by the pulling of a single piece of string. If we frame “materials” as a verb rather than a fixed object, as “authored” objects rather than discovered conditions, we are better able to explore the fullness of matter undergoing transformation as it sheds one state of arrangement in order to adopt another. 

The exhibition intends to highlight new material practices alongside the rich milieu of ideas that accompany their making, including revisiting the term “nature,” “innovation,” and “sustainability.” The wastefulness of single-use materials, from plastics to minerals, have prompted designers to embrace alternative design principles, such as “degrowth”, emphasizing shrinking rather than growing economies, in order to use less material resources, and “disassembly”, the practice of designing buildings to facilitate future change through dismantlement, in order to allow for a recovery or recycling of materials. Terms such as such as biodesign, biomimicry, and biorealism are revisited through the perspectives of life cycles, degrowth and post-naturalism, perspectives that together show nature to be inheritably and intentionally altered by humans.

Typically we think of building materials as raw resources found in nature. Whether wood or stone, materials are often understood to be products extracted from nature to be utilized by humans in the building process. Such understandings of materials belie the complex logistical, ecological, and technological transformation that “raw” resources undergo in order to become material substrates for our architecture. Even the simplest dimensional lumber found in the local hardware store is harvested, milled and sawn, pressure treated, decontaminated, and transported. Similarly, rather than consider concrete as a plastic form, we might treat concrete instead as a series of logistical operations, of transport, mixing and curing, as well as a junction of energy flows. This perspective of “simple” materials such as wood and concrete as a process— rather than a product—re-centers the human actor and systems responsible for a materials transformation, reminding us that materials are not in fact natural. 

Curated by: Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu

Contributors Include: Adobe is Not Software, After Architecture, Anupama Kundoo, Assemble, Assia Crawford, Atelier LUMA, BC Architects, Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, DOSU Studio Architecture, Dylan Wood, Gramazio Kohler Research, HANNAH, Joar Nango, Lola Ben-Alon, Maru Garcia, Omar Kahn, Post Rock, Rael San Fratello, Sara Inga Utsi Bongo, SOFTLAB, Soft Matters, Sutherlin Santo, Yogiaman Tracy Design