W 9:30 a.m.– 12:00 p.m.
Anderson Hall, Room 230
The ubiquitous reliance on carbon-intensive materials, toxic building products, and extractive practices enmeshes architecture in a crisis of material culture. Chronic climate disasters are both symptomatic and catalytic of an
expanding negative commons: the infrastructures that support our lives and buildings distribute environmental and social costs which threaten both planetary and human health. This crisis demands a reform of material practices that
doesn't stop at merely improving efficiency or substituting one material with an ostensibly more sustainable alternative.
Can we imagine new structures of interaction, care, and performance starting with an interrogation of building materials? This course operates on the premise that transformation processes of raw matter to building product—
from formation through extraction, processing, manufacturing, and assembly—embody materials with dispositions beyond technical and economic dimensions. If we re-valuate matter beyond inherited preconceptions of properties and
affordances, can we identify latent, transformative potentials for architecture not singularly subject to commoditized value structures?
Through readings, guest lectures, workshops, case studies, and making, we will trace the ecologies of material transformation, studying how networks of matter, labor, and logistics shape material practices within a planetary metabolism.
And we will engage with building material directly through constructive experiments at the scale of furniture or building components. These will be our testing grounds toward defining a "material ethos"—an individually derived f
ramework emerging from each student's understanding of embedded values, technologies, relations, and possibilities.
This seminar establishes the intellectual and aesthetic foundations for projects to be continued in the spring Watkin Studio (ARCH 402). The spring studio will elaborate on a specific context and site of intervention to further develop
our research into an architectural design thesis.