“With typical buildings, details are decided upon in the final stages,” writes Japanese architect Kengo Kuma, Hon. FAIA, in Matter in the Floating World (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011). “The site is chosen, then form, and lastly the details. By then, there is less time for the details—only standard details are considered because of the limited time.”
Kuma is, in part, referring to material selections—the particularities of which most architects leave to the last minute. Kuma avoids this challenge by focusing on material ideas at the outset: “We do decide upon some details toward the end of the project, but we think about most of the details at the beginning,” he writes. “If we have a year to design, we think about those details for a whole year. In that way, we do not leave things to the end.” However, his eponymous firm's approach to craftsmanship is an outlier unique in architecture.
How is material knowledge incorporated into architectural education? Certainly, students in pre-professional and professional degree programs take a variety of building technology courses and occasionally participate in design-build efforts in which material guidelines are well-established. However, the bulk of architectural studios operate as Kuma postulates: Material details are developed late, if at all, in the design process.
Intending to improve this situation, this semester I teamed up with my colleague Marc Swackhamer, Assoc. AIA, professor and head of the University of Minnesota School of Architecture, and Blair Satterfield, associate professor at the University of British Columbia School of Architecture, to offer an experimental M.Arch. design studio at the University of Minnesota.
Titled “Generative Matter: Procedural Material Design in Architecture,” the half-semester course began with a simple, but risky, assignment. We asked our students to select a common material and pair it with an unlikely manufacturing technology. Without indicating any specific end goal, such as a building site, program, or circumstance, the material investigations began in earnest. The results surprised all of us.
Given the freedom to select any material, several students picked unexpected substances such as ice, salt, wax, and hot-melt adhesive. We then asked them to form small teams based on shared interests.
The Cold Form team took inspiration from two Minnesotan material traditions: ice harvesting and road de-icing with salt. The team applied rock salt to ice blocks in a form of subtractive manufacturing, coaxing the melting ice to form spatial cavities in general locations that the team could not entirely control. The students then cast hot-melt adhesive over the resulting ice, recording the shape. The group proposed using these thermoplastic modules as daylight diffusion lenses with acoustic properties, capable of mitigating both unwanted glare and distracting reverberations in existing spaces. For the final review, the students created a mock-up infill panel for a south-facing window and analyzed the modules’ sound absorption characteristics with acoustical analysis software.
The Hydro Wax Formwork team studied the interactions between molten paraffin wax and water. Through trial and error, the team devised a method to form skeletal, wax-tube building modules, made by injecting liquid wax into cylinders of ice placed within a tank of cold water. Once the wax solidified, the students cast plaster around the units to create more permanent building blocks. With their intrinsic system of vascular voids, these modules function both as structure as well as fluid conveyance systems, enabling the thermal tempering of a mono-material wall assembly from within. With the exception of the plaster, both Hydro Wax Formwork and Cold Form teams made use of inherently recyclable, reusable feedstocks.
Recognizing the renewed popularity of wood in construction due to its carbon-storing properties, the Wood Foam team confronted the recurring problem of wood waste. According to California-based CalRecycle, “Wood waste is, by far, the largest portion of the waste stream generated from construction and demolition activities,” and the Environmental Protection Agency reports that more than 1.3 million tons of the construction and demolition waste generated in 2014 consisted of wood products. After much experimentation, the students devised a way to create rigid foam panels using waste paper pulp from local lumber companies (with the intention that the feedstock could be generated by utilizing waste wood from construction sites). The foams were made using widely available substances, including baking soda, yeast, and sugar, which resulted in bread-like matrices with insulating and carbon-sequestering properties. These new panels compare favorably to typical petroleum-derived insulation boards in terms of environmental performance, and the ingredients are completely biocompatible. Furthermore, the tunable chemical aeration process enables the wood foam panels to have custom thermal, light-transmissive, and ultraviolet light–responsive characteristics.
Calling themselves “Oh Knit,” the last group investigated the processes of knitting, cooking, and gardening to create tensile structures filled with growing medium whileinterrogating traditional gender-based roles in design and construction. The project developed out of the unlikely combination of hand-woven nylon monofilament and a homemade bioplastic consisting of glycerin, starch, and water. The students devised a system of monofilament tubes and rigid connectors that, when heated, formed semi-rigid hyperbolic paraboloids. Coated with bioplastic, the translucent tubes were then planted with seeds. The team pointed out that activities such as knitting and cooking have strong cultural associations with the domestic, feminine role of homemaking, yet these methods can affect the traditionally male-dominated design environment. For example, a gossamer planting system could generate what the students call “a volumetric and occupiable hedge” within a framework of negligible material mass.
Some might view this uncommon approach emphasizing material selection as a backward design process in which students develop solutions in an attempt to find problems. Others may argue that architecture students should use disciplinarily “appropriate” materials and not tinker with paraffin wax, rock salt, or baked wood bread.
But this “first problem, then solution” process ignores the realities of scientific advancement. Many breakthrough discoveries are not the result of linear approaches, but rather by happenstance, inspiring a fundamental shift in the direction of the research. Significantly, the teams making such discoveries are capable of making the critical, unexpected associations that result from years of collaborative material experimentation.
Most architects not only delay crucial material decisions in their projects but also rarely, if ever, develop their own products. As a result, architects maintain a bizarre relationship with the substance of their craft, preserving a remote intellectual distance that dramatically limits the generation of innovative ideas. If architects can incorporate hands-on material testing into the design process on a regular basis, the built environment stands to benefit considerably.
