Experimental Materials Library
The Experimental Materials Library is a hands-on, community sourced material library and an initiative of Material Acts, an interdisciplinary research initiative, exhibition, publication, and symposium exploring the intersections of architecture, craft, and science through material experimentation. Material Acts explores material experiments across 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 intensified understandings of nature’s tangible and imagined substrate. The projects explores how contemporary design practices mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter.
Student researchers will assist the faculty in researching, collecting, cataloguing and displaying material samples as part of a Material Library to be housed in the Media Arts Project Space. Students will assist in conducting outreach to designers and material makers to submit samples of materials that they have created through their practices, trials, or research; organizing materials through an online cataloguing system; developing research and descriptive information on materials as both technical matter and cultural technique.
Whether experimentations in chemical reactions, design with scoby, environment-reactive metals, bio-calcified foam, woven earth fibers, or other mobilizations of matters, the library aims to highlight material explorations and advancements in contemporary design practices—as well as the material accidents that happen along the way. The library welcomes the outcomes of diverse sites of crafting and fabrication, from the backyard, to the kitchen sink, to the lab hood booth. The material library will operate as a part of a teaching classroom, allowing for hands-on encounters and experiential learning to showcase the rich milieu across contemporary sites of material production.
To apply, please email Professor Jia Yi Gu with a brief statement of interest and your CV.
The research allows students to engage in architectural materials as cultural techniques through the experience and practice of assembling an institutional material collection. Materials are typically described as raw resources, fixed products, or inert objects to be sourced from a shelf in the store—a function of commodity more than of making. Yet, such understandings of materials belie the complex logistical, economic, ecological, and technological actions that transform matter into the material substrate for our lives. Instead, Material Acts considers materials as participants in and outputs of cultural practices and techniques. This perspective of materials as an ongoing process—rather than as raw resources or finished products—centers human actors and systems in the event of the material transformation, reminding us that materials are not, in fact, natural.
To apply, please share a 200 word statement on your interest in the topic or project, and what you hope to learn or advance in the research engagement.