Verbing with Materials

A presentation by Kate Yeh Chiu, Jia Yi Gu and Hilary Huckins Weidner on the 2024 Getty PST ART initiative Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design, presented by Craft Contemporary. The exhibition and publication is organized around five material acts, Animating, Disassembling, Feeding, Re-fusing, and Stitching. Each of these terms operates 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, could we differently explore the fullness of matter undergoing transformation as it sheds one state of arrangement in order to adopt another.

See Kate Yeh Chiu, and Jia Yi Gu, eds. Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design. Los Angeles: Craft Contemporary, 2024  

Place-Based
Lectures

Research presentations by Jia Yi Gu, Andrew Herscher, Phoebe Springstubb, and Dana Salama. Place-based lectures takes place within, or directly alongside, the landscape, collection, building, or material context being discussed, treating the site itself as part of the subject and as a source of knowledge. Rather than separating scholarship from its physical context, these lectures use location to make material histories tangible and encourage audiences to encounter ideas through the places where they are materially produced.

For example, see the site-specific experimental lecture series Place Setting (which inspired Place Based Lectures) in Los Angeles.

Deconstructing a
House: Annotative
Drawing Workshop

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes’s re-drawn diagram of the deconstructed 2-4-6-8 House traces the provenance (or sources) of materials by accounting for their basic elements: aluminum, silica, copper, crude oil etc. This work politicizes the seemingly neutral information presented in architectural drawings by tracing them back to sites of extraction and industry. Working in groups of 4, students further annotate the drawing with their own layer of information (labor, degradation, petrol lines, repair), researched together. These annotations will form a basis of understanding how domestic architecture is not only through the parts of assembly but the flows of energy, labor, resources, and time that account for architecture.

See Charlotte Malterre-Barthes, “The Devil Is in the Details: Who Is It That the Earth Belongs To?,” in Non-Extractive Architecture: On Designing Without Depletion, ed. Space Caviar (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021)

Parasitic Reading
in Detail

Inspired by the Parasitic Reading Room, this event activates Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Design as a text itself, inviting participants to read and discuss material systems together. The program produces a spontaneous set of reading spaces in which select texts are read aloud in relation to a specific set of material assemblies found on site. 

For example, see the Parasitic Reading Room—a nomad, spontaneous and parasitic set of reading spaces took place along the venues  of the 4th Istanbul Design Biennial ‘A School of Schools’ and other spots in the city. Learn more.

Mon. Nov. 16
6:30pm
Taubman College
Liberty Annex

Material Feast is an interdisciplinary dialogue featuring designers and practitioners interrogating the contemporary role of materials in design. Framed as a "material feast"—a term that gestures toward abundance—each participant will offer a brief presentation of their practice using provisional objects and materials to probe the boundaries between art, science, design, and craft, inviting us to consider materials as processes rather than products.