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, Animating, Disassembling, Feeding, Re-fusing, and Stitching. 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 undergoin transformation as it sheds one state of arrangement in order to adopt another.
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