Material Library: Open Call
This open call invites contributions to the material library component of Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design, an upcoming exhibition opening September 28 at Craft Contemporary in Los Angeles, CA. Designers, artists, and other makers are encouraged to submit experimental material samples from their practices for possible inclusion in the exhibition’s material library.
Material Acts examines the role of nature in 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 exhibition will examine how contemporary design practices mobilize, confound, and generate natures, whether through simulating mechanics or growing biological matter.
For the material library, we invite individuals and collaborators of various levels of expertise to submit samples of materials that they have created through their practices, trials, or research.
Whether experimentations in chemical reactions, design with scoby, environment-reactive metals, bio-calcified foam, woven earth fibers, or other mobilizations of matters, this call aims to highlight material explorations and advancements in contemporary design practices—as well as the material accidents that happen along the way. We welcome 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 the exhibition, in one of the main galleries, allowing for hands-on encounters and experiential learning to showcase the rich milieu across contemporary sites of material production. All samples selected for inclusion in the library will be displayed together on a collection of shelves, tables, and other interpretative surfaces.
Submission Guidelines and Eligibility
The form will ask you to:
- Briefly describe your material, its makeup, process of production, and possible utilizations.
- Provide material dimensions (Please see below for size and weight guidelines.)
- Submit photographs that show both the materiality of the sample and its scale.
- Confirm whether your sample is safe to be touched by audience members.
- Provide any additional comments or questions.
Acceptance of your material sample(s) into the library will be determined by the curatorial team to ensure all samples support the exhibition thematics and fit the submission guidelines. The project team can provide a prepaid shipping label for submissions that meet the shipping requirements listed below. Samples will be displayed in the state and format in which we receive them. Please package your sample as it will be displayed. All samples must be safely handled by museum staff.
Underrepresented practices, as well as practices outside well-funded circuits of academic research, are encouraged to apply. Material Acts has a limited pool of funding to support international shipping. With international shipping rates and timelines taken into consideration, we will work with accepted material samples from international practices on a case-by-case basis.
Size Guidelines and Shipping
Maximum size requirement: 11 ¼” (L) x 8 ¾” (W) x 6” (H), in order to fit within a standard flat rate medium box.
Weight limit: 15 lb.
All material samples should adhere to USPS regulations on hazardous, restricted, and perishable mail. Non-hazardous liquids and powders can be mailed if they are properly packaged and sealed in a waterproof or sift-proof container. The outer of packages containing liquids should be marked to indicate the nature of the contents, and include orientation arrows. Please review USPS regulations for full details.
Further shipping instructions and timeline will be provided upon acceptance of submission.
Return shipment of samples will not be available.
Weight limit: 15 lb.
All material samples should adhere to USPS regulations on hazardous, restricted, and perishable mail. Non-hazardous liquids and powders can be mailed if they are properly packaged and sealed in a waterproof or sift-proof container. The outer of packages containing liquids should be marked to indicate the nature of the contents, and include orientation arrows. Please review USPS regulations for full details.
Further shipping instructions and timeline will be provided upon acceptance of submission.
Return shipment of samples will not be available.
Timeline
- Submissions open July 15, 2024.
- Deadline for material submissions is
August 12, 2024 at 11:59pm PSTEXTENDED TO August 19, 2024 at 11:59pm PST. - Notice of acceptance will be on a rolling basis with latest confirmation of acceptance by Friday August 16, 2024.
- US-based material samples should be mailed no later than August 27, 2022.
- Non-US based material samples will need to be mailed earlier; to be determined case by case.
Please contact us at materialacts@gmail.com with any questions.
“Nature” in Architecture, Craft, Science
“Nature” in Architecture, Craft, Science was a roundtable discussion with historians and scholars organized to advance the topics of the exhibition. The roundtable focused on the definition, sites, and treatments of “nature” within three overlapping disciplines–architecture, craft, and science.
Participants
Graham Burnett is a historian of science, a writer/editor, and a 2013-2014 Guggenheim Fellow in residence as a Research Fellow at the Bard Graduate Center in New York City.
Christina Cogdell is Professor of Design at UC Davis. Her recent book Towards a Living Architecture? Complexism and Biology in Generative Design (University of Minnesota Press, 2018) examines architecture’s relation to recent scientific theories of self-organization and emergence, development and evolution, and complex adaptive systems.
Melissa Lo is a feminist historian of early modern science, medicine, and visual culture. As a freelancer, she writes about the politics of art, cultures of images, and histories of contentious knowledge. Based in Los Angeles, she serves as on the board of the Feminist Center for Creative Work.
Michael Osman is Associate Professor of architectural history at UCLA. He works on the technological, environmental, and economic aspects of architectural history in the twentieth century.
Jenni Sorkin is Associate Professor of art history at UC Santa Barbara. She writes on the intersections between gender, material culture, and contemporary art. Her current book project, Art in California, written for Thames & Hudson’s acclaimed World of Art series, will be released in the fall of 2021.
Material Acts
Material Acts is a presentation and discussion series with design practitioners organized to advance the topics of the exhibition. The discussion series examines how contemporary design practices (specifically in architecture) mobilize, confound, and generate natures, from simulating mechanics to growing biological matter. The conversations are organized around processes, attending to specific actions or activities enacted upon materials to induce their change. Rather than, say, consider concrete as a plastic yet static form, we might treat it instead as a series of logistical operations, of transport, mixing and curing, as well as a junction of energy flows. By engaging action over object, verbs over nouns, the framework allows us to understand materials as process-based events, rather than artifacts in stasis, re-centering the human actor or agent in the event, reminding us that materials are not natural.
A series of 75-min discussions were organized around thematic gerunds, or actions transformed into nouns, including weaving, feeding, aggregating, laminating, etc.
Material Acts 1: Aggregating
The first half of the session focuses on the processes of aggregating. Historically, aggregate materials result from a process of breaking down one material into smaller components, and then recomposing those materials with a second, such as glue, cement, or another binding agent. While aggregating has typically incorporated geologically decomposed materials (sand and gravel), this session invites practices who have incorporated non-naturally occurring materials (such as plastic) and reclaimed materials (construction waste) into the processes of aggregation. The second half of the session furthers this inquiry into recycling or circular economies by inviting practices who question the need to bind aggregate material, instead exploring methods of jamming or piling.
Participants
Meredith Miller (she/her) is an architect and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning. Her research and practice links architecture’s materiality to global resources, climate change, and post-natural ecologies. She is a founding member of T+E+A+M.
Anton Maertens (he/him) is Business Developer at BC materials. He studied City Development & Renovation Coordination in Brussels and has worked as a (sustainability) advisor for the Flemish & Brussels Government. BC materials is winner of the Pioneer Award of the Belgian Building Awards & Henry Vandevelde Award - Climate Challenge 2020.
Petrus Aejmelaeus-Lindström (he/him) is an architect and researcher at Gramazio Kohler Research (GKR) at ETH Zurich. In his current research, Petrus is developing innovative robotic fabrication techniques for in situ fabrication of fully reversible structures from locally sourced materials.
Garrett Ricciardi (he/him) is a lecturer at UCLA and co-founder of Formlessfinder, an interdisciplinary practice for design, research, and writing. The practice operates as a laboratory for methodological experimentation oriented toward the introduction of moments of formlessness into architecture.
Material Acts 2: Animating
Focused on processes of animating, this session invites practices that embed responsive materials within assemblies, in order to induce changes in surface porosity, visual transparency, and/or structural composition. In some cases transformation is induced electro-mechanically—actuators activate changes through electrical signals. Other projects heighten the physical-chemical responses of specific materials to environmental inputs such as heat and changes in temperature. In many cases, the practice of animating materials also requires designing a choreographed sequence of inputs and outputs that echoes a homeostatic model of nature.
Participants
Doris Sung is Associate Professor of Architecture at the University of Southern California and founder of DOSU Studio Architecture. Through grant-funded research, she is developing smart materials, such as thermobimetals, to self-ventilate, self-shade, self-structure, self-assemble and self-propel in response to changes in temperatures–all with zero-energy and no controls.
Omar Khan is Professor and Head of the School of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University. Khan’s research and creative activities span architecture, installation/performance art, and digital design and fabrication.
Felecia Davis is an Associate Professor at the Stuckeman Center for Design Computing in the School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture at Pennsylvania State University and is the director of SOFTLAB@PSU. This lab is dedicated to developing soft computational materials and textiles.
Material Acts 3: Growing
Focused on processes of growing, this session invites practices that incorporate living matter into material fabrication, to enhance structural or environmental performance or open new pathways for form-making. In some cases this occurs through directing the labor of organisms and harvesting the organic output of this labor, to be combined with inanimate materials. In other scenarios, populations of organisms are embedded directly into material systems, as structure or processor. Across these various approaches, the engagement with living non-human agents recenters attention on the practices of care necessarily involved in sustaining liveness, such as acts of growing and feeding.
Participants
Christine Yogiaman is Assistant Professor of Architecture and Sustainable Design at the Singapore University of Technology and Design, where she leads the Dynamic Assemblies Lab with Kenneth Tracy. She directs Yogiaman Tracy Design (yo_cy), a research and design practice that focuses on the utilization of digital techniques along with contextual influences to create culturally embedded, affective work in Indonesia.
Ferdinand Ludwig is Professor of Green Technologies in Landscape Architecture at the Technical University of Munich. He is also the co-founder of ludwig.schönle, a collaborative office focusing on design strategies to integrate Baubotanik concepts in architecture and urban planning.