Materials Conference 2011
Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering
Panel — Architecture: Plastic Life, Life of Plastics
Galia Solomonoff
Associate Professor, GSAPP, Columbia University: Moderator
Anna Dyson
Director, CASE, RPI/CASE SOM, New York
Winka Dubbeldam
Professor of Practice, University of Pennsylvania
Sheila Kennedy
Professor of Practice, MIT School of Architecture + Planning
Bill Pearson
Technical Director, North Sails 3DL
In an era of harvesting energy, pushing boundaries, recovering lost energy and convening new means of cross fertilization if not purposeful conflation of means, do plastics add a particular value or are they one of many newly liquid materials in the fields of design and engineering? Has the status of the architectural work gained or lost distinction in this regard—that is, is there an overt architectural significance to plastics today, or are they so fully embedded in work that they assume a less overt but nonetheless more pervasive role?
Are current designers more beholden to performance or strategic purpose than in prior generations and do plastics today signify something far more distributed and codified; or are plastics simply purposed as other materials with their own unique design instincts and parameters?
In the mid-1950s the promise of plastics took on a utopian guise but also a full-fledged image of total design: is it possible that plastics heralded an era of synthetic and ultimately engineered design whose concrete image and form betrayed the flexibility and dexterity that plastics represented at a technical (chemical) level? Did the image of the ’50s utopian house of the future become too unilateral and too closed even as it was first envisioned to corral or signify the torrents of heterogeneous practices that were beneath, within and around these new engineered materials? Does design find itself outside of these practices, or possibly within them?
