PROGRAMME
In the light of increasing environmental awareness, timber emerged at the forefront of material investigations in architecture over the past decades. Waste material from the end of the manufacturing process, or recycled material is fused with other materials to produce composites with changed structural, performative and aesthetic properties. Pulped, cast, bundled, 3D-printed, and robotically-stacked, new technologies enabled a radical shift away from traditional tectonics and towards articulations previously associated with other materials such as concrete, masonry and plastics. Together, these experiments give rise to a new techno-aesthetic paradigm that could be described as a form of transmateriality.
In nineteenth century architectural theory, Gottfried Semper’s Practical Aesthetics already suggested a synthesis between artistic and technological developments brought about by processes of material transfiguration (Stoffwechsel). Today, new visual languages emerge alongside innovative technologies that permit the realistic study of material changes across structures: in folded plates, grid-shells and multi-reciprocal frames, structural integrity is achieved through grading, layering and fusing of surfaces. In practice, developments in timber range from Walter Gropius’s and Konrad Wachsmann’s Packaged House, which unsuccessfully attempted to sell the modern dream of technologically advanced living to the masses, to Jürgen Mayer H’s Metropol Parasol whose captivating elastic forms promise the activation of public space.
Tickets
Please go to www.eventbrite.de to buy the tickets for this symposium. The symposium is supported by ARUP and the UTS Centre for Contemporary Design Practices.
Ansprechpartner an der Fakultät Gestaltung der Hochschule Wismar ist
Prof. Matthias Ludwig unter der E-Mail matthias.ludwig@hs-wismar.de.