Last week I found myself in Zürich, Switzerland, which in itself is somewhat unusual for a person who typically lives and works in the great state of Texas.  To add to that, while installed in said location I experienced one of those intensive periods of excitement and discovery that only happen when you toss yourself and an over-stuffed rolling suitcase headlong into a foreign country and participate in a workshop in order to learn how to screen print electroluminescent lamps (and also to learn that, although they are healthier, multigrain croissants are simply not as delicious as the …

If you’ve been to Disney World or were alive in the 1960’s, you’re likely well aware of the work of Buckminster Fuller, a designer, architect, engineer, globalist, and mathematician who (among a wide variety of other activities) developed geodesic spheres, structures whose geometry engendered great strength without much mass.  I made it down to the World of Disney in college, and while riding the escalator up into Epcot I remember thinking the building was radical, but that was because of the geometry – not because of the …

Have you met TED?
No, I’m not playing wingman for Ted Mosby.  TED is a conference during which exceedingly smart, skillful people present their work in 20 minutes or less.  The presentations are published on the Internets and made available to the world at large for the low price of $free.99.  TED talks are an amazing source of inspiration and information – and some of them feature innovative materials! Therefore, in this post I present three TED talks that relate in some way to the content on ARCHITERIALS:
 1. Thomas Thwaites: How I built …

ARCHITERIALS is a year old now, and like most healthy, well-adjusted one-year-olds it needs to be changed constantly, crawls all over my apartment, and makes strange burbling noises.  No, really – it does.  It’s terrifying.
Over the past year I’ve profiled approximately 65 materials and learned about blogging, bacteria, and biscuits, although I must confess that the biscuts were a side project.  A delicious, buttery side project.  Anyhow, to celebrate the birthday of ARCHITERIALS and the fact that the tagline “Investigating architectural materials since 2010” has finally attained temporal legitimacy, I’ve compiled for this, …

Context changes how we perceive materials.  For example, if you were to examine a carpet from a distance of 1.5″ (as you might do if you’d tripped on up the stairs and upon landing found yourself face to face with the ground) the experience would be completely different than if you were to view it from 5′-6″ feet away (as you might do if you were walking around in a competent manner).  Close up, you’d see the loops and fibers that make up the carpet, and you might be able …

Architects are visual people by and large, and we don’t like clutter or disorganization unless it’s a very carefully ordered chaos within acceptable parameters.  (If you disagree with this broad generalization please feel free to express yourself with wild abandon in the comments section – it is the perfect forum for dissent).  Anyhoozle, I’m bringing this up because a lot of the product data we look at when assessing different building materials that get specified for projects makes my head hurt.  The brochures tend to be tacky, poorly organized, and …

You may have surmised that I spend a not inconsiderable amount of time scouring the Interwebs looking for the latest and greatest materials with which to regale all of you intrepid readers.  Many of the websites I visit tend to tag their posts about architecture projects by material.  The upshot of all of this tagging is that it becomes possible to sort or search these sites by material and as a consequence to encounter lovely, intriguing projects (and also heinous, unspeakable projects) that feature the material in which one may have an interest.  I’ve provided a few links to …

I’m not sure how New Video figured out that I’d be interested in watching an approximately 90 minute documentary film featuring the work of a famous Dutch architect mostly in subtitled German with numerous interviews conducted in English, but that’s what happened.  I will say for the record that if it means watching interesting movies, I don’t really mind that my demographic profile has been targeted and acquired by I-don’t-know-who (though I guess anyone in my demographic would say that).  Anyhow, to cut to the chase, I watched* and enjoyed the …