Lecture
Thursday 23 April 2009
Over the last ten years, designers throughout the world have developed a strong interest in the study and innovative exploration of the use of materials. Material Design explores the possibility of informing architecture based on a new taxonomy of materials. At the core of this approach lies an investigation that emphasizes a tactile and sensorial immediacy of physical artifacts, while establishing an abstract exploration of their potential sans project or program constraints. The approach discussed in Material Design acknowledges the complex interplay of material properties, performances, operations, and strategies on the basis of a number of key concepts such as “aggregation” and “modulation” that transcend currently established material categories and potentially offer a much richer basis for exploration. Material Design further discusses the larger framework within which these explorations take place and speculates about their future.
Thomas Schroepfer
Associate Professor, Harvard University, Graduate School of Design
Thomas Schroepfer is Associate Professor of Architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design (GSD). He is also a registered architect in Germany and has been associated, in addition to his own practice, with several architectural practices in Berlin, among them Studio Daniel Libeskind. Schroepfer has been an invited lecturer and critic to many architecture schools in the US and Europe including Technical University Berlin, Yale University, and The Cooper Union. His own projects have received awards and recognitions, including from the Union Internationale des Architectes (UIA) in 2002, and his work has been exhibited in the US, Europe, and Asia. Schroepfer received concurrently a BArch from The Cooper Union and a Dipl-Ing in Architecture from the University of the Arts Berlin, and subsequently an MArch with distinction and a DDes from the GSD.
