The final review of Shaping Environments: Experiments in Geometry and Matter takes place Friday 10 May from 11:30am-2:00pm in MMCH 303.
Shaping Environments is a project-based design-research seminar immersed in negotiating physical prototyping with digital environments. This semester the seminar is focused on architectural potential of bioplastics as an alternative to our current petrochemical reality of material formations. Interestingly, blood, clay, and sawdust were common mixtures in material culture of the 19th century. In 1855, Francois Charles Lepage got a French patent for a method of combining blood albumen from slaughterhouses with wood powder to form a plastic, moldable material he called 'bois durci,' the first animal-based polymer for production of ornamental objects. The 19th century world regarded reusing materials as a matter of common sense, of stewardship of material goods. The Shaping Environments seminar experiments with bio-material mixtures, using food and construction waste to propose new material paradigms. Focused on material self-forming tendencies within our contemporary digital production, we explore new biodegradable aesthetics and sensibilities for bio-material lifecycles.