The Material Variance Symposium is organized by Assistant Professor Lola Ben-Alon at Columbia GSAPP, where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Tech curriculum. Additional curatorial support for this event from Kaeli Alika Streeter. Ronald Rael (UC Berkeley) will deliver a keynote lecture for the event titled “Salt y Glue and Mud y Robots.”
This conference is free and open to the public. Everything that we call a “material” in architecture comes from the Earth. The geological trade routes of building materials dictate their earthly origins through strata, soil beds, rocks, sedimentary deposits, metals, minerals, fertilizers, chemicals, and molecular elements. Couldn’t we therefore classify all buildings as fundamentally "earthen" or "natural"?
Nonetheless, the refinement and processing of certain materials is intricately intertwined with politics, regional health, labor practices, human hands, and tools, employing thermal energy, chemical treatments, and institutionalized exploitation. ] Embracing readily available raw materials in building processes allows to minimize toxic processing and advance localized streams.
Material Variance distinguishes materialities that are extensively variable, non-engineered, non-refined, messy, porous and disobedient, offering a new paradigm and aesthetical inquiry into unruly fabrication, unexpected mix designs, and demilitarized construction techniques. By doing so, material processes catalyze non-husbandry material traditions, self-sufficiency construction centering community reliance, and feminine-energy labor practices with manually crafted, minimally processed, uncooked, unbaked, untreated, and raw.
The Material Variance symposium will delve into the realms of extensively variable materialities and the transformative (and often, messy) processes they evoke; classifying them into geological products, plant based fibers, by-products, animal friendly elements, fungi and living microorganisms.
SCHEDULE
Welcome by Lola Ben-Alon
9:30am
113 Avery Hall (Wood Auditorium)
SESSION I — Matter and Alchemistry: earth, fibers, plants, living tissues
10:00 am
Wood Auditorium, 113 Avery Hall, Columbia University
● Living Matter, David Benjamin, Columbia GSAPP (moderator)
● Breathing Space: On Biomass and Air, Mae-ling Lokko, Yale University
● Earthen Tectonics, Adam Marcus, Tulane University
● Adaptive Wildwood, Leslie Lok, Cornell University
MATERIAL KITCHENS — kitchen, materials, lunch, screening, performance
12:30 pm
Avery Hall 400 level, Columbia University
● Liquid Eel, Sasha Fishman
● 3D Printed Earth-Fiber, Olga Beatrice Carcasse, Columbia GSAPP
● Healthy Materials: Samples from Donghia Library,Jonsara Ruth, Parsons
● Textural Threshold: Dreadlock, Felecia Davis, Penn State
● Raw Metrics: Sound Installation, Ethan Bourdeau, Columbia GSAPP
● ReadyMix at DIA, Lucy Raven, Cooper Union
SESSION II — Processes and Impermanence: robots, open source, printing, stacking
3:00 pm
114 Avery Hall, Columbia University
● Dust and Stain, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Columbia GSAPP (moderator)
● Molds as Magic, Sarah Graff, The Metropolitan Museum of Art
● Reconstructing Variability, Mitch McEwen, Princeton University
● Biological Transient Materials, Ruth Morrow, Newcastle University
KEYNOTE LECTURE titled “Salt y Glue and Mud y Robots” by Ronald Rael (UC Berkeley) with a response
from Lola Ben-Alon
6:00 pm
114 Avery Hall, Columbia University