In France, the construction sector accounts for one third of the country’s CO2 emissions. Materials, which are partly responsible for this ratio, are extracted, transported, processed, poured or placed, dumped or incinerated… All these steps are opportunities to work on limiting impacts, involving architects, among other things, in deploying a new aesthetic.
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The star of the stage of the recently concluded Design Week in Paris, plastic seems to have moved beyond the disdain it had been experiencing lately. Thanks to recycling, its environmental footprint is now better controlled, which has turned into a real selling point. But beyond the material itself, it is an entire production logic that should be “recycled” to extricate ourselves from the dogma of newness and disposability.
Lucile Viaud is a designer and “geoglass” artist. Working from salvaged materials, she crafts objects that carry within them the history of the territories from where the materials originate. Its snail or abalone shells, forgotten sands, and powdered seaweed are slices of fleeting time and result in objects that cannot be replicated.
It is a sign of both a shift in our relationship to organic life and the ubiquity of new information technologies that a young generation of architects has seized the digital tools within their reach to conceive of new forms in direct interaction with biological life. This is happening both through computational power and digitally-controlled additive fabrication. Nexi Oxman—an architect and a researcher at MIT, where she founded the Mediated Matter design research group—brings up the links between biology and design in her work on materials and 3-D printing. They reflect the use of biology as a technique and an approach to design that is inspired by nature and that modifies the very properties of materials themselves. Neri Oxman is an architect, designer. She is the director of the Material Ecology research initiative, and teaches at the MIT Media Lab.