Blaine Brownell

The landscape is changing at breakneck speed. Innovation threatens to outpace architects’ and designers’ working knowledge of materials thereby limiting their applicability. To create innovative design from concept to completion, a knowledge of the uses, properties, and sources of new materials is integral.

The study and practice of architecture and construction of buildings, until recently, has largely focused on a few core materials while ignoring the better part of a lot of the innovative materials and products that we’re seeing developed for buildings.

Architectural education, until recently, in this country especially, has been focused a lot on theory and on everything from French philosophy to various formal explorations. Certainly a lot of structures and nuts-and-bolts stuff as well, but not necessarily on this larger understanding of materiality and energy and resources in our worlds, and how architects can help to shape and respond to various problems or situations with regard to the greater material picture.