Material Variance

Material Variance is a one-day symposium organized by Lola Ben-Alon, Assistant Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Tech curriculum. The symposium will delve into the realms of extensively variable materialities and the transformative (and often, messy) processes they evoke.

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 are 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 for the minimization of toxic processing and the advancement of 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 connects material design researchers, building scientists, and artists to discuss the reciprocal impacts of species and form, and the defiance against refinement, exploitation, and technocratic establishments.

Material Variance features a Keynote Lecture titled “Salt y Glue and Mud y Robots” by Ronald Rael (UC Berkeley) at 6pm, preceded by the following sessions:

Session I—Matter and Alchemistry: earth, fibers, plants, living tissues
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
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
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

This event is free and open to the public. Please visit the Columbia GSAPP website for the full schedule and additional information about the speakers.