Permanent Change: Plastics in Architecture and Engineering

2011 / 59 min. / color
Directed by Michael Blackwood

Filmed in the spring of 2011 at the 4th Columbia conference on materials in architecture and engineering.

The participants in the conference:

Paola Antonelli, Jack Armstrong, Michael Bell, Raimondo Betti, Johan Bettum, Craig Buckley, William F. Carroll, Beatriz Colomina, Hernan Diaz Alsonso, Winka Dubbeldam, Anna Dyson, Billie Faircloth, Mark Goulthorpe, Michael Graves, Laurie Hawkinson, Juan Herreros, Steven Holl, George Jeronimidis, Lydia Kallipoliti, Brian Kane, Sheila Kennedy, Jan Knippers, Craig Konyk, Sanford Kwinter, Sylvia Lavin, Chip Lord, Greg Lynn, Fabian Marcaccio, Michael Meredith, Erik Olsen, Jorge Otero-Pailos, William Pearson, Werner Preusker, Theodore H.M. Prudon, François Roche, Hilary Sample, Rita Schenck, Felicity Scott, Hartmut Oliver Sinkwitz, Werner Sobek, Galia Solomonoff, Heiko Trumpf, Ignaas Verpoest, George Wheeler, Mark Wigley

Plastics have become the most ubiquitous and increasingly permanent materials in construction. The material capabilities of plastics both as a generic material nomenclature and as specific polymers and the processes that underlie them suggest a potential to reshape design and the roles of architects and engineers in construction. While plastics are perhaps the most deeply engineered building materials today, they are still in their nascent stages of understanding in terms of their potential applications and uses. Permanent Change sheds new light on these materials and their implications for the fields of architecture and engineering.

Traced through history, plastics in the overarching sense reveal aspects that are often completely contrary to assumptions. Permanent Change undertakes to reexamine the histories and reassess the futures of polymers, exploring their origins in industry and science as well as their role in domestic and public realms, up through recent advances in composites and the new forms of fabrication assembly these portend. Materials that originally anticipated easily molded, re-formed shapes have become a permanent measure and control point in design. From their means of production to their assembly and to their presence in design, polymers have continually been redeployed and developed in ways that often do not align with either the early scholarship or technical forecasts of their capabilities. Plastics, as both broad material nomenclature and specific polymer, may no longer be capable of sustaining the breadth of cultural ambitions the term has held at various historical points. As a material that is still being engineered and increasingly leads to composite assemblies, how are the multiple histories and mediatic aspects of its developments being remade?

Michael Bell
Professor, GSAPP, Columbia University
Conference Chair