Prof. Bechthold recently delivered a public lecture at the TU Graz, addressing the role of design methods in research that spans the disciplinary divide of engineering, material science and architecture.

Birkhauser recently announced the publication of our forthcoming book ‘Ceramic Material Systems’: “Ceramic material systems comprise the full ecosystem from material extraction and processing to the assembly of construction elements and their eventual reuse and recycling. This book establishes the state of the art of this quickly emerging field, with a particular interest in presenting the knowledge needed for developing project-specific solutions that often involve custom ceramic elements. The authors provide a rigorous background of the materials and associated technologies as well as inspiration from the very best contemporary buildings using ceramic systems, along with an overview of emerging ceramic technologies and research.”

The book will be available starting in May 2015!

MaPS has been invited to present ongoing work at the 2014 Wyss Retreat. In addition to displaying our prototypes we are also designing and fabricating a modular exhibition environment that can be quickly installed and taken down. Work from ALivE will be shown along with ongoing research by the Bertoldi group as well as research by Wyss scholar Chuck Hoberman and James Weaver.

MaPS is offering two ceramic material systems courses this fall. At the GSD Material Practice as Research is offered by Leire Asensio Villoria and Felix Raspall, at the TU Graz Ceramic Re:Visions is offered by the Institut for Structural Design with Stefan Peters, Andreas Trummer, Felix Amtsberg and GSD faculty and TH-Graz visiting professor Martin Bechthold. Student work of these classes will be shown at the 2015 Cevisama in Valencia, Spain.

M. Bechthold delivered a keynote at the 2014 Bergamo, Italy, Science Festival, speaking about the relationship between science and design. He will be giving his next keynote at the IconARCH conference in Konya, Turkey, in November.

The following is an excerpt from the article published in the IconARCH proceedings:

“(…)

Research in Architecture?

Individuals without connections to the building industry are often surprised to hear that research indeed exists in our field. What one could possibly be working on is equally unclear to outsiders, much in contrast to fields such as engineering or medicine where research is widely assumed to be fundamental to progress. There is more understanding of building related research in the University setting, where colleagues from other disciplines expect those affiliated with departments of architecture, landscape architecture or urban design and planning to be scholarly engaged.

At Harvard University I am engaged with a broad range of research projects and topics, most of which are connected through their pursuit of material systems and innovation. Conducted in the context of the Material Processes and Systems (MaPS) group, and often collaborating with Prof. Sayegh’s Responsive Environments and Artifacts (REAL) group, our work is different from yet related to material science, refers to industrial process engineering as much as to chemistry and building physics. It operates on dramatically different scales, from the nano-scale to the scale of the city, with outcomes that range from prototypes and pilot project to patents and papers. Most importantly, however, the work has led to the development of methods that accelerate the rate of innovation and our quest for novelty, ultimately geared towards advancing the built environment to a more sustainable future. This article puts forward several aspects of this work in a provocative, polemical manner as food for thought, not as a literal recipe for success.

(…)”

Please refer to the full paper for further reading.