Material World Monday | The Female Gaze

Material World Monday: ‘Windows to the World’-Curtain Walls

What is a wall anyways? What should it do? If you answered that it should hold up the roof, you would be right-if you lived before 1900.

Material World Mondays: ‘Lean In’-A Discussion of Cantilevers

If you had asked grade school Tiffany what her biggest pet peeve was, it would have been the inability to build more than two squares out from the walls on the Sims. But to be fair, the game developers were just using the rules of physics that builders had used for hundreds of years-until 20th […]Read Post ›

Material World Monday: Fantastic Plastics

If you were asked to name building materials, I doubt many people would list ‘plastic’ as one of them. But at one point in time, engineers and designers thought it would completely revolutionize the way that we build.

Material World Monday: Steel and the Industrial Metropolis

If you asked me to list the materials that changed American life the most profoundly, steel would certainly be at the top of the list. Ubiquitous in our modern daily lives, at the turn of the century this material completely revolutionized the fields of engineering and architecture in the 20th century.