Transparent Plastics Between Intellectualisation and Trash Culture

Abstract

Synthetic materials have re-established themselves in the experiments of the contemporary architectural avant-garde in the tension between spirit and matter, form and material.¹ Digitally generated forms on the one hand and material fetishism on the other favour the use of transparent plastics, which are characterised by immateriality and ambiguity. Their random formability plus their versatility bind the synthetic material to the digitally animated architectural form. Flexibility, efficiency and adaptability — the essential features of synthetic materials-are ideal for so-called bionic architecture. Their indifferent properties predispose them for an architecture that regards metaphor as extremely important, relies on sensuality, ambience and irritation, and takes “removal of barriers” as its key theme—specifically, the removal of barriers between inside and outside, matter and space, loadbearing structure and enclosing envelope, two-dimensionality and three-dimensionality, static and dynamic, and between space and time.

The renaissance of plastiCS — and especially transparent plastics — in architecture is based on the dissolution of the form-material relationship and the associated paradigm change in design approaches and concepts. Detached from the material, form is generated digitally, or the architecture is understood as a material art.