The Subject Matter design studio approaches materials as a continuum, from their extraction and production, through craft and fabrication, to their use and significance. For the Spring 2023 semester, the subject matter is metals.

Metals are among the earliest of elements in our world, and among the most common. Their refinement and use parallel the development of human society. In the 1830s, the Danish archeologist Christian Jürgensen Thomsen proposed a ‘three age’ system for categorizing human history: from stone to bronze (around 3500 BCE) and to iron (around 500 BCE in Europe). The refinement of metals is among our earliest technologies and represent decisive moments in society. Each of these metal technologies changed the ways humans interacted with each other and their environment.

Another transitional moment was the invention of the Bessemer process in the 1850s, when the mass production of steel became possible by purifying iron in a blast furnace. This method allowed for strong structural sections to be produced, enabling the steel frame building. At the same time, the process produced a great deal of carbon pollution – poorly understood at the time, but a significant problem for inhabitants of the Anthropocene – ourselves.

It is becoming increasingly clear that the way that we use materials in architecture has implications for the environment in which we live and which we leave for our descendants. In this course, we would like to understand materials better, and to know how they circulate in today’s world. We use provenance to study the path a material takes from production, to use, and re-use. Provenance is the 'life story' of a material, rendering it concrete and specific rather than abstract and formal.