This international transdisciplinary symposium examines new material practices in architecture and design in the age of climate crisis. It takes place in hybrid form at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK) situated adjacent to modernist icon and UNESCO World Heritage Site Weissenhof Estate and is open to a global audience. The event is organized by The Laboratory / AA Visiting School Stuttgart, a cross-disciplinary initiative of the AA at the ABK that brings together architects, artists, designers and researchers to speculate about our life in the future.
Covid-19 and the climate emergency have enhanced our material sensibility and refocussed our vision onto our real problems. As vital to our life on this planet as water and air, material resources are finite and can’t be (mass)reproduced. The material ethos that has underwritten the fields of architecture and design is shifting.
The symposium probes and charts the contemporary frontiers of material practices in the age of climate crisis putting the responsibility for our future back into our own court. Material itself is a pressing design question and task. Developing acute sensibilities about material’s role in ecological process has become increasingly urgent.
