TUM Professorship of Architecture and Construction

The Material Exchange is a platform for research, exchange, and dissemination on cutting edge technologies and methods of material practice, dedicated to the questions of our lived environment.

The platform will be anchored by a series of annual symposia that bring together the best minds on an evolving material topic, bridging across disciplines and between academia, practice, and industry. Conversations will be built on the intersections of the science, engineering, and design considerations facing the material in question.

Architecture is a material discipline. We design and create environments, transforming seemingly inert and physical materials into social and spatial interactions that evolve over time. And for many years, our relationship to our material world was based on this understanding – of accumulating and organizing material products into new physical configurations. However, with the climate and environmental crises more urgent than ever, we must expand our material understanding and material attitudes not only to repair what we may have destroyed in the past but also to find new ways forward that would be more ecologically conscious and resource efficient. This entails expanding our understanding of the material process as one that begins long before it hits the construction site and long after its usefulness in the building. It also entails understanding the material as dynamic, rather than inert; as a resource that evolves over time, whose properties may change, and whose evolution may present other opportunities. This line of thinking requires that we look beyond a collection of inert samples, and beyond our disciplinary boundaries to see the material world as a necessarily transdisciplinary exchange.