Ghost of Stone

Ghost of Stone is one of four sculptural prototypes of the series: “TRANSTECTONICS,Craft traditions and material narratives in the age of the Anthropocene.”

In Ghost of Stone, stone masonry carving techniques are translated to the material of glass, creating mass and volume in a material that is normally presented in a flat state. With silica being the main molecular component of glass, Ghost of Stone aims to rethink this material by considering its mineral origin. The raw material of this experiment is a solid block of glass that is manipulated recreating old techniques of hand carving stone with digital tools that allow high degree of precision.   This prototype proposes a double translation in the process of making: first from the old carving techniques to the new digital capacities, but also from the material of stone to the material of glass.

TRANSTECTONICS, an exhibition by Spanish architect and designer Cristina Parreño Alonso, lecturer in the MIT Department of Architecture, is on view at MIT’s Keller Gallery through January 31, 2020. Crossing materials and processes, Parreño presents sculptural prototypes that combine natural materials such as glass, stone, wood, and volcanic rock, with unexpected craft processes, and juxtaposes them with geological events. The exhibition presents five videos as well as four sculptural prototypes. 

The four prototypes, Rock in Full Metal Jacket, Ghost of Stone, PlyGlass, and Wooden Bubble, each embody their own “tectonic translations.”

A video portraying a sequence of material events occurring across scales, introduces the exhibition’s proposal of “tectonic translations,” the idea of transferring processes and techniques from one material to another. Shifting between human craft and geological forces, the film equalizes sources of energy for creation–juxtaposing the collapse of a large iceberg with the breakdown of a massive marble block in a quarry and overlaying lava pools with molten metal, ready to be forged.

About the project

TRANSTECTONICS is an ongoing research project that examines the cultural and contextual implications of material practice in Architecture through a series of experiments. TRANSTECTONICS questions the ways in which widely used materials like stone, wood, metal, and glass are processed today into standard building construction products with a limited repertoire of systems of assembly. In their conventional manufactured states, these materials are often stripped of inherent potentials, embodied cultural histories, and important capacities promised when they are in a raw state. By stepping out of the standard systems of assembly, TRANSTECTONICS aims to defamiliarize the processes of construction, transforming it into a process of experimentation. Understanding the process of material assembly as a powerful tool for exploration, the project stages a series of material events, historical timelines embedded in physical prototypes that bear remains of their material narratives.