Rock in Full Metal Jacket is
one of four sculptural prototypes of the series: “TRANSTECTONICS, Craft traditions and material narratives in the age of the Anthropocene.”
In
Rock in Full Metal Jacket the
technique for casting aluminum called foam vaporization is reinterpreted
and put in dialogue with indigenous metal clamping techniques of stone,
creating a seemingly fluid joint between a volcanic rock and the metal.
The
foam vaporization technique was
patented at MIT in 1962 The prototype
“Rock in Full Metal Jacket”, takes us back to the foundry of Material Science
at MIT, to reimagine the “foam vaporization” technique by introducing a foreign
material _a volcanic rock. In this material experiment, half of the geometry is
carved out of a volcanic rock, and the other half of the geometry is made out
of foam. Both materials are then assembled and buried together in sand with a
tunnel to pour aluminum. When the aluminum enters in contact with the foam, it
disintegrates it and fully replaces it, as in foam vaporization. In “Rock in
Full Metal Jacket”, however, the aluminum also gets in contact with the
volcanic rock making its way into its pores and creating a permanent connection
between the mineral and the metal when it all cools down.
In
Rock in Full Metal Jacket, the technique for casting aluminum called foam
vaporization is reinterpreted by introducing a foreign material _a volcanic
rock. By combining newer metal casting methods with ancient indigenous metal
clamping systems to connect stones, this prototype creates a seemingly fluid
joint between a volcanic rock and the metal. “Rock in Full Metal Jacket” looks at a way of working with
metal that retains the fluidity that it has at high temperatures, speculating
with a new type of non-mechanic assembly between rock and metal.
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.
