Wooden Bubble is one of four
sculptural prototypes of the series: “TRANSTECTONICS,Craft traditions and material narratives in the age of the Anthropocene.”
Wooden Bubble, is prototype where
two materials transform each other in the very
process of making; a
reciprocal assembly of glass and wood rooted in the Tegalalang’s blowing glass
craftsmanship. In this prototype half of the geometry is milled on wood and the other half is
made by blowing molten glass into that same piece of wood. In the process, the
glass chars the wood and the wood gives shape to the glass. The final prototype
is rendered as a collaboration between the precision of digital fabrication
techniques used for milling the wooden piece and the imprecisions of the
blowing glass technique that is traditionally used for revolving and curved
geometries and that offers great resistance when it comes to corners and
straight lines. The experiment aims to reveal latent capacities of both materials
that are often lost through the current
conventional systems of construction and the more expedient way in which we
build today.
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.
