Mixed Matters

Introduction—The (Multi-)Material
Things to Come
Kostas Grigoriadis
Material innovation has historically been at the forefront of change in architecture
and with the advent of a variety of new technological developments
in materiality, it is imperative to consider its implications within the built
environment.
Starting off an investigation into advances in material research, the ten MIT
Technology Review Breakthrough Technologies for 2015 for instance, consisted
of, among others, helium balloons that use the layered stratospheric
winds to navigate the globe and beam high-speed Internet access to remote
locations. Additionally, a cinematic-reality interface that projects light into
human eyes, making it blend seamlessly with natural light and therefore
populating one's vision with virtual imagery, promised to make the virtual
appear as real as reality itself. Research in both of these technologies partly
involved a material problem (in the build-up of the balloons' polyethylene
envelope and in manufacturing the grain-sized projector in the case of cinematic-reality)
but more interestingly, five out of the other eight technologies
were related to material innovations per se. With this kind of research nowadays
ranging from the atomic and nano all the way to the visible scale it is
possible to see the nano-lattice architecture, liquid biopsy, brain organoids,
supercharged photosynthesis and internet of DNA technologies as material
level inventions. Additionally, taking this range of scales into account while
looking through previous years of the MIT Technology Review, it is rather
striking that there has been a steady decrease in the magnitude in which
materiality has been intervened with. From the use of additive manufacturing
for 3D printing jet parts in 2013, to micro-scale 3D printing in 2014, the
natural continuation of this lineage was the creation of nano-scale material
lattices in 2015.
What one can effectively extract from looking into these reviews that capture
the forefront of scientific and technological innovation is that there are
two main ongoing changes taking place currently. Firstly, in what material
research and the definition of materials themselves actually are and secondly
in how matter interfaces and weaves together with information and
the digital domain. Or as Spina (2012, p.6) aptly suggested:
"We live in an age of permanent mutation and continuous adaptation...
Now, what if material itself was put into question? What if the
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