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Marcus presents "Material Natures" research at ACSA Annual Meeting, Detroit, Michigan, USA.

Updated: Jul 31


In 2017, Marcus presented "MaterialNatures" at the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA) conference. Over the last century, two paradigms have dominated attempts to address the challenges of the city. On one hand, there was a "substantive" approach that aimed to control the physical substance of the city, treated as a completely predetermined object: form and life dictated by architects who claimed a universal understanding of the goals and values of society. On the other hand, a "procedural" or strategic approach focused on process as a form of social action, a negotiated creation involving many stakeholders with overlapping or competing interests in developing visions, identity, and physical projects. The substantive and procedural were not always antagonistic concepts, but rather two different approaches to controlling the evolution of urban space. The distinction between the procedural and the substantive was inevitably subsumed by the “practice” of city building as distinct from city design.


Beaches have always been ongoing settings for erosion and the effects of natural processes on materials and landscapes. In this setting, natural selection takes its toll and ecologies are shaped because of what they are, where they are, and what they are made of. Unfortunately, in the 20th century, this setting became prime territory for pollution, waste, and erosion due to manufacturing and coastal shipping practices that privileged transient, international growth at the expense of local sustainability. In “MaterialNature: An Opportunistic Paradigm of Architecture & Landscape Ecology,” the influences of shipping industry waste, coastal erosion, and natural growth became the vehicle for architectural speculation. It leveraged the material waste gathered from industry and created a new material trajectory based on need and the aesthetic of ecology. The project comprised a series of architectural pavilions made from a mixture of residual, off-cast materials designed specifically to be weatherized. Its design aimed to provide a useful architectural community amenity in an area of high recreational activity while simultaneously realizing a potential for architecture to be born from waste and to return to nature without providing further waste.


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