Transstudio

Blaine Brownell now writes a regular online column for Architect magazine. Brownell is one of four featured bloggers, including Aaron Betsky, Hannah McCann, and Lance Hosey. Entitled “Mind & Matter,” Brownell’s blog provides a platform for a broad range of material considerations in design.

Mind & Matter discusses not just emergent materials R&D, but also the possible—or, in some cases, actual—design applications for these next-generation building products. It also delves into the pedagogical and societal aspects of material science, including sustainability, cross-cultural pollination, and the ongoing, radical rethinking of the manmade world.

Blaine Brownell’s design/research project entitled “Infratecture” was featured in Lars Lerup’s Everything Must Move: 15 Years at Rice School of Architecture 1994-2009, edited by Luke Bulman and Jessica Young. The book was co-authored by Albert Pope, Sanford Kwinter, Stephen Fox, and Peter Cook.

Everything Must Move is a book documenting over a decade of propositions about the suburban city in general, and Houston in particular. This city—shapeless, polluted, traffic-clogged, water-logged, limitless—has been a workshop for testing ideas about operating in impossible situations. Everything Must Move is, in many ways, an archival project, however through the infusion of this archival material with new perspectives and projections the project remains poly-vocal, diverse, and open.

Blaine Brownell was interviewed by Mason Riddle for the article “Smart Materials, Intelligent Futures” in the July/August 2009 issue of Fabric Architecture, published by the Industrial Fabrics Association International.

The rapid change in environmental stability is a mandate for an equally rapid change in how architects and the building industry develop and employ materials. At an elemental level, Brownell sees a more healthy environmental future inextricably linked to developments in material science and material technology. “Massive changes are occurring environmentally. Our materials need to address that. Changes in materials can transform society, how we live, what our environmental impact is,” says Brownell. “This current downturn in the building industry is an opportunity for architects to reconsider materials and their impact,” he states.

Blaine Brownell gave a keynote lecture in New York on the subject of aging infrastructure, sponsored by the DHS S&T Directorate and Columbia University. The talk focused on future demands on U.S. infrastructure and possibilities created by emergent material technologies in the spirit of The American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Blaine Brownell lectured at the Architectural Institute of Japan in Tokyo on June 19, 2009. His lecture was entitled ”Sustainable Material Futures in Architecture,” and covered emerging trends in material development based on environmental, economic, and cultural responses, as well as future possibilities.

“Japan is a test, a challenge to think the unthinkable, a place where meaning is finally banished. Paradise, indeed, for the great student of signs.” – Edmund White

Sixteen graduate and undergraduate students from the University of Minnesota School of Architecture set out on May 24, 2009 for Tokyo. The Japan traveling studio—led by Blaine Brownell in collaboration with Kaori Ito and her students at the Tokyo University of Science—is engaged in a documentary film project entitled “Parsing Tokyo.” This project will endeavor to capture material manifestations of immaterial qualities and effects specific to Japan, as seen through the eyes of western and Japanese designers. After the film debut, the students will begin a cross-country tour that includes Sendai, Kyoto, Osaka, Awaji, Himeji, Hiroshima, and Iwakuni.