Theme

What’s the Matter when rethinking materiality and materialism in contemporary architecture creations? Is it a matter of matter’s morphogenetic power revived with the ubiquitous involvement of digital technologies in contemporary design and fabrication? Is it a matter of the omnipresent shift from mutant material to dynamic matter? Is it a matter of increasing awareness, exchanging knowledge, thinking differently, on 

matter matters through transdisciplinary research? Is it a matter of reconsidering the role of matter in contemporary design processes as a whole? Is it a matter of reconsidering the role of materialism in social discourse associated with large scale and energy intensive projects?

Sub-themes

• Emergent materialities
• Matter and material(s)
• Encoding and encoded materiality
• Matter as morphogenetic agent
• Real time fabrication and malleable matter 
• Creating the machine to form matter 
• Fragile materiality
• Smart Materials
• Form-generating materiality
• Associative potential of material
• Matter and sympathy
• Neo-materialism and architecture
• Material ecologies
• Speculative materialism and architecture 
• Performativity versus performance 

• Intelligent and adaptive materialities 
• Material-based design
• Informed tectonics
• Materialising form – forming matter
• Experimentation on matter-form generation 
• Agile fabrication
• Mutant Materials
• Materialisation technologies
• Responsive materiality
• Empowering matter in contemporary design 
• Top down materiality-bottom up matter 
• Neo-materialism and matter
• Materials and the Anthropocene 
• Para-materiality