Michael Bell

Craig Buckley

DVD features highlights from the conference held at Columbia University.

Concrete in Transition

Solid States

Almost every industry in the world has benefited from the invention of plastics, but it is only in the recent past that they have begun to be appreciated as architectural materials in their own right. Plastics are quickly becoming one of the most ubiquitous materials in construction and have the potential to reshape the roles of architects and engineers, as well as the construction industry at large. As a building material, plastic allows for easily molded and formed shapes, leading to increasingly malleable design processes. Despite being the most deeply engineered building materials today, plastics are still in the nascent stages of understanding in terms of their potential applications and uses. In Permanent Change an interdisciplinary group of architects, historians, theorists, and engineers collectively explore the past, present, and future possibilities of this innovative building material.

Plastics in Architecture and Engineering

Permanent Change

Francesco Casetti

Rudiger Campe

Against the grain of the growing literature on screens, *Screen Genealogies* argues that the present excess of screens cannot be understood as an expansion and multiplication of the movie screen nor of the video display. Rather, screens continually exceed the optical histories in which they are most commonly inscribed. As contemporary screens become increasingly decomposed into a distributed field of technologically interconnected surfaces and interfaces, we more readily recognize the deeper spatial and environmental interventions that have long been a property of screens. For most of its history, a screen was a filter, a divide, a shelter, or a camouflage. A genealogy stressing transformation and descent rather than origins and roots emphasizes a deeper set of intersecting and competing definitions of the screen, enabling new thinking about what the screen might yet become.

Craig Buckley

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