The alchemist architect: Towards exploring materials

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the growing interest of many artists, architects, and designers regarding the exploration of handmade materials. Today, designers focus on gaining experience with new materials. These experimental material investigations for discovering the nature of the material can be placed in the intersection of homo faber, human production, and technology. The transition between alchemists, artisans and technicians has been expressed by Jacques Ellul, Lewis Mumford, and Jose Ortega y Gasset. What kind of transformation can these contemporary quests in design create and what experiences are involved in the practices and theoretical integration of the senses in material encounters and produced by haptic experience? The aim is to figure out the possible outcomes of this inquiry of designers through the act of making and how these experiences might contribute to future design pedagogies in architecture and interior design. Therefore, deriving from experimental approaches in working with unknown materials, this chapter explores the need for these experimental investigations. © 2021, IGI Global.