“The people who become the custodians of these buildings then have the skills to maintain and repair, as well as evolve, the site over time,” she says.
As Burchert puts it, science fiction tends to show a future built of concrete and steel; Material Cultures instead offers something natural, communal, and innovative, a needed paradigm shift. And it’s increasingly working on a larger scale. The Phoenix, a forthcoming low-carbon development in the southern English city of Lewes that’s being developed by a former managing director for Greenpeace, will use the firm’s designs for 70 of its 700 planned homes.
The project Gormley may be most excited about is an interdisciplinary school Material Cultures is creating north of London: a 500-acre former farm in Essex that will be a living laboratory bridging the firm’s work in supply chains, materials science, and construction. The rural site for the project, which has the working title Land Lab, was deliberately chosen as a place where those connections would be inherent, Gormley says.
The Essex project advances the firm’s larger mission. As Gormley, Massoud, and Islam advise in their book, “Hold a vision of a radically different world in your mind while continuing to act in the world as it is, persisting in the project of making changes that are within the scope of action.”
Patrick Sisson, a Chicago expat living in Los Angeles, covers technology and urbanism.
