Design materials science | 1st semester | summer semester 2020
Reduced to a volume of 125 cm³, the material cubes reveal all their aesthetic, functional and mechanical properties. Where stone, wood, concrete, steel, plastic, glass and other materials often hide behind their intended purpose in everyday life, the cubes reveal the material itself. In addition to their genuine potential as hardware of design and construction, this highlights special properties of surface, density or light transmission.
At the very beginning of their studies, in the first semester, students create such a material cube in the materials science course. For this purpose, the students independently look for a suitable material, which they examine for the respective material properties and cast, glue, mill, saw, grind, print or shape in the form of a homogeneous cube with an edge length of 5 cm (= 125 cm³).
This way samples are created from traditional, innovative, familiar and unusual materials, based on the students’ origin, interests and craftsmanship.
The “125 cm³ MATERIAL” collection at the Design Center Baden-Württemberg in Stuttgart and the Vitra Design Museum in Weil am Rhein showed how inspiring these material samples can be for use in architecture and design.
The collection of all previous works now comprises over 1000 cubes made of more than 300 different materials, impressing with their particular originality, functionality, materiality or aesthetics. They demonstrate that material issues are not only highly relevant in materials science, but also play an important role in everyday perception. Each of these student works illustrates how materials can function as storage for sentiment and memory, it shows their unimagined potential, or the immediate effect they can have.
The MaterialSTUDIO is an innovative and transdisciplinary platform at our faculty.
Under the supervision of Professor Lutz Dickmann, it has been firmly integrated into material-inclusive teaching since 2013. It imparts material-specific knowledge and thus sharpens the sensibility for materials and their aesthetic, mechanical and ecological properties.
The works were supervised by Professor Lutz Dickmann.
