The cluster is premised on the discussion that current and conventional systems / processes of making ‘things’ (including construction) are hijacked by industrialised and machinic systems providing no space for independent / autonomous agencies. This has an impact on the ‘things’ themselves and the lives they produce around them. Making and material processes are largely seen through two major standardised categorisations in the global context:

1. Sustainable material research and practices, where the existing materials are being replaced with organic alternatives with lower carbon footprint, and

2. processes driven by logics of intense technological efficiencies. The cluster aims at developing alternative (in the realms of home-made / kitchen-made, single-person produced/made, self-made/self-driven, smaller processes) materialities and processes for making things including constructing builtform. It also aims to introduce new logics of material manifestations beyond the popular digital modes, exploring hybrids and hacks to imagine apparatuses for new forms of living.

The Architectural Kitchen

The practice of alchemy was to escape the materials that one could find in the natural surroundings, within the domestic. Defined as ‘witchcraft’ by many in the period it was practiced, it was a super power that a human possessed, the knowledge to alter material’s and its behaviour. Beyond a force applied material shaping, other elements and knowledge became the method for working with materials. In such practices, sourcing material was the key. The network of material flows re-oriented and got re-organised with the entry of machines and quantities. The scales of operation and transportation possibilities across the globe facilitated a new network of material access and flow. The domestically available materials are sourced and produced on a national/global scale. What is our current material landscape and how does the material flow from the source to the market and its use? 

These new material relationships have changed our sources of materials and sets up the base for a new domestic exploration. The rise of the DIY culture has encouraged many new ways to use different materials, sourced from many of the available delivery platforms. DIY has not only started a culture of doing things/making things by our own but have brought in a new approach to discovery, joy, repair and repurposing materials/objects. It translates into an agency of the individual that manifests itself into the object/material/design. 

Apparatus: Emerging logics of material phenomenology

The current making process involves a culture of imagining and making structures by individual parts, a technique of assemblies, that has thereby governed the system of thinking, making and producing new components to fit in. These established ‘industrialised systems’ which work in parts, are reliant on these components to make a system. New materials that are being developed or found are fit into these systems of parts. The other alternate systems exist, in ways people build with available parts found in and around them, for example the indigenous tribes and communities that build their spaces from the available materials around them. The ecosystem of materials is different from the industrial mass-produced items, but rather produced by nature. The access and reach define their methods of making, processes of designing their own spaces. Current research and practices are emerging from two major contexts, the crisis of environment as posed to humans by humans and the other is high quality and precision, fast manufacturing parts to serve the ever-growing demands. One is the ethical question and the other is a more pragmatic problem-solving approach (consumption based) to the needs we pose at the profession and industry. The intent of this research is neither, but to look at possibilities within the current material workflows that had capabilities to either explore new possibilities of making processes or look at ephemeral/temporal material conditions in architecture. The intent was to look at the processes by which a material is transformed by humans into habitable space. The investigation in this research intends to open up these processes to develop new spatial-material relationships. To re-engage with newer landscapes of material and techniques and associations beyond the industrial research, scale and quantity. 

A constant revival of crafts through digital methods in the global south has been the context for new experiments. Practitioners, theorists, and academics have attempted to articulate thoughts on space through a digital lens to bring in new ideas of spatiality. Material manifestations of architectural ideas through the digital have been both material and immaterial in their experience. Matt Ratto introduces critical making through this new lens of materializing design ideas in the context of new digital desktop tools. Giles Restin introduces and reinforces the ideas of the discrete not only as a digital strategy but also as a material strategy to articulate ideas of space and methods of making in the current making cultures and the politics of manifesting built forms. And on the other hand, the new revival of the vernacular or local building practices with the ideas of sustainability and localization is in the works of many practitioners. A new interest in these contexts in the global south and the hybridization of technologies have opened a new dimension in the conceptualization of built forms.

New methods of making and digital processes have disrupted the normative ways of imagining built forms. Where the skill domains of masons and building makers are disrupted by these new desktop tools of 3D printers and other industrially manufactured parts which assemble together to make buildings. Within these new contexts of emerging tools and making possibilities, lies the space for experimentation of methods, material forms, and new phenomenologies. The space of experimentation is what we are interested in, these experiments not only intend to explore materials and their phenomenologies but also the underlying cultural and political contexts within which the experiments are performed. A new understanding of people, communities,  economies, and resources are expected to emerge from our experiments. 

Our experiments have the intent to know the potential of an individual person setting up processes for material-built forms. It is intuitively supported by the new ecology of information and a sense of digital/computational thinking. To test this approach of making apparatus to frame and set these many understandings of materials, its science, formations, geometries, calculations, and speculations is where we start from. These apparatuses in dialogue with the human generate an experimental performative material formation. These apparatuses are intended to be operative in the newer contexts of such experimentation. The practices of cooking, crafting, repairing, and practices of domestic everyday life are where these experiments begin, the domestic spaces provide many such possibilities and openings to rethink the scale of operations of big industrial production methods, at the same time bringing the agency to make, articulate and engage the individual and other associated processes. 

Pedagogy on Making