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Panel 1
Environments, Air, Oxidation and Decay: Dullness, Brittleness, Oxidation and Time.
9:30AM to 11:00AM

The oxidation of metal occurs when the material loses electrons: the atoms of the metal move from a neutral state to becoming positively charged. The result is the formation of what we commonly call rust and what we must routinely address as a fact of maintenance and potential decay. The concept of decay in metals dramatically changed during the rise of Core Ten and other materials that allowed oxidation as a protective finish. The steady state of what constitutes a stable material changed its locus. The visual result was a dulled surface and dark, rough patina; a kind of weathered material that allowed aspects of the temporal to affect the otherwise universal or "timeless" features of material in modernism.

What role does oxidation play in the conceptualization of design? What alternate meanings of reflectivity are critical in metals today?

Simultaneously metals are routinely polished and made reflective. Here aspects of optics affect the work, and metals bridge more artistic disciplines in works by Jackson Pollock or Man Ray. What Duchamp called an "arrt la rtine," a stopping of analytical process at the retina, meant that the production of visual meaning could be found in the interactions between the nerve endings. The optic aspects of art are the coordinated stimulation and innervations of the retina and form, what Rosalind Krauss called a "self-sufficient or autonomous realm of activity." Is it possible to discuss aspects of polished and highly reflective or refracting metals and their counterpart of Core Ten or controlled oxidation?

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Panel 2
Linear and Planar Loading
11:15AM to 12:30PM

New aspects of spanning and the management of forces in structural design have been harnessed toward new levels of ambitious spatial and semiotic goals. While computational modeling has allowed new levels of customization it has always allowed reductions of weight, precision in routing or organizing force, and also opened new forms of infrastructure and architecture.

The result is crossover work: building as infrastructure or infrastructure. A case to consider is that of bridge or bridge-like buildings. In the case of the cable stayed bridge the delicacy of the balance and the control and vectoring of forces all are a place of visual and mechanical invention that creates new forms of structure but also new forms of monumentality. While cable-stayed bridges isolate forces and manage loading in a way that sustains stability by diminishing lateral loads they also open new aspects of aesthetics and change expected formal qualities. The towers or pylons carry primary compression loads as the cables are arrayed in a way that essentially cantilevers the deck away from the towers. The deck's ability to resist the compression loador buckling load--of the cables essentially does not present itself visually but the lack of buttresses or anchorages can give an odd or unexpected quality. The cable-stayed bridge requires that the deck be able to resist and counter the linear loading of the cables--in effect turning a linear loading into a planar loading.

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Panel 3
Heavy and Light: New Metals = New Space
2:00PM to 3:15PM

The post-war city and its wildly expansive and often predicted collapse has usually been presented as having humiliated the local aspects of building, but in this new moment of material logics, do we return to the real or imagined aspects of architectural and engineering history of engagement?

It is possible to see in the threshold decades at the outset of the 20th Century a coincidence of material being organized within previously unimagined matrices of engineering, industrial coordination, political and economic will. What is inherited from this era--aspects of high modernism often are received as a story of rationalized or discrete production yet the steel and glass towers of this period were never isolated from wider parameters. Political or social action could not be separated from material even as new forms of urban, social and financial life emerged that increasingly relied on dispersed and bucolic forms of suburbia and media-based modes of social life.

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Panel 4
SURFACE: Precious Metals, Abstraction and Rationalization
3:30PM to 5:00PM

Today it seems we have entered a new realm of technical work in architecture and engineering that is decidedly less abstract in how it relates to broader issues of economy and money--of its place in the spectrum of building than issues of speed in realization, not as leitmotif or zeitgeist of cultural experience, but as a denominator of management; of monies, time and ultimately profits. From what basis do we engage materials today and how is our thinking still affected by the social and technical aspects of the previous centuries' origins--from all its vantages, whether quasi-religious, secular, mystical, technically based or socially driven. How have we constructed the imaginary and literal aspects of our goals, and how does this revise what we have come to expect as standard appreciations and procedures for the role of materials in practice?

In the case of metals, what are the nomenclatures that serve to outline our field? Is metal now one material among many; does it hold a central position as it might have with the work of Walter Gropius or Mies van der Rohe, or in the contemporary work by Renzo Piano, or even Frank Gehry? . Did metal become more precious as a surface and less meaningful as frame and structure? Can we now consider surface as the site of the building arts?

If the most secure foundations for the role of materials in architectural thought--in design, production and building--are still likely to be found in the varied strains of Bauhaus philosophy, and its concepts of engineering and production--to what degree is the cleft between real and imagined, rational or abstract and indeed economic vs a-material aspiration of architectural and engineering accessible today? Are we aware of its scope and the qualities of these issues, and how they are changing? How do our professions operate within these received histories and imagined futures?

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Concluding Remarks
Architectural Surface and Structure Today
5-6PM

Are new terms possible that would conflate surface and structure or materials and industry again and that give material aspects of social life--and the debate of its terms and conditions.

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