ARCHITECTURAL EXPERIMENTS

This chapter describes a series of design-led transdisciplinary experiments with spatial, aesthetic and material agendas that provoke the emergence of alterative architectural practices, which may rouse the experimental architecture of the twenty-first century. A range of multi-authored architectural experiments are offered that suggest testable ways of navigating “wicked” challenges, which are executable through practice and evolvable via iterations of experiment. Ceramic bricks and tiles, so ubiquitous in their application in the built environment, have surprisingly lacked recognition as a viable nonstandard building component in contemporary architectural applications of mass customised and digitally fabricated material systems. The architectural experiment focuses on graphene’s extraordinary conductive performance in the development of a composite responsive, soft and flexible architectural membrane. The resultant proto-architectural fabric is not only highly intricate and reprogrammable but also heterogeneous. The idea of the proto-architectural refers to the systemic and prototypical value of designed systems.