快猫短视频

BUILDING and decorating a house 鈥� or an office or city, for that matter 鈥� is not what it used to be. Architects no longer have to make do with stone, concrete, wood and glass. They have tens of thousands of materials to choose from, from metal-strengthened plastics to liquid-metal alloys and 鈥減lastic wood鈥�. More building materials have been introduced in the past two decades than in the entire prior history of architecture.

Keeping up with this bewildering new world of modern materials is a major task. Enter Blaine Brownell. In the late 1990s, while working on a new home for the Houston Symphony orchestra in Texas, this Seattle-based architect began looking into new, innovative materials. He soon saw that the conservatism of the building industry was stifling architectural creativity. 鈥淚f architecture is the mother of the arts, it is also the great-grandchild of the sciences,鈥� he noted, and determined to return the discipline to its roots.

He set out to educate architects, designers and engineers about new materials, products and processes they could use to shape the world. His 鈥減roduct of the week鈥� email service and blog () have won him a following of thousands.

His latest offshoot is Transmaterial, which at first glance looks like a handy reference book of interesting and useful new materials, but on closer reading offers a lot more. It is colourful and stimulating, and you don鈥檛 have to be an architect or even a home-improvement enthusiast to appreciate it. I wasn鈥檛 far into its 188 entries and 800 colour plates before I started imagining the outlandish plastics, fabrics and composites into hybrids of post-millennial architecture.

Need to throw together a village of easy-build shelters for emergency relief, for example? Why not fly in a phalanx of Airtectures, inflatable fabric structures from engineering company Festo. Hooked up to a computer they can even react to environmental influences, altering the internal air pressure according to weather conditions.

Fancy a sustainable tropical summerhouse? Try lining the floors with Durapalm plywood made from plantation-grown coconut palms, growing the walls on a Greenscreen landscape trellis made from recycled steel, and topping it off with a Lotus self-cleaning clay roof from German firm Erlus, which repels water and dirt using technology derived from lotus plants. Need a teleconference room without keyboards or monitors? No problem: take a computerised InteracTable with a touch-screen monitor embedded in its surface, and a bank of transparent Holopros projection surfaces.

As well as acting as an encyclopaedia for cutting-edge materials, Transmaterial also sorts them into seven categories using Brownell鈥檚 innovative system, which identifies the essential inspirational element in a product or process. This goes to the heart of his 鈥渂reaking down the barriers鈥� philosophy: the categories defy convention. For example, 鈥渕ultidimensional鈥� transmaterials explore depth where previously they were constrained to length and width. Examples include 3D wallpaper, the undulating plywood surface known as Ply, and Aero, a flexible corrugated-aluminium sheeting.

鈥淚nterfacial鈥� materials explore the interaction between physical and virtual worlds, such as Fabriled, a cotton fabric with LEDs woven into it. And 鈥渞epurposed鈥� materials act as surrogates for conventional ones 鈥� like Wellies, colourful rubber sheets made out of recycled children鈥檚 boots, or a Paper Softwall, an expandable paper and wool room partition.

There is endless inspiration here 鈥� not least for those seeking a less energy-intensive, more sustainable built world. Try this for innovation: cover the sunniest side of your building in Photovol Glass 鈥� semi-transparent photovoltaic glass 鈥� and you鈥檒l meet a good part of your electricity and heating needs. Pipe sunlight into interior rooms using Parans Daylight fibre-optic cables, and sequester your carbon dioxide emissions with absorbent Eco-Cement. A far cry from bricks and mortar, you鈥檒l agree.