___ ornament ___
The ability to resist structural stresses via surface form at the macro scale and gradations in surface composition at the micro scale allows for the tuning of architectural form and structure in a way never before possible. Beyond performance, there are also unprecedented aesthetic territories implied here, including super-thin shell and membrane constructions characterized by structural ornament. Ornament is in this case not applique but rather ´ evidence of a push and pull between aesthetics and matter, privileging neither.
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__ multi-materiality __
The next step in composite thinking is multi-materiality.
Multi-materiality is the holy grail of materials scientists, also called ‘functionally graded material’. It refers to materials which vary in composition gradually over a surface, resulting in corresponding changes in structural capacity and visual properties. Closer to alchemy than architectural tectonics, multi-materiality allows variability from soft to semi-rigid to stiff with continuous bonding rather than any kind of assembly. Suddenly, it becomes possible to think of polar opposite models to the frame-and-skin dilemma, such as semirigid plate-like formations embedded within less-rigid zones of polymers, which are in turn embedded in an expansive gellike envelope; no skin and no bones, just permutations of the molecular middle-ground: cartilage.
For engineers, multi-materiality has allowed the conception of extremely high performance skins, such as for Japanese space-planes in the 1980s [7]1. For architecture, however, multi-materials open up the greater possibility of being able to not only customize structural rigidity but also create variable material responses to structural, environmental and aesthetic criteria all at the same time.