The Objectiles Guide to Time Travel: Re-Envisioning Building Materials as Narrative-Collecting Object-Projectiles on a Trajectory Through Space-Time

Abstract

As the architectural discipline grapples with its role in resource depletion, carbon emissions, and waste generation, there is a growing urgency to stop sourcing new materials and to reuse materials from existing buildings instead. One challenge to integrating reused materials into current building practices is technical: inventorying, deconstructing, reconditioning, and designing with reused materials is slower and more labor-intensive than with new ones. But another challenge is cultural: the materials that make up architecture are currently perceived as unmoving and single-use, with little consideration for their trajectories from raw resource to landfill. This thesis is focused on developing an aesthetic sensibility and design methodology that helps us re-envision materials as objects on a trajectory instead: Objectiles, or object-projectiles. Objectiles are objects on an adventure across space-time to collect as many uses as possible. Rather than remaining associated with one primary use, Objectiles are impressionable, bearing ambiguous traces of all the uses they encounter as they re-circulate. Through the aesthetic qualities that hint at their many uses, Objectiles invite us to time travel - to imagine the potential past and future narratives that may precede or follow their present physical state. Embedding the aesthetics of Objectiles into architecture can lead to the development of a new collective consciousness of the materials that surround us. They can make us aware that all the objects around us have trajectories that extend beyond their present state, and lead to an alternative material culture of greater care in how we use, re-circulate, and dispose of all objects.