LOS ANGELES — Cardboard boxes, bubble wrap and shipping containers aren’t art, but they are part of an art exhibit at Craft Contemporary.
“Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design” focuses on new materials and technologies for the building industry — something Doris Sung has devoted her entire practice to for the past 17 years.
“I thought I was going to be an architect,” she explained. “But as an architect, [I] was disappointed by the lack of materials out there that responded to the climate.”
One of her innovations involves a material called thermal bimetal — something used for temperature sensing in thermostats.
It’s a smart material made of two metals fused together that react to heat — curling when they warm up and flattening as they cool. It makes a fun candle topper, blossoming open because of the heat of the flame, but it has much bigger uses as well.
She’s designed windows that contain a multitude of small metal surfaces that can be used in construction projects of all sizes as a self-shading system.
“As you can imagine, at nighttime is cool. It’s in a neutral position,” she said as she grabbed a heat lamp and directed its light toward her sample. “During the day when the surface starts to heat up, the pieces will flip over, shade the interior, reduce the need for air conditioning. And as it goes back to evening, it’ll go back to its original position.”
Practical and also, she points out, pretty.
She described the metal pieces as being like “little butterflies inside the window that just react and flutter around.”
There is also a mental health benefit over the coating currently used on the windows of large commercial buildings, she says. She describes standard tinting as the equivalent of wearing dark sunglasses all day long. Her fluttering metal pieces allow for a clear view of the sky.
“When you look through it, you get greater color spectrum,” Sung said, pointing out that impact this can have on the brain and mood. “To see more color is actually better than to see black and white.”
She is very excited to have an example of her lo-tech technology is featured in the Craft Contemporary exhibit which is part of PST ART: Art and Science Collide.
“The art and science collision is completely up my alley,” she said with a smile. “You know, a lot of what I do is for research. I don’t do it necessarily for art, but I also believe that things and products and stuff have to and can be beautiful.”
Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu are co-curators of “Material Acts.” The construction industry, they say, is one that is in need of reform.
“The building industry contributes anywhere between 30 to 40% of global carbon emissions,” Chiu said. “Concrete is a big part of that and it’s absolutely critical that designers are proposing new solutions.”
The approach they show, she explained, is a way to look at materials as not products but as processes.
They challenged artists to think of building, “not through a framework of producing something permanent, but thinking about what it means to build something that will eventually disassemble,” Chiu explained. “Building structures that come apart and can be moved to different locations and rebuilt.”
For the first time in its history, PST Art included a climate impact program. As the entry display at Craft Contemporary shows, there are a lot of materials and often waste involved in creating an exhibition. Chiu and Gu designed the exhibition with reusable or biodegradable material in mind.
“The steel, the studs, are all going to be reused for another building project. The pedestals are taken from the museum’s pedestal collection and repainted,” Gu said. “A lot of exhibition production requires plastic, so vinyl and dye bond and just a ton of materials that go to the trash. And this is really a way of thinking about how to make exhibition design a part of the show.”
While the exhibit features an array of new materials or new uses for materials that are in their early research phases, Sung is much further along.
Early next year, her windows will be used in several building projects from Florida to California.
“I always thought that buildings actually should be dynamic and active and move,” she explained. “It should breathe. It should adapt to the environment.”
“My biggest hope,” she continued, “is to use this material that requires no energy in order to reduce the need for energy. It’s looking forward to how we can adapt to climate change.”