NINETY-EIGHT PERCENT NOTHING

There is a curious thickness about architecture’s thinness today. Even as they have grown ever thinner, building skins have developed an appetite for more: more performance, more voluptuousness, more intelligence, more more. The virtues of the thin have been fattened, sated by the capacity of contemporary materials to absorb, affect, and assimilate. Refusing a singular loyalty to function, technology, or form, these materials are unabashed in their collective acceleration of commodity, firmness, and delight. Technically exacting in their pursuit of performance, this species of materials also provokes reassessments of some of architecture’s principal aesthetic subjectivities: proportion, form, and perhaps even beauty itself.

Aerogel, a silica-based substance that is ninety-eight percent nothing—air—is one such material. A one-inch cube of aerogel contains a total surface area equal to that of a basketball court. Its fabrication begins with the suspension of a low-density silica chemistry in a liquid solvent. This solvent is then extracted using an autoclave, leaving an ultra-fine glass matrix of hollow cavities. The combination of aerogel’s adaptable characteristics—an aerogel surface can migrate freely across transparent, translucent, and opaque physiognomies—and its liquid origins suggested to us that a different species of materials is emerging. Our research focused on the fact that these materials are “detailed” at the scale of microns rather than feet and inches, and they produce surfaces comprised of “material contours” rather than assemblies of parts. To better evaluate this process of material contouring, we began a parallel research project that led to the fabrication of a series of large-scale cast-resin panels. These panels allowed us to refine the contoured geometries of the mold/material relationship at a scale that is currently not tenable with aerogel given its processing constraints.

One of our primary aims has been to challenge the still persistent binary of “window” and “wall” that permeates architecture. Aerogel’s extraordinary insulation value—a single-inch thickness of the material insulates as effectively as thirty-two layers of glass—obviates any need to distinguish between walls and windows for thermal reasons. Introducing carbon into the aerogel chemistry creates an opaque surface that, when placed in a layer less than one-quarter-inch thick, is translucent. Altering the autoclave processing allows portions of the aerogel to become far denser, almost plastic in character. This stronger material, known as a xerogel but made of precisely the same materials that go into aerogel, allows stiffening “mullions” and a “stressed skin” to be formed out of the material’s homogeneous chemical composition.

To test various contour configurations, we developed a series of glass molds capable of withstanding the high temperatures and pressures of the autoclave. Layers of varying aerogel chemistries were then placed into these molds, creating an array of prototype tiles. At the larger scale of the resin panels, the design work was done digitally and, using computer-numerically-controlled equipment, a styrene substrate was then milled to create the molds used to fabricate the panels.

As a final phase of our research, the exhibit lighting projects the aerogel and resin surfaces onto the floor, walls, and ceiling, a further thickening of these surfaces that fills the volume that they define rather than leaving them as mere planar expressions of themselves. Through lighting, the optical depth of the panels’ variegated composition is absorbed by nearby surfaces. Technology is omnipresent, on the one hand, and entirely evaporated on the other. Ninety-eight percent nothing is one-hundred percent technicalogical ricochet.