How can advanced materials help to create new, smarter architecture? Our designed and built environment is becoming increasingly smart. This is partly possible because of intelligent application of smart materials. Enabling these developments are clever people backed up by a lot of computing power.

One such thought-leader is Manuel Kretzer, an architect, researcher and educator who is interested in dynamic architecture. In particular, he looks at advanced material performance.

These days, boundaries between areas of expertise (biology, physics, design) are fading. Equally, crossovers between different fields are easier to imagine and to realise. However it can take years before a new material or technique reaches the market, and meanwhile targeted solutions are being designed for specific problems. 3D printing, for example, has been around since the early 1980s, but only recently have architects really grasped its full potential.

Materiability is the speaker’s term for the process of turning smart materials into useful applications. Exciting examples, video presentations and of course physical samples of advanced materials will be shown to illuminate the subject.

We will be bringing you all the details on this subject matter during Material Xperience 2014, in a lecture by Manuel Kretzer. Manuel is scientific assistant and PhD candidate at the Chair of Computer Aided Architectural Design at the world-renowned ETH Zurich.

He is also a founding partner at the responsive design studio, an architecture and design agency that explores opportunities in creating responsive and adaptive solutions for vivid architectural geometries that interact with their user in the process of creation but also in the built shape, materialization, surface and visual behaviour.

This profile is one of a series in which we are giving previews of the lectures featuring at Material Xperience 2014. You can see the entire speakers’ programme here. For your free ticket, register here.