Brownell, Blaine
Brownell, Blaine
Bio Sketch
Blaine Brownell is an American architect, materials researcher, and educator; Professor of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (formerly University of Minnesota, where the chapter's crystal, termite, and driftwood experiments were conducted in his studios). Known for the Transmaterial book series (2006–2017), a catalogue of emergent materials and technologies, he studies the convergence of design with the natural sciences. With Marc Swackhamer (see satterfield-blair-swackhamer-marc) he co-authored Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015) — the source of the chapter's central concept — and Matter in the Floating World: Conversations with Leading Japanese Architects and Designers (2011), from which the chapter quotes Tokujin Yoshioka. His chapter "'Living' rooms: The hypernaturalization of the interior" (2018) gives the wiki its name and framework for the hypernatural turn.
Key Works
- *"Living" rooms: The hypernaturalization of the interior* (2018) — chapter 30 of The Interior Architecture Reader (ed. Marinic); the hypernatural condition, the properties/processes/phenomena framework, and the "living machine" reversal of Le Corbusier.
- Hypernatural: Architecture's New Relationship with Nature (Princeton Architectural Press, 2015, with Marc Swackhamer) — the book that names the hypernatural; cited as the chapter's note 1. (Not yet ingested.)
- Transmaterial series (Princeton Architectural Press, 2006–2017) — the annual(ish) catalogue of next-generation materials; the research base of the chapter's materials inventories. (Not yet ingested.)
- Matter in the Floating World (Princeton Architectural Press, 2011) — interviews with Japanese architects and designers; source of the Yoshioka serendipity quote. (Not yet ingested.)
Key Concepts
Concepts associated with this author that have pages in this wiki:
- hypernaturalization — his central concept: "extend, amplify, or transcend natural capacities by partnering with nature"
- animal-architecture — "structures created for the habitation of non-human species"
- machine-for-living — the dictum he reverses: "not a machine for living, but rather a living machine"
- mechanization — the historical separation-from-nature his thesis answers
- nonhumans — silkworms, termites, barnacles, and a calf as models, clients, and builders
- ecology / sustainability — the normative frame of "responsible environmental choices in design"
- interactive-architecture — the responsive surfaces of the phenomena section (thermobimetal, HygroSkin, Stratus)
Relevance to the Core Research
Brownell gives the wiki's interior-architecture cluster its ecological-materials register: where Garófalo-Khan supplies the grotto's typological nature-turn and Gattegno & Johnson its data turn, Brownell supplies the fabrication turn — what the living interior is made of, by whom, and by what process. His reversal of the machine-for-living connects the cluster to the wiki's mechanization history (mechanization, dematerialization) as its counter-movement, and his designer-as-"director of the design experiments" connects it to the authorship cluster (authorship, production-stream) from the nature side. The hypernatural/unnatural-nature pairing (Brownell/Eisenman) gives the wiki two third-categories between natural and artificial — one biological, one computational.
Source Support
Source notes in this wiki drawn from this author's work:
