Martin Bechthold, founding Co-Director of the Master in Design Engineering Program and the Kumagai Professor of Architectural Technology in the GSD’s Department of Architecture. Associate Faculty at the Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS) at Harvard.
Since the dawn of industrialization have process and form standardization as well as construction tolerances been our response to the inevitable variations in the material properties of the constructed world. This practice, however, is an impediment to the potentially more sustainable use of natural, unprocessed, or living materials that inherently present larger uncertainties compared to industrially produced matter. Uncertainty of final shape is one direct consequence of these larger material uncertainties. Work at the Material Processes and Systems (MaP+S) Group at the Harvard Graduate School of Design is actively developing approaches to this challenge.
