Exploring the materials that will shape our future.
I investigate how emerging materials, technologies, and design strategies can transform the built environment—and help create a radically more sustainable future.
Materials are the vehicles of change.
Every building begins with material. Materials determine what the built environment can do: how far buildings can span, how lightly they can touch the earth, how much energy they consume, how long they last, and what remains when they are gone.
Today, the material foundations of architecture are changing in extraordinary ways. The next generation of materials will not simply be stronger, lighter, or more flexible. They will store carbon, harvest energy, remediate pollution, respond to their surroundings, grow themselves, repair themselves, and challenge our assumptions about where technology ends and nature begins.
The question is no longer simply what can materials do, but what should we ask them to do?
Ideas worth pursuing
My work explores the changing relationship between materials, technology, architecture, and the environment. These investigations overlap, evolve, and foreground new influential trajectories.
What happens when the materials of architecture fundamentally change?
Forthcoming
What if our buildings could do more than simply reduce environmental harm?
Radical Green explores emerging materials and design strategies that enable architecture to generate energy, store carbon, clean the air, remediate pollution, conserve resources, and support living systems.
Over two decades of asking what materials can become
From cataloging emerging materials to investigating their architectural application, environmental agency, and future trajectories, these projects form a continuing inquiry into how material innovation changes design.
More about me:
Blaine Brownell, FAIA, is an architect, author, educator, and researcher whose work examines emerging materials and their implications for architecture, design, and the environment. He is Professor and Director of the David R. Ravin School of Architecture at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a former Fulbright Scholar to Japan. Brownell has authored ten books on materials and design and has written the Mind & Matter column for Architect since 2009. His current work focuses on radically sustainable materials, material futures, and new models for design innovation.