Ryan (Jie) Wu & Fei (Zhifei) Xu

Specious Materials

Ryan (Jie) Wu & Fei (Zhifei) Xu

Advisor: Brandon Clifford Readers: Timothy Hyde & Axel Kilian

Our world is saturated by digital media that’s manipulated, spread as fact, and sorted algorithmically — creating many different “facts” for each niche com-

munity and increasingly blending the “faked” into our physical reality. As a result, the modernist sense of truth is on the verge of collapse.

As solid and real as architecture might have always been conceived as, the field of architecture is not immune to the question of reality. The faking of one ar-

chitecture material with the image and texture of another has long existed in our field for various purposes yet not critically considered but indifferently per-

ceived. Today, digital media adds another dimension on top of the simple binary of real and fake, making the authenticity of the building increasingly confusing.

This thesis proposes to see fake materials not as an ethical problem (the betrayal of the classical modernism paradigm of “truth to the materials”) nor as ready-made industrial products made only for their economic or performance

benefits but, instead, as contemporary mediums that blend digital media into physical reality as well as providing new design areas for architects to intervene

with agencies. Then what we like to explore becomes what would we make of a

material that embodied multiple different materialities? Can fake material stand its own ground against its “real” counterparts? Freed from the real versus fake dichotomy, can these specious materials bring forth a new aesthetic and convey critical

meaning?

Image: Specious Bark / Model by Zhifei Xu and Jie Wu.