We have made too much stuff. The current production model of more, faster, cheaper - which makes what is culture today, product tomorrow, trash the next - has created a counterproductive muchness of simultaneous material excess and environmental precarity. This persistent materialism is contributing to social inequity and climate crisis alike and from material extraction to Pinterest boards to distribution centers, architecture is implicated at all scales of this material saturation.

Beginning from this moment of material reckoning, postcommodities… architecture after stuff argues that our resources should no longer come from the ground, but from the muchness we have already produced. The symposium foregrounds designers and thinkers who are proposing other-again-new modes of operating within this moment, those that present tactics, material ingenuities, and tools needed for a more future-minded and non-extractive material culture.

postcommodities… architecture after stuff explores the possibilities of architecture’s participation in a new socio-material ecology by focusing on reversible design, circular materials, commodity exchange networks, protocols of maintenance and commercial antagonisms, to set the questions:

Is there material after materialism?

What can architecture do with all this stuff?

his mixed-modality 2-day symposium will presented both in-person in Ann Arbor, MI and streamed virtually.