Ricky Rhodes

At the cusp of the Anthropocene, we have begun to think differently about how materials are extracted and refined, and how they might repurposed in the future. Raw materials are extracted from the world into order to build, transforming them. These processes are sometime quite complex and involve the participation of industries. Even though we sometimes speak of natural materials, almost everything that is used in architecture is manufactured. With the growth of the idea of circularity and reuse, buildings can be seen as a ‘pause’ in the circulation of materials from the sites of their extraction to further future use whose conditions are unknown. In concert with the Provenance Projected project, this studio studies the passages of materials and their potential use as poetic markers of our time.