Discussion: Plastics: Ethereal Materials or Trash Culture?
With the dissolution of the relationship between form and material and the attendant altered approach to design, plastics have now been re-established in experimental architecture. Plastics can take on virtually any form, and its transmutability ties the synthetic material to digitally animated architectural form. In many respects, free-form, digital architecture and transparent plastics constitute a congenial symbiosis. They embody - analogous to the immateriality of the digital forms - the triumph of mind over matter. As a transparent and at the same time, nearly weightless material, it seems to be closer to the intellectual sphere than to the material one. In his seminal text on plastic, Roland Barthes defines the intellectual content of plastics with respect to its capability to completely metamorphose: "So, more than a substance, plastic is the very idea of its infinite transformation [.] it is less a thing than a trace of movement.
