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By Sara Hart

Scheduled to launch in the spring 2005, Materials Monthly will be a subscriber-based magazine-in-a-box, and like DesignAid, it will include material samples, a written guide book, and access to an online database. Rather than assemble a permanent panel to choose materials like the DesignAid principals, Siegal will select a guest designer to edit each themed volume.

Then there’s Blaine Brownell, an architect and associate at Seattle-based NBBJ Architects, a one-man clearinghouse for the most cutting-edge materials on the market. Whereas Material ConneXion, DesignAid, and Materials Monthly charge subscription fees, Brownell’s undertaking—Transstudio—is a not-yet-for-profit enterprise. A self-published catalog of the latest materials, Transmaterial, currently weighs in at 196 pages in its hard-copy version. Because it’s an ever-expanding archive, Brownell invites architects to download the entire catalog as PDF files at no charge from his Web site. He also produces a free product-of-the-week newsletter, delivered by e-mail and added to his database. Recipients get a one-page description of a material in the same format as the catalog so that it can easily be added to the appropriate category.

Strategies and arrangements

Each enterprise adopts similar subscription models, although there are differences. Material ConneXion uses somewhat traditional genres—polymers, glass, ceramics, carbon-based materials, cement-based materials, metals, natural materials, and natural material derivatives. Still, the catalog receives 35 to 45 submissions of highly innovative products each month.

Kaplan and Schacht organized DesignAid’s material into categories—materials, mechanics, processes, electronics, and last but not least, the sexy “wow” division that gets the creative juices flowing. “Our five categories were developed for easy sorting. These were the primary categories of items that designers we interviewed look into. Also, since we only publish 20 per month, because we are being so selective, we did not want to get too specific limiting what could be in a particular category. For example, if we made a category ‘glass,’ it would be too narrow. We cover more than just materials.”

Like DesignAid, Princeton Architectural Press is developing Materials Monthly to be a tool kit with which architects can build their own libraries. At this point in development, Siegal is using the following general system—natural materials, color-changing materials, recycled materials, pattern materials, shape-memory materials, films, plastic composites, super soy, paints and coatings, and future fabrics.

Brownell, on the other hand, delivers no samples for fondling. However, he has employed a unique curatorial classification system in lieu of generic labels. Transmaterial is organized according to ultra-performing, multidimensional, repurposed, recombinant, intelligent, transformational, and interfacial materials. His goal with this system is to collect seemingly dissimilar materials into groups that will identify trends that may not be evident in more generalized groupings.