UCLA AUD Spring 2025 Events: Heather Roberge presents "Fabricating Plasticity in Aluminum"
May 1, 2025, 5:30 pm, Perloff Hall Decafe
Join Heather Roberge, Professor at UCLA AUD, for an event celebrating her new book, Fabricating Plasticity in Aluminum (March 5, 2025; Routledge).
Fabricating Plasticity in Aluminum argues for the value of the material prototype as a critical site of design innovation, through a series of design and architectural case studies. Illustrated by physical objects such as chairs, columns, and building façades, these full-scale material investigations reflect their designers’ deep knowledge of material, manufacturing, and geometry. The projects do not simply express how they are made, rather their designers leverage the capacities of metal forming to exert distinctive influence on the object’s expression and performance, embracing manufacturing processes as instruments of material innovation.
Organized in two parts, part one presents the material framework informing work by Arad, Newson, Heatherwick, Future Systems, Foster, OMA, Rex, Hadid, and others. Seven metal forming techniques including Press Forming, Press Brake Forming, Spinning, Panel Beating, Casting, Extruding, and Superplastic Forming are presented alongside work implemented with these processes. Part two presents original design research. Thermoformed aluminum façade systems ask critical questions of The Part: Tessellation, The Mold: Tooling, The Seam, and the Finish: Post Processing, illustrating the potential of design inquiry when techniques of material production alter techniques of design. Aluminum is redefined, inheriting a plasticity which alters the intrinsic qualities of its raw production.
For students and professionals in the fields of industrial design and architecture, this book presents an optimistic role for material in the design process.
Heather Roberge is an architect and educator based in Los Angeles. She is the founder and principal of design practice Murmur and Professor at UCLA Architecture and Urban Design.
Roberge’s research and professional work investigate the spatial, structural and atmospheric potential that digital technologies have on the theory and practice of building. Her teaching emphasizes innovative approaches to material, computation, and manufacturing to expand the formal vocabulary and spatial implications of building envelopes and assemblies.
Roberge served as the Chair of UCLA Architecture and Urban Design from 2017-2020, and has also directed the Undergraduate Program. She has received numerous accolades in recognition of her distinctive work, including the 2017 ACADIA Teaching Award of Excellence, the prestigious 2016 Emerging Voices Award from the Architectural League of New York, a 2015 AIA LA Merit award for En Pointe (an installation for the SCI-Arc Gallery), and a 2011 AIA Next LA design merit award for the Succulent House; she also was selected as a Finalist in the 2006 PS1/MoMA Young Architects Program. Her work has been published in A+U, Wallpaper, Architectural Record, Log, Architect, Architects Newspaper, The New York Times, and The Los Angeles Times and exhibited in group shows in the U.S. and abroad.
Her professional training in architecture continued in the New York offices of Eisenman Architects, Architecture Research Office, and Davis Brody Bond. She has previously taught at University of Virginia, Yale University, OSU, Washington University in St. Louis, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and Pratt Institute.