Motionographer® HUSH | ‘Material Stories’ – Venice Biennale *Handpicked*

‘Material Stories’ is an exhibition of HUSH’s design exploration into embodied carbon, materiality, data-driven and generative design processes, and a new type of aesthetic. We wanted to explore new structural forms that reveal the invisible embodied carbon costs contained within their own materials.

We developed custom design software that calculates the embodied carbon costs of materials and alters the scale of a physical form to stay within a specified carbon budget. The visual characteristics of each material was driven by a relationship to its production in the real world (e.g. timber shaped by a lathe; clay shaped on a wheel, etc.) and specifically designed to remove the exact quantity of material according to its embodied carbon data. We used the software to generate the ‘Materials Story’ exhibit which contains 144 iterations of these sculptural forms using a consistent set of building materials, design language and carbon budget.

Using this methodology, we imagined a future built environment that showcases this new aesthetic and connects us to the materials of sustainability.

Exhibition Photos by Giacomo Blanco

This new visual language and design process – in which objects, products, spaces, exhibitions and architecture outwardly display their hidden energy costs – represents the foundation on which to explore new scales of sustainable and expressive design.