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Esperanza Santrizos
Our 310 facilities nationwide include stores, component manufacturing plants, custom door shops and engineered wood product centers in 35 states. 84 Lumber is an industry leader in building supplies, manufactured components, and services for single- and multi-family residences and commercial buildings.
Star Building Materials Specializes in masonry materials
- Brick
- Block
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- Mortar Type N-S-M
- Cement and Lime
- Pre-Mixed Mortar and Cements
- Masonry Sands
- White Sand
- Wide Range of Mortar Colors
- Masonry Cleaners and Waterproofers
- Curing and Sealing Compounds
- Thoro, Prosoco, and Diedrich Products
Building materials and home improvement companies have a tremendous opportunity to leverage platforms like Architizer, Houzz, Pinterest and Instagram to not only showcase product photos, but installation videos, product use cases, before and afters and other built environment imagery.
Description: Houzz is a collaborative platform for home remodeling and design, bringing homeowners, home professionals and building material companies together in a uniquely designed community. It has over 20 million active monthly users.
How to use it: Building materials companies can advertise their products within the framework of the site. Advertisements look less like advertisements and more like actual content within the site by using design idea pictures to promote the products.
Description: Instagram is a mobile first social networking app that allows users to take pictures using their cell phones or tablets, edit the pictures using various filters and share with their followers on Instagram and other social media platforms. It has over 187 million active monthly users.
Interrupt helps building materials companies understand the value of social media engagement and how to best tie the time, effort and budget to the strategic plan. Contact us for more information about our process and services.
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What has surprised many is the increasingly apparent closeness to overcoming the Turing test and the growing similarity, in terms of visualizations, to what an architect with skills in this field can achieve. In this context, while the debate persists in the architectural community about whether AI can process architectural concepts, this article explores how it interprets materials to develop these visual representations. With that in mind, a single prompt was developed for this experiment (with materiality as its variable) to delve into the obtained results.
The generated visualizations may imply that the AI interprets the building within its context and understands various applications of the materials. Thus, some of them depict a contextualization of materials, emphasizing their use as part of a construction system. This aligns with common applications in specific building types and introduces a stylistic element to the process.
The prompt led to the creation of visualizations, organized by material types commonly used in architecture. These materials, including brick, steel, adobe, wood, concrete, and stone, were chosen for their distinct characteristics, facilitating comparisons.
With this material, a common thread was the robustness of the buildings, linked not only to the properties of brick but also to its technical characteristics that do not favor the addition of large windows on the facade. It is noteworthy that AI recognizes the variations of the brick in terms of shades and textures, making its aesthetics visible. In this way, the visualizations could suggest projects of various typologies, ranging from collective housing and public buildings, such as Exeter Library, to industrial facilities like the Fagus Factory.
The results of this material are exemplary in showcasing an "understanding" of the role of steel. Instead of employing it as the dominant texture on the facade, the visualizations suggest its application as a construction system, often in conjunction with glass facades or what appears to be ventilated facade systems. In this manner, certain buildings exhibit design elements reminiscent of projects like the Seagram Building and public spaces like Centre Georges Pompidou.
With Adobe, although the prompt refers to a contemporary building, features that evoke regionality can be observed, generating visualizations with a local character. These features include small rectangular windows, a pitched roof similar to Earth House, and the involvement of textures that might suggest wood. The Plúmula Workshop House project exhibits similarities with the obtained results in the tones of the building and its geometry, as well as in the presence of a patio terrace at the top.
In the visualizations, the consistency is evident in that none of the materials suggesting wood have the same shades. This color spectrum varies from light tones, possibly reflecting the appearance of plywood, to darker textures such as walnut. Some images exhibit structures of two or more levels, and one specific image presents an elevated structure similar to those found in humid climates, as in projects such as the Boca de Agua Hotel, as well as volumes similar to Open Park Villa.
The concrete results reveal visible combinations with glass facade systems, reminiscent of the long windows and open facade of Gropius House. Of all the images obtained, these volumes are the ones with the largest number of blind faces on the facade. In some cases, this gesture is an essential part of the building's identity, as seen in the case of Folm Arts.
So far, this experiment suggests that the AI recognizes that the character of some buildings is linked to the use of specific materials, establishing a direct relationship with typologies. Despite the prompt being designed using the word "building", the AI presents visualizations that suggest a broad range of structures, including single-family housing, industrial complexes, and multi-story buildings.
Although it is undeniable that AI can distinguish between the textures of materials, it seems there is still a way to go before it can generate complex proposals that arise from a deep understanding of the built environment, materials, their characteristics, and, most importantly, their essence. But perhaps, in a few years, the title of this article will evolve from a question to a statement.
Around 10,000 years ago, man started to make fundamental changes in the way he lived. Slowly moving away from a nomadic lifestyle, he started staying in one place for longer periods. This was probably due to the ending of the last ice age creating more abundant resources. Man didn't have to travel as far to find food, so he stayed where food was plentiful. Over time, a more settled lifestyle brought some challenges with it. Instead of having to find caves or create makesift shelters from animal skins for protection from the weather, man started to look for more durable materials with which to build long-lasting dwellings [source: Castleden].
Over time, man has used a variety of materials, and they help to paint a picture of our ongoing quest to make long-lasting structures to meet our changing needs. The evolution of architecture meets those challenges and handles the cultural perception of what those buildings should look like and how they should be used.
In the next few pages, we'll take a look at five materials that man has relied on to build homes, halls, temples and many other types of structures. All five are still used today, and knowing something about them will help us make the historic leap from mud huts and tents to skyscrapers that can shelter thousands.
As a construction material, wood has a lot going for it. It can be used as a primary material, as seen in log cabin construction or blended with other building materials and used as either a decorative element or support structure. Wood is lightweight compared to stone, and it's strong once it's been seasoned to remove moisture. It can also be cut to length easily.
Even with these vulnerabilities, wood buildings can survive a long time. Just how long may surprise you. The oldest wood building in existence is the Horyu-ji temple in Japan, which dates to the 8th century [source: CWC].
Today, there are cheaper and more efficient building materials that have usurped the position of stone in modern building construction, not the least of which are decorative stone veneers. It seems humbling, but steel, wood and concrete construction with a thin layer of decorative stone on the outside is more in keeping with modern budgets and standards of construction than the impressive, towering stone edifices of historical buildings. Newer synthetic materials are even mimicking the look of stone in much lighter weight, inexpensive incarnations, eliminating the need even for veneers.
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