Daniel Diffendale
Shapeless Ugly Hunks; or, What’s the Matter with the Roman Tuffs?

Rome became a city under the tutelage of tuff, the volcanic stone that forms the bedrock of the seven hills and whose affordances shaped the development of their urban architecture. But which tuff, where, and when? Geological science has only recently been able to approach this question, and, paired with careful archaeological approaches, can offer a new story on the development of Roman architecture. At the other end of the life of buildings, what sorts of ruins, sensu lato, does tuff construction create and leave behind?

Daniel Diffendale is the Dorothy and Lewis B. Cullman Rome Prize Fellow in Ancient Studies and a research fellow in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean Studies at the University of Missouri.

Eugenia Morpurgo
Syntropic Materials: Designing Forests to Design Materials.

How can we shift the natural material production process from an extractive, monocultural, entropic one to a nurturing, multicultural syntropic one? Syntropic Materials is an attempt to answer this question combining agroforestal regenerative practices with the latest development in natural material research. With the ultimate goal of researching: how a polycultural forested ecosystem, rich in biodiversity, can produce a range of resources that can be used in synergy to produce traditional and innovative materials, colors, and binding agents.

Eugenia Morpurgo is the Tiffany & Co Italian Fellow in Design and a designer base in Venice, Italy.

The shoptalks will be held in English.