Plastics Now

Billie Faircloth is a practicing architect and partner at KieranTimberlake, where she leads transdisciplinary research, design, and problem-solving processes across fields including environmental management, chemical physics, materials science, and architecture. She fosters collaboration between trades, academies, and industries in order to define a relevant problem-solving boundary for the built environment.

"Plastics Now is a veritable candy store for the mind of the materials enthusiast. This thorough assemblage of essays, timelines, case studies, interviews, and conference proceedings takes the reader on a giddy ride through the vibrant history of one of our most common - and least understood - materials. Faircloth’s rich and multilayered portrayal of polymers in architecture is both a masterful work of research scholarship and a useful reference for architects - and as such establishes a new model of materials book." - Blaine Brownell, author of the Transmaterial series and Associate Professor, University of Minnesota, USA"If C.P Snow had not already used 'The Two Cultures' it would have made a fitting subtitle for Billie Faircloth's book Plastics Now. Providing a depth of information on how plastics are made and processed, Faircloth additionally weaves a story of how both technologists and architects, each in their own culture, learn what plastics are, what they can do and what 'plastic' means - practically. And the two cultures do not fully understand one another even after 75 years." – William F. Carroll, Jr., PhD, Adjunct Professor of Chemistry, Indiana University, USA

• Prologue: How Should We Use Plastics?  Introduction  A Method: How to Wrestle With the Emergence of Plastics  1. Defining Plastics  2. Describing Plastics 3. Plastics. In. Building.  4. All-Plastics  5. Prototyping with Plastics  6. Professing Plastics  Epilogue  Why We Use Plastics The Way That We Do.  Index