Project Description

We collaborated with undergraduate and graduate-level architecture and landscape architecture students at the University of Texas at Austin to develop the Mapping Materials Project, a design-research studio investigating the spatial, cultural, and material dimensions of the built environment in Rwanda. The project adopted mapping not merely as a representational technique but as a generative method of research and critical inquiry—one that reveals embedded systems of production, circulation, and labor often obscured in conventional architectural workflows. Scholars such as James Corner (1999) and Denis Wood (2010) have articulated mapping as a form of agency, capable of constructing new relationships between knowledge, power, and territory.

The Mapping Materials Project sought to trace the geographic, economic, and environmental flows that shape the life cycle of building materials—including traditional, imported, regionally sourced, and variably processed components. Over 200 maps were generated, examining networks of import and export, education and technology, energy and resource distribution, agriculture and bio-based materials, transportation systems, and regional construction typologies. Through this cartographic analysis, students were encouraged to visualize materials not as static objects, but as dynamic agents within intersecting territorial, economic, and social ecologies.

In the second phase of the project, students developed speculative design strategies aimed at redirecting these flows toward more equitable, ecologically attuned, and context-specific forms of architectural production. The studio culminated in a public exhibition and open forum, bringing together mapmakers, scholars, practitioners, policymakers, and students to collectively reflect on the role of mapping in shaping future-oriented design imaginaries and material agency.