This book reflects and expands on the current trend in the building industry to understand, simulate and ultimately design buildings by taking into consideration the interlinked elements and forces that act on them. This approach overcomes the traditional, exclusive focus on building tasks, while posing new challenges in all areas of the industry from material and structural to the urban scale. Contributions from invited experts, papers and case studies provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the field, as well as perspectives from related disciplines, such as computer science. The chapter authors were invited speakers at the 5th Symposium "Modelling Behaviour", which took place at the CITA in Copenhagen in September 2015.

Plastics Now addresses one primary question: why do we build with plastics the way that we do? For decades, plastics have been described over and over again as "the future," yet we still do not know precisely what to do with them. Billie Faircloth argues that this inertia is due to plastics' indecipherability, which has prevented them from becoming fully known. The author tracks the process by which plastics became defined as a class of building materials. Drawing on original data from industry press, original timelines, hundreds of historical and contemporary images, advertisements dating to the 1940s, and technical data, this unconventional book explores the emergence of plastics as a building material and presents new findings. Plastics Now takes a provocative approach that calls on architects to participate in the redefinition of plastics for our time. This is essential reading for professional architects and architecture students to engage with our shared history with the plastics industry.

This book reflects and expands on the current trend in the building industry to understand, simulate and ultimately design buildings by taking into consideration the interlinked elements and forces that act on them. This approach overcomes the traditional, exclusive focus on building tasks, while posing new challenges in all areas of the industry from material and structural to the urban scale. Contributions from invited experts, papers and case studies provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the field, as well as perspectives from related disciplines, such as computer science. The chapter authors were invited speakers at the 5th Symposium "Modelling Behaviour", which took place at the CITA in Copenhagen in September 2015.

Plastics Now addresses one primary question: why do we build with plastics the way that we do? For decades, plastics have been described over and over again as "the future," yet we still do not know precisely what to do with them. Billie Faircloth argues that this inertia is due to plastics' indecipherability, which has prevented them from becoming fully known. The author tracks the process by which plastics became defined as a class of building materials. Drawing on original data from industry press, original timelines, hundreds of historical and contemporary images, advertisements dating to the 1940s, and technical data, this unconventional book explores the emergence of plastics as a building material and presents new findings. Plastics Now takes a provocative approach that calls on architects to participate in the redefinition of plastics for our time. This is essential reading for professional architects and architecture students to engage with our shared history with the plastics industry.