As a child I remember visiting several projects by Frank Lloyd Wright that used cork - such as the Fallingwater House and the Martin House in Buffalo. It struck me that one of the few materials used in his interiors that lasted was cork. As I began to look for different materials to use in my own projects, I really wanted to use cork because of its acoustic properties, impact absorption, durability and the fact that it’s a renewable resource. From my perspective, cork ticks all the right boxes. That was even before considering the question of carbon sequestration.
From the point of view of circularity and carbon sequestration, the fact that the tree itself is not cut down, that it’s a process in which almost everything can be used, can be continuously reused, that it doesn’t have an end-of-life like other materials. All of this makes cork an interesting and viable solution. The key challenge, at least in the United States, is scale. In other words, the time from seed to the first harvest is not a single growth cycle. So we’re looking at longer time horizons and this really involves great learning, knowledge, culture and concepts. This is also very important. One of the things that I think is really interesting about cork is its ability to make us think about longer timeframes.
It was actually Daniel Michalik [designer and assistant professor of product and industrial design at Parsons School of Design] who brought this project to Parsons. We gave him our full support. He’s been working with cork as a material for industrial design, furniture, interiors, over many years. He wanted to figure out how we can access resources that will enable our students to focus intensively on this material, through this programme - “The Thick Skin: Cork as Material for Design New Futures”. The main challenge was to try to combine the issue of materials and the idea of learning, together with experimentation and research. In a way that takes this material seriously, in terms of both its properties and potential, and also helps students realise that they’re not working in a vacuum: that this is knowledge that other people have acquired, in particular Corticeira Amorim, and has a firm cultural base. And not just assume that they are taking a material and making things. It’s actually about looking at things that have been done and understanding how we can build on that knowledge.
We do, but not so explicitly, focusing on a single material. In other words, there are few materials that have such a wide range of beneficial social and environmental impacts, as cork. We have projects and students who effectively work with wood and have been looking at the possibilities of hemp, another regenerative material. But cork is unique, given its singular properties and ability to have a complete and much more robust circular life cycle, and because we have knowledge and professors who can facilitate this kind of experience and make connections, and inform students in a way that they are able to develop them. My own interest in cork derives from looking at regenerative materials.
After working for more than 20 years at Parsons, I was appointed as Dean 18 months ago. My core objective in this new position has been to foster a clear focus on addressing the issue of materials in design practice, to operate a shift from the dominant perspective that we still rely on: an industrialised process where we think of design as a form and then apply a material to it. This is the modernist understanding of materials, where materials are actually by-products of form. We need to foster materials-driven innovation.
We need a systemic change. When we talk about climate change, we tend to fall essentially into the ‘doomsday’ discourse. If you’re a student, you’re going to say “I didn’t create this problem. Why’s it my problem?”. The question is: what are the actions that we can take now? What are the actions that we can plan to do 15 or 20 years from now? These are very different things. What are the actions that can be taken now, within each of our disciplines and spheres? The key question for students is to give them the framework and the materials, in particular materials such as cork, that make them think: why are we doing this with plastic, when we could be using cork? Why are we designing this in a way that does not take into account the materials? It’s up to us, as a faculty, to change the way that we are talking about design - to move it from identifying problems to a perspective where we are actually creating educational conditions, to allow change to happen. This has to happen now - not in 10 or 15 years time. That’s why it’s inspiring to have 10 to 12 students involved with cork. Because they can become ambassadors to talk about it to their colleagues. What are its possibilities and limitations? What are the complementary materials? We want materials that are regenerative and transformative. Not those that are extractive and reductive. So this is really exciting.
