BUILDING and decorating a house – or an office or city, for that matter – is not what it used to be. Architects no longer have to make do with stone, concrete, wood and glass. They have tens of thousands of materials to choose from, from metal-strengthened plastics to liquid-metal alloys and “plastic wood”. More building materials have been introduced in the past two decades than in the entire prior history of architecture.
Keeping up with this bewildering new world of modern materials is a major task. Enter Blaine Brownell. In the late 1990s, while working on a new home for the…
