Fall 2017 through Summer 2019

Joshua G. Stein is the founder of Radical Craft and the co-director of the Data Clay Network, a forum for the exploration of digital techniques applied to ceramic materials. Stein will use his Fall 2017 CAI residency working with a number of different UB units and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery on a project entitled "Delta Mountains."

Radical Craft is a Los Angeles-based research and design studio operating between the fields of architecture, art, and urbanism. Radical Craft advances design saturated in history (from archaeology to craft) that inflects the production of contemporary urban spaces and artifacts, evolving newly grounded approaches to the challenges posed by virtuality, velocity, and globalization.

Recent projects engage earthen materials that resist easy manipulation, whether in raw or consolidated states. Stein has taught at the California College of the Arts, Cornell University, SCI-Arc, and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design. He was a 2010-11 Rome Prize Fellow in Architecture, and is currently Professor of Architecture at Woodbury University.

Delta Mountains

Photograph by Donatella Cusma

Delta Mountains aims to recover the history and repercussions of the decision to dismantle Buffalo’s streetcar system. By translating two different forms of digital data into material sculptures that can be touched and examined by the public, the project renders accessible the more abstract or invisible structures that shape daily life in Buffalo. Delta Mountains will consist of three ceramic sculptures: two of these will materialize transit data to allow for a comparison between Buffalo’s pre-war transit network and that of the current city. The third will be a digital scan and reconstruction of one of the remaining artifacts of the historical streetcar infrastructure. By “unearthing” the history of Buffalo’s previously extensive transit network, we can discuss the decisions that resulted in the abandonment of this system and the construction of a structure with a contrary set of values and outcomes.