The editors of Fresh Meat ask, “what’s the matter?” as they detect a growing affinity in explorations of material capacities, and wonder what new ideas material can be utilized in the architecture discipline to produce unexpected conditions. With new experiments come new experiences, techniques, and the potential to develop relationships between materials as objects and morph our perception of them as a subject matter. The inventory of materials that inform architecture is evolving and Fresh Meat 14 aims to document this revitalized curiosity bubbling up around materials. Through written pieces, drawings, photographs, videos, and design proposals, FM 14 acts as both a record of materials of architecture and a resource of possibilities on how the combined knowledge of material capabilities may enrich the architecture of the future.

Armand Gamboa, associate editor, is a master of architecture student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His interest is in leveraging the poetic potential of architecture to produce and distribute novel experiences equitably across diverse communities. His stance is that all architecture not rooted in community considerations runs the risk of producing fruitless beauty.

Emily Kellogg, associate editor, is a master of architecture student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She is interested in architecture’s role in shaping or responding to social and environmental realms such as identity politics, critical regionalism, and mass culture.

Mark Melvin, associate editor, is a master of architecture student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is driven by revisiting past examples where architecture perhaps failed to deliver on its promised contributions and using precedent as a starting point to rethink new architectural initiatives

Adam LaBarge, associate editor, is a master’s of architecture student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He is interested in the obscuring of visual media as a means of communication and representation

Ethan O’Kane, associate editor, is a master's of architecture student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He loves vague geometries and fuzzy resolutions and is obsessed with horror movies.

Ellen Stonner, associate editor, is a master’s of architecture student at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her main interest is in exploring how the perception of craftsmanship affects the life of structures, especially in affordable housing developments. She is an avid dog lover.

Fresh Meat Journal—the compendium of architectural fictions, judgments, and opinions—is a forum for freshness in architecture. FM is an independent journal published by students of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC). It was founded in 2008, and is produced by students with support of UIC faculty and staff. FM publishes content that both reflects and challenges UIC’s pedagogical agenda and is a response to the architecture discipline. FM orchestrates an open dialogue between students and faculty, as well as between the school and the discipline at large.

The School of Architecture at University of Illinois at Chicago promotes architecture as a cultural practice of organizing information, of intelligently identifying and deploying patterns—conceptual, visual, structural, behavioral, and material—in the world. The program prepares its graduates to project all scales of these spatial and organizational patterns through the systematic development of an aesthetic attitude, a technical confidence, and a theoretical opportunism.