Study Architecture 
ProPEL 
Author(s): Ingrid Halland
The inorganic compound titanium dioxide has progressively brightened our world throughout the 20th century. Titanium dioxide (hereafter TiO2) was invented and patented as a white pigment for the colour industry by Norwegian chemists Peder Farup and Gustav Jebsen in the early 1910s, and the industrial production of TiO2 for the global market began in the mine Titania and the factory Titan Co (today Kronos Titan), both in Norway, in 1916. TiO2 as a colour pigment was named Titanium White and the advertisements described the paint as “the whitest white” or “absolute white” due to its pure white colour tone, its stability and resistance against chemical influences, and its maximum ability to hide the substance underneath. As a result of its ability to also protect materials against the toxic influences of sunlight and weather, the substance was progressively used in combination with other colours (as coating for concrete, glazing for ceramics, and additives in plastic) thereby changing the aesthetics of surfaces in architecture and design. Today TiO2 is literally present in every part of modern life. Yet although circulating extensively through our material, biological, and economic systems, TiO2 is most of the time completely unnoticeable: it hides in the food we eat, in the paper we print on, in wall paint and concrete coating, in lipsticks, concealers, sunscreens, pills, and smart phones. If the European Green Deal is to succeed, new material awareness needs to be implemented, as “increasing material efficiency is a key opportunity to move towards the 1.5° C goal set by the Paris agreement.”1 We need to know more about how mineral extraction and patterns of consumption are linked. In order to better understand materials and their properties, and by extension a better oversight of the environmental impact of materials, design students need material knowledge. I argue in this paper that environmental history could be valuable for a better understanding of the environmental impact of materials. In this paper, a brief reading of the historical background and material properties of TiO2, will bring forth, unpack, and analyze some of the messy entanglements between modernist homogenization, global extraction economy, and our present-day material surroundings.
https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2021.38
Volume Editors
Jonathan A. Scelsa & Jørgen Johan Tandberg
ISBN
978-1-944214-38-8
