Synthetic Types Atlas, Vol. II

A database is not a cookbook. Generative Matter V3 holds 13,638 building-material candidates with machine-generated synthesis protocols: a search space, open and citable, in which most entries will never be made. The Recipe Atlas is what the research looks like once it has decided what to make. Its 245 compositions were selected for architecture and for the workshop at once, and each recipe was rewritten so that a school workshop, a FabLab, or a ceramics studio can follow it: the precursors and where to buy them, the masses per 100-gram and 500-gram batch, the firing curve or the hotplate schedule, the compressive strength and density to expect, the carbon and energy of the material against the conventional one it could replace, and a safety check written for people who have never handled a potash flux.

The volume continues the Generative Matter research I began with Catherine Graubart, whose pipeline produced the protocols, and it inherits its discipline: a recipe is a claim that a material will form, and claims get tested. The recipes were checked by the same multi-agent verification pipeline that produced Vol. I, precursor by precursor, and the compositions the atlas rates highest became the shortlist that students at the Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart took into the kiln in 2026. Where a first firing corrects the book, the correction goes into the database.

The compositions are organised by family and by the temperature at which they form. Thirty of them form without a kiln, on a hotplate at 130 °C, which moves the making of a material from the factory to the table; most are high-fire silicates and ceramics; a few need temperatures that only a specialised kiln reaches. Two hundred of them, with their recipes, can be browsed on this site in the materials browser, one page per material. Synthetic Types Atlas, Vol. II: The Recipe Atlas. 245 Makeable Compositions has 261 pages (ISBN 979-8-1844-4942-5) and was published in 2026, alongside Vol. I, which follows thirty-six of the materials to the building types they induce.