Over period of three years, Eric Peterson has worked with students at Florida International University School of Architecture building furniture and researching the material potential of shipping pallets.  This exhibition is both a retrospective of this work and an invitation for us to reconsider how we value humble materials.

Shipping pallets are made in many different countries and used to transport consumer products, foods, and raw materials around the globe. Pallets change hands, travel across oceans and continents, and are damaged and repaired multiple times over their useful life-cycle. These ubiquitous devices play a fundamental role in supporting our consumer culture and yet go largely unnoticed in our daily lives.

The furniture and architectural material prototypes displayed in this exhibit dispense with the notion of a predetermined material nobility. Wood from shipping pallets is investigated for its potential properties as cladding, surface, structure, or spatial modulator. Through the investment of human labor, Palletcraft exposes the hidden qualities of an overlooked material resource and asks us to reconsider the ramifications of our participation in global material and product transportation networks.