AIC's 46th Annual Meeting

Up to the middle of the nineteenth century, the “liquid-to-solid” organic materials that serve as architectural paints, coatings and adhesives represented the chemistry of natural products. The sources of raw materials were varied, including drying oils, tree resins, and animal and fish glues, but commercial users wanted products with greater ease of use, and better (and more consistent) performance. The earliest of these improved materials involved relatively simple modification of natural products, with industrial-scale experimentation giving us vulcanized rubber and cellulose nitrate. Improvements in the production of coal and oil distillates, and in the structural study of organic molecules, led to the first generation of phenolic resins and butadiene rubber in the early twentieth century. By 1930, many familiar materials—such as alkyd resins, PVC and Nylon 66—were starting to enter the marketplace. They set the stage for a broader revolution in polymer science that dramatically changed the work of architects, engineers and builders in the decades that followed.