ABSTRACT

In “Regarding Economy,”1Adolf Loos argued that the “old love of ornament” should be replaced by a love of material. In proposing materiality to replace ornamentation, he was advocating the exposure of “inherent qualities” of materials, which has remained an enduring, at times nostalgic, approach towards materiality in architecture. is correlation overlooks Loos’ deeper argument of societal values and taste toward materiality, which must therefore be constantly reevaluated and questioned. Our diculty with this formulation today is twofold. First, we understand that we can no longer endlessly extract, polish, and arrange blocks of some pure material so that their surfaces conform to shared standards of privilege; we know that those standards, at a large and ever-increasing scale, are unsustainable.2 ere are no obvious untapped resources to be easily exploited. Before the Industrial Revolution, material extraction rates were constrained by the expense and diculty of transport, along with the technological limitations of local cra. ese pressures constrained the formal and eectual traditions of vernacular architecture. Wood was harvested from local trees with certain desirable characteristics, bricks were red from area clays with unique strengths and limitations, and stones were quarried locally. e relationship between the material and the act of making was constructed locally. e Industrial Revolution seemed to modify this relationship of the construction of materials and the construction of buildings in scalar as well as proportional terms. Transportation infrastructures combined with large urban working populations and the development or redevelopment of technologies such as steel and concrete created a long-term illusion of endlessly abundant materials that could be moved about and employed without regard for regional application traditions. e architect was suddenly presented with a palette of materials. Architecture became less hermetic, more democratized, selection could be based on considerations of cost, structural limits, form, and eect that had been completely rescaled and detached from material sources. Material properties themselves became expressive (an expression that was also manufactured much like the materials); the way façade related to structure or frame related to enclosure was regulated not by necessity, but by tasteful artfulness. With performance and technological development as the architect’s only limitations, the composition of architecture became bound with the selection, application and detailing of materials. Over and above our fundamental socio-ecological shi, new fabrication and construction technologies have severed the equally illusory tie between the “natural,” so-called inherent properties, and architectural applications. In other words, compressive strengths, bendability, tensile limits and other “innate” physical properties no longer dene our relationship to a dwindling material palette. e mediation of fabrication technologies has multiplied and fragmented what had seemed to be stable application-traditions: when tree trunks cease to be automatically understood as cylindrical brous bundles and can instead be conceived as stacks of veneer sheets laminated without consideration of wood grain, or sawdust molded and pressed together with chemicals to achieve dimensional stability, we nd that our nostalgic default material understanding has

been fundamentally destabilized. In the context of our reluctant comprehension of scarcity, we have eschewed the presumed link between performance and the pseudo-science of natural material properties. (Performance has become a method of rationalizing expressionism.) is is a necessary attempt at countering our shrinking ecological and economic purchasing power. Our expanded technical abilities have allowed glass, steel, plastic and concrete to become almost endlessly malleable, engineered lumber accumulates smaller members into any shape and span, woodchips and sawdust are recycled as OSB and MDF, and even masonry has found new formal and technical applications. e emergence of digital fabrication processes has similarly driven a needed expansion of our methods of production and fabrication. Anything can be cut with ease and precision. Materials can be bent, rolled and cast with seemingly innite exibility. e design application limits of a particular material are no longer seen as inherent within the material itself, but rather as functions of surrounding processes. Tools and materials have become inseparable and indistinct from one another. ere is no material that is unmediated. Twenty plus years ago, the notion of “material” was aligned with the so-called humanist tradition of the crasperson. Material consideration was not “avant-garde” or recognized as a part of a conceptual project. Instead it was relegated to a technical discourse in which the history of architecture was reduced to a pedantic history of building, of materials used and the repertoire of joinery and construction techniques. Because this narrative was seen as appropriated by capitalist production and commodication, some sought to eliminate the agency of material in architectural signication: to produce architectural meaning capable of amortizing physical considerations. is was how architecture could become “conceptual.” e hope of “cardboard architecture” 3 was that a formal language divorced from material immanence could uniquely negate capitalist appropriations of aesthetic power. is position is no longer tenable. Today we must come to terms with our knowledge that there is no clear objective mind-body split, that we are part of the elds of matter, materials are matter, and matter is always connected to all other matter, the notion of negating materiality is no longer ontologically possible. Architects and architecture are part of mutually interdependent material networks composed of neurons, trees, electricity, nance, et cetera, all together. We operate in the context of simultaneous and dynamic forces to which all matter is subject and with which all matter participates, amplifying and mitigating and being amplied or mitigated in turn. Today, we have to learn to look at the old “normal,” “natural,” and “traditional” as just as articial as cardboard architecture, and at cardboard architecture as just as inescapably “real” – composed of real matter – as the rest. In other words, we can no longer locate the avant-garde in the myth of ephemerality; since “what is not there” is always actually “there,” architecture cannot seek resistance in refusal. Today, we need to construct an inclusive architecture through matter. e past decade has shied towards a more practical model of architecture. Pedagogy has engaged a new literalism of architectural technique and production that focuses on material performance, to work through the real instead of ignoring it. As the architectural discipline begins what we can again term a more direct relationship with materiality, however, we continue to lack a way of understanding materials as protagonists rather than subservient to form. Our disciplinary challenge today, therefore, is to invent new narratives which help us make sense of denaturalized, destabilized, and contingent matter-as-material, matteras-social, and matter-as-fabrication-technologies. Our re-emerging interest in physical form and visceral eects is a way of playing with a post-postmodern need for realism and a post-digital need for quantiable techniques and evaluation. What does it really mean to say that we operate within mutually interdependent networks of matter? Would we not see innovation today as fundamentally manipulative rather than extractive and/or constructive: that it is about deploying altering sequences within existing relationships? Understanding the interface of design and process as manipulative helps establish a new series of operational logics in which matter-as-material, matteras-human, and matter-as-fabrication are all identied participants. Grouped under three primary collections, their loose identications are: monolithic (planes and surfaces with continuous, there-or-not-there integrity), unit (aggregation, chunking, and eld eect), and vector (bone, member, trajectory). An equivalent trifecta of material, process and assembly logic in each of these approaches permits design and form to be generatively synthetic, resulting in a new conceptualism that positions materiality as a procedural medium in which and

through which we work. Understanding the interface of design and process as manipulative also requires us to revise our traditional scalar narratives. When transitions from element to element and position to position are no longer ignored as givens but instead problematized as creative potential, part-to-whole systems of composition are scrutinized. In other words, the singular scale of an image is exposed as incomplete: part, whole, surface and unit become equally available for consideration at multiple scales, and Beaux-Arts overarching compositional models are undermined in favor of scalar and discrete situational relationships. ese emergent and required reorganizations of architectural thinking and action through matter, reveal both our current opportunities and our mounting debts with greater clarity. In responding to these issues rather than avoiding their implications, the practices and projects highlighted in this book propose the possibility of a conceptual architecture of substance, of matter – accepting that there was never another alternative – by manipulating and deploying an array of innovative interactions with, through and in our unavoidable material circumstances.