ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in subsequent chapters in this chapter. The book explores historical and contemporary reveries inspired by or resulting from the act of assembling materials into places and meditates on the imagination of materials in architecture. As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, the book challenge readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architecture through an examination of historical precedent, architectural practice, literary sources, philosophical analyses, and everyday experience. In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as material honesty, form finding, or digital materiality. Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in the process of fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form.
