ABSTRACT
While no one could sensibly deny the importance of materials for architecture, they have long occupied an only marginal position within the discipline of architectural history and theory. Confronted, however, with the limited resources of planet Earth, scholars have increasingly started to point to the importance of material histories of architecture. As Katie Lloyd Thomas argued in the aptly titled Material Matters, this historization of building materials is crucial for architecture to “reach an understanding of how materials may be productive of effects, both experiential and political”. All the more important now that popular descriptors for building materials – like durable, sustainable or ecological – are continually used without any historical awareness of the (at times disturbing) contexts that engendered these categories. By analysing the discursive practices in which building materials are mobilized, and the tense “moral economies” that underlie such practices, the papers collected here aim to respond to Antoine Picon’s provocative question, “What does it mean [for a building material] to be hard, waterproof or durable?”
