Matter: Material Processes in Architectural Production

Gail Peter Borden, Michael Meredith, Gail Peter Borden, Michael Meredith

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780415780285
• eBook ISBN: 9781136798429
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

Beginning with material, this book revolves around physical material making and design decisions that emerge from material interaction.

Combining essays from both practice and academia, this book presents some of the most significant projects and thoughts on materiality from the last decade. Beautifully illustrated with a great deal of technical information throughout, it shows work, technical technique and process, and positions it within a broader theoretical intention.

By assembling a range of voices, here is a multifaceted portrait of material design today. Students and design professionals alike should find in this book an essential resource for understanding this increasingly important aspect of design.

Part I

Matter Conversed

These fireside chats discussing the role of materiality began a conversation with significant designers on both the east and west coasts. In order to break down the traditional formalities and pre-prepared answers of an introductory or framing essay, these interviews were employed to ignite a conversation about materiality. These figures were identified as forefathers of the issues and the generation of thought that the text represents. Attempting to address the communities of themes, methods and participants within the book, each of the conversations represents a distinct touchstone of materiality: theory, systemization, representation, application, discourse, and effect. Though each of these issues is similarly discussed as themes in each conversation, their significance and approach present a distinct vantage of each architect and their approach to materiality. In each conversation, however, the role of materiality proves to be a universal almost spiritual connector among the collective community of architects as intrinsically rooted in the shared craft of the profession, but is locally and individually taken with disparate vantages and agendas. These conversations reveal the themes of contemporary practice and reveal the position and interest of the participants, they spark the issues of the collection and illustrate the dialog and thinking that have led us to where we are and hint at where we are going.

Stan Allen
Neil Denari
Michael Maltzan
Nader Tehrani

Interview 1

SA = Stan Allen; MM = Michael Meredith.

MM: We are trying to frame a certain pedagogical discourse that is of a particular moment, and perhaps a particular generation, where there is a return to thinking about materiality. If materiality was at one point the enemy of the formal, humanist project, it is not any more. It is probably closer to an avant-garde trajectory, that is to say, materiality is now used to find new methods of non-composition through rethinking the part to whole relations of “tasteful” composition. Materiality provides ways to destroy the objectness of architecture. It is a tool for undermining the status quo. There are now many different groups in relation to material. There is the Aalto-esque camp, there are those who are looking for new kinds of logics within materials, and there are those who are looking for new ways of thinking about organization through material.

SA: What I found refreshing about looking over the table of contents of this book is that it has a generational frame, and it seems that most of the people in this current generation do not see the opposition between material and form as a dilemma. By contrast, that opposition certainly framed my thinking when I was trying to formulate ideas about what I came to call “material practices” back in the early 1990s. At that time, there really was an opposition between the points of view of, on the one hand, someone like Kenneth Frampton, Peter Zumthor, or Juhani Pallasmaa, for whom materiality, the concrete, the haptic, and the tactile were ends in themselves. These people were completely skeptical of any form of abstraction. On the other hand, the opposing camp of Eisenman and even, at that time, Hejduk in a certain sense, thought the fundamental building blocks of architecture were formal, or representational, and not material. And it’s important to remember that at that time, the lingering notion that you could do architecture without ever building anything was still a viable, alternative route.

MM: I still think it is a viable route. Even just to be thinking about material, you are already part of what Hal Foster calls the real; you are already dealing with life, not just abstract representation.

SA: Well, partly why I hesitated with the Hejduk example is that. It is true that Hejduk built very little, but everything he drew was buildable in comparison to, let’s say, the Libeskind Micromegas, which were impossible to construct.

MM: They were pure representation.

SA: The opposition between an architecture of pure representation, on the one hand, and the Frampton critique of representation in favor of materiality, on the other, in my mind, is just non-productive. And to me it is refreshing that most of the people of your generation do not see this as a tremendous dilemma to be resolved. They are very comfortable toggling back and forth between the actual and the virtual. I do not want to just assign that comfort to the emergence of digital technology; the change of thinking is more important than the change in technology. Nonetheless, engagement with the tools of computation has certainly facilitated the intellectual agility of toggling back and forth because that is exactly what you do with a computer. I think the other cause of this refreshing change is the critique of what I call discursive practice: architecture as built discourse that holds itself up to the criteria of other media. These other forms – film, writing, video, and so on – are much more transparent in their means of communication than architecture. If you try and hold architecture up to the criteria of these fluid, discursive forms of media, it is always going to come up short. You are going to feel like you are working with a tool that is very blunt, and if you do not take account of architecture’s bluntness, slowness, and lack of transparency as a discursive medium, then you are always going to feel hobbled.

MM: But discourse on architecture is not always meant to clarify the architectural object. For example, the avant-garde of architectural production was all about film – you can link Tschumi, Eisenman, and Koolhaas through a desire to create an architecture of film. The problem, of course, with this craft-oriented analysis is that film was a formal condition of repetition for some, and for others is was a visceral event. For Koolhaas, film was a surreal experience, a way of overlapping multiple realities. The form of the craft was used to communicate very different kinds of content. There could be even more ways of thinking about film today through material. If we flatten discourse in order to find clarity, what is produced? a horrible equivocation of everything. At that moment we hit a frictionless dead end. Then, inevitably, we just build. I am not willing to give up the discursive; I do not want to turn in to a mere craftsman, although I am a craftsman, of sorts.

SA: There is another issue here, and it is not so much about specificity of disciplines as it is about paying attention to the capacity of the discipline to produce certain concepts. For a lot of people – Greg Lynn, Sanford Kwinter, myself – in the early 1990s, Deleuze was a very important figure, and the shift from Derrida, who is a philosopher of language, to Deleuze, who is a philosopher of matter, had a great impact. People looking at “Field Conditions”¹ from the outside may think it is just another part of the larger movement of post-structuralism. If they do, they did not pay attention to the difference between Derrida and Deleuze. For us, at that moment, it was a very important difference. Thinking about Deleuze’s books on cinema, for example, I am going to build on your comments on film for a moment. For Deleuze, the goal is not to apply philosophical concepts to a reading of cinema, but instead to pay attention to the way cinema – through its own internal rules and procedures and methods – actually produces philosophical concepts. You can still be deeply theoretical and discursive about your discipline, but you do not have to fall back on what, to me, is a suspect intellectual construct – some vague corpus of ideas called theory, which you then make specific relative to architecture, film, painting, or whatever. Deleuze suggested that every discipline is capable of producing its own theoretical and philosophical concepts through means that are specific to each discipline, and thus you end up producing different ideas in architecture than in film or painting. This methodology breaks down the false dilemma between the discursive and the practical, in that you pay very close attention to the capacity of architecture to produce ideas, rather than applying or importing ideas from the outside.

MM: I once had a conversation with Eisenman about what he did, and he said: “It was very easy for me because I had a PhD first.” I thought, that is the most depressing thing I’ve ever heard: I had my theory figured out first and then I did the work. Theory and work should be much more fluid – more like criticism. Practice and theory are strangely concrete categories. If practice is slow, I think theory should be fast, but the reverse seems to be true right now. I love Eisenman, but I am also very troubled by him.

SA: I think that is his role in the field.

MM: For me, Eisenman is not one to listen to but rather to watch. He operates much differently from what he says, and the way he operates is far more interesting.

SA: This generation has a great deal of facility in working with and manipulating form, which they, in some ways, learned from Eisenman. At the same time, they are skeptical of Eisenman. Famously – going back 40 years now – for him, the drawing, the model, and the buildings were just one among many possible representations of an idea. So it did not matter if the building was built out of cardboard, and when the photograph of the finished building was confused with a photograph of a model, he was fine with that.

MM: Architecture was somehow separated from embodiment. It’s a horrible idea. Inevitably you have to think of material, even if you are just drawing. Not that material is inherent in drawing, but that it is in some way stuck to it.

SA: I think it works the other way around too. I have been reading Richard Sennett’s book on the craftsman.² There is one particular point where Sennett talks about the loss of craft in architecture, and he blames digital technology. I am part of a generation that learned digital technology very late, so I cannot call myself an expert at all, but to say that there is no craftsmanship in digital technology is crazy. I can look at computer models done by different people in my office and see that some of them are beautifully crafted while others are a mess. Exactly the same concepts of a craftsman organizing his or her workspace, taking care with execution and finish, as well as the idea of making your own tools to perform a job apply in digital work. In a shop, somebody makes a jig to hold a model piece, and in the digital realm there are people who write routines to manipulate form. They are the same. You can see the exact same values operating in the digital medium.

MM: If anything, there is the craft to understanding the actual world’s material properties in digital modeling, but then craft is still a word that makes most people cringe. I get a little nervous about it. When you take Frampton, and the avant-garde – Eisenman, Hejduk – and you put all of them together, you end up with this new, strange soufflé of ways of working. Most of us do not think about it that deeply while working. Maybe there is something nice about finding tools that nobody else knows how to use and exploiting them. This soufflé produces a new generational methodology, but the discourse of craftsmanship is still a tricky thing.

SA: Maybe it is a question of parsing the generations too finely. I belong to a generation that was pretty much educated by Eisenman, Hejduk, Libeskind, and Tschumi in the 1980s, when there was this huge sense of doubt and skepticism and, in a material sense, very little work. We tended to do speculative work, competitions, early on and have only more recently made the transition to practice.

MM: This current generation is more interested in practicing first.

SA: But this is what I am saying about parsing generations too finely because the generation in between, the early 1990s, moved very quickly to an entrepreneurial mode of practice. My sense of your generation is that you do not see a strong distinction between a gallery installation, a temporary construction, or a commission for a client – or, for that matter, working in digital media, film or drawing. All of those things are operating on a similar plane. There is less of a sense in the current generation that – as you get with SHoP – where you have a set of very powerful tools, learned from the previous generation, which are now going to be applied in a very concrete, real-world, market-driven situation.

MM: SHoP did open up territory for us, which is very important, but you can get too removed from a discursive mode, which is also problematic. You start to put everything into terms of money. I think that is a really bad place for architecture to be. I also think it is a problem if you put everything in terms of sustainability. I do not see it as an enemy, but rather want to temper it with other models that have been given to us through the avant-garde trajectory. For me the autonomy of architecture exists, but it is not formal. It’s social. I am not interested in theory without images. I would probably be more interested in criticism than theory, ultimately, as a mode, because it cannot get rid of the object. The question everyone is debating now is just how influential the outside is on architecture. I think it is incredibly influential, but what I think is most influential is the art world, music, film, and writing – culture in general.

SA: Take a building like the Seattle Public Library. Clearly, you can have an incredibly well-developed conversation within the discourse about it, but part of the intelligence of OMA is their ability to operate simultaneously in multiple registers. We can have a complex technical discussion about the diagrid as a strategy for dealing with seismic loads, the move away from the free plan, the separation of the skin from the structure, and the integration of the structure into the skin. However, 99 percent of the people who use the library each day do not care about that. The success of OMA is their ability to deploy specifically architectural expertise in service of broadly legible effects – architectural, urbanistic, cultural, and social.

MM: And, frankly, most of those architectural strategies already existed in late modernism. Koolhaas and Herzog & de Meuron have arguably had more influence on thinking about materials: Koolhaas through large models, where you try to make it as close to real as possible – even if materiality is just a Xerox copy – and Herzog & de Meuron through prototyping, where everything is mocked up at full scale. These strategies have had incredible influence on a generation who have had to think outside of the American dilemma produced by Eisenman.

SA: This is one of the reasons why these figures make Eisenman so nervous.

MM: They should! There is always the sheer power of built architecture – the thing itself – regardless of discourse. Eisenman is not a builder type – he does not seem to care about making buildings, at any cost. He is happy with the grids. The desire for a non-figurative architecture is something that is still around as a faded trajectory of the avant-garde and as a strategy of non-composition, and it is something we are all still interested in, even the younger generation working with digital technology. Materiality, however, is a relatively new way to pursue the desire for non-figurative architecture, and a way to deal with architectural materiality that is not a craftsmanship or humanist model has not yet been completely figured out.

SA: Two things. First, I recently did an interview with Mansila Tunon, and they used a phrase that really stuck in my mind: “non-centralized expansive systems capable of becoming specific at any given point.” Although a little bit awkward in the phrasing, this is actually quite provocative as a response to the grid. They describe their own work MUSAC, the museum they recently completed in Leon, as the moment they discovered this. They are an interesting test case in this discussion because they come out of Moneo’s office. Their work has very often been seen in terms of materiality and tectonics, and they have an incredibly impressive record of getting stuff built in a super-convincing way. Yet their work method is also super-diagrammatic and very playful. The capacity to go back and forth between the diagrammatic and the material is remarkable. The other thing – what I would say particularly for our generation – is a suggestion: do not think about specific materials. Do not think about concrete, glass, or steel; think about material properties: think about heaviness, lightness, translucency, and transparency. Those kinds of properties are much more important than the particular stone you choose. The theoretical framework for this that is helpful for me is Gregory Bateson’s discussions about information and information exchange. Oppositional readings would see form, organization, and material, on one side, and communication and information, on the other – Bateson collapses this difference. His famous definition of information as “the difference that makes a difference” continues to resonate with me, and gives you a way out of the form/content (or form/program) dilemmas that have haunted recent architecture. We can talk about the form of a form. For Bateson, form is information, and you can talk about a complex formal configuration as one with a high degree of embedded information.

MM: Could you describe the difference between information and text?

SA: Text requires a linguistic framework for translation, a series of agreed-upon conventions, which are in turn socially or culturally based. Information exchange, by contrast happens on a one-to-one basis, a more immediate and material basis, as in the opening or closing of a circuit. What for me is valuable about Bateson’s model is that you can talk about something, for example, as familiar as the pitched roof: on the one hand, we could see it through the traditional semiotic lens as the symbol of the house, which is in turn deeply embedded in history and culture. Or we could simply think of it as a geometrical or material configuration with a certain performative capacity – let’s say, to shed rain. The information model collapses this distinction. When rain falls on the roof, all the material characteristics of that roof – if it is porous, if it is rough, the steepness of the pitch – can be defined as embedded information, and there is in turn a process of information exchange between that embedded information and the raindrops falling on the roof. Or you could see the semiotic dimension too as part of an information exchange; Bateson was trained as an anthropologist, after all, and he saw this kind of exchange too as something that could be recorded and analyzed. You could see all that as information – cultural and material – in very abstract, almost calculable terms rather than reiterating the distinction between the material and the symbolic condition of the house. Bateson collapses the formal distinction between material infor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Copyright
• Title Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Foreign Matter
• Part I: Matter Conversed
• Part II: Matter Design
• Part III: Matter Processes
• Part IV: Matter Precedent
• Part V: Matter Detail
• Part VI: Matter Ecology
• Part VII: Matter Pedagogy
• Part VIII: Matter Sensations
• Part IX: Matter Surface
• Figure Credits
• Index