Building Materials

Material Theory and the Architectural Specification

Katie Lloyd Thomas

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Visual Arts
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350176249
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Criticism

At a time of unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and their deployment in construction, better theoretical and historical tools are needed to understand these new developments and how they are altering the practices and concepts of architecture. Building Materials offers a radical rethink of how materials, as they are constituted in architectural practice, are themselves constructed and, in turn, uncovers a vast and neglected resource of architectural writing about materials as they are mobilized in architecture. The book is unique in conceiving architectural specification as a starting point for architectural theory, arguing that how materials are prescribed - through a range of practices from the literal processes of procurement and manufacture to epistemological, contractual, social and economic frameworks - radically alters their potential in architecture. Drawing on the work of French philosopher Gilbert Simondon, as well as close readings of everyday specifications from the 18th to 21st centuries, the book reveals that materials do not pre-exist their shaping or use in the world, but come into being through the processes that constitute them. The book addresses three distinct methods of specification each through the lens of a different material – 'naming' through timber, 'process-based' through concrete, and 'performance specification' through glass – in turn revealing how the process of architectural specification (or 'Preliminary Operations' as Simondon puts it) allows for the development of specific relationships between material and function.

1

Introduction

‘Through most of history’, claimed the historian of metallurgy Cyril Stanley Smith in a lecture given over 50 years ago, ‘matter has been a concern of metaphysics more than physics, and materials of neither’.¹ Despite the ‘material turn’ now in full swing across so many disciplines, from political science to gender studies and also in my own discipline of architecture, Smith’s claim that materials have been overlooked still deserves our attention. His complaint is with philosophy and science; disciplines he shows that have, since Aristotle, made use of experience and knowledge gained in the workshop to develop their concepts of matter, deriving their ideas from those who worked directly with ‘the wonderful diversity of real materials’, but left them behind in their theories. Either, as in physics or most philosophy, accounts have ignored the rich variety of materials and eliminated what Smith calls the ‘funeous aspects of the world’. Named after Jorge Luis Borges’s character ‘Funes the Memorious’ who remembered everything, ‘funicity’ is Smith’s own term for the tendency of material structures to lock into patterns that reflect the local events through which they came into being, and thus for diverse histories to exist through these material records into the present.² Or, as in chemistry, efforts to study and explain matter via the atom abandon the human scale, which Smith points out is also the realm in which material structures ‘have achieved something like the maximum significant degree of funicity’.³ In other words, we find the richest variety and funicity of entities, not at micro or macro scales, but at the scale of our everyday experience.

Architecture as a discipline must necessarily engage with materials at this intermediate scale and make use of their ‘wonderful diversity’ in the construction and inhabitation of buildings. So it is paradoxical that it nevertheless resorts to concepts of matter, drawn from science, philosophy and fine art, as a means to conceptualize building materials. Nevertheless, the strange abstracted status of building materials as matter in architectural practice is quite easily explained. The architect emerged as a protagonist only when techniques of drawing enabled the practice of design to be separated from the building site, and from building materials. The orthographic drawing maps out geometric form and dimension, but leaves materials blank. It is left to marginal notes or other documents appended to the drawing and usually considered supplementary to it, such as specifications or bills of quantities, to provide information about materials. Such practices reproduce and lend credibility to an idea of materials as substrate for form, and as such architectural thinking has tended to align materials with an Aristotelian notion of matter. For Aristotle, all entities are always a composite of both matter and form, where matter is that which is correlative with form in any substance but cannot bring about any change. The term now used for this schema – ‘hylomorphism’ – reflects this necessary pairing of morphē or form, and hyle or timber, and indeed Aristotle was the first to use this everyday term for a building material to stand in for the concept of ‘material in general’. Like other early philosophers of matter, as Smith shows, Aristotle derived his formulation from the ordinary practices of the workshop. The philosopher Gilbert Simondon, whose work is central to this book, also notes the dependence of this abstract schema on technical activity. The form/matter schema makes use of a process of technical production (and just one type of production; casting) for its paradigm. But, as Simondon shows, the universal application of its explanatory power to all things, including to living beings – and we could add, to architectural production – proves problematic.

One aim of this book is to show the limitations of considering materials in architecture in terms of the form/matter schema and to set out an alternative theory of building materials. I take a very particular route to do this, turning to found descriptions of timber, glass and concrete as they are to be used in construction, and to the anti-hylomorphic, process-oriented philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. But I am by no means alone in rejecting hylomorphism as an adequate means to understand matter in architecture. Both technological developments such as 3D printing, smart materials and composites, and innovative practices exploring emergent form, craft and material invention have revealed the explanatory limitations of the form/matter schema. A number of enquiries are explicit about the need for revised notions of matter. For practitioners and theorists such as Lars Spuybroek and Neri Oxman matter should be understood as active – with its own potential to participate in form-taking.⁴ Following Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter, Rachel Armstrong goes further in her book Vibrant Architecture, arguing that all matter has the capacity for liveliness, even intelligence, and that divisions between organic and inorganic matter are artificial.⁵ Starting from eco-feminist positions Peg Rawes and Hélène Frichot argue that our present times demand new ecological paradigms in which distinctions between human/non-human; living/non-living and the environment are replaced with a relational approach to our shared materiality.⁶ Outside architecture, the work of Maria Puig de la Bellacasa on relations of care through permaculture practices with soil, or Astrida Neimanis’ work on bodies of water, are some of the most compelling studies of materials that at the same time challenge hylomorphic concept of matter.⁷

These writers do engage with concrete examples; experimenting with emergent form or working in the lab with living matter, or studying artists’ works, resource extraction or stem cell research. But the commonplace world of mainstream building materials is rarely touched upon in this body of work. The New Zealand based architect/artist Julieanna Preston is a rare exception. Her performative and textual works engage with a range of materials – from the incised stone of an ancient city wall, to an even older lump of coal, cherished in the hand so we pay attention to it before letting it go up in smoke, from a submerged timber post of a pier to bales of untreated wool.⁸ Preston’s explorations of more prosaic building products – such as MDF and gypsum – operate through her efforts to interact with them by cutting through their bland, blank surfaces to find their rough, expressive interiors. Preston reveals the degree to which the specificities of these ubiquitous materials are normally withheld from us. Through her actions, the featurelessness of these materials, their capacity to disappear into a background invisibility, is shown to have been carefully contrived and crafted.⁹

This book takes on Smith’s call to attend to materials at the scale they are used, encountered and (with engineered materials) designed, instead of moving past them to generic matter, or matter as it appears at other scales. But why ask this question in architecture? Why try to establish a theory of materials as they are used in this practice and what is at stake in seeking to challenge the form/matter schema in the case of building materials? First, one of the problems with the dominance of the hylomorphic schema is that it privileges active form over passive matter, and gives agency to form. This structure supports the prevalent idea that the architect shapes form, leaving ‘matter’ secondary and interchangeable, degraded with respect to the more valued form, as expressed for example in Walter Gropius’s statement that, ‘Matter in and of its own is dead and without character. It draws life only from the form that the creative will of the artist breathes into it.’¹⁰ Moreover, in recent decades, the reality of practice has come to resemble the schema yet more closely, because design and build contracts can literally give over material and construction choices to the contractor, taking away the architect’s responsibility for material design, and leaving them as designer of form only, or to use a term from industry, of ‘visual intent’ (as we will see in Chapter 6 ‘Systems of Material’). Over and above any principles that architects should be involved in material selection because it makes for better looking design, there are important arguments that architects need to assert their responsibility for material choices at all levels of detail, to ensure sustainable sourcing and futures for materials, and that materials used are safe, at a time when cutting corners for profit and ‘efficiency’ is rife (as happened in the early 19th century), but governmental regulation and monitoring of compliance has weakened.

Second, there is a problematic tendency in architectural discourse and practice to denigrate the ‘technical’ and pragmatic aspects of building, even to consider them as outside the discipline proper. Discursive attention to materials is acceptable if it concerns aesthetic preferences; how should the building look, how should it feel? But debates are considered merely technical, if they concern the production of the building; the manner or economics of construction, issues of labour, legality, regulation and so on. According to the Marxist historian and theorist of labour and architecture, Sérgio Ferro, the relegation of technics and labour to architecture’s underside, or the privileging of design over the building site is no accident (in the original Portuguese, ‘canteiro e o desenho’ or ‘dessin/chantier’ in his concise formulation¹¹). Architecture’s techniques of design and project organization have been developed precisely so that the maximum surplus value can be extracted from construction labour. According to Ferro, the separation of architectural drawing from material labour on site, enables the control and exploitation of building workers. Architectural critics and historians, who reproduce the wilful neglect of production and technics, affirming that architecture is something other than, or ‘over’ building, are simply the ideologues of the status quo.¹² Even putting this strong claim aside, we can see there is a problem with refusing to engage with the technics of building materials. The last few decades have seen unprecedented levels of change in the production of building materials and in how they are deployed in building, in particular the widespread use of composite, smart and performance-engineered materials and new forms of contract. By simply accepting these new materials as no more than additions to the available palette of options, we fail to interrogate their effects and the extent to which they, and how they are deployed, are altering the built environment and even the concepts we use in our discourses about it.

Lastly, and by no means least, I turn to building materials because of the sheer wonder and pleasure I take in their diversity – from the many species of timber and stone with their various natural properties and beauty, that have traversed the world for centuries, to the mixing of mortars, paints and cements and the complex processes of preparing metals and glass, to the many tiny components; nails, screws, hooks, locks, hinges, levers and handles for every situation, and the proliferation of products; wall ties, drips, insulation panels, tiles, floor coverings, waterproof sheets, felts, asphalts that characterized the building industry from the late 19th century to the present day – and all this without even taking into account the diversity of materials of local building cultures around the world. It seems a travesty to reduce this display of difference and variety, this ‘funicity’ of past material invention and ingenuity, spread out before us (though often hidden from the eye) in the environments we inhabit, to a concept as dumb and homogenous as matter! What if architecture allowed this variety of materials to inform its material concepts, at their own scale? What would a theory of building materials look like that drew less on notions of matter from philosophy and science, and more on how materials are defined and mobilized within architecture’s own practices?

Simondon and the Specification

To pursue this exploration I make two key distinctive moves in terms of theoretical framework and primary resources. The first is to develop a theory of building materials with particular reference to the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon. At the start of the research, it was only his critique of the hylomorphic schema that seemed relevant, but as the research progressed his ‘process-oriented ontology’¹³ and discussion of technical objects and systems became central to my theoretical approach to building materials. I will return to Simondon’s work in the second part of this section and it is introduced in detail from Chapter 4 ‘Process’ and throughout the subsequent chapters. To study building materials I look not to the substances themselves, but to a rich but neglected historical and contemporary resource of writing on and about building materials – their descriptions in architectural specifications. The history of these documents is a vast and underexplored topic, and I limit my study to examples of specifications from London and its environs, setting out a brief survey of its development since the 18th century in Chapter 2, before organizing the main body of the book ...