Performative Materials in Architecture and Design

Rashida Ng, Sneha Patel, Rashida Ng, Sneha Patel

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781841506494
• eBook ISBN: 9781783201426
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Tecnología e ingeniería
• Subtopic: Recursos energéticos

Performative Materials in Architecture and Design addresses the convergence of several significant and fundamental advancements in the ways that materials and environments are designed, evaluated and experienced within architecture and related disciplines. The emergence of experimental and ultra-performing materials, interactive processing systems and digital design and fabrication techniques has established an interconnected network or technological inputs that has stimulated the development of materials, assemblies and systems with performative properties. Providing an overview of representative design projects and relevant theories, this volume illuminates both the interaction of these technologies and the role of materiality in research, design and practice.

Chapter 1

Material Ontologies

Algaetecture (Courtesy Steve Pike)

on·tol·o·gy

• a branch of metaphysics concerned with the nature and relations of being

• a particular theory about the nature of being or the kind of existents¹

1 Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (1995) 10^th Edition, Springfield: Merriam-Webster.

Approaching a Material History of Architecture

Jason Crow

In spite of our tendency to understand matter as being transhistorical, the materials with which we build as architects today are not the same as they were 20 centuries or even 20 years ago. The concrete of the ancient Roman Pantheon’s dome is not the concrete of the Hoover dam. In this essay, I briefly introduce the historical and cultural invention of materiality in order to better understand the influence of matter within the digital project. What is a material? In contemporary architectural discourse, we interpret matter as a fixed set of quantifiable qualities. As material, matter has a strength. It has a resistance. It has a texture. It has a color. We assume that these qualities of the material in question do not change. Qualities are definitively fixed to the material. However, these qualities—the facts of the material—are a result of our own particular interpretation of the ontological status of matter. How might we understand the history of architecture differently if we approach materials as if they have a biography—as if they come into being, live, and eventually die?

Exploring the biographies of materials owes a debt to recent scholarship in the history of science such as that of Lorraine Daston (2000). “Biographies of materials” obviously borrows from her edited collection of essays, Biographies of Scientific Objects. However, one must proceed with caution following her example within an architectural context. Paraphrasing the words of Bruno Latour, any object has a series of local, instrumental, and practical networks that surround and determine how it is understood (Latour 2000: 250). In opposition to the progressive nature of scientific inquiry relative to its objects, matter in the hands of the architect always has the capacity to be treated and understood anachronistically. The inherent anachronism of architectural matter develops a tension between the two modes of scientific work on objects that Latour identifies. Discovery is an ahistorical mode of operation in which something has an eternal but unknown existence. In effect, a discovery has always been even prior to its local history. It marks a point in time at which a thing has been found despite the fact that it “had always been there.” Invention is a mode of work embedded within the linear progression of a history (Latour 2000: 251–252). It forms a part of a logical progression from one thing to another. An invention will always be superseded by something new. The tension between these two modes is erased within the epistemology of scientific equipment. The biography of scientific equipment uncovers its over-determined state of being. It is an ontological state that allows the objectifying scientist to discover “with” equipment. For the scientist, facts cannot be invented. His or her facts exist outside our temporality. The ontological status of equipment thus prevents a confrontation with historical context.

The intent of suggesting biographies for materials in architecture is to reveal how these networks similarly fix our interpretation not only of equipment but also fix our interpretation of the material we put to use. Matter is mistakenly believed to not change over time. Understanding why and how materials change requires that the stories of matter be recognized and told to reveal their inherent tensions. The biographical approach to materials uncovers the most critical aspect of any given material. Matter is phenomenal. It can slap you in the face. Matter does not play by our rules. While there has been some progress made toward the type of biography mentioned above in the history of science, none of the research has taken into account the uniquely anachronistic relation of an artisan to material. Phenomena of matter receive less attention. Even within the context of Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle, the scientist desires to elide any ontological instability of his or her devices. It is not good for scientific equipment to resist the work to be done. This attitude is simply not true of the artisan and requires a different epistemological method. Biographies of matter offer a possible approach. How to write such material histories remains, largely, an unexplored question.

Within the context of what is admittedly a prolegomena to approaching material histories in architecture, the goal of the current study is simply to introduce a mode of inquiry. The inquiry is a historical address of the ontology of matter and of the ontology of equipment as its supplement. The desire is to be able to construct a ground upon which notions about the so-called digital matters can be tested. In particular, a major shift occurs with regard to the theorization of materiality in digital projects like Gramazio and Kohler’s Programmed Columns of 2009 and 2010 (Gramazio and Kohler 2009; 2010). In the spirit of the Speculative Realists, I would argue that the matter of these brick columns, in and of itself, withdraws (Harman 2005: 89–100). Despite the obvious phenomenal presence, the brick in these columns is not allowed to be. In the place of the matter with which the artisan engages, equipment has been substituted.¹ Failing to address the shift from an ontological precedence of matter to the equipment that forms matter falls prey to Graham Harman’s criticism² of Heidegger’s own confrontation with technology (Harman 2010: 5–13). Even Heidegger tends to gloss over the more curious status of equipment.³ Equipment is not, as in Heidegger’s understanding of the tool, an extension of the body. Equipment is ontologically autonomous.

The concern of the gloss introduced here is metaphysical. I will take as an exemplar the ontological status of brick. A special mode of being is implied in Louis Kahn’s infamous conversation with brick. When Kahn asks Brick, “What do you want?” he recognizes a desire within the brick. The recognition is an important concession to the brick. The brick is allowed to live and to be by mysteriously being filled with its own self-forming power.⁴ Kahn’s seemingly mystical approach to the brick appears anachronistic. His understanding of animate matter is deeply embedded in a historical epistemology. Perhaps despite Kahn’s own desires, the matter of the brick is literally alive and desires perfection for itself much like more quotidian animate beings. Kahn’s anachronism reveals the supplement to the ontological status of material, where matter withdraws and is replaced by equipment.⁵ The material aporia covered over by equipment is implicit but not obvious in the work of Gramazio and Kohler. Digital materiality cannot be known without a foundation whether a ground exists or not. The history of brick, which Kahn evokes, provides insight into the grounding necessary to understand digital materiality. In this essay, that history is presented below in an abbreviated form.

Matter: An Abbreviated History of Brick

In order to understand Kahn’s material anachronism and Gramazio and Kolher’s attempted material elision, the history of the changes to the conceptualization of brick must be traced. Between the thirteenth century and the eighteenth centuries, the story of matter in the Latin West changes focus. The history shifts from a mysterious power that realizes a brick as the vivified creation of God. It moves toward a matter informed with the power of nature by an artisan, and it concludes with dead matter divorced by equating material with the light that animated it. The survey presents the virtus mineralibus—literally, the power of stone—of the thirteenth century, the limits of matter-as-form defined in the fifteenth century, the capacity to harness the power of nature to inform matter in the sixteenth century, and the death of matter in the eighteenth century. From the grounding of that historical introduction, the difference between Kahn’s brick and Gramazio and Kohler’s digital brick can be revealed.

In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, a brick was a stone crafted by an alchemist and evocatively filled by a mysterious power from God. In the middle of the thirteenth century, Albert the Great had systematized the epistemology of stone. His systemization integrated stony matters with his understanding of the Aristotelian categories of life. In this work, a treatise called the de mineralibus—about stones, he crafted an interpretation of stone that would appear almost nonsensical to our contemporary epistemology of matter. For Albert, not only was stone a living thing, it also contained a mysterious power he named virtus mineralibus—hereafter, power-of-stone. In the first book of his treatise on stone, Albert explained that the power-of-stone was similar to the power of light contained within stones and making them animate. He associated this vivifying power with Aristotle’s notion of substantial form, which animates form with life (Albertus Magnus 1967: 24–26). Substantial form for Aristotle is described in his treatise on the soul, de anima (Aristotle 2000: Bk II, Ch I). As in the form-matter pair that constitutes all things in the world, substantial form was a power that quickened inanimate form to create the soul. The soul following itself as a model gave life to the body. The doubled pairing of substance-substantial form and form-matter was something that Albert could only imagine as the realm of God’s activity. Stone was thus a matter crafted and vivified solely by the hands of the deity. The fabrication of stone existed outside of any potential earthly act.

Albert’s student, Thomas Aquinas, would follow with a similar argument questioning the possibility of a human-made gold. In the second half of the thirteenth century, Aquinas (1997) could imagine a limited human agency in craft. The famous scholastic argued that an alchemist could produce a stone that had the same measurable qualities as real gold. However, Aquinas concluded that the alchemist could not truly transmute metals. He argued that without the addition of the power-of-stone by God no human-made material could truly be gold. Aquinas was arguing against the alchemical beliefs of men like Pseudo-Geber, Themeo Judeaus, and the later Petrus Bonus. All would argue for true alchemical creation. Intriguingly, alchemists like Themeo and Petrus believed the creation of brick to be a human fabrication equivalent to God’s own creation of stone (Newman 2004: 268–269). A brick did not simply substitute for stone. Nor was a brick an artificial stone. It was, in the alchemical interpretation, a real and true stone made by humans and filled with the power of God at the alchemist’s evocation.

By the late fifteenth century, the dominance of Aristotelian explanations of the matter of things in the world was beginning to recede. Form and power took precedence over matter. There was a change in focus from the capacity of the artisan or alchemist to manipulate matters. Interest was beginning to grow in form as a kind of perfect matter, which revealed something similar to the power of God in the power of nature. The drawings of the Platonic and Archimedean solids by Leonardo Da Vinci for Fra Luca Pacioli’s (1980) de divina proportione are not the pure mathematical abstractions that we would assume when discussing Platonic forms. Albert the Great had proposed a hierarchy of matter in his book on stones where closeness to perfection was made evident in the transparency and regularity of a stone. In the context of Pacioli’s transparent bodies, Da Vinci was drawing the matter of the solids approaching form as perfect transparency and shape. With minimal matter left in the thickened lines of the polygonal volumes, the light that could be contained by the form was revealed. Recalling that Albert had associated this light with the vivifying power of God, Pacioli revealed access to the power of God in nature as the light at the limits of the material world.

Contemporary to Pacioli and Da Vinci’s solids, an interest was growing in magical mineralizing springs that transformed leaves, twigs, and other matters into stone. These springs contained a natural power equivalent to Albert’s power-of-stone that could be demonstrably used to transform inert matter into something else by the artisan or alchemist. The fifteenth century brick no longer was made through the alchemist as the instrument of Go...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Introduction: Experimental Performances: Materials as Actors
• Chapter 1: Material Ontologies
• Chapter 2: Material Elements
• Chapter 3: Material Fabrications
• Chapter 4: Material Behaviors
• Chapter 5: Material Futures
• Contributing Authors
• Index
• Back Page