Material Matters

Architecture and Material Practice

Katie Lloyd Thomas, Katie Lloyd Thomas

• Editore: Routledge
• Anno: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134228232
• Edizione: 1
• Argomento: Architecture
• Categoria: Architecture General

Bringing together texts and work by theorists and practitioners who are making material central to their work, this book reflects the diverse areas of inquiry which are expanding current material discourse. Focusing on the cultural, political, economic, technological and intellectual forces which shape material practices in architecture, the contributors draw on disciplines ranging from philosophy, history and pedagogy to art practice and digital and low-tech fabrication.

By paying critical attention to material, a wide range of issues emerge which are otherwise excluded from architectural discourse, issues that shape and determine the buildings we make, the processes we use and the ways we understand them.

Beautifully illustrated and designed, this book is a unique collection which will be of great interest to architectural practitioners and theorists who want to consider the wider implications of material practice, and to students who are developing their own approach to making buildings.

INTRODUCTION

ARCHITECTURE AND MATERIAL PRACTICE

The practice of architecture and the discourses surrounding it are, as so many ways of understanding and constructing the world, structured around a distinction between form and matter where the formal (and conceptual) is valued over the material. On the one hand, historically, discourses and theories of architecture have tended to concern themselves with formal questions and to establish the architect as form giver. On the other, the very method we use to develop architectural proposals – orthographic drawing – describes only form, and relegates material to the empty spaces between the lines. The privileging of form is deeply embedded into our working practices, and material is rarely examined beyond its aesthetic or technological capacities to act as a servant to form. The essays and projects collected here each insist on making the material matter, and in doing so something exciting and potentially important happens. From this simple shift in attention towards the material a very wide range of issues emerge: issues otherwise invisible or excluded from architectural discourse; issues that shape and determine the buildings we make, the processes we use and the ways in which we understand them.

Like any building, the book you have in your hands right now is a material object. But as you read it you will be unlikely to think of it this way. The materiality of the book has probably gone unnoticed: at most you might be aware of its weight, or the smell and texture of its pages – and even these immediate sensory qualities are secondary while you are concentrating on the contributors’ ideas through their words and images. To shift your attention to the book as a material object would be to see that it is not only the ideas of the authors which shape it. Like any building, this book is in fact the result of a vast network of practices. There are conventions of its structure and of the English language in written form; the designs of typefaces and the software in which the print is set; the manufacture of papers, glues and inks from which it is constructed. Behind each of these materials is a complex history of development, extraction, technique, transportation and exchange. Economies of production, regulation of standards and labour shape this object, as do the lives and contexts of the many persons who have handled it along the way.

To move beyond the ideas behind this book and the physical experience of its ‘objecthood’ involves the recognition of the social and material practices in which its generation is embedded and the forces at work in the realization of objects (and their continuing lives) which range from the conceptual to the practical and technical, to the institutional. In shifting attention from the formal to the material, it is precisely these forces and practices which become visible in the contributions which make up Material Matters. To reverse the usual hierarchy and valorize matter over form does of course leave the opposition intact, and some of the essays try to dismantle this opposition altogether and suggest alternative ways of conceiving the material world, which may in turn help to explain why attention to materials sets so many questions in motion.

Before moving to a discussion of the individual contributions I want first to elaborate on the form/matter distinction and the particular problems that architectural discourse might inherit from it. I will go on to suggest that the surge of interest in materiality in architecture at the present time results from the convergence of a number of rather different areas of endeavour – particularly from technological developments, environmental concerns and current philosophical debates. Taken together, these developments might be seen to be shifting discourse about material towards questions of practice and challenging the dominance of formal concerns. My own concern in putting this collection of writings and images together is to ask how this current interest in materiality might open architectural discourse up to social and political questions of material practice, rather than simply providing us with some new form-making techniques which are inflected by their material realization.

ARCHITECTURE AND HYLOMORPHISM

The privileging of form over material is central both to the theoretical discipline and to the profession of architecture. It is also a preference that many architects display in their own design work. Material’s secondary status not only lends it a certain invisibility that leaves it under-discussed but also creates a number of problems for the discipline and its critical accounts. Materials tend to be discussed in guides to construction rather than in theoretical works, where formal concerns are dominant, or in historical works, where, as Andrew Benjamin discusses, an idealist approach tends to prevail. As Pablo Miranda notes in his contribution, the ‘craft’ of the architect is not building but drawing. The descriptive geometry we traditionally use did not so much enable communication between designer and builder, as is often commented upon, but produced that separation, and affiliated the design of buildings with the high-minded and ideal disciplines of mathematics and the pure sciences. In contemporary professional practice the split appears again in the tender package, where drawings describe form but language is used for the materials of building in notes on working drawings and in the specification.¹ Furthermore in architectural education, as Alan Chandler discusses, the formal aspects of design are usually developed first in student projects with material considerations only brought in at a later stage and left to ‘technical’ studies.

The form/matter split which structures architecture also has a long philosophical tradition. It is one of many foundational binary oppositions in which one member of the pair is privileged and the other is secondary. In Plato’s theory of forms the material realization of a pure form is always imperfect and degraded. The perfect form can only exist in the ideal realm where it is untainted by matter. In a typical account of ‘hylomorphism’ such as Aristotle’s, matter, or ‘hyle’, is given shape by form, or ‘morphe’. Matter in itself is inert and undifferentiated; it is the servant of form and gives it presence. It does not determine form.

In a hylomorphic account the form giver might appear as an architect, as in John Protevi’s description of the typical conceptualization of material production as ‘the transcendent imposition of the architect’s vision of form on chaotic matter’.² Despite the properties of matter which might inform or resist the work of the form giver, as Protevi goes on to describe, ‘the architect is blind to such traits and despises “surrender” to matter; he only sees and commands’.³ The hylomorphic schema ‘that a simple unchanging commanding origin is responsible for change in others’ may not, he suggests, simply be of philosophical significance but may also be a model which supports systems of work such as slave labour⁴ or industrialization.

By characterizing matter as inert – as that which is given form – the image of the architect as a kind of mythic form giver is reinforced and the processes and labour of construction are covered over. The very resistances that matter has to being formed are ignored. Materials must be extracted or manufactured, they must be worked and, once in situ, they must be maintained. And of course materials are themselves active; it is a transaction, rather than a one-way operation, that occurs in the shaping of stuff.

The valuing of form over matter relegates material in architecture to the practical underside of the profession and lifts the status of the architect to form giver. Hylomorphism also leaves architecture with another difficulty: while the concept of form may be transferable to architecture, the hylomorphic concept of matter, I want to suggest, cannot in fact account for materials (in the plural) as they are understood in architectural practice.

In the Metaphysics Aristotle understands substance (that which is separable) as a compound of form and matter.⁵ The term Aristotle uses for matter, ‘hyle’, also means wood (and is occasionally used for other materials) and is, as I understand it, a positive term which refers to an instance of the material such as might be used in building. Aristotle uses a second term, ‘hypokomenon’, which is usually translated as ‘substrate’ and refers to prime matter. This word literally means ‘that which lies beneath’ – it has the sense of something behind, something perhaps which can be deduced rather than touched. In Aristotle’s account a kind of elision occurs between the hypokomenon and the hyle. In trying to explain the concept of prime matter he uses examples of specific materials: ‘In speaking of matter I have in mind say, the bronze of a statue, while by the shape-form I mean the geometry of the object’s appearance.’⁶ Not all materials would do as well as bronze in this example – a statue made of charcoal would become dust if you tried to change its shape – but we are happy to accept it as just one example of a generic material. The specific properties of bronze – its ability to become liquid and be moulded, and its own formlessness – lend conviction to a concept of matter that would be common to all materials. Aristotle is not alone in using a plastic material to support an argument concerning matter. In his sceptical account of matter, Descartes, for example, chooses wax.⁷

Hylomorphism understands matter as singular; form is that which differentiates and matter is that which can be differentiated. But it imagines prime matter in reference to the properties of a particular material and passes over others which would not fit, and in doing so ignores or represses the plurality of materials. The hylomorphic concept of matter is not as easily conflated with materials as it would appear. Nevertheless architecture has this concept at its base and sets up a discourse in which form must be realized in matter, with the material being seen as merely interchangeable – just one instance of matter rather than another. In any binary opposition it is not only that the secondary term is degraded but that it is defined negatively, as ‘not form’. Within such a definition there is no space for a positive appearance of the term, and therefore, for the possibility of differentiation.⁸ Hylomorphism, which understands materials as a subset of matter, does not provide a way of positively distinguishing materials, and underscores the architectural tendency to use materials as mere finishes, exchangeable and superficial. In turn, it is no surprise that materials become supplementary in architecture and are used to decorate or to signify.

MATERIAL ATTENTION

This book, and the conference and workshops it has grown out of, emerges at a time when there is a renewed interest in questions of materiality in architecture. The essays and practices presented here respond to very different forces and concerns within (and without) the discipline and use a variety of strategies to do so. Some posit an alternative philosophical approach which does not split the world into form and matter but instead considers it in terms of force, setting up equivalence between persons, objects, words, solar systems and so on, which all act on each other. In such a view the real and the virtual, or the material and the idea, are part of a continuum of potentiality and actualization. Interestingly, at least for architecture, developments in practice support these conceptual frameworks, particularly in relation to digital-based mechanistic processes such as Computer Numerically Controlled (CNC) milling operations and Rapid Prototyping which make possible a direct link between conceptualization and production, undoing a gap which has been such an important part of the discipline’s structuring.

A number of the essays consider materials in terms of effect, either on the process of design or on performance. In this view, form emerges out of a transaction with the material or the material demands or invites certain practices in terms of maintenance or behaviour. New products, particularly those using ‘smart materials’, add to the persuasiveness of these kinds of analyses. Façade components which are responsive to changes in the environment, for example, challenge a view of materials as inert or acted upon, and encourage us to consider the active aspects of all materials.⁹

Most of the essays however, would seem to generally accept the hylomorphic account of architecture and object making. Their approach is to redress the balance, and to replace neglect with what I have called ‘material attention’. Inevitably, in adopting this strategy, the primacy of form is reiterated rather than avoided, but out of the attention to material a number of very different and interesting issues emerge, ranging from temporality to economics. Attentiveness to material does not, of course, only happen through intellectual research, but is part of the manual work of craft or fabrication. A problem for any book dealing with material attention, then, is how to give making a presence. Here there are a number of written accounts of making, from sewing and tailoring to slicing a disused sand dredger in two, and also a number of sections which allow the visual to dominate and punctuate the textual in an effort to evoke the attention of the hand and eye within the limits of the printed page.

The contributions here, then, are distinguished more by the variety of their approaches to materiality than by a commonality but in choosing to put them together, and in using the term ‘material practice’ in the title, I have tried to draw attention to what is a shared refusal to consider materials in purely visual (and static) terms and an insistence on examining materials as part of a network of forces and actions (although few of the contributors would use this terminology). Architecture must explore materials in this way if it is to use them responsibly, to open itself to the potentiality of new and ‘old’ materials and to reach an understanding of how materials may be productive of effects, both experiential and political, as it already has to some extent in relation to space. An emphasis on practice accepts that materials can only be understood (and even defined) within the terms of a specific discourse and in relation to when, where and how they are produced and used.

In his influential account of a woodworker making a table, Brian Massumi describes how the qualities of the piece of wood have a future potential to affect (to resist gravity when a glass is placed upon it) and be affected (to submit to ‘the pressure of salt shakers and discourteous elbows’) and arise out of its individual past (‘the evolution of the tree’s species … the cultural actions that brought that particular wood to the workshop for that particular purpose’).¹⁰ The material, at any particular point in time, is brought into its existence through a developing chain of events, both ‘natural’ and cultural, and has the potential for a myriad of future interactions and transformations. Massumi suggests that what is important in this encounter is not the distinction between form and matter for:

There is substance on both sides: wood; woodworking body and tools. And there is form on both sides: both raw material and object produced have determinate forms, as do the body and tools. The encounter is between two substance/form complexes, one of which overpowers the other.¹¹

Rather it is this power differential that determines that we understand the wood as merely ‘content’ and the craftsman as ‘agent of expression’. Massumi points out that if we see the craftsman instead as produced by ‘the apprenticeship system or technical school that trained him’ he becomes content – content and expression are relative, and they themselves can be seen as organized into forms of qualities or of functions. Such a form is not separable from its substance but ‘is that substance seen from the point of view of the actions to which it submits and the changes of state through which it passes.’

Massumi provides us with an (Deleuzian materialist) alternative to the hylomorphic account of the architectural material, which suggests that material is itself active and does not distinguish between the physical forces (the plane smoothing it) and immaterial forces (the building standard that determined its fire treatment in a certain way) that produce it. Within this account the line that is a string of code in a computer or an idea is no less material than a piece of wood or a spoken sentence; each acts. While only a few essays in this book take such a position – and it may even be problematic to think of a material as a constellation of forces when we are trying to stage a discussion about architectural materials (since how are we to separate them, then, from tools, treatises, tables, institutions, geometries and so on?) – Massumi’s account suggests how the simple undertaking of attending to the material can yield the extremely wide range of issues that emerge in the essays collected here.

Massumi’s account also problematizes the reason that is often given for the contemporary interest in materials. It has become commonplace to understand the recent interest in materials in architecture as a response to the impact of the computer on our discipline, or, in a more sophisticated version of the same argument from Sheila Kennedy entitled, tellingly, ‘Material Presence: The Return of the Real’,¹² to consider it as a broader cultural phenomenon in an increasingly mediated world – a longing for the...