35: the material culture of architecture
on site review 35: the material culture of architecture
You can place an order for a print version for CAD$16: 9 x 13”, 56 pages, full colour, beautiful paper, high resolution images –- a thing of beauty:
It is proving to be interesting, the difference between reading a journal online and in print. Robin Wilson, on receiving his copies wrote, ‘It is amazing how the art copy just brings everything together in a different way.’
Robert Hill, at KPMB, wrote, ‘I am a firm believer in value of print editions of journals, and I also took time to see your website with the new digital edition of Issue No. 35 now up and viewable. At our growing office on King Street, we continue to hold subscriptions to 16 printed editions of journals, including those from Italy, England, Japan, USA, Canada, and we have noticed a pattern with all these journals that, in every case, they are maintaining print editions AND, at the same time, offering digital online editions.’ [emphasis his]
Well, we like print too; we like the material object. But print, today, is wildly expensive, and postage in Canada is crippling compared to other countries, such as Scotland where a 500g letter international is £1.27, and here it is $21.80).
in this issue: material, materialism, material culture, the material culture of architecture, the materials of architecture, architectural materialism
Ultimately, this is an issue about materials and the culture that produced them, the cultures that use them, and the culture that takes them for granted, as everyday. Often discussions about architecture tilt to the philosophical; the proliferation of ~isms that encode attitudes, dogmas, not-so-eternal verities leading us to more and more arcane discussions in which physical buildings lose their materiality and become primarily signifiers of the conditions of our time.
It surprises me that after almost 40 years of the writing of deep history in most other fields, it hasn’t permeated architecture that much. We still tend to focus on one interest and then delve into a building in search of occurrences that support that interest. If we start with the existential fact of the materials a building is made from and of, and let that lead us to a web of social, economic, historic, geographic, environmental, political, technological and cultural factors, might this not start to build an archive of deeply understood artefacts we understand as architecture?
It is a matter of which direction we approach architecture from: from our own, often abstract, carefully crafted preoccupations, or from the materiality of a built work.
The material culture of our present day architecture has roots certainly, but is not necessarily the culmination of a long process of development, rather it is the product of these times, neither progressive nor recessive, simply these times. And what are these times? We seem singularly unable to read them: our world is in chaos as orders fall, hard-won civilities crumble, alliances fracture and reform and over it all, the climate hurls us toward extinction. What does architecture have to say about such things? Is it an eloquent practice? Not as currently discussed. This is why it might be helpful to consider the small, local, hard details of the material culture of architecture, for its strengths and its blindnesses.
amplifying links:
Think of each article as the tip of a lifetime of thought, education and practice. There is always much more to a contributor than just this one article — it is fair to share this.
Andrey Chernykh, ‘Forensics of Nuclear Landscape’ pp 28-33
Nicole Dextras, ‘The Culture of Materials: Chronos, Forest Warrior’ pp 14-17
Robin Wilson, ‘The Hard and the Brut: a journey through Parisian Brutalism’ pp 34-41
the original call for articles
Material culture: the things important to us that we can touch, things that mean something to us because they figure in our lives, things we see and know without having to explain why they are there.
There is a vast literature on material culture, we won't go over it here, but we might think about architecture as material culture in the way we consider Navajo pots, pit houses and tupperware collections as micro-monuments to particular ways of living. This isn't a conversation about the vernacular, although that is part of a larger discussion of material culture. It is a conversation about how and why we make things, choose things and how things embody our culture(s).
The question here is: what will be read from the material culture of our houses, our settlements and artefacts when all our words, our theories, our ambitions are gone? What does the materiality of our architecture tell us about who we are?
And, what is the materiality of our architecture?
keywords:
thick description resource extraction and use surface
microhistory extravagance and parsimony shape
identity materials and capital accumulation shelter
pattern identification materials and carbon accumulation settlement
building materials agency one short life
