Material

Our thermal environment is as rich in cultural associations as our visual, acoustic, olfactory, and tactile environments. This book explores the potential for using thermal qualities as an expressive element in building design.

Until quite recently, building technology and design has favored high-energy-consuming mechanical methods of neutralizing the thermal environment. It has not responded to the various ways that people use, remember, and care about the thermal environment and how they associate their thermal sense with their other senses. Not only is thermal symbolism now obsolete but the modern emphasis on central heating systems and air conditioning and hermetically sealed buildings has actually damaged our thermal coping and sensing mechanisms.

I believe the way most organizations produce digital products is fundamentally broken. The elephant in the room is a dated understanding of the role of both design and engineering, which in turn shapes how organizations hire, manage, and produce digital things. These companies invest billions of dollars building teams, processes, and tools on top of an immature discipline and an outdated waterfall model that ends up being detrimental to productivity, team happiness, and ultimately, the resulting experiences we bring to life.

A Swedish innovation since 2006 by Olof Hansson, the white grid on gray paper ensures a professional look, allowing your notes to shine. Use the free Whitelines App to effortlessly annotate and manage your notes in the digital realm, a sleek way to boost productivity and elevate the importance of your ideas.

User interfaces (UIs) are the connections between us — soft, adaptable humans — and the hard, deterministic world of data and machines.

Historically, these interfaces have been rigid, representing the deterministic logic of the machine and relying on the user to translate the hard logic into a soft, meaningful form. With the rise of LLM capabilities, our technology is newly better at acting soft and squishy. Which brings the question: how should our interfaces handle the transition from the hard logic of machines into the soft logic of humans?

...Hopefully this framework of segmenting at different scales or gradually transitioning across different dimensions can help organize our thinking.

Raking sunlight is a fantastic way to get information about a facade. Any out-of-plane geometry is immediately visible as a shadow. You can see the natural irregularity of a brick wall...and a bulge that might indicate steel damage.

I have on occasion waited around longer than I care to admit for the sun to get to the position necessary to rake the facade.

I’m now more inclined to attribute Looseleaf’s power to its visual texture than to some cognitive media-style abstraction. And the visual texture owes more to the beauty (yes, beauty!) of the original pdfs from the Vasulka Archive. Perhaps the demo is best understood not as a prototype generic tool, but as a specific curated experience in its own right, with form and content claiming equal importance in its overall success.

Even so, I think there are some general lessons that can be drawn from this demo:

• Content is not inert
• Visual texture lets content breathe
• Visual texture lets the eye wander without losing itself

[3] Since the early days of computing there has been a shift from being “close to the metal”.

[22] I would like to posit that women, before the mouse and after, were always and already “close to the metal”.

[27] Being close to the metal is all at once a means and a value and a metaphor. It is a means of getting into the hardware, being able to get into the chip and understand its switches before layers of abstraction start to cover its mechanics.

[28] ...If you are close to the metal, then you are a programmer in the truest form.

A scientifically accurate version of The Core (or The Journey to the Center of the Earth, for that matter) wouldn’t have been very exciting to watch. The Kola Superdeep Borehole, the deepest hole ever drilled into the real Earth, only penetrated a third of the way through the continental crust somewhere just shy of the Finnish border. That’s a little under eight miles; the Earth’s core, for reference, is 4,000 miles deep. Although it surfaced plenty of surprises from deep below the permafrost—boiling hydrogen-rich mud, a shock of liquid water, and even microscopic Plankton fossils as far as three miles below the surface—it was hardly the stuff of adventure tales.

Even before the Russians welded it shut in the ‘90s, the Kola Superdeep Borehole was only 9 inches wide, and in photos, its opening peters immediately away into darkness, a blank slate that has been enthusiastically filled in by eldritch creepypasta authors, clickbait farms, and evangelical memelords suggesting that the Soviet Union opened the gates to hell. Images taken by urban explorers of the abandoned site could not look more like outtakes from Stalker, adding to its postlapsarian Soviet spook factor.

...Although both make us feel very small, the challenges of inner-space exploration are, in every way, inverse to those presented by outer-space travel: tremendous pressure and heat make it impossible to dig beyond a certain point. The mantle is yet to be breached; pending some miraculous advance in materials science, it’s unlikely that it ever will.

Unno is deeply concerned with providing simple methods of construction that people can use to build houses for themselves. These concerns originate in the events of the Kobe earthquake of January 17, 1995, and in his profound spirit of generosity. He has developed several different yet related URC methods of forming cast-in-place walls. All of these methods provide large reductions in the materials consumed in construction. Most noteworthy perhaps is his method of using sheets of rigid insulation in place of plywood on the flat side of a fabric-cast wall, while using a plastic netting as a formwork membrane on the ‘finished’ side. The insulation, which is captured by the concrete cast against it, provides an insulated structural wall with essentially zero construction waste as no plywood or other disposable rigid mold materials are required.

A complex structure is a result of, and to a large extent a record of, its past. Though a proton and an electron may, as a pair, be able to spring full-panoplied from the head of Jove, more complex things cannot, or at least do not.

Everything complicated must have had a history, and its internal structural features arise from its history and provide a specific record of it. One might call these structural details of memory “funeous,” after the unfortunate character in Borge’s story “Funes the Memorious” who remembered everything.

We may be doing our best to create a digital world as quickly as possible, but that won’t replace hundreds of thousands of years of evolution making us deeply physical beings. From the time we are infants in our crib we humans love to touch stuff. We love tactility, shape, texture, and color. As designers we don’t want to fight that, we want to work with it! We think the world can be better, or at the very least more friendly and enjoyable. So to our fellow hardware designers, developers, engineers, and product managers out there who might be reading this, we dare you to take the road less traveled and make something that people will truly love to use.

I recently made a physical object that defies all intuition. It's a square of acrylic, smooth on both sides, totally transparent. A tiny window.

But it has the magic property that if you shine a flashlight on it, it forms an image.

As they work, the experience of the material under the artist's fingers subtly interacts with the idea in their mind to give the finished work some quality that was rarely fully anticipated. A few artists seem to have such a feeling for their materials that the prevision needs little modification; most say that the idea grows as they work experimentally.

The "cheap" web is a solarpunk philosophy of web design.

• Cheap to maintain: Most webpages should work indefinitely without falling over.
• Cheap to leave: Opting-out of the web should be painless.
• Cheap to access: Most websites should be compatible with screenreaders, etc.
• Cheap to participate: Interacting with the web should be possible on a Wii.
• Cheap to explore: Exploring the web should be pleasant on 1W of power.
• Cheap to contribute: Making/hosting websites should be easier than scrapbooking.

I have explained, and supported with evidence, the concern for rationality in construction and economy understood in, I dared to say, a cosmic sense rather than a financial sense. However, this is not the whole thing that has guided me. I have also been guided by a sharp, almost painful, awareness of form.

Mr. Serra’s most celebrated works had some of the scale of ancient temples or sacred sites and the inscrutability of landmarks like Stonehenge. But if these massive forms had a mystical effect, it came not from religious belief but from the distortions of space created by their leaning, curving or circling walls and the frankness of their materials.

This was something new in sculpture; a flowing, circling geometry that had to be moved through and around to be fully experienced. Mr. Serra said his work required a lot of “walking and looking,” or “peripatetic perception.” It was, he said, “viewer centered”: Its meanings were to be arrived at by individual exploration and reflection.

Critical Minerals – Geography of Energy is a multi-chapter project that explores the profound transformation in the global energy landscape – the shift towards renewable energy sources. The story delves into the intricate geopolitical, social, and environmental implications of the exponential demand for minerals necessary to achieve renewable energy goals.

...The project currently has four chapters, each focusing on a different critical mineral. It consists of four, possibly five chapters, each dedicated to a specific critical mineral: copper, lithium, cobalt, nickel, and we are planning to include a fifth chapter on rare earth elements.

During [Mark Boulton's talk on typography at Web 2.0 Expo in Berlin, he] admonished the audience members who don’t allocate a writing budget to projects. Riffing on his thoughts on art direction he pointed to sites like A Brief Message where the design is driven by the content rather than the content simply filling up a pre-designed template. He makes a good point but, as I said to him later, he’s talking about a certain type of website.

There are some kick-ass designers, such as Mark, Jason and Khoi, who are fortunate to work on editorial sites. There are other equally kick-ass designers, such as Hannah and George, who work on social media sites where the content is written by the audience. In many ways, that second category is more challenging. The designer must somehow create a design that communicates without ever knowing the details of the message. That lack of control might seem like a hindrance but in many ways it simply reflects the inherent lack of control in this medium.

Of course writing is still very important, even on social media sites. Perhaps especially on social media sites. Writing—and by extension, typography—is part of the user interface. One of the reasons why Moo’s design works so well is because Denise writes kick-ass copy as well as crafting great visual designs. Design is about communication and creating the right tone of voice (through words and type) is critical to successful communication—just ask 37 Signals.

Going back to Mark’s example of content-driven design, A Brief Message has published a rather wonderful piece by Dan Saffer called Making Stuff vs. Making Stuff Up in which he argues that design needs to be a craft, not a cerebral exercise.

The evidence seems to back this up. Speaking personally, all of my favourite web designers have one thing in common: they know how to write HTML and CSS. Dan Cederholm, Doug Bowman and Jon Hicks aren’t just markup-literate; they are markup craftsmen. It’s this ability to work hands-on with the raw materials of the Web that allows them to put all the theory of typography, colour and layout into practice.

To sum up: there’s a few reasons to believe that stone construction could theoretically be cheaper than concrete or steel, based on the fact that stone could have simpler supply chains and construction process, and be less energy intensive to produce. And there's a small group of architects and engineers (most of whom are talking their own book) advocating for the material. But the theoretical lower cost of stone is partly based on intuitions that don't take into account economies of scale, which can make added process steps and long supply chains surprisingly inexpensive. Highly processed materials like OSB can be as cheap or cheaper than “raw” ones like dimensional lumber, and it's not clear if structural stone could be produced as cheaply as concrete or steel, even if automation greatly improved.

These window sills - and window frames - have not been re-varnished since they were put in, leaving the wood grain exposed to view.

Years of exposure to the southern sun has dried out the springwood, leaving the summerwood proud.  A low sun angle enhances the lines, texture, and waves of the wood grain.

Given all of the downsides of asphalt, you might ask "why is asphalt so pervasive if there are better options out there?" A lot of it comes down to cashflow. Cashflow is one of the biggest challenges in real estate development, since – it's a business where you invest a lot of money upfront and then earn it back over time afterwards.

Developers are often motivated by short-term incentives when choosing materials for construction projects. They need to manage immediate expenses and ensure the project is completed within budget.

...We need to stop planning project primarily by spreadsheets, where the dominating inputs are costs you can measure easily. There are factors that are not reflected in those calculations that not only affect the quality of the place you're creating, but also the financial burden that the community will have to bear for decades down the line.

Telling web designers they don't need to worry about code is like telling architects they don't need to worry about steel, wood or physics. [Twitter]

I still believe this. Does that mean designers need to know how to implement designs in code? Do architects need to be able to lay a block foundation or hang drywall? No.

Designers need to understand and work with the grain of the medium for which they’re designing. For the web, that means understanding important concepts related to how things play out in the browser.

...It’s also important to recognize that static design tools are not the browser and can’t articulate many dimensions of a user experience...The best thing any designer can do is to communicate and closely collaborate with the people who are building things in the actual medium. Designers who foster good relationships with developers will learn what they need to about code, and the final product will greatly benefit from that collaboration.

Watermark guidelines are subtle and unobtrusive, offering direction without overpowering the page. The high contrast between the discreet guidelines and the ink from your pen creates an optical illusion: the lines seem to vanish gradually as you write.

Once your thoughts have taken shape on the page, the lines fade into the background, allowing your text to take center stage. It’s an optical illusion, based on the way our eyes work. We focus on the highest contrast. Since the ink is stronger than the watermark lines, the watermarks appear to be invisible.

People who make works of art, whatever they might be, have gone to great trouble to make something unique which is embodied in the form that it is, and not in any other form, and that it transmits things that remain implicit

...Works of art are not just disembodied, entirely abstract, conceptual things. They are embodied in the words they’re in or in paint or in stone or in musical notes or whatever it might be.

As we draw closer, we see that the three-faceted planes of the museum are fabricated out of rectangular panels made of white bronze that was poured directly into dammed forms on the concrete floor of the foundry, producing a surface texture similar to both metal and stone.

For others, perhaps especially those artists who worked with light and transparency and were involved in the birth of the Light and Space Movement, an immaculate surface is a prerequisite. Helen Pashgian explained this very clearly:

“On any of these works, if there is a scratch... that’s all you see. The point of it is not the finish at all – the point is being able to interact with the piece, whether it is inside or outside, to see into it, to see through it, to relate to it in those ways. But that’s why we need to deal with the finish, so we can deal with the piece on a much deeper level”.

The importance of a pristine surface calls for a very low tolerance to damage by the artists. The feeling is shared by Larry Bell:

“I don’t want you to see stains on the glass. I don’t want you to see fingerprints on the glass... I don’t want you to see anything except the light that’s reflected, absorbed, or transmitted”

The currently popular Figma has a tendency to push development teams into the waterfall direction and for that reason I avoid Figma in web development projects. I prefer to work with the materials at hand, HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (TypeScript). It avoids design handoff and allows to adhere to what lays in the materials.

Buildings which most profoundly communicate subtle harmony are composed of a complex mixture of materials, with the overall amounts of different materials jumping in a calibrated cascade — typically according to a power law. The relative proportions — the statistical distribution of materials by quantity of total visible area — is critical. It is this specific distribution, not just the mixture, which creates depth of feeling.

Part of how Lou Kahn made things be good was to ask the material what it wanted to do and be. He asked brick what it liked, and would get a different answer depending on the context for the building. In Dacca, the capital of Bangladesh, brick said it liked an arch. For the Korman House in Philadelphia, brick said it liked two giant fireplaces with a lintel between them for a doorway beneath and a balcony above.

A woodworker works along the grain of the wood to prevent splinter. A butcher slices across to the muscle fiber to improve tenderness. A sailor trims the sail to balance the lift and drag from the wind. When we respect the material, the material pays us back in convenience, safety, and efficiency.

Good web design requires the same understanding of and respect for the materials. And that material is the browser, along with its semantic HTML, default styles, and standard behaviors. But the wide use of design software such as Figma, Sketch, and AdobeXD has trivialized the nuances of such material into “canvases” or “artboards” of pre-defined sizes. The convenient styling and manipulation of pixels and objects have disguised the hierarchy of the DOM, the constraints of the device, and the personal preferences and browser setting from real users. Dishonest tools encourage dishonest design.

We are working against the grain of the wood.

There is something very appealing about a form constructed in a single material.

• Notion, Roam, Muse, file systems feel "fractal":
  • blocks within blocks in Notion
  • boards within boards in Muse
  • bullet points within bullet points Roam
  • folders within folders in file system
• hash-maps are also fractal
• Figma is not fractal - tabs, canvases and layers are all different things, and can't be nested ad infinitum
• fractal tools seem to give more freedom, but at a cost - how to Orient Myself in these possibly infinite structures

The constant pursuit of human centric qualia further distances us from the innate elemental properties on which computation relies — computation is not an extension of nature but rather part of nature itself. We can deliberately engage with the strategic metaphors that serve to legitimize abstract techno landscapes and their inhabitants: The cloud, internet of things, and the desktop utilize our understanding of the physical world to ground us in familiarity, but without consequence. Might we instead choose to reshape, tend to, and explore the shared grounds between nature and technology as an ongoing process, allowing metaphors to sit in a state of perplexity to allow collaborative authorship by human, non-human, and environment, rather than consolidated authorship of a few? 

By tracing the personal and earthly genealogy of computers and their predecessors, we can redefine and reconstitute their fundamental material properties based on discoveries made in the world around us — building hardware like earthenware

File over app is a philosophy: if you want to create digital artifacts that last, they must be files you can control, in formats that are easy to retrieve and read. Use tools that give you this freedom.

File over app is an appeal to tool makers: accept that all software is ephemeral, and give people ownership over their data.

The brick is one of those old technologies, like the wheel or paper, that seem to be basically unimprovable. ‘The shapes and sizes of bricks do not differ greatly wherever they are made,’ writes Edward Dobson in the fourteenth edition of his Rudimentary Treatise on the Manufacture of Bricks and Tiles. There’s a simple reason for the size: it has to fit in a human hand. As for the shape, building is much more straightforward if the width is half the length.

Rather than the craft object finding the most suitable material, it can be said that the material finds the right object. Folk crafts are invariably the product of a local environment. When a certain locality is rich in a certain raw material, that material gives rise to a certain craftware.

Space is substance. Cézanne painted and modelled space. Giacometti sculpted by "taking the fat off space". Mallarmé conceived poems with absences as well as words. Ralph Richardson asserted that acting lay in pauses... Isaac Stern described music as "that little bit between each note - silences which give the form"... The Japanese have a word (ma) for this interval which gives shape to the whole. In the West we have neither word nor term. A serious omission.

Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them. Note to the artist: when the medium fails conspicuously, and especially if it fails in new ways, the listener believes something is happening beyond its limits.

We tend to throw the term “craftsmanship” around on the web, but it’s nice to see “craftsmanship” in the context of intricate Japanese carpentry where skills take a lifetime to develop and are generations of apprenticeships in the making. Traditions evolving over centuries, not sprint cycles. This is the perspective I need. And for decades Japan has embodied a culture stuck between a rich heritage, but constantly learning to adapt to innovation and the new modern.

In that evolving world, what is the meaning of craftsmanship? I don’t know if I got the answer, but one thing I took away from these videos are that true craftsmen are cognizant of both materials and tools. They know their materials, in this case wood, their relative strengths and which variety is best suited for which situation. They know how much material is waste (cost and bloat) and which cut or join (process) will produce the best outcome. And they know about their tools; to the extent they build their own specialty tools and spend years learning how to expertly wield them. They are proud of their tools and lay them out on the table in an unintentional knolling worthy of a million likes on Instagram. There’s a relationship there between the person and the tools.

We wanted wood, not only in many visible places, but also in the roof trusses of the homeroom buildings, where they are invisible. Fujita wanted to replace the invisible trusses with steel trusses. They could not understand the idea that it was the actual substance — even though not visible — which would control the feeling of the thing.

Sparklines work at intense resolutions, at the level of good typography and cartography. Currently such intensities can be found only on paper, film, and metal - where resolutions > 1,200 dpi are easily and inexpensively achieved. Today's computer monitors operate at about 10% of paper's resolution, producing coarse typography in the smaller point sizes as well as sparklines lacking in fine detail.

The work of an artist in getting the details that he wants is greatly facilitated if he selects a material whose inner nature makes it want to take the desired shape.

My media isn’t glass, it’s the light that hits that glass.

Forming a paper clip presents a common dilemma encountered by engineers and inventors: the very properties of the material that make it possible to be shaped into a useful object also limit its use. If one were to try and make a paper clip out of wire that stayed bent too easily, it would have little spring and not hold papers very tightly. On the other hand, if one were to use wire that did not stay bent, then the clip could not even be formed. Thus, understanding the fundamental behavior of materials and how to employ them to advantage is often a principle reason that something as seemingly simple as a paper clip cannot be developed sooner than it is.

One of the reasons that Japanese katanas are such strong blades is the technique used to make them called folding. A swordsmith will forge and hammer out a long blade, and then fold the steel onto itself, repeating the process dozens of times, if not more. This technique has an advantage. Each time the blade is folded some of the oxygen and impurities are removed, making it harder and stronger. It produces a sword that is durable and resistant to wear, and the folded blade has become the stuff of legends.

Sometimes, working on a website can feel like that. ...You give it a broad, rough pass that takes into account as many of the requirements you have, and the corners you’re able to see around.

And then, you fold it. Once you have the site all laid out, you can see where some of the impurities are. Where there are rough edges to the experience, and places where information is not immediately apparent, or the design starts to fall apart.

And so you can go over it again, from the start, with new assumptions and fresh ideas. You’ll find the holes you missed the first time, and fill them. You’ll add details to pages you hadn’t even anticipated.

The nineteenth century saw an increasing separation between the treatment of the surface and the structure of designed objects. Mass production and a mobile market economy encouraged the production of heavily ornamented yet cheaply fabricated products. Affordable manufacture allowed the burgeoning middle class to acquire “luxury” goods fashioned after objects formerly reserved for an elite.

In other cases, the limitations on material reduction have more to do with building form. Most buildings, for instance, are rectangles that contain a series of rectangular rooms, because of the many benefits of this sort of arrangement. A rectangular room is easy to use (since you can push furniture flush against the walls), easy to build, packs tightly together against other rectangular rooms, and so on. Technically circle or sphere-shaped buildings would be more materially efficient (requiring less material to enclose a given amount of space), but while in some cases you see this (such as with pressurized storage tanks or the brief fad of octagonal houses in the 19th century), in general the material savings is not worth the added construction complexity, cost, and loss of convenience.

With architectural elements, we see the same general phenomenon, where further material reductions come with performance tradeoffs. In general, thick, heavy materials feel better than lighter, flimsy materials, and all else being equal people prefer the former to the latter. This is one of the reasons that drywall substitutes like vinyl on gypsum have had limited appeal, and why people still want tiled bathrooms even though fiberglass or acrylic are probably superior from a pure performance perspective.

Why is programming fun? What delights may its practitioner expect as his reward?

First is the sheer joy of making things. As the child delights in his mud pie, so the adult enjoys building things, especially things of his own design. I think this delight must be an image of God’s delight in making things, a delight shown in the distinctness and newness of each leaf and each snowflake.

Second is the pleasure of making things that are useful to other people. Deep within, we want others to use our work and to find it helpful. In this respect the programming system is not essentially different from the child’s first clay pencil holder “for Daddy’s office.”

Third is the fascination of fashioning complex puzzle-like objects of interlocking moving parts and watching them work in subtle cycles, playing out the consequences of principles built in from the beginning. The programmed computer has all the fascination of the pinball machine or the jukebox mechanism, carried to the ultimate.

Fourth is the joy of always learning, which springs from the nonrepeating nature of the task. In one way or another the problem is ever new, and its solver learns something: sometimes practical, sometimes theoretical, and sometimes both.

Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by the exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures….

Yet the program construct, unlike the poet’s words, is real in the sense that it moves and works, producing visible outputs separate from the construct itself. It prints results, draws pictures, produces sounds, moves arms. The magic of myth and legend has come true in our time. One types the correct incantation on a keyboard, and a display screen comes to life, showing things that never were nor could be.

Programming then is fun because it gratifies creative longings built deep within us and delights sensibilities we have in common with all men.

Websites are the most expressive medium I know, but they’re used today in such a tiny narrow way.

The thing is, they could be like digital paper: back-of-napkin notes, moodboards, journaling, letters, toy apps, lists, sprawling canvases.

Something with the ease of paper, but the expressiveness and capabilities of software.

The human maker, working in unself-conscious matter, receives no worship from his creatures, since their will is no part of his material; he can only receive the response of their nature, and he is alone in fault if that response is not forthcoming. If he tortures his material, if the stone looks unhappy when he has wrought it into a pattern alien to its own nature, if his writing is an abuse of language, his music a succession of unmeaning intervals, the helpless discomfort of his material universe is a reproach to him alone; similarly, if he respects and interprets the integrity of his material, the seemliness of the ordered work proclaims his praise, and his only, without will, but in a passive beauty of right structure.

Very few people are looking closely at the illegal sand system or calling for changes, however, because sand is a mundane resource. Yet sand mining is the world's largest extraction industry because sand is a main ingredient in concrete, and the global construction industry has been soaring for decades. Every year the world uses up to 50 billion metric tons of sand, according to a United Nations Environment Program report. The only natural resource more widely consumed is water. A 2022 study by researchers at the University of Amsterdam concluded that we are dredging river sand at rates that far outstrip nature's ability to replace it, so much so that the world could run out of construction-grade sand by 2050. The U.N. report confirms that sand mining at current rates is unsustainable.

Problem

There is a fundamental conflict in the nature of materials for building in industrial society.

Solution

Use only biodegradable, low-energy-consuming materials, which are easy to cut and modify on site. For bulk materials we suggest ultra-lightweight 40–60 lbs. concrete and earth-based materials like tamped earth, brick, and tile. For secondary materials, use wood planks, gypsum, plywood, cloth, chickenwire, paper, cardboard, particle board, corrugated iron, lime plasters, bamboo, rope, and tile.

Despite our lofty expectations, the defining material of the 21st century so far has probably been cardboard: the consumer-facing surface of a logistically administered world; the last mile made visible and tangible; what we scan for, in box form, on our porches and in our mailrooms and lobbies, hastily gathering it all into our homes as we find it and then ripping each package open in a postmodern daily harvest ritual. Cardboard—unboxed, flattened, bundled, discarded, recirculated—is the disposable but essential outer sheath of the global economy in its physical state.

Cardboard embodies the actual values of our era—not the harmonious perfection of a high modernist sci-fi monolith like the Starship Enterprise or even a humanoid robot (the iPhone may be the maximum scale at which the “future” has delivered this quality to consumers), but instead flexibility, ephemerality, lightness, and modularity, all qualities that enable tiny parts to circulate within sprawling invisible systems.

Handmade washi (traditional Japanese paper) is replete with appeal. Looking at it, touching it, fills me with an indescribable sense of satisfaction. The more beautiful it is, however, the more difficult it is to put to use. Only a master of calligraphy could possibly add to its beauty; it is exquisite just as it is. This is wonderfully strange, for it is merely a simple material. Yet plain and undecorated as it is, it is alive with nuanced beauty. Good washi makes possible our most ambitious creative dreams.

If someone is investigating texts, they can concentrate on the subject / content / style / linguistic nature of the writing.  Increasingly, however, scholars have begun to concentrate on the objects and materials on which the writing takes place.  From this, they tease out all sorts of interesting information about the social, political, and economic aspects of the texts.  A new book on this topic is Thomas Kelly's The Inscription of Things:  Writing and Materiality in Early Modern China.

Why would an inkstone have a poem inscribed on it? Early modern Chinese writers did not limit themselves to working with brushes and ink, and their texts were not confined to woodblock-printed books or the boundaries of the paper page. Poets carved lines of verse onto cups, ladles, animal horns, seashells, walking sticks, boxes, fans, daggers, teapots, and musical instruments. Calligraphers left messages on the implements ordinarily used for writing on paper. These inscriptions—terse compositions in verse or epigrammatic prose—relate in complex ways to the objects on which they are written.

Spolia, the Latin word for ‘spoils’, are defined as architectural fragments taken out of their original context and reused in a different context; essentially, pieces of structures transplanted into different structures. An example of unintentional usage of spolia is the Mausoleum at Halikarnassos (modern-day Bodrum in Turkey). Following its burial due to an earthquake, both the Knights of St John and the Turks, who later settled in the region, viewed the former monument as a convenient source of construction materials, using spolia to build a castle and houses, respectively.

Aristotle’s 18 qualities of homoeomerous bodies that he chose to explain in detail in his Meteorologica, are just those fine points of behavior that would be noticed in a workshop. They are:

solidifiable
meltable
softenable by heat
softenable by water
flexible
breakable
fragmentable
capable of taking an impression
plastic
squeezable
ductile
malleable
fissile
curable
viscous
compressible
combustible
capable of giving off fumes

This redundant list of properties is not the neat classification of a philosopher. It reads more as if it were based on a conversation with a workman whose eyes had seen and whose fingers had felt the intricacies of the behavior of materials.

So: it is perfectly true that contemporary traditional architecture tends to be structurally dishonest. But traditional architecture has always tended to be structurally dishonest. So if this is what makes contemporary traditional architecture pastiche, then most traditional architecture has been pastiche since the faux timbering of the Parthenon. Contemporary traditional architects have most of the great builders of our history as their companions in guilt.

"You cannot make what you want to make, but what the material permits you to make. You cannot make out of marble what you would make out of wood, or out of wood what you would make out of stone. Each material has its own life, and one cannot without punishment destroy a living material to make a dumb senseless thing. That is, we must not try to make our materials speak our language, we must go with them to the point where others will understand their language."

— Constantin Brancusi

If we conclude that creative mind is in fact the very grain of the spiritual universe, we cannot arbitrarily stop our investigations with the man who happens to work in stone, or paint, or music, or letters. We shall have to ask ourselves whether the same pattern is not also exhibited in the spiritual structure of every man and woman. And, if it is, whether, by confining the average man and woman to uncreative activities and an uncreative outlook, we are not doing violence to the very structure of our being. If so, it is a serious matter, since we have seen already the unhappy results of handling any material in a way that runs counter to the natural law of its structure.

In between these two extremes is a room with three constructions by Robert Irwin. These can be read as individual works of art but their function here is primarily that of creating a climate of fastidious ambiguity. Light turns into a new kind of material; new kinds of material are fused into light; a vaporous middle-world stands midway between total black (Bell) and total white (Wheeler)

The Sukiya consists of the tea room proper, designed to accommodate not more than five persons, a number suggestive of the saying "more than the Graces and less than the Muses..."

The tea room is unimpressive in appearance. It is smaller than the smallest of Japanese houses, while the materials used in its construction are intended to give the suggestion of refined poverty. Yet we must remember that all this is the result of profound artistic forethought, and that the details have been worked out with care perhaps even greater than that expended on the building of the richest palaces and temples. A good tea room is more costly than an ordinary mansion, for the selection of its materials, as well as its workmanship, requires immense care and precision. Indeed, the carpenters employed by the tea masters form a distinct and highly honored class among artisans, their work being no less delicate than that of the makers of lacquer cabinets.

The analog-digital debate in audio is a longstanding one, and while it is unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, I thought I might be able to offer some background as a longtime audio professional and musician. Recordings are a beautiful mix of technical and aesthetic concerns, and this post will attempt to tease out how to navigate these two framings of music recording, especially with regard to the often-oversimplified distinction between analog and digital recordings.

There are deep moral/practical reasons for our search which give form to our work: with the form we create we can adjust to the laws of matter with all reverence, forming a dialogue with reality and its mysteries in essential communion... For architecture to be truly constructed, the materials must be used with profound respect for their essence and possibilities; only thus can 'cosmic economy' be achieved... in agreement with the profound order of the world; only then can have that authority that so astounds us in the great works of the past.

We talk as though good material were found instead of being made. It is good only because workmanship has made it so. Good workmanship will produce something better our of pinchbeck than bad will out of gold. Corruptio optimi pessima! Some materials promise far more than others but only the workman can bring out what they promise.

It seems that the first and most imaginative use of practically every material was, before quite modern times, in making something decorative. People are experimentally minded when looking for decorative effects, but they can’t experiment with the established techniques on which their livelihood depends.

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It is of basic significance for human history that, from the cave paintings on, almost all inorganic materials and treatments of them to modify their structure appear first in decorative objects rather than in tools or weapons necessary for survival. Aesthetically motivated curiosity, or perhaps just play, seems to have been the most important stimulus to discovery.

During the 1960s and 1970s, light became the primary medium for a loosely affiliated group of artists working in Greater Los Angeles who were more intrigued by questions of perception than by the notion of crafting discrete objects.

...Often with modest means (a bolt of scrim, a sheet of glass, a bucket of resin, an open window) these artists engaged in a kind of aesthetic palate cleansing, shaking off the art-historical weight and heavy impasto of midcentury painting as it had been influentially practiced in New York and San Francisco.

There are good reasons why lacquer soup bowls are still used, qualities which ceramic bowls simply do not possess. Remove the lid from a ceramic bowl, and there lies the soup, every nuance of its substance and color revealed. With lacquerware there is a beauty in that moment between removing the lid and lifting the bowl to the mouth when one gazes at the still, silent liquid in the dark depths of the bowl, its color hardly different from that of the bowl itself.

"Lightness is born of heaviness and heaviness of lightness, instantaneously and reciprocally, returning creation for creation, gaining strength proportionally as they gain in life, and as much more in life as they gain in motion. They destroy one another also at the same time, fulfilling a mutual vendetta, proof that lightness is created only in conjunction with heaviness, and heaviness only where lightness follows."

— Leonardo da Vinci

If in the following I overemphasize the Orient, this is simply because in the Far East the properties of materials are a little nearer to the surface, a little more consciously a part of what the artist is trying to show. The naturalistic aspects of Oriental philosophy encourage a sensitivity to the quality of materials — or is it the inverse, that an early enjoyment of stone, wood, clay, and fiber gave rise to the philosopher’s perception of the soul in all natural things comparable to man himself? Westerners tend to override materials, usually in ignorance, but sometimes proudly as a tour de force.

If the characters and the situation are rightly conceived together, as integral parts of the same unity, then there will be no need to force them to the right solution of that situation. If each is allowed to develop in conformity with its proper nature, they will arrive of their own accord at a point of unity, which will be the same unity that pre-existed in the original idea.

Wood speaks of its two existences and timescales: its first life as a growing tree and the second as a human artefact made by the caring hand of a carpenter or cabinet maker.