Matter Material Processes In Architectural Production

Beginning with material, this book revolves around physical material making and design decisions that emerge from material interaction. Combining essays from both practice and academia, this book presents some of the most significant projects and thoughts on materiality from the last decade. Beautifully illustrated with a great deal of technical information throughout, it shows work, technical technique and process, and positions it within a broader theoretical intention. By assembling a range of voices, here is a multifaceted portrait of material design today. Students and design professionals alike should find in this book an essential resource for understanding this increasingly important aspect of design.

This comprehensive catalogue of contemporary work examines the renewed investment in the relationship between representation, materiality, and architecture. It assembles a range of diverse voices across various institutions, practices, generations, and geographies, through specific case studies that collectively present a broader theoretical intention.

It assembles a range of diverse voices across different institutions, practices, generations and locations to reveal the design influence of geometry and the processes of fabrication and construction on architecture.

This book examines the interrelationship of representational methods and material systems as fundamental drivers of the design process. Identifying four primary categories of representational logics - point, line, surface, mass - each category is illustrated through four precedent projects that deploy iterative material sensibilities. As a collection, this text provides a comprehensive categorization of the architectural design process. Through the comprehensive definition of categorical typologies, it illustrates the collective capability of this conceptual methodology. By unpacking projects through their specific design devices, the collective analysis reveals the impact of material techniques and methods of representation as a generative tool. Broad in scope, it identifies and uniformly analyses some of the most significant projects from the last century, including: UK Pavilion Shanghai - Heatherwick Studio, Shanghai,China Gatehouse - Office dA, Beijing, China Maison Colonial - Jean Prouve, France/Africa de Young Museum - Herzog and de Meuron, California USA Montreal Expo 67 - Buckminster Fuller, Montreal, Canada Jean Marie Tjibou Cultural Center – RPBW, Noumea, Indonesia House III - Peter Eisenman, New York, USA Barcelona Pavilion - Mies van der Rohe, Barcelona, Spain Tel Aviv - Scott Cohen, Tel Aviv, Israel Los Manantiales - Felix Candella, Mexico City, Mexico Yokahama Terminal – FOA, Yokahama, Japan Pantheon, Rome, Italy Tres Grand Bibliotheque - Rem Koolhaas, OMA, Paris, France Brother Claus Field Chapel - Peter Zumthor, Switzerland Embryonic House- Greg Lynn Richly illustrated with consistent, clear and precise line drawings, the book presents a series of iconic precedents through a unique analytical and graphic sensibility.

The aim of this book is to expand the subject and matter of architecture, and to explore their interdependence. There are now many architectures. This book acknowledges architecture far beyond the familiar boundaries of the discipline and reassesses the object at its centre: the building. Architectural matter is not always physical or building fabric. It is whatever architecture is made of, whether words, bricks, blood cells, sounds or pixels. The fifteen chapters are divided into three sections - on buildings, spaces and bodies - which each deal with a particular understanding of architecture and architectural matter. The richness and diversity of subjects and materials discussed in this book locates architecture firmly in the world as a whole, not just the domain of architects. In stating that architecture is far more than the work of architects, this book aims not to deny the importance of architects in the production of architecture but to see their role in more balanced terms and to acknowledge other architectural producers. Architecture can, for example, be found in the incisions of a surgeon, the instructions of a choreographer or the movements of a user. Architecture can be made of anything and by anyone.

This book marks a turning point in architectural theory by using philosophy to examine the field anew.Breaking from the traditional dualism within architecture - which presents the body as subject and space as object - it examines how such rigid boundaries can be softened. Zuzana Kovar thus engages with complementary and complex ideas from architecture, philosophy, feminist theory and other subjects, demonstrating how both bodies and bodily functions relate deeply to architecture. Extending philosopher Julia Kristeva's notion of abjection - the confrontation of one's own corporeality as something is excreted - Kovar finds parallels in the concept of the 'scaffold.' Much like living bodies and their products can impact on the buildings that house them - old skin cells create dust, menstrual blood stains, our breath heats and cools surfaces - scaffolding is similarly ephemeral and yet not entirely separable from the architecture it supports. Kovar shifts the conversation about abjection towards a more nuanced idea of architecture - where living organisms, building matter, space, decay and waste are all considered as part of a continual process - drawing on the key informing works of thinkers like Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari to do this. Including a number of experimental projects conducted in the spaces inhabited by the author herself to illuminate the theory at its core, the book forms a distinguished and pioneering study designed for practitioners and scholars of architecture, philosophy and visual culture alike.

We are now on the brink of a new era in construction – that of autonomous assembly. For some time, the widespread adoption of robotic and digital fabrication technologies has made it possible for architects and academic researchers to design non-standard, highly customised structures. These technologies have largely been limited by scalability, focusing mainly on top-down, bespoke fabrication projects, such as experimental pavilions and structures. Autonomous assembly and bottom-up construction techniques hold the promise of greater scalability, adaptability and potentially evolved design possibilities. By capitalising on the advances made in swarm robotics, the collective construction of the animal/insect kingdom, and advances in physical computational, programmable materials or self-assembly, architects and designers are now able to build from the bottom up. This issue presents future scenarios of autonomous assembly by highlighting the viability of decentralised, collective assembly systems, demonstrating the potential to deliver reconfigurable and adaptive solutions. Contributors include: Marcelo Coelho, Andong Liu, Robin Meier, Kieran Murphy and Heinrich Jaeger, Radhika Nagpal and Kirstin Petersen, and Zorana Zeravcic. Featured architects: Aranda\Lasch, Arup, Philippe Block, Gramazio Kohler Architects, Ibañez Kim, Achim Menges, Caitlin Mueller, Jose Sanchez, Athina Papadopoulou and Jared Laucks, and Skylar Tibbits.

This anthology of selected works outlines three critical instigators of architecture, all tied directly to the tectonic makeup of our built environment – place, material, and assembly. These catalysts provide the organizational framework for a collection of essays discussing their significant influence on the processes of architectural design and construction. With content from a diverse collection of notable architects, historians, and scholars, this book serves as a theoretical structure for understanding the tectonic potential of architecture. Each chapter is thematically driven, consisting of a pair of essays preceded by an introduction highlighting the fundamental issues at hand and comparing and contrasting the points of view presented. Situate, Manipulate, Fabricate offers an opportunity to explore the essential topics that affect the design and construction, as well as the experiential qualities, of our built environment.