Materiality is a polarising aspect of the architectural
practice, viewed either as superficiality or reverential. Antone Picon analyses
how the industrial era had fractured the importance of materiality as the use
of steel became widespread, resolving that only now are we “returning to a
conception closer to the pre-industrial one, with all the researchers on composite
and smart materials and the tendency to solve more and more problems at the
level of material design rather than structural design.” This statement is
mildly contradictory as it states that smart materials are not in the same
realm as structure, I would argue that materiality is the same architectural
theology as structure, however on a micro or nano scale. This new manipulation
of material is advanced through computation as there no finite scale within the
digital realm; this gives the ability to view molecular material structures at
the scale of the macro.
In conjunction with Picon, Michael Weinstock
begins to analyse the importance of simple and complex polymers and the
advances of materiality in the near future. He believes that the use of
composite or ‘smart’ materials enhance the treatment of structure as an
informing principal of design. Soap bubbles become his crutch to logically
demonstrate circle packing or voranoi techniques, taking mathematical principals
to derive tangents of best fit for non-tessellating or radial differing shapes.
Weinstock states “Form, structure and material act upon each other and this
behaviour of all three cannot be predicted by analysis of any one of them separately.”
He speaks of a hybrid unknown composite that is the result of form, structure
and material, like outlined in an earlier theoretical discussion about Picon,
he believes in a more socialist process of design where each small micron of
matter plays its small part in an overall product. This is an embodiment of
materiality as extension of structure and how a new materiality must be smart
in its discourse to ‘play its part’ what will be the overall design, not as a
trivial facade.
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