Clicking through cascading menus of material color options for a project I’m working on, I begin to wonder: how does this particular metal trim perform in prolonged exposure to ultraviolet light? What’s its actual durability? If only there were a reliable way to learn more. Enter Acelab and Grace Farm’s collaboration titled “Materials Hub,” a new digital platform developed to assist designers in navigating the labyrinthine world of material selection, offering data-driven insight into the performance and availability of an ever-expanding catalog. At first glance, the promise is enticing—leverage computational power to streamline material decision-making. But can this be done well? What are the implications of centralizing information into an accessible database in this way? How accessible is it exactly?
Tools seem to advance slowly in our field, so it remains to be seen if architects will gravitate towards this systematized way of organizing material libraries. The interface appears to be similar to the logic Autodesk employs in its endless sets of menus, settings, and disconnected pages of project information. Some may appreciate all the metadata embedded in it, however.
In the vast constellation of design professions, materials are not neutral characters. Like the term “space,” they come with cultural, environmental, and political implications. The means we employ to achieve our end goals intrinsically carry meaning along the way.
Tools and materials alike matter profoundly, even poetically, to those who shape the built environment, and they are always in the process of reformulating themselves. To quote Doreen Massey (2005) in the opening chapter of “For Space”:
“…we recognize space as always under construction. Precisely because space on this reading is a product of relations-between, relations which are necessarily embedded material practices which have to be carried out, it is always in the process of being made. It is never finished; never closed. Perhaps we could imagine space as a simultaneity of stories-so-far” (pp. 9-10).
For generations, toolsets have been iteratively understood through embodied experience and tested application. That knowledge resides in people, practice, and place, not just in databases. A well-designed tool might help synthesize or surface those layers, but too often tools introduce unnecessary complexity under the guise of efficiency and innovation—in short: systems over people. Materials Hub’s interface is Exhibit A. Rather than simplifying access, it substitutes walled logic and hidden assumptions for open-source clarity. It’s not clear how to add or modify the database of materials. This lack of edit-ability (perhaps Wikipedia has spoiled us) fails to inspire trust the way a seasoned product representative or industry colleague who understands nuance, risk, context, and consequence might. That embedded knowledge could be all-too-easily lost in our rush to codify materials into a singular digital interface.
When we open a modeling or drafting program, we expect UI/UX consistency and a stability that supports creative flow. No such standard exists for material knowledge. It is still, largely, tacit and localized. And perhaps it should be. Interfaces shape the way we imagine possibility. Picking up a handful of soil tells us something a filtered database never could. The relationship between muscle memory, cultural continuity, and material experimentation is not trivial—it is foundational to design thinking. New tools should amplify this, not obscure it.
Moreover, material selection isn’t incidental to the design process, it is the compositional substrate of the future we are building. In an era of climate disruption, political volatility, and economic precarity, how we choose materials, and what choices we believe are available, are questions of ethical and ecological gravity. Materials Hub’s answers raise more questions. Does it help create a mental map of locality, elevating traditional practice’s feel for the vernacular, or does it erase this in favor of global averages and standardized products? Does it reflect the cultural and environmental constraints of place, or flatten them into abstract data points? Even before AI came into the scene, materiality was being divorced from its narrative potential—its backstory, speaking to where it came from and how (and by whom) it was made, rendered generic algorithms prioritizing optimization over meaning.
This challenge may yet be overcome. The problem is not cataloging per se, but the ethos behind it. Materials Hub risks becoming a tool of extractive logic. Designers are asked to input critical project parameters—budget, performance goals, and aesthetic criteria—with no clear sense of reciprocity. What do they get in return? A sortable table of materials’ stock keeping units? Worse, what’s to prevent this data from being used to model and commodify design intention itself? Adding surveillance to assistance is all too easy: extracting knowledge from the creative labor of designers in order to later replace them with AI.
As Paul Makovsky hyped it in Architect Magazine:
“The platform’s inception is rooted in a simple yet profound realization: the traditional ways of handling architectural materials were inefficient and often ineffective. By harnessing over 100,000 building materials, Materials Hub offers comprehensive analyses based on aesthetics, performance, and sustainability, moving beyond simple keyword searches to understand the intent behind each query” (2025).
While Materials Hub may indeed improve visibility across material options, we must ask—whose intent is being understood, and for whose benefit? If optimization is the metric, we risk prioritizing market logic over human-centered spaces designed for habitation, wellness, and other human imprints on space. When a single interface defines how we discover, evaluate, and select materials, what will happen to improvisation, place-based experimentation, and a designer’s constant push for difference?
The notion that over one hundred thousand licensed architects in the U.S. might align around a singular system for material selection is both intriguing and alarming. To be useful, such a system must be porous, adaptable, and deeply attuned to local practices not just in material availability, but in how we teach, share, and value materials themselves. If not, we risk turning creative practice into a closed system incapable of growth and change.
Materials are carriers of meaning, not just commodities. For the profession to move beyond the extractive or imposed narratives emergent in recent decades, it must resist the temptation to treat design as a problem of data alone. This means valuing the relationships behind material knowledge, between designers, builders, communities, and ecologies. Instead of building ever-expanding libraries in the cloud, let’s ask which stories our materials still have to tell, and how we can listen more effectively.
Massey, D. (2005). For Space. SAGE Publishing, (9–10).
Acelab. (2025, March 3). Acelab launches Materials Hub, an Al-powered platform revolutionizing architectural material selection. The Architect's Newspaper.
Makovsky, P. (2025, March 26). Transforming Material Selection: How Acelab's Materials Hub is Shaping the Future of Architecture. Architect Magazine.