Architects have a displaced or anticipatory relationship with materials. They address them, but is this only to inform the imaginary of their contemplation? They hold realization at a distance, preserving a visual-textual language that’s opaque even to builders. If interior designers are more closely involved with realization, their work can resemble fashion, Chanel or Zara. Both these professions often strive for a sense of place, but this attentiveness costs money, so that work is bespoke. Mass costs less, but its real costs can be externalized. 

Mass and bespoke have long been paired. Each has its virtues and its drawbacks. Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class skewered what the Arts & Crafts movement kept hidden, yet we treasure its legacy. Mass is the open question of bespoke: how to bring quality to the masses. Mostly, though, volume and price govern. Materials are caught up in these tensions and contradictions. Ethics are shoved aside at both ends. 

The Victorians’ Gesamtkünstwerk impulse reflected the exuberant iconography of its important buildings. The Arts & Crafts movement tried to dial this down, and the Bauhaus took this further, but the desire to control the whole persisted despite minimalism’s steady and reductive paring down of the material palette. Art crept in as the last bastion of variability, with artists like Richard Serra exploiting the textured, evolving patina of industrial materials, while others simply painted against the blank purity on offer. Postmodernism turned this inside-out in revulsion, but a shrinking palette left its architects without the needed craft. When it gave way to neo-classicism in some quarters, some of it revived. A few—Annabelle Selldorf is one—have made something new from this, giving the dialectic of modernism and postmodernism a different synthesis. 

Fred A. Bernstein has made adaptive reuse a cause because buildings are masses of embedded carbon. Tearing them down releases and squanders it. Andres Duany notes that the vernacular also benefits from a willingness to renew and transform. Carriers of a demotic spirit, buildings accumulate myriad small acts over time, most of them anonymous. The Victorian’s penchant for “restoring” older buildings to reflect their own aesthetics led William Morris to found his Anti-Scape Society to resist this. Bernstein similarly mocked a Harvard-sponsored renovation that overloaded an old house with tech gizmos meant to run at net-zero, with no thought for embedded carbon or return on investment. Part of his point, also applicable to passive-house fanatics, is that performance should always be seen in human terms and valued accordingly. 

We often make material choices from emotion, yet we need those quantitative factors to be visible and reliable. Trust is crucial, as what’s offered can be misrepresented. As James Butler wrote about the Grenfell fire tragedy, “Arconic, the cladding manufacturer, had been told before the fire that fitting a large tower block with polyethylene-core panels would be equivalent to attaching a 19,000-liter oil tanker to the outside of the building.” There’s an ethics to materials that we ignore at our peril, whether the risks are known but ignored or suppressed, immediate or impacting our descendants. 

Materiality can even manifest as scent—a natural one from cedar planks or a quasi-natural one made by perfume chemists, those “architects of the invisible,” whose work does its part in keeping humanity going. We trust our noses, which is why perfume chemistry has its own ethics: “Do no harm.” Architects’ failures haunt them doggedly. If you’re going to be the ghost at your building, it’s best not to have such baleful company. 

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References

Bernstein, F. (2024). “That ‘Net-Zero’ Home Is Probably Living a Lie,” Untapped, 5 February 2024. 

Bevis, M. (2024). “I prefer my mare,” London Review of Books, 10 October 2024. (Source of the Hardy quote.) Butler, J. (2024). “This much evidence, still no charges,” London Review of Books, 10 October 2024. 

Duany, A. (2022). “Be Gentle With Yourself: Recovering the Vernacular Mind, Common Edge, 3 January 2022.

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