Hyper-materialised immaterial
Re-considering the immateriality of
architecture in the digital era
Maria Voyatzaki
Maria Voyatzaki
Abstract
Architectural materiality is the
manifestation of the immaterial philosophical background of architecture.
Building materials and construction techniques contain architectural ideas,
which are embedded within them, controlling their proper choice and their
contribution to structuring a form. The origin of these ideas is based upon the
relation between the alive and the artefact, the natural and the fabricated,
the human-live being and the building, the material and the immaterial. In
contemporary architecture a new ethos emerges from the new content attributed
to this relation with a strong impact on the materiality of the building. The
paper examines the transformations of these relations in the architectural
experiences of the last century and approaches the contemporary overemphasized
materiality of architecture as a consequence of a new version of the conception
of the building as alive.
1.
The immaterial substance of material architecture
Even
though architecture is expected to be solid and stable, exposing its
materiality as its proper substance, there are always immaterial and ephemeral
forces, which drive its creation by the architect as well as its inhabitation
by the user. Ideas, values, concepts, references, and meanings constitute an
inseparable immaterial framework of architectural creation and/or inhabitation
enforcing the nature of architecture to be structured upon the complementarity
between the material and the immaterial. Can architecture escape from its
immaterial derivation? Can the act of designing develop without the instructive
and conductive presence of the immaterial? Is it possible to create, form,
organize, syntax, and generate architectural forms without the decisive
presence and imperative leadership of the immaterial? All the theoretical or,
even better, doctrinal discourses developed from Vitruvius to date, would give
a negative answer to the above questions. The immaterial is definitely a
primary material of any architectural creation. Architects do not only work on
the material aspect of architectural form but primarily on its ideas and
meaning[i].
Users do only inhabit the materiality of the space produced by architects but
also the meanings they associate with it[ii].
Even in cases where the immaterial is consciously denied as the driving force
of the act of designing, this very refusal encompasses the immaterial nature of
architecture. For architects to act as bees or spiders presupposes their
conscious, and for this reason immaterial in nature, decision to escape from
this immaterial which according to Marx distinguishes architects from insects.
But
how does this immaterial become the profound nature of architecture? Jonathan
Hill argues that there are many ways to understand the immateriality in
architecture: As an idea, as a formless phenomenon, as concepts or notions, as
moral weight and certitude or as a programmatic focus[iii]. He finally focuses on “the immaterial
(architecture) as the perceived absence of matter”, a perception which can
spring from the creativity of the architect and the user. This view implicitly
presupposes the existence of an architectural materiality on the basis of which
this perception occurs. This paper focuses on the immaterial as the conceived
absence of matter in a process of creating material (architectural) forms. The
immaterial is defined as the conception of the expected material architecture,
the not attained as yet, the desired new architecture to replace the rejected
existed, the better, the immaterial. This immaterial is the permanent reference
point of any intervention on urban and architectural space. It is the source of
inspiration for the architect, the energy of the project, its primary material,
its intellectual motivation, and its main objective. The immaterial is the
desire, the utopia or the heterotopia, the expectation, the wish, the hope but
at the same time the rule, the order, the law, the ‘arche’[iv], that is to
say the principle and sometimes the model, the standard, the ‘prototype’, the
image, the archetype.
Urbanity
and its materialised architecture is the ‘mother’ of the immaterial. Its
resistance to change, its conflicting nature, its internal contradictions, its
passive inflexibility, its uninspired inclination to power, its rigid
materiality, become the threads that weave a web of desirability around the
immaterial; fascinating but at the same frustrating; attractive but remote,
intriguing but unattainable. The history of the city and its architecture runs
parallel and interdependent to the history of the immaterial. Both are
constructed socially and culturally and create an inseparable complex of two
different substances rendering it impossible for us to understand the one
without the other.
What
is the immaterial made of? What is its substance? The immaterial consists of
values and their virtual formal aspects. It is structured by ‘arches’ and has
its own intellectual tectonic, its Archi-Tecture: These values always make
reference and represent a particular vision of the world and more importantly a
particular conception of the human being. Behind every line that an architect
draws, there is always an implicit or explicit human figure which directs its
design decisions and give sense to this line. City and architecture have always
had the human figure as a distant prototype, loved and admired for its beauty
(classic period), for its functional perfection (modern movement), for its
social differentiation (in the early seventies), for its cultural identity
(post modern), for its unique biological encoding (digital era). The history of
Architecture could be considered as the history of transformations of the
conceptions of the living being inspiring the designed architectural forms and
legitimising their materiality. This conception of the human being could be
considered as the deep meaningful structure of the immaterial, the connotation
of the act of creating architecture.
Our
premise is that materiality is the structural and aesthetic aspect of matter as
elaborated substance applied in the medium of building. Architecture as the art
of blending culture with feeling (senses) manifests itself through materials by
virtue of the values that are always strongly related to the way each era in
the history of humanity understands the living being, the alive. Building
materials and construction techniques act as the mediators for this blending.
Materials contain architectural ideas, which are embedded within them. They
constitute elaborated matter developed under a process of fabrication, which
gives them form, new substance and above all meanings that is to say values,
ideas. This immaterial is perceived as the ideas which lie within or behind the
materiality of architecture. It affects any decision related to the way the
‘artificial’ to-be-materialised is handled representing this way a particular
way of perceiving the immaterial and through it the living being.
Architects
use the body as a reference point and conceive their creations as a
materialised artefact that mimics the living being encapsulating a specific
relationship between the alive and the artefact, the natural and the
fabricated, the material and the immaterial. As with time this relationship is
transformed, the role of the material and the immaterial takes different
gravitas and meanings. The fact that we can nowadays observe an accentuated
attention to the material, and with this, a shift of focus from the intangible
immaterial into the quantitative and measurable, is the result of the new forms
and contents attributed to the immaterial as the contemporary expression of the
relationship between the material and the immaterial. There is a new ethos
emerging from the new content attributed by contemporary architects to the
relation between the alive and the artefact, the human-live being and the
building. Let us examine the impact this ethos has on the conception of
architectural materiality. We wish to inspect the contemporary aspects of
materiality as an expression of new conceptions of architecture, the human and
the artefact, as a new hyper-materialized immateriality.
2.
From the beautiful to the functional body
The
human-live being has always been regarded, and continues to be, as a kind of
model, an ideal, an exemplar, loved and admired at times for totally different
reasons. The Renaissance found the ultimate expression of the natural beauty in
the human body, a kind of objective definition of the elegance emerging from
the human as a divine image. The well-known Da Vincian figure appreciated
through the use of geometry, became the measurable, the rule, the order, the
immaterial reference point for the architects to proportion their buildings,
thus certifying their beauty. The
builders’ task, in turn, was to
employ the available materials and construction techniques in order to
materialize this conceived elegance.
Even
though building materials have always been inseparable from and integrated with
architecture, the classical period and to a great extent modernism, have always
seen them as the assistants of form and the allies of structure[v],
thus maintaining for them an inferior status compared to the one form
possessed. Since form has
always been the focal point of architecture, building materiality has stood on
the fence of the overall design process. Either due to the fact that the aesthetic codes were
relatively limited or defined by the dominant tendencies and, at times,
manifestos or due to the fact that the available palette of materials was not
significantly extended, the choice of materials engaged the architect to a
lesser extent, when designing the form of a building at those times. It was a
clear dominance of the immaterial upon the material in the conception of
architectural form.
Modernism
loved the human body as the optimum expression of functionality and of the
ideal machine and stripped off the ‘body’ of architecture the ornamental
garments of the past as signs of the self-referential beauty in order to
present it clear, honest and purified. For grasping and describing the
complexity of the living being, notions such as function, system, skeleton,
frame and brickwork were employed to express a particular way of understanding
the building through terms proportional to the living body. In the design
process, the form was conceived as a load-bearing ‘organism’ and brickwork,
where the architect com-posed[vi] building
materials offered by the building industry in order to fulfill the design
principles and to respond to the constraints of the building.
The
expressive demands of this concept of the immaterial directed the construction
in materials that could, through their properties, best respond to the
typological classification in bearing and non-bearing and formed a distinct
compositional/design ethos and style. The choice of a material in the
appropriate position was considered as the way to best portray and attribute
values such as clarity, honesty and sincerity, which constituted fundamental
design values. From Viollet-le-Duc to Louis Kahn[vii],
from Gotffried Semper to Le
Corbusier and Jørn Utzon, ‘honesty’ of the construction emerges as the constant
value of architecture[viii].
We
can observe a new role of the building materiality and a new relationship
between material and immaterial in which materiality absorbs part of the
immaterial. Kahn always felt the live nature of a brick when he declared that
it ‘wishes’ to form an arch, and perceived as undermining its nature in its use
as cladding or ornamentation. As Jonathan Hill remarks, “the material speaks
and the architect responds”[ix]. The same
way Giedion prompted the architects of his times to ‘listen to the material and
to reveal the hidden life of its amorphous nature’[x].
The
enhancement of the nature of a material as the revelation of the way the (immaterial)
concept of the alive blends into the artefact was a fundamental idea in the
manipulation of building materiality by modernism.
3.
From the expressive to the intelligent body
Post modernism admired the
human body for its capacity of recording and tracing meaningful contents and
references that define its social and cultural nature. The non-load bearing
elements introduced by Modernism, assert their independence in the end of the
60s and turn into building parts capable of alluding to meanings. The building
elevation is no longer the inseparable part of a whole but the expressive body
that opens up to the city and communicates, talks and informs about itself and
its cultural context.
The emergence of the concept
of the expressive body as a focal point of architecture attributed to materials
a new and central role, that of the agent of meaning and became the signifier
with which the architect ‘syntaxes’ the meaning of a building. This gave to
building materials a new role as a material basis of meaning and placed the
emphasis on the theoretical question on the way in which objects and the
material world function as signifiers. In this new relationship, material and
immaterial are conceived as the components of the semiotic sign, and as such
impossible to separate the one from the other. The material is considered
capable of encompassing a plethora of meanings, which refer to the origin of
the building, the cultural context that enhanced it, its functional value and
properties, its life cycle, the know-how of its process and the legends that
accompany it.
The materiality of the
signifier was no longer neglected, as was the case in the traditional
approaches. On the contrary, it celebrated attention afresh, becoming the
central preoccupation of the architect. In this perspective, the material
choice was the structural element of the design of form and, therefore, an
inseparable part of the design process. Architects could no longer think of
form as an independent question; on the contrary, they had to conceive it and
elaborate on it together with its materiality. This new relationship between
form and its materiality rendered the building material an expressive aspect of
form, and its selection a creative challenge for the designer. This perspective
opened up the production of building materials to a new spectrum of choices and
possibilities that would broaden the expressive vocabulary of architects,
contributing to the generation of increasingly genuine architectural forms.
The
deliberation of the building elevation from the functional indoor space results
from this new relation between material and immaterial and in the simultaneous
enhancement and recognition of the material as a focal point of the
architectural creation. It constitutes a special and very significant highpoint
in the history of contemporary architecture. By the end of the 80s a new substance and appreciation of
the deliberated elevation surfaces appeared. As building skin or as artefact-cladding,
the building elevation gradually overcame its exclusive expressive and
communicative aspect in order to acquire other roles such as the protection of
the body of the building from the environment, the climate, the noise and other
internal or external stimuli. The elevation progressively became intelligent,
an alive skin, which is able to react dynamically to its environment[xi].
The materiality of the building gets life.
4.
The blurred duality ‘immaterial versus material’- ‘natural versus artificial’
Nowadays,
more than ever before, the taxonomy of the material and the immaterial, the
living, the natural and the fabricated artefact, seem totally merged. Is
software a material product? Is the completed project of a building stored in a
memory stick a material product? Is there any materiality in the representation
of the rendered facade of a building? Is the immaterial departure of the
creation of architectural forms arrived at a materialised expression when it is
structured in digitally prepared architectural construction drawings? Is there
any materiality in a testing digital model simulating the properties of the
material with which it could be constructed and testing its resistance to
different charges? In the same way, is the genetic information of the DNA
really material? We witness the immaterial becoming the objective and the value
of the material production and the materiality of the form becoming the focal
point of the immaterial ideas and conceptions related to the creation of
architectural forms.
It
is interesting to remark that the same confusing merging can be observed in the
relation between the natural and the artificial. Is a piece of natural marble
less artificial than a glazed panel that, designed with interference in its
molecular structure, has acquired new properties that enable it to adjust as an
alive to the natural environment and climatic changes? Is an MDF panel less
artificial than a specially processed glazed panel that loses its transparency
when the structural positioning of its crystals changes due to the change of the
electric field that controls them? Is a shoe less artificial than a computer[xii]?
This way, Antoine Picon reminds us of the absence of the clear-cut distinction
between what is alive and what is artificial and as a consequence, points out
the practical difficulty for a transitional process from one to the other.
If
the traditional taxonomy of the alive and the artefact were to be recognized,
it could be easily argued that the former from the above mentioned materials
are undoubtedly less artificial than the latter as they can, in no time, return
to their initial, natural state. If, however, looked at in a different way, a
way that is becoming increasingly familiar in our days, through which nature
can be understood in terms of information flow, processes, relationships among
distinct areas, genetic codes and decoding, then the latter materials could be
considered as being more life-simulating, as a genetically modified living
organism could be similarly considered as more ‘artificial’. We are
experiencing a new condition characterized by a new version of the conception
of the relationship between the material and the immaterial. The boundaries
between the natural and the artificial become increasingly blur confusing all
traditional taxonomies and introducing a new ethos in our understanding of the
relation between architecture and the human-live being to which it is
addressed. Advanced contemporary technologies give opportunities to the
artefact to acquire properties of the alive and to the natural to be in a position
to acquire properties of the artefact. In other words, the material artificial
appears to be virtually alive and the alive to be virtually an artefact. We are
experiencing a new approach to the relationship between material and immaterial
where the immaterial seems to dissolve into the material and vice versa.
The
notion of the virtual is a key word to understand the immateriality of
architecture, the ethos underlining this new condition. According to the
Deleuzian philosophy which is very influential in contemporary architectural
discourses, virtual is what every object carries with it, which is neither its
reality, nor merely what it could have been, but rather what it is imagined to
be. The virtual is a potential state, which could become actual. It is the new
nature of the immaterial. Opposing the virtual to the actual, and not to the
material real, it appears as something, which is not real but which displays
the full qualities of the real and for this reason is a non-actual version or
extension of the material real. As a superimposed version of the material real,
the material virtual is embedded into it in a form of seamless boundaries.
As
the artefact is now conceived as virtually alive, (and not following the image
of the alive or according to its functionality or its expressive ability), in
this new condition of virtuality, the alive is no longer a reference but a body
embedded into the artificial, inseparable part of this new hybrid condition[xiii]
which is creating a new species resulting from the availability of the advanced
digital means and this new vision of reality. To design an architectural form
is now to generate its living materiality, a process, which obliges the
architect to measure, to quantify, to estimate the parameters assuring the
generation of the alive and to represent them in algorithmic terms as a virtual
DNA of the architectural form to be generated.
5. From Body to Hyper-Body: The materiality of the digital
This
new way to consider the alive and the artefact radically transforms the way we
understand architecture and its materiality. In this new paradigm, the alive as
the immaterial reference of architectural creation is conceived as a framework
for the management of genetic data and codes. Advanced contemporary technologies
offer possibilities to architectural materiality to acquire properties of the
alive, and to the natural to be in a position to acquire properties of the
artefact. The notion of the hybrid takes a central position in architects’
mental processes. The building is no longer perceived as a machine the
functional-mechanical parts of which mimic the organs of a living being nor as
an artificial extension of the human body, an artificial skin with natural
properties that, with interference in its genetic code, acquires the ability to
transform, mutate, adapt, change. On the contrary, it is itself a living being
that is created from the development of the genetic code –algorithm that is
responsible for the properties of the form as well as the properties of its
matter. It becomes a hyper-body[xiv]. This
designed building with the aid of computers transforms, mutates, adapts and
changes until the architect decides on its ‘frozen’, ‘final’ form[xv].
Every initiation of change presupposes the adaptation of each genetic
code-algorithm from which the desired improvements of the designed form will
emerge.
In
this new context the immateriality of architecture advocates an entirely new
ethos in the ways of handling the materiality of a building. We can distinguish
three main characteristics expressing the impact of the new ethos in the
materiality of architecture.
The
first concerns the diminution of the importance of the distinction between
load-bearing and non load-bearing building materials. With the exploitation of
digital technologies in design and construction, complex structures render the
traditional distinctions of the type increasingly impossible.
The
second characteristic concerns the integration of the creation of a material in
the design process. The experimentation in form generation is simultaneous and
identical with the experimentation in the material that not only will best
express the immaterial, but will be an inseparable and indistinguishable part
of it. As material is born[xvi] with the
form, its production as well as its manufacturing and place in the construction
constitute part of the same design process-question. In contemporary
architectural examples such as in the work of Peter Eisenman, Greg Lynn, UN
Studio it could be argued that there is a shift of emphasis from the design of
architectural forms to the design of architectural properties which are, in
turn, responsible for the genesis of forms and, as a consequence, the selection
of materials.
While
a few years back, the exclusive, one-off production of a building material or a
component was impossible due to the high cost entailed and only eminent
architects and clients with high budget could afford to think of it as a
possibility or an option, nowadays building industries are able to receive a file
of the design of a component, proceed to its manufacturing and deliver it to
the site within a few days[xvii],
[xviii].
The
third characteristic, which emerges from the second one, is the increasing use
of new materials which are produced through new digital production techniques
that enable the architect to employ a new range of materials, as well as to
imagine new and unknown properties[xix]. In
contrast to the current practice, where building materials are produced in the
building industry with specific dimensions and specifications shifting their
potential design interest into the way they are combined and assembled, the new
approach demands the pre-definition of the desired characteristics and
properties to be investigated during the design process in order for the material
to better ensure the occasional demands.
6.
The materiality of architecture as the super-nature of the artefact
New
materials with changeable properties, with different degrees of transparency,
translucent, blurred, bright[xx], folded,
compressed or moveable that often ‘melt’ through light and data systems
accompany contemporary architectural ideas. With interference in the molecular
structure and with the aid of nanotechnology foams or other composites, paints
and other coatings[xxi] change
their appearance, their proof capacity and even their structural strength[xxii].
Materials that manipulate in particular ways light, heat, dampness[xxiii],
sound are used in conjunction with immaterial materials such as light, sound,
vapor, odor, in order to create ‘forms’ and ‘spaces’ that stimulate the senses
attributing to the building the properties of an artificial cladding that
asserts for the intelligence of the natural and the living but also for the
aesthetics of high technology[xxiv].
The
broad spectrum of new building materials available to architecture nowadays
deliberates the research in new architectural forms and spaces with not long
ago unthinkable properties. The more the definition of properties of building
materials becomes a vital part of the design process, the more the demands for
further research in new technologies, applications, and products. New building
materials, with interference in their molecular structure gradually form a new aesthetic, new preferences but
also a new vocabulary from which the new ethos of contemporary architecture
emerges. An ethos expressed with terms like the layered, the hybrid, the
composite and the mutable that not only appear as properties that advertise
certain building materials. They are also registered as the principal values of
the architectural immateriality within the same theoretical discourse as
through these terms the building, as a materialized artefact, declares and
manifests its new relationship as well as its renewed admiration to the
natural, the living, the alive. The shift of a great deal of the focus of
architects’ interest from the design process to the design of the ‘genetic
material’ of the form and in turn of the design of the material that will
materialise it, portrays the contemporary version of the architectural artefact
as a living organism. It is interesting to note that this new approach to the
living appears deliberated from its reference to human existence. It has to do
with a hyper-human nature that undertakes to become the reference point of
architectural creation, as this is evident in Oosterhuis’s “hyper bodies”[xxv],
[xxvi]
and in Novak’s “allogenesis”[xxvii]. If this
reference to the living constitutes a metaphysic foundation of architectural
immateriality in the entire spectrum of history, the contemporary architectural
paradigm with its hyper-natural aspiration seems to hold new and extremely
interesting adventures for a hyper-materialised immateriality of architecture
and its intellect.
[i]
Marc Mimram
, “MatièreàPenser”, Rencontre, Poïesis, Architecture, Arts, Sciences et Philosophie, ‘La Part de la Technique’, ed. Stephane Gruet no 10 (1999):13-20.
[ii]
Jonathan Hill, Immaterial Architecture
(Great Britain: Routledge, 2006),
3 and 77.
«the
user decides whether architecture is immaterial, but the architect creates the
material conditions in which that decision can be made».
[iii]
Ibid. 3 and 77.
[iv]
The Greek word ‘Arche’ has at least three meanings: It means the principle, the
power in terms of authority and the beginning.
[vi]
The word compose with the meaning of putting together expressing the meaning of
the Greek word ‘synthesis’ coming from the verb ‘συνθέτω’ (συν + θέτω) which
means put together.
[vii]
Richard
Weston
, Materials, Form and Architecture(London:Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2003), 94
Richard
Weston
, Materials, Form and Architecture(London:Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2003), 94
Kahn
always felt the live nature of a brick when he declared that it ‘wishes’ to
form an arch, and perceived as undermining its nature, its use as cladding or
ornamentation.
[viii]
Richard
Weston
, Materials, Form and Architecture(London:Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2003), 79
Richard
Weston
, Materials, Form and Architecture(London:Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2003), 79
The same way Giedion prompted the architects of his times
to «listen to the material and to reveal the hidden life of its amorphous nature».
[ix]
Ibid. 76.
[x]
Richard
Weston, Materials, Form and Architecture(London:Laurence King Publishing Ltd, 2003), 79.
[xi]
Ed.
Christian Schittich
, Building Skins: Concepts Layers Materials(Munich: Birkhäuser, 2001), 86-7.
[xii]
Antoine
Picon, “Villes et Paysages de la Technologie Contemporaine”, Poïesis, Architecture, Arts, Sciences et Philosophie, ‘La Part de la Technique’, ed. Stephane Gruet no 10 (1999):61
This
is a question posed by Antoine Picon investigating the characteristics of the
contemporary technological context in which we live.
«
Do products of
human invention have genes? And if indeed so, are buildings organisms? And if buildings can be seeing as organisms, what then is our position as human beingsin that complex living matter?...we people surround ourselves with a very complex web of hardware: structures, materials, things, machines...and with an equallycomplex software world: laws, signs, language, meaning. ...are we surrounding our selves with dead things or must we accept that our self-invented environment is just as alive as we are?
According to Oosterhuis,
,
a «hyper-body is a programmable building body that changes its shape and content in real time».
[xvi]
Genesis and birth are the same word in Greek
[xix]
Naomi
Stungo (Ed.), “Dare to be Different: Why do Architects Strive to Use Unusual Materials”, RIBA Journal, (July 2003):24-6, 70.
[xx]
‘Mise en Œuvre: Matériaux Imprimés, Gravés, Sculptés, Sérigraphies en Façade’,
Techniques et Architecture, no 466, (juin-juillet 2003): 126-137.
[xxiv]
Ed.
Christian Schittich
, Building Skins: Concepts Layers Materials(Munich: Birkhäuser, 2001),86-7.
[xxv]
Kas
Oosterhuis, ONL Scenario Hyperbody Logic, From Experience to Transformation(Rotterdam: AADCU Publication, 2006).
[xxvii]
Marcos Novak, “Transvergence, Allogenesis: Notes on the Production of the Alien Speciation”, Architectural Design: Reflexive Final, 64-71
http://www.mat.ucsb.edu/~marcos/transvergence.pdf
(accessed May 12, 2008)
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