The Material Imagination Reveries on Architecture and Matter

In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as 'material honesty,' 'form finding,' or 'digital materiality.' Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form. Yet, as the ethos of material pragmatism gains more popularity, theorizations about the poetic imagination of architecture continue to recede. Compared to an emphasis on the design of visual form in architectural practice, the material imagination is employed when the architect 'thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary.' As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, this book challenges readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architecture through an examination of historical precedent, architectural practice, literary sources, philosophical analyses and everyday experience. Focusing on matter as the premise of an architect?s imagination, each chapter identifies and graphically illustrates how material imagination defines the conceptual premises for making architecture.

An Introduction, Matthew Mindrup; Part One The Material of Architectural Conceptions; Chapter 1 Material Intuitions: Tracing Carlo Scarpa’s Nose, Carolina Dayer; Chapter 2 Extracting Desire: Michelangelo and the forza di levare as an Architectural Premise, Jonathan Foote; Chapter 3 Phenomena and Idea, Steven Holl; Chapter 4 The Resistance of Factures in Drawing-out Architectural Constructions, Matthew Mindrup; Chapter 5 Mythic Geology: Under the Surface at Palazzo del Te, Tracey Eve Winton; Part Two Construction Matters; Chapter 6 Architectural Encounters between Material and Idea, Paul Emmons; Chapter 7 Displacing Matter, Manuela Antoniu; Chapter 8 Jørn Utzon’s Reverie of the Eye: Surfaces of the Sydney Opera House, John Roberts; Chapter 9 On the Dissolution of the Modular Imagination, Dan Willis; Part Three Imaginative Perceptions of Architecture; Chapter 10 Glass, as Light as Air, as Deep as Water, Ufuk Ersoy; Chapter 11 Found Spaces and Material Memory: Remarks on the Thickness of Time in Architecture, Jonathan Hale; Chapter 12 The Return of the Ruin: Modernism, History and the Material Imagination, Jonathan Hill; Chapter 13 Adventures in Angelic Material Imagination: The Baroque and the Digital as Recounted by Putto_1435, Alessandro Ayuso; Chapter 14 Communication Material: Experiments with German Culture in the 1930 Werkbund Exhibition, Sandra Karina Löschke; Chapter 15 Unfinished Architecture: Urban Continuity in the Age of the Complete, Nicholas Temple;

Matthew Mindrup is an Assistant Professor of Architecture at the University of Canberra, Australia.