another pamphlet #07 2015
material!
Materials both matter and are more than matter. Long overlooked and out of fashion, relegated to the realm of “finishes,” tainted by claims of “authenticity” or “craft,” and always overshadowed by issues of space, program, or form, materials are once again making a comeback. Materials are increasingly being recognized and interrogated as more than mere matter. Materials are logics. They are systems. They are complex algorithms. They are histories. They are psychologies. They are memories. And they are geometries.
Materials are the inert matter of our built environment, but materials are also the active generators of the spaces, atmospheres, and interactions that exist in between. Throughout the 20th century there has been an almost manic drive to make materials lighter, thinner, and more efficient. This issue of another pamphlet asks how materials might once again be protagonists – unruly, assertive, unapologetic, and difficult to quantify; how materials might once again carry their own weight.
01 perverse tectonics
02 material performance
03 material change
04 material variation
05 material flows
06 material evolution
07 material suspensions
08 material waits
09 material networks
>< material conversation
MATERIAL! pamphlet contributors:
JOHN CAPEN BROUGH practices architecture in New York City and Miami.
RICHARD DUPONT is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. His multifaceted artistic practice includes installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings, reliefs, animations and prints.
ANDREW KOVACS is a Visiting Assistant Professor at UCLA Architecture & Urban Design. He is the creator of Archive of Affinities, a website dedicated to the architectural b-side.
BILL KREYSLER is founder of Kreysler and Associates, a custom fabrication studio in Napa, CA specializing in composite materials and working between the worlds of art and architecture.
RYAN NEIHEISER is a co-founder of London based architecture practice Neiheiser Argyros, a teacher at the Architecture Association, and a co-conspirator of another pamphlet.
KILIAN RUTHEMANN is an artist living and working in Basel, Switzerland.
SPYROS PAPAPETROS is an Associate Professor in the History and Theory of Architecture at the Princeton University School of Architecture.
GIANCARLO VALLE is an architect in New York City and co-conspirator of another pamphlet.
ALEJANDRO ZAERA-POLO is founder of London and New York-based Alejandro Zaera-Polo & Maider Llaguno Architecture (AZPML).
another pamphlet is a document of loose exchange, an excuse to play, a frame through which to look, a shared excitement. It is an open dialogue with our friends, our histories, and our surroundings.
Meaning both “more of the same” and “something different”, “another” contains the seeds of both continuity and change. another pamphlet mines this contradiction – this tension between past and future – opportunistically interrogating, critiquing, and celebrating the discipline of architecture.
It is deliberately short. We’re all busy and we want to keep the conversation quick, easy, relevant, and fresh.
It is perversely anachronistic – it is printed on paper and distributed via, gasp, the post. Against the haze of digital distraction we crave an object to hold our attention – something to touch, to fold, to tuck in our back pocket, to discard.
And above all it is a group effort. Distinct voices are provisionally brought together into a contingent collective. But while the contributors and the ideas they offer are vital, particular authorship is obscured. The authors are given credit for participating, but the ideas stand on their own. The collective dialogue is given primacy over the individual position.
