Imaginaries on Matter - Tools, Materials, Origins

Imaginaries on Matter – Tools, Materials, Origins, promotes an innovative architectural research agenda that connects historical-cultural written research with digitally led material explorations.

The common thread is the notion of the material imagination, disclosed in the reverie, or material daydream, which challenges overly pragmatic or unreflective material choices within current architectural practice. In bonding our imagination directly with matter while also confronting new technologies, this book promotes strategies by which architects’ and builders’ future relations with materials can stay rooted within the deeper concerns of cultural meaning.

Imaginaries on Matter includes interviews with Aulets Arquitectes, Alibi Studio, Ensamble Studio, Geometria, Helen & Hard, KieranTimberlake, Supermanoeuvre, and Vandkunsten, as well as a postscript by David Leatherbarrow.

Reviews 

If there ever was a time when materials didn’t matter to architects in their design work and theory, it is certainly not today. This book joins step with the increasing number of studies that see the building’s material reality as the site and soil of both productive creativity and rich experience – dethroning shape and style. In its layout and arguments, we see ways of restoring matter to its proper role and place in architecture: formative and native, also strangely familiar and silently understood.

David Leatherbarrow, Professor Emeritus, University of Pennsylvania

While contemporary architectural writing overflows with talk of materiality, surprisingly little of it engages with actual materials – their resistance, their affordance, and the imagination they fuel. This book is a rare exception, exploring the richness and complexity of materials and our dealings with them.

Mari Hvattum, Professor of Architecture, The Oslo

School of Architecture and Design

 This enthralling collection of essays takes the reader on an extraordinary quest through materiality and matter, inviting us to discover a perceptually rich form of bold and substantial architectures in marble, timber, concrete. The juxtaposition of

theory, research, archival illustrations, creative works and cutting-edge technologies such as robotics and advanced fabrication creates a mesmerizing fusion of past and present. These material imaginations firmly anchor us in the world, igniting our dreams and inspiring us to explore the boundless possibilities of materials with joy and fascination.

Dagmar Reinhardt, Associate Professor of Architecture,

The University of Sydney.