Nathaniel Coleman: Materials and Meaning in Architecture

Description

It explores the theme of ‘material imagination’ and the power of establishing ‘place identity’ in an architect’s work, to consider the enduring expressive possibilities of material use in architecture.

The book’s chapters can be dipped into, each individual chapter providing close readings of built works by selected modern masters (Scarpa, Zumthor, Williams and Tsien), insights into key texts and theories (Ruskin, Loos, Bachelard), or short cultural histories of materials (wood, brick, concrete, steel, and glass). And yet, taken together, the chapters build to a powerful book-length argument about how meaning accrues to materials through time, and about the need to reinsert the bodily experience of materiality into architectural design. It is thusalso, in part, a manifesto: arguing for architecture to act as a bulwark against the tide of an increasingly depersonalised built environment.