Material | Immaterial
Architecture is expected to be solid, stable and reassuring – physically, socially and psychologically. Bound to each other, the architectural and the material are considered inseparable. Material express their age and history, as well as the story of their origins and their history of human use. Hidden within one another, the terms material and immaterial blur and slip, questioning other terms such as intellectual and manual, form and formless, real and virtual. One familiar meaning of the immaterial refers to the realm of idea.
The flatness of today's standard construction is strengthened by a weakened sense of materiality, which has devastating mental effects. It then required the roles of immaterial as a formless material. Immaterial is the less absence of matter than the perceived absence of matter—Jonathan Hill.
The Row, by Studio Bikin. Using adaptive local materials as the theme for the design.
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Nest we grow/ College of Environmental Design UC Berkeley + Kengo Kuma & Associates.
It is true that materiality predominantly about the expression of material properties. “Every material possesses its own language of forms and none may lay claim for itself to the forms of another material.”stated Adolf Loos. Modernism encapsulates the simplification in the phrase “truth to materials.” Here the material speaks and the architect responds, as in Louis Kahn’s remark – both comical and thoughtful – that “When you are designing in brick, you must ask brick what it wants or what it can do.” Rather than coupling tectonics to materials. In short, it is something that designed with the materiality of material will contribute to the immateriality aspects in a space. But above all else, one must still never forget the intimacy of one’s building to the nature and culture aspects and avoid for falling into the category of architecture for the eye and loses its plasticity.
Office by Mies van der Rohe.
Mountain Dwellings / PLOT = BIG + JDS
The eye conquers its hegemonic role in architectural practice, both consciously and unconsciously , only gradually with the emergence of the idea of bodiless observer. It is therefore transformation of material to immaterial which then bring in the sensory to the architecture as an element. For instance, in Mies van derRohe’s architecture frontal perspectives perception predominates, but his unique sense of order, structure , weight, detail and craft decisively enriches the visual paradigm. Also, Mountain Dwelling designed by Bjarke Ingel Group (BIG) architecture - like a concrete hillside covered by a thin layer of housing, cascading from the 11th floor to the street edge.
Likewise, immaterial is something that come out with complexity which the designers have to dwell with very much time and consideration then the work eventually created. Contradictory, material is something that exist before immateriality.
My argument is both material and immaterial are crucial element in architecture since the task for designers are to compose these elements all together. In fact, it is hard to say what is necessary or set a level of quality, but what we can do is to adapt to the situation given and express all aspects and dispense the solutions to all design challenges.