Rethinking History in Design Education through the History of Materials (Part 2)
This essay is the second of a two-part series. Please follow the link to read part 1
Every material has not just one history, but several. One history traces a material’s extraction and processing, answering the question “Where does this material come from?” A second focuses on how the material has been used in the past, providing a window into why buildings look and act the way they do, the physical nature of the material, and questions of labor, skill, and cost. A third builds on both of these to explore the cultural meanings attached to materials and how they have changed over time. Meanings are often intimately tied to the source of the raw materials and the skills and resources needed to work them, but meanings also relate to the physicality of the materials themselves, their warmth or coolness to the hand, for example. All of these histories can and should inform the design process.
Figure 1: William Henry Jackson (American, 1843 -1942), Quarrying Granite for Mormon Temple, 1870–1875, Albumen silver print 84.XC.979.4886. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Calif. Gift of Weston J. and Mary M. Naef. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
History of Extraction
All materials need to be mined or harvested, and then processed into a usable substance (figure 1). Exploring the history of a material requires learning about processes of extraction and the social and economic structures that permit the material’s components to be extracted, processed, and transported. Some materials are quite rare, such as metals that occur in profitable quantities in only a few places on earth, or plants or animals that require a very specific ecosystem. The skills involved in extracting and processing some materials are specialized and may be carefully controlled. Other materials, like clay, are broadly available and relatively easy to work (figure 2). Complex economic and social systems underlie the history of extraction. For example, mahogany was deeply embedded in colonialism and the slave economy of the West Indies, where it was harvested in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until its astonishingly rapid deforestation in favor of sugar plantations worked by the enslaved.[1]
Figure 2: Objects made by Ben Johnston from clay that he mined from his back yard, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Jessica Sewell, 2018.
Paying serious attention to the history of the extraction and preparation of materials allows designers to engage with the ethics of the materials they use, including their ecological footprints. Knowing what is involved in the extraction, processing, and transporting of materials will also allow designers to make more ethically conscious decisions, as the consequences of material extraction are also human. Understanding who does the work of extraction and processing, under what circumstances, provides necessary information that allows designers to choose materials that will not increase human suffering. Putting the story of extraction, processing, and transportation into a historical context further increases our understanding of how materials are enmeshed with social systems including colonial and postcolonial power structures. All too often materials are extracted from former colonies, with the profits going to first world corporations.[2]
Figure 3: Wood is varied in color and pattern and takes glue easily, making possible elaborate decorations using wood from multiple sources throughout the world. Joseph Baumhauer (French, died, 1772), Secrétaire, about 1765–1770, maple, mahogany, beech, and oak veneered with tulipwood, amaranth, ebony, and holly; gilt-bronze mounts; marble top137.2 × 104.1 × 38.1 cm (54 × 41 × 15 in.), 84.DA.969. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Calif. Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program.
History of Use
The history of materials extends beyond understanding extraction and preparation to learning about the ways that materials have been used in the past. All designers begin with some aspect of this knowledge, whether through precedent studies, architectural history courses, or everyday experience. But delving beyond the fact that wood, for example, was used to build houses in early America, and exploring the details of how it was worked, and by whom, expands their understanding of the material’s meanings and its properties.
The physical properties of a material—its strength, resilience, malleability, density, opacity, and so forth—are fundamental to its use. A material needs to be able to stand up to the forces exerted upon it, or else it cannot function as a designer envisions. Craftspeople are experts on the properties of materials and determine the materials that best fit a particular context (figure 3). But materials are not chosen only because of their properties in the finished structure; other important questions for designers to consider are these: What is required to work the material How much labor and skill is needed? How common is that skill? How much capital needs to be spent on tools and specialized machinery? Some materials, such as wood, are worked relatively easily with straight-forward tools. In comparison, steel and glass require more complex manufacturing processes and significantly more specialized skill to use them. They only became common building materials in the context of globalized industrial capitalism, when economies of scale made the outlay on specialized factories and tools profitable.[3]
Figure 4: Microscopic images of 40/60 silver-copper alloy as cast (left) and after being worked (right) at 200x. The squishing of the grains of the metal from working can be clearly seen. Images from Heather Lechtman. 3.094 Materials in Human Experience, Spring 2004, Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Use courtesy MIT OpenCourseWare, Creative Commons BY-NC-SA.
In order to gain insight into the processes involved in using particular materials, it is best to go beyond reading and talking about the ways that materials have been worked. Exploring materials and their history through hands-on experience gives students greater insight into the history of materials and allows them to experiment with their qualities. Hands-on education, as a mode of analysis and as pedagogy, has at its core a focus on understandings arrived at through bodily knowing. People who make things learn through the practice of manipulating the physical world with their bodies—the body and mind working together, creating understandings based on bodily knowledge.[4] Two different forms of hands-on learning–examining historical objects to see how they were made and working materials using historical methods—give students an understanding of materials that they cannot derive simply from texts. Metallurgical analysis, for example, allows students to see how metal has been worked (material that has been drawn or hammered has more stretched grains) and also gives them insights into the behavior of that metal, such as why it becomes hard and then brittle when worked (figure 4). Working materials allows students to further understand materials both historically and in the present. Using historical methods of construction allows them both to better understand the decisions made by designers and builders in the past and requires them to work intimately with the materials (figure 5). The expensive machines that students encounter in architecture department shops, particularly the laser cutters and 3D printers that are used in digital fabrication and are crowding out woodworking tools, tend to lead towards thinking about materials as mere substances. Working a relatively raw material with hand tools allows students to get closer to the mindset of historical actors as well as to get to know the materials much better (figure 6).
Figure 5: Students repointing brick using lime mortar that they have mixed themselves, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Andrew Johnston, 2018.
While exploring the qualities of materials experimentally is a mainstay of foundation courses in architecture, framing this exploration within a historically defined context enriches not only students’ experimentation with materials, but also their understanding of architectural history. Through hands-on exercises, in concert with more traditional historical research, they gain an understanding of the qualities of materials that is centered in their cultural context, rather than in the abstract statistics of tensile strength.
“Exploring materials and their history through hands-on experience gives students greater insight into the history of materials and allows them to experiment with their qualities. ”
Students gain a subtler approach to their own use of materials by understanding the historical use of materials as in large part a reflection of the relationship between the abstract qualities of a material, its source, and what skills and investment it takes to work with it. This has consequences for the design process. Examining how a material has been used historically as well as working it oneself enriches students’ understandings of the possibilities of each material. By considering not only the qualities of a material, but also the skills and economic and cultural capital required to work it, designers’ decisions about what materials to use and how to use them can also respond to local skill sets and engage with vernacular knowledge of materials, placing buildings more intimately within a community.
Figure 6: Student riving a shingle, University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia. Photograph by Andrew Johnston, 2017.
History of Meaning
The central questions contemporary architectural historians ask about architecture are cultural. One element of the cultural expression of buildings is in their materials. Materials can speak loudly about the aesthetic and social ideals of the architects: modern architects deliberately used industrially produced materials, such as plate glass, structural steel, and aluminum, to express their break with the past and their alliance with the possibilities of the machine age. Whenever architects use a material, they inevitably reference the history of meanings attached to that material. By exploring the range of meanings attached to a given material, architects are better able to make use of these meanings explicitly.
“Whenever architects use a material, they inevitably reference the history of meanings attached to that material.”
For example, glass is ubiquitous in contemporary architecture, used for building “skins” that change with light, scrims for projected media, and play with transparency and reflectivity (figure 7). However technically and aesthetically astonishing these glass facades are, they communicate not only their novelty, but also their relationship to the history of glass as a luxury product, expensive and painstaking to produce as well as fragile and delicate in nature. Students working with glass can engage with the history of such ideas as transparency, light, cleanliness, and vision, enriching their use of the material.
Figure 7: The buildings in Suzhou Industrial Park’s new central business district feature glass curtain walls to symbolize their modernity, Suzhou, China. Photograph by Jessica Sewell, 2019.
Exploring the history of meanings associated with a material can deeply affect the design process. All design begins from ideas, sparks that designers work, enrich, and complicate until they culminate in a finished design; the meanings of materials can potentially provide such a spark. Understanding the multiple associations of a material inevitably enriches designs even when they do not provide a starting point. With each material that they employ, architects who are cognizant of its history and meanings can exploit those meanings, heightening those that enrich their design, playing with others by contradicting them, as when structural plate glass is used as a floor. Architecture plays with meanings as well as forms, and the meanings of materials provide a vocabulary that informed architects can use to make their designs richer and more complex.
NOTES
[1] Jennifer Anderson, “Nature’s Currency: The Atlantic Mahogany Trade and the Commodification of Nature in the Eighteenth Century,” Early American Studies 2, no. 1 (2004): 47-80.
[2] Many of the largest mining companies, for example, are based in the United Kingdom, United States, Canada, Australia, and Switzerland, and mine throughout the world, particularly in Africa and South America. See also Mimi Sheller, Aluminum Dreams: The Making of Light Modernity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2014).
[3] Joshua B. Freeman, Behemoth: A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2018).
[4] Pamela H Smith, The Body of the Artisan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004).
