Materiality in architecture

There are many ways of practice and discourse that architects understand and construct the world. These methods are essentially ordered around the distinction between form and matter where the formal and conceptual is valued over the material.

Historically, architects have been concerned with formal questions of conventional theories and discourses, establishing the architect as form giver. The methods utilised to develop proposals, orthographic drawings, describes only form, relegating material to the empty spaces between the lines. This favour of from is genuinely entrenched into our working traditions, and material is rarely examined beyond its aesthetic or technological capacities to act as a servant to form.

My fifth year project, Australian Centre of Architecture, will examine the the shift in attention towards the material and reports on the wide range of issues that surface; issues that are otherwise concealed or disqualified from architectural discourse, issues that shape and elucidate the buildings we make, the processes we use and the ways in which we understand them.