Week 7: Material, Immaterial, Virtual

Key Readings:

Auer - Baustoffe sind von Natur aus künstlich

Damisch - Blotting out Architecture? A fable in Seven Parts

Cache - Digital Semper

Auer's argument revolves around the idea that all building materials are artificial, and that the idea of natural materials is an illusion of an unattainable nature, therefore he argues that the idea of a material having an essential quality or truth is false. If we agree with Auer's ideas, then we can use materials in any way - the brick does not need to 'like an arch' (Louis Kahn) but can be used in any way. This then starts to set up oppositional groups of those who believe in a truth to materials, and those who treat materials for their cladding purposes. Its hard to say which I would try and work with, as both sides have very strong points - there is a strength in the beauty of Kahn's Ahmedebad project, or Ando's churches, but then the possibilities of being able to use materials in a wide variety of different ways is very tempting. Perhaps the distinction is not so clear anyway, and it is an issue that I would be able to look at afresh in each project.

As a continuation of Auer's ideas, we discussed in the tutorial the notion that our lives are not on the whole 'authentic', and that our experiences are a combination of real and virtual ones. We talk to people on the other side of the world over the internet with skype, but this is no different to talking to people in the next building on the phone. Physical and virtual networks often overlap, so an inauthentic existence is not necessarily a bad thing. So many products around us are labelled with 'authentic', that the word hardly seems to have any real meaning or value any more. If this is the case, then why do building materials need to be used in an authentic sense? This is quite interesting in relation to Gunther Vogt's lecture at the ECA where he talked about his unease at architects' interests in 'instant' nature in buildings through living walls. This rested on a critique of the belief that we are able to create and control nature - his own work tries to make it clear that the 'nature' being created is just an image.

Diller and Scofidio's Blur project, as discussed by Damisch is undoubtably interesting in the way that it uses an unconventional material - cloud - to create a dynamic form and obscure the primary steel structure, but this still remains one of the only built examples of a formless building, and its application in other uses is quite unclear to me.

In music, there is a similar question as to what is a real or artificial instrument. With electronics, sounds can be created without the need for traditional percussive, bowed, plucked or wind methods. The theremin (as demonstrated by Bill Bailey) is an early electronic instrument which creates sound based on the proximity of objects to the instrument. Messiaen combines a modern symphony orchestra with the electronic theremin in his Turangalila Symphony, mixing very different sounds together. Despite having a very different nature to traditional instruments, he is happy to deploy it in his range of texture and tone colour. A really interesting recent extension of virtual instruments can be heard in the music of Super D'Orch, an Edinburgh based laptop orchestra. From my own experience of playing in orchestras, digital and analogue techniques can combine very effectively together (Roxburgh's Saturn, where a quartet of violin, flute, trumpet and xylophone are recorded live during the performance and fed back into the music at a later stage).