Thesis Highlights
"Immaterials"
alex langley and sam spencer, 2023
"Immaterials: New Sensations From Old Materials"
In today’s building practices, the lifecycle of the building and its materials are treated as one and the same. We conflate the condition of the building as a whole with that of its components. Once demolished, what remains is not the building but the building materials. However, the damage has already been done, and what could have been reused is reduced to useless fragments.
Sifting through the wreckage of this material graveyard, the only materials with the hope of escaping are the ones that retained their factory edge or still possess enough size to be redimensioned. This is because form is equally as important as matter in informing how we perceive materials. Unfortunately, demolition does not discriminate between the form of the building and that of its materials, it destroys both. And yet we continue to demolish buildings and destroy their materials as well.
The standardization of building materials has caused them to become more ubiquitous and less precious than they once were. There is no formal difference between a new brick and one from the 1800s. Therefore, it is easy to demolish an existing brick and then purchase a different one. But this formal assessment does not take into account immaterial qualities embedded in the materials. This project aims to broaden the criteria for the valuation of materials to include immaterial qualities such as perceptual and cultural significance. Myths emerge around objects as a result of the meanings people confer upon them. Could architects similarly orchestrate the talismanification of building materials?
As waste from construction and demolition increases in amount every year, the need to rethink how we view waste becomes more urgent. Through a radical approach towards material reuse, architecture has the ability to reposition our perception of what is valuable, by bringing out latent immaterial qualities within used materials.
The fate of construction materials has been erroneously tied to that of the building. We must sacrifice certain buildings in order to reuse their materials thereby preserving the cultural, symbolic, and immaterial qualities within them.
WORK
