My current book project, working title Materials-Thinking, examines how cultural assumptions about building materials are constructed, transmitted, and naturalized within Western design discourse. Specifically, the book traces the legacy of truth-to-materials as a modern design principle. The project draws on the work of Antoine Picon, Bruno Latour, and Adrian Forty (among others) to construct a genealogy of the term as it has been applied to materials in design writing. Individual chapters focus on specific materials: marble, concrete, glass, oak, plaster, plastics, gold, paint and wallpaper, ceramics, and textiles. Each material is examined to reveal reductive (but persistent) categories through which it is conventionally understood.
This project was inspired by a class that I teach in the Pratt Interior Design Department, and the individual chapters will rely on scholarship contributed by a talented group of professors, particularly: Edwin Zawadski, William Watson, Irina Schneid, Timo Lindman & Annie Coggan.
Leave a Reply