Frank Matero

It’s a material world. The paper or digital issue you are now reading is only possible through the complex assemblage of raw materials that have been grown, extracted, or synthesized, fabricated, and then designed into copy as print on paper or pixels on an LCD (liquid crystal display) that has been delivered through a real or virtual network. Each step and process involves people and machines in a chain far more complicated than the space available here to fill. Materials still matter yet in the worlds of architectural theory and practice, and especially in academia, form and space continue to dominate all other concerns. Despite a flurry of interest in materials and materiality in art history and anthropology in the first decade of this century in what has been termed “the material turn,” those engaged in writing and designing the built environment have largely ignored the implications of material choice beyond the aesthetic or technological. Tim Ingold, Kiel Moe, Antoine Picone, Katie Lloyd Thomas, and others have begun to expand the discourse toward larger implications that material selections have had and continue to have on designing, building, and living in this world, increasingly with ominous consequences. Behind every material selected and employed is a complex history: a chain of operations including extraction, production, fabrication, labor, transport, and exchange that involves a circle of players—individuals and institutions—that participate in the social and material practices of design, construction, maintenance, repair, and demolition, and all the implications of those actions. While often hidden in plain sight, we now know this complex network affects every aspect of life on the planet now and for many years to come.

Heritage conservation has always been concerned with materials and materiality, sometimes to the exclusion of what lies behind.[i] Renewed material considerations have turned toward investigating the complex transmission and reception that objects and buildings can have as social and historical agents. Any study of materials in the service of heritage conservation has the potential to reveal a great many connections between their creative deployment (selection and use), performance (durability and deterioration), and ultimately meaning through intervention and interpretation. Materials make form, and form creates space, yet a greater understanding of material choice beyond basic functional requirements can reveal a hidden world of economic and social status, locality (regionalism), cultural identity, gender, and power relations to name a few. As art historian Paul Philippot has noted, “The relation to the past is always an integral dimension of the form being of the present, and restoration, dealing materially with the object, always exteriorizes this relationship in a manifest and indisputable manner, even in its least conscious aspects.” In the end, all conservation is a critical act and therefore an essential part of the transmission and reception of cultural property and its reconstruction as heritage.

[i] “Materials,” special issue of APT Bulletin: The Journal of Preservation Technology 53, nos. 2/3 (2022): 7–14.

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