soft matter out of place surface
history traces records migration
Surfaces – which is what the eye registers first - are often more telling than their contents, which are provisional by definition. — Joseph Brodsky, Watermark 1
Alisha Kapoor and diana guo
This glossary begins from the premise that what most architecture exists upon is often what it fails to name. We include those building materials that form our infrastructures and hard surfaces, the ones mythologised as eternal, but we turn our attention to the fissures, residues and heterogeneous compositions that quietly undo these claims, not as failures but as inevitabilities. These materials — monument, home, ground, farm, nursery, aquarium — appear at the phenomenological limits where the built environment slips from prescribed protocols into lived experiences, and where surfaces reveal more than their contents. Soft materials are co-constitutive material states and ecologies – dust, soil, canvas, roots, water, microbes, labour, memory – that mix with firmer materials to make space, even as they resist architectural containment. Deliberately we begin with materials and spatial forms that sit visibly above ground, their dominant histories held within the architectural canon; from there, we move down and out into the messy soil, roots, and ecological infrastructures working below the surface. We end with edge conditions where land meets water, and more- than-human ways of knowing come into view. Following anthropologist Mary Douglas’ work in Purity and Danger , we approach these material coalescences and secondary building materials as soft ‘matter out of place’, in that they fall outside epistemic order 2 ; they cannot be neatly classified, fully observed, nor easily predicted. They persist in the margins of archival instututions and are rarely taken up by the architectural discipline which still celebrates qualities historically marked as masculine: permanence, originality and singular authorship. 3 Soft matter marks moments where architecture slips from disciplinary coherence into everyday encounter, where surfaces cease to stabilise meaning and instead register accumulation, erosion and temporal drift. To call materials soft is not to undermine their force, but to recognise their capacity to slip between taxonomies and unsettle the stable ground of daily life. They refuse to stay in place… in time… in collective memories. As Aya Nassar suggests, attending to the small and insignificant allows us to disrupt sovereign scales of space and time, to write from messy particularities without cleansing them into coherence. 4 Working with archival images and primary sources, we collect images that refuse clarity and fixed chronology, emphasising a-temporal and amorphous qualities that echo the behaviour of the materials themselves. The images are not meant to explain or illustrate the glossary terms. They are shown alongside the text as visual counterparts. Using archival images and primary sources, the project emphasises blur, fragmentation and temporal ambiguity. This approach keeps the materials unresolved, encouraging viewers to notice surfaces, residues and minor disruptions rather than searching for a single coherent narrative. The terms do not seek resolution. What they offer, instead, are sites of rupture - where our everyday encounters are undone just enough to allow other histories to surface. 1 Joseph Brodsky, Watermark . New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1992 2 Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966 3 Hilde Heynen, ‘Genius, Gender and Architecture: The Star System as Exemplified in the Pritzker Prize’, Architectural Theory Review , 17, no. 2–3 (2012) 4 Aya Nassar, ‘Where the Dust Settles: Fieldwork, Subjectivity and Materiality in Cairo’, Contemporary Social Science 13 , no. 3–4 (2018)
50 on site review 48 :: building materials
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