The Material Imagination

In recent years architectural discourse has witnessed a renewed interest in materiality under the guise of such familiar tropes as ''material honesty,'' ''form finding,'' or ''digital materiality.'' Motivated in part by the development of new materials and an increasing integration of designers in fabricating architecture, a proliferation of recent publications from both practice and academia explore the pragmatics of materiality and its role as a protagonist of architectural form. Yet, as the ethos of material pragmatism gains more popularity, theorizations about the poetic imagination of architecture continue to recede. Compared to an emphasis on the design of visual form in architectural practice, the material imagination is employed when the architect ''thinks matter, dreams in it, lives in it, or, in other words, materializes the imaginary.'' As an alternative to a formal approach in architectural design, this book challenges readers to rethink the reverie of materials in architec