Navigation – Plan du site

AccueilNuméros23Dossier: Material ConstraintsSwimming in an ocean of materials

Dossier: Material Constraints

Swimming in an ocean of materials

Introduction: un océan de matériaux
Monika Motylińska, Robby Fivez, María Ignacia Jeldes Olivares et Paul Sprute

Texte intégral

  • 1 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 14, 2007, p. 1-16. DOI (...)

1“Human beings swim in an ocean of materials.” With this sentence, anthropologist Tim Ingold announced his crusade against the abstract concept of “materiality” that had taken the academic world by storm. In his text Materials against Materiality, Ingold argues how the discrepancy between mind and matter has clouded thinking in social sciences and humanities, necessitating the concept of agency—that “magic mind-dust”—to set things into motion. However, if we think of the world only as matter, “bringing things to life is a matter not of adding a sprinkling of agency, but of restoring the generative fluxes of the world of materials in which they came into being and continue to subsist.”1 This thematic dossier aims to do exactly that: to “restore the generative fluxes of the world of materials” in which buildings came into being, focusing on the very real constraints these materials posed in their production, processing, and distribution.

  • 2 Antoine Picon, The Materiality of Architecture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 20 (...)
  • 3 Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nich Beech (eds.), Industries of Architecture, London: Routled (...)
  • 4 Ilka Ruby and Andreas Ruby (eds.), The Materials Book, Berlin: Ruby Press, 2020; Space Caviar (ed. (...)
  • 5 Jonah Rowen, “Pipes, Provision, Profits, Privatization: The Materials of Water Infrastructure in N (...)
  • 6 The EOS project “Construction History, Above and Beyond. What History Can Do for Construction Hist (...)

2Even in the “material turn” in architectural history, a rather worldly field, the abstract concept of “materiality” long had the upper hand.2 It is only recently that the very physical materials our buildings are made from truly became of interest, when studies began to center on the construction site or account for the dynamics of “reciprocal landscapes” of production on the transnational scale.3 Moreover, in the face of the climate crisis, contemporary discourses have focused on the severe environmental impact of construction, seeking solutions in the de-materializing, re-materializing, or circularity of construction. However, they rarely engage with the depth of historical contexts.4 This dossier shares this interest in the world of materials but is decisively seeking to historicize the dynamics of construction across the long 20th century. Some of the essays herein also build on the growing body of literature on the manufacture and flows of building materials and the related contexts of extractivism and labor exploitation.5 In trying to understand the genesis of such on-site material constraints, this collection of articles also shows the need to transgress the borders of these specific places and spaces of production and distribution. This expansion of the spatial perspectives and scales mirrors current interests in the field of construction history. Although the discipline has a long tradition of delving deeply into the material and technical processes of historical building, current recalibrations go beyond the construction site as the main place of interest.6 Therefore, in these essays, manifold “reciprocities” of construction come into view, including legal frameworks, state ideologies, or economic logic.

  • 7 For the reflection on the notion of “economic constraints,” which posed a stepping stone to develo (...)
  • 8 Max D. Woodworth and Cecilia L. Chu (eds.), “Roadsides, Collection no. 011,” Roadsides. URL : http (...)
  • 9 Penelope Harvey, Colin Eleanor Casella, Gillian Evans, Hannah Knox, Christine McLean, Elizabeth B. (...)
  • 10 E. g. Simon Schaupp, Stoffwechselpolitik: Arbeit, Natur und die Zukunft des Planeten, Berlin: Suhr (...)
  • 11 For instance, by investigating how “‘newness’ is a specific way to demarcate a material (or, for t (...)
  • 12 Sebastian Haumann, Eva-Maria Roeveling, Nora Thorade and Christian Zumbrägel (eds.), Perspektiven (...)
  • 13 “Zugleich kann die physisch vorhandene Welt aber nicht als objektiver Wahrnehmungsgegenstand gedac (...)

3This broadened perception of construction is stimulated by conversation with other fields of endeavor, some of them seemingly remote from architectural history. The interdisciplinary approach allows the architectural historian to navigate from the construction site to the production spaces to larger territories. Economic rationales and geopolitical settings come into play.7 Interdisciplinary perspectives on material constraints are necessary to revisit definitions and conceptual frameworks (e.g., constraints are not only on-site limitations). Recent discussions related to social anthropology invite us to consider the social properties and dimensions of construction materials, and their attention to cement and concrete resonates well with the focus of this dossier.8 These essays, with their sensitivity to social questions, are congruent with social anthropology’s interest in material; likewise, they share a call for specificity. As Penny Harvey pointed out, “(…) [Change] is shown to occur under the weight of specific administrative, legal, technical and material constraints.”9 In this collection, the outspoken interest in these specific material constraints, and their weight in particular circumstances, is a crucial device. It directly confronts generalizations and simplifications that arose over the last decade in sociology and practical philosophy around the production of cement and concrete. Both materials were equated indiscriminately with modernity and globalization, without acknowledging any local conditions, tensions or aspirations.10 Approaches from STS and sociology add another essential layer to the analyses by showing how material properties are constructed in the discourse,11 while Stoffgeschichte (which can be translated as “fabric history” or “material history”) with its exploratory approach highlights the need for historicizing the discourses investigated.12 Finally, faithful to Ingold’s initial statement, and to avoid a binary framework that would oversimplify, we obey a suggestion arising from the intersection between architectural history and architectural sociology, namely that “(…) the physically existing world cannot be thought of as an objective item of perception; sensory perceptions cannot be considered separately from processes of experiencing, interpreting and knowing.”13

  • 14 Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion Books, 2012; Cyrille Simo (...)
  • 15 German. “Widerstand der Materie,” a term originating from Kantian metaphysics. Immanuel Kant, Meta (...)

4In line with the disciplinary context of architectural history, the contributions to this dossier emphasize different typologies in the built environment—production sites, infrastructures, commercial buildings, or different housing solutions. Whatever the typology at its heart, however, each contribution deconstructs the subject, taking an interest in its production and the steps involved. In consequence, construction materials come into view, very concretely, with their physical dimensions, chemical composition, and links to specific building technologies. However, instead of following the histories of construction materials as enabling devices,14 we encouraged the authors to shift the focus to materials as constraining factors, imposing restrictions on agency, and to address the question of how these (construction) materials compelled various actors to avoid or perform certain actions, under specific circumstances. In such an interpretation, we lean on the ontological notion of the “resistance of matter,”15 indicating how the material world (or what we perceive as such) limits, eludes, or actively withstands the (human) attempts to shape it. It is clear, for instance, how certain physical or chemical processes cannot be ignored—yet we should simultaneously acknowledge how these chemical or physical properties emerged as discursive and social constructs. To address these material frictions, we developed the concept of material constraints.

  • 16 In the original: “Construction (and demolition) is a highly diverse process, which always has to a (...)

5Specifically, contributions to this dossier interpret long-term sociopolitical transformations as consequential contexts to the diffusion of prefabricated structures (such as the Arcon structural steel system in West Africa); engage with political resignification of architectural heritage (using the example of ger nomadic dwellings in Mongolia); examine how the materials market is steered (as in the case of the cement production in sub-Saharan Africa); and chronicle experimentation with techniques, standards, and materials (taking as examples early infrastructural construction with concrete in India or local building practices in the context of the exchanges between the GDR and Cuba). It is important to emphasize how the different contributions centralize these material constraints without disregarding their flip side. Every “constraint” afforded—or required—several possible alternatives. Hence, such moments of material constraint should also be understood as creative and productive moments. To paraphrase Heine and Rauhut, construction (and demolition) is a highly diverse process, which is simultaneously constrained and challenged, but also inspired, by the availability or lack of resources, knowledge, and experience.16

6However obvious it may sound, the essays in this dossier should make it clear that materials impact construction. Nevertheless, every contribution also points out that human organization is always crucial to the processes of construction. Avoiding the magic dust of agency, we argue that an exact understanding of the physical and chemical constraints of the built environment lies precisely in analyzing the material-human interface and relationality. In these contributions, material constraints in the construction processes are encountered by someone or posed to someone––invariably a human who is immersed in a setting where design, constraint, and experimentation interact to produce physical structures. In this process, new building practices are shaped and the “generative flux” of materials continues to unfold. For example, in “Becoming Concrete: Materiality and Water Infrastructure in Colonial South Asia” by Gauri Bharat and Bhavya Jain, we witness how material constraints re-calibrated the predefined construction technologies rationalized by public works. They were thereby joined into a continuum that brought them closer to craft-based localized building practices. Notably, “Projected traditions? Tracing an East German-Cuban Collaboration in Loam and Soil Cement Construction in Havana-Cocosolo” by Juliane Richter and Alfonso Alfonso González discusses how material possibilities and constraints acted to reshape expectations of both East German and Cuban groups, while they gained and honed insights into soil cement construction. Cement scarcity and mental paralysis in sub-Saharan Africa, as described in “Addiction to cement: Narratives and strategies for tackling the lack of cement in sub-Saharan Africa (1920s-1980s)” by Monika Motylińska and Robby Fivez, shows several dimensions of this material-human interplay where either the geographically determined lack or human-created abundance of cement finds resonance across different productive and political settings. Materials, throughout these examples, repeatedly demand careful consideration of their generative impulses that impact humans beyond the functionalities they harbor. 

  • 17 We consciously avoid the notion of “glocal”, as it may be easily misread as a projection of the bi (...)
  • 18 Armelle Choplin, Matière grise de l’urbain: la vie du ciment en Afrique, Genève: Mētis Presses, 20 (...)

7Transnational connections are made evident through the constellation of actors that navigate material constraints and mediate constantly between various global and local scales.17 The different articles tend to relate an external actor with a local counterpart (of constructions or a group of actors): the British engineers of Public Works in India are linked to Indian building practices; the British building system with West African industrialization interests; Soviet writing on the Mongolian yurt (ger); and the Cuban-East German constellation around the Experimental House’s construction. Lastly, the mental addiction to cement in sub-Saharan Africa is linked to the material, as seen through the prism of German manufacturing companies. The actants within these varying constellations tried to exert control over construction practices, knowledges, and narratives in various ways. These links further reflect a wide scope of possible transnational connections between the Global North, East, and South, that both include and go beyond (former) colonial ties. Jointly, the articles scrutinize the variations of these global relations, e.g. by exploring bilateral conversations alongside more diverse constellations of scales and actors. Our geographic focus further stems from the central position such material constraints take in architectural histories of the non-West. Not because there were indeed more actual constraints in such geographic settings, but rather because such constraints, like the lack of industrial building materials, were often projected “from Europe” onto these places “beyond Europe” both by the construction industry and in academic research.18

8The temporal scope of this collection encompasses the long 20th century. Following Bharat and Jain’s work covering colonial British India in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Harrison, Woudstra, and Jackson’s work focuses on the era of African decolonization following the Second World War. Litvinenko takes a long-term view on state socialism from the 1930s to the 1980s. Richter and Alfonso González’s study centers on the historical moment of the ending of European state socialism but also accounts for the preceding and following processes. Finally, Motylińska and Fivez open the perspective towards the entire period under consideration connected to their observations of a lasting addiction to cement.

9Material constraints often shaped non-conventional paths toward industrial production in non-Western regions and countries. Stories of “alternative industrializations” appear already under British colonial rule, as thematized by Bharat and Jain in their account of water infrastructure projects. “Becoming Concrete” confronts the diffusionist perspective of technology transfer (in this case, of colonial building technologies) and foregrounds how experimentation with momentarily available resources gave way to “alternative” materials and building practices. In “Accelerating Development: Taylor Woodrow and Arcon’s Prefabricated Steel Structures in Decolonizing West Africa,” Ewan Harrison, Rixt Woudstra, and Iain Jackson cover the years leading up to statehood for the former British colonies in West Africa and their post-colonial constellations. The authors argue that the Arcon system was instrumental in both late-colonial resource extraction and the post-colonial drive for industrialization as a fast, flexible way to establish the connected material structures in place. The Soviet path to industrialization is discussed in “Unsettled Modernization: Soviet Historiography on the Mongolian Ger, 1935-1980.” Ksenia Litvinenko analyzes how constraints of material availability and housing pressures, as well as the modernization project of the Mongolian state, led to reframing and resourcification of the ger for projects of housing, extraction, colonization, and tourism. Finally, in “Addiction to Cement,” the real and/or perceived lack of cement in sub-Saharan Africa was the constant in dissimilar constellations of cement production and consumption throughout the 20th century. Motylińska and Fivez note that the construction of cement plants in response to this scarcity influenced the industrialization of various sectors that were either suppliers (mining) or consumers of cement (numerous industries that benefited from cement-based infrastructure).

  • 19 G. A. Bremner, Johan Lagae and Mercedes Volait, Fabrications, vol. 26, no. 2, 2016, special issue (...)
  • 20 For a rare exemption see: Johan Lagae and Robby Fivez, “‘Tout le Congo est un Chantier’: Notes on (...)

10All the contributions respond to the current broadening of architectural history towards “gray architecture,” a development that is also reflected by the wide range of investigated sources and methods.19 “Becoming Concrete” relies, first of all, on contemporary articles from professional journals published in Britain as well as India, offering a detailed presentation of construction processes to a readership of engineers. This article therefore makes use of the possibilities that gray literature and technical reports afford. “Accelerating Development” is an exemplary illustration of the benefits of working with the hitherto mostly overlooked archives of general contractors and other businesses, using a blend of marketing materials to offer a view into the sale and implementation of the Arcon system in West Africa.20 “Unsettled Modernization” emphasizes the possibilities of working with sources produced through architectural and historical research themselves, critically re-reading Soviet Russian-language texts to uncover changing narratives toward the Mongolian ger in the context of state socialist modernization. “Addiction to Cement” also makes use of professional journals, oral history, and different types of sources from company archives, to trace the development of cement dependency over several decades. The authors put notable emphasis on visual materials and promotional brochures where other kinds of sources are missing. “Projected Traditions” is the result of placing past architectural research alongside findings from site inspections and oral history. Crucially, the article was co-authored by a researcher and a contemporary who was involved with the construction project investigated in this article, thus offering insights mitigated by a professional’s memories of his experience as an actor. This perspective cannot be reconstructed through written sources.

11Articles gathered in this thematic dossier are, first and foremost, an invitation to architectural historians to acknowledge the weight of material constraints. In conversation with construction history, social anthropology, STS, and material history, we are learning to unpack the specificity of building processes under clearly defined socio-spatial circumstances and temporalities, and more importantly, addressing their (physical) limitations, with a simultaneous sensitivity toward the discursive construction and epistemological contexts. Currents in the “ocean of materials” can bring us to unexpected depths without the risk of floating on the surface of the abstract.

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank everyone who contributed towards the publication of this thematic dossier. Firstly, we are grateful to the authors who responded to our call and took up the proposition of thinking with material constraints. We also thank the ABE editorial team for its openness to publishing this dossier in the first place and their support and flexibility as well as crucial suggestions and advice towards its development. The twelve anonymous reviewers deserve our thanks for their engagement towards refining the articles. Such extensive research would not have been possible without the support of many archivists literally across the globe. Contemporary witnesses who shared their insights and opened up their private collections need to be acknowledged here, even if the majority of them remain unnamed to protect their privacy.

Haut de page

Notes

1 Tim Ingold, “Materials against Materiality,” Archaeological Dialogues, vol. 14, 2007, p. 1-16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/S1380203807002127.

2 Antoine Picon, The Materiality of Architecture, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

3 Katie Lloyd Thomas, Tilo Amhoff and Nich Beech (eds.), Industries of Architecture, London: Routledge, 2015; Kiel Moe, Empire State & Building, Barcelona; New York, NY: Actar Publishers, 2017; Jane Hutton, Reciprocal Landscapes: Stories of Material Movements, Abingdon; New York, NY: Routledge, 2019.

4 Ilka Ruby and Andreas Ruby (eds.), The Materials Book, Berlin: Ruby Press, 2020; Space Caviar (ed.), Non-Extractive Architecture. 1. On Designing without Depletion, Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2021.

5 Jonah Rowen, “Pipes, Provision, Profits, Privatization: The Materials of Water Infrastructure in Nineteenth-Century Kingston, Jamaica, and London, England,” Aggregate, vol. 11, May 2023. DOI: https://doi.org/10.53965/QMUZ2869; Janet Ore, “Workers’ Bodies and Plywood Production: The Pathological Power of a Hybrid Material,” Aggregate, vol. 10, June 2022. DOI: https://doi.org/10.53965/CPGG8794; Kim Förster (ed.), Environmental Histories of Architecture, Montreal: Canadian Centre for Architecture, 2022 (esp. Hannah le Roux, “Circulating asbestos: The International AC Review, 1956-1985”). URL: https://www.cca.qc.ca/en/articles/87164/environmental-histories-of-architecture. Accessed 7 August 2024; Peter H. Christensen, Precious Metal: German Steel, Modernity, and Ecology, Pennsylvania, PA: Penn State University Press, 2022; Robby Fivez, “The rubble in the jungle: A fragmented biography of Lukala’s cementscape, DR Congo,” Journal of Landscape Architecture, vol. 15, no. 1, 2020, p. 78-87. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/18626033.2020.1792691.

6 The EOS project “Construction History, Above and Beyond. What History Can Do for Construction History” actively seeks such reciprocal sites of construction that impact the construction site. For this ongoing research project, see: URL: https://www.vub.be/arch/project/eos. Accessed 7 August 2024.

7 For the reflection on the notion of “economic constraints,” which posed a stepping stone to develop the concept of “material constraints” see Christoph Bernhardt and Monika Motylińska, “Global Entanglements of Socialist Architecture and Planning in the Cold War Period: Approaches and Perspectives,” in Christoph Bernhardt, Andreas Butter and Monika Motylińska (eds.), Between Solidarity and Economic Constraints: Global Entanglements of Socialist Architecture and Planning in the Cold War Period, Boston: DeGruyter, 2023 (Rethinking the Cold War, 12), p. 1-18.

8 Max D. Woodworth and Cecilia L. Chu (eds.), “Roadsides, Collection no. 011,” Roadsides. URL : https://roadsides.net/collection-no-011/. Accessed 1 July 2024.

9 Penelope Harvey, Colin Eleanor Casella, Gillian Evans, Hannah Knox, Christine McLean, Elizabeth B. Silva, Nicholas Thoburn and Kath Woodward (eds.), Objects and Materials: A Routledge Companion, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2014 (Culture, Economy and the Social), p. 15.

10 E. g. Simon Schaupp, Stoffwechselpolitik: Arbeit, Natur und die Zukunft des Planeten, Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2024; Anselm Jappe, Béton : arme de construction massive du capitalisme, Paris: L’Échappée, 2020 (Pour en finir avec).

11 For instance, by investigating how “‘newness’ is a specific way to demarcate a material (or, for that matter, a behavior or ideology) from others and one that serves its claimants by effacing that which is not to be renewed or replaced, that which is to be naturalized as ongoing.” (Amy E. Slaton (ed.), New materials: Towards a history of consistency, Amherst, MA: Lever Press, 2020, p. 2). For the proposals from spatial sociology and border studies on combining the discursive with the material, see Kamil Bembnista, Vivien Sommer and Sune W. Stoustrup, “Lost in Space: Introducing the spatial dispositif in space-sensitive discourse research,” Zeitschrift für Diskursforschung, vol. 2, 2021, p. 291-309. URL: https://www.beltz.de/fachmedien/soziologie/zeitschriften/zeitschrift_fuer_diskursforschung/artikel/49969-lost-in-space-introducing-the-spatial-dispositif-in-space-sensitive-discourse-research.html. Accessed 3 July 2024.

12 Sebastian Haumann, Eva-Maria Roeveling, Nora Thorade and Christian Zumbrägel (eds.), Perspektiven auf Stoffgeschichte: Materialität, Praktiken, Wissen, Bielefeld: transcript, 2023 (Histoire, no. 212).

13 “Zugleich kann die physisch vorhandene Welt aber nicht als objektiver Wahrnehmungsgegenstand gedacht werden, Sinnesempfindungen können vielmehr nicht von Prozessen des Erfahrens, Deutens und Wissens getrennt betrachtet werden.” (Cornelia Escher and Nina Tessa Zahner (eds.), Begegnung mit dem Materiellen: Perspektiven aus Architekturgeschichte und Soziologie, Bielefeld: transcript, 2021 (Architekturen, no. 56), p. 23).

14 Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History, London: Reaktion Books, 2012; Cyrille Simonnet, Le béton : histoire d’un matériau ; économie, technique, architecture, Marseille: Éditions Parenthèses, 2005.

15 German. “Widerstand der Materie,” a term originating from Kantian metaphysics. Immanuel Kant, Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft, Riga: Johann Friedrich Hartknoch, 1786, p. 32.

16 In the original: “Construction (and demolition) is a highly diverse process, which always has to adjust to social change and technical innovation, while it is also sitting on ‘technological paths’ and is constrained by the availability of resources, knowledge and experience.” Eike-Christian Heine and Christoph Rauhut (eds.), Producing non-simultaneity: Construction sites as places of progressiveness and continuity, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018, p. xxii.

17 We consciously avoid the notion of “glocal”, as it may be easily misread as a projection of the binary “the global vs. the local”—and all the contributions prove that the spatial scales constantly shifted in the construction process, thus complicating and blurring the identification of what can be deemed “local,” “regional,” or “transnational.” It would be worth pondering whether a substantial difference between the late 19th century and the beginning of the 20th century can be observed due to structural changes within the construction industry. Cf. also Christoph Rauhut, “The non-simultaneous as a research tool for late nineteenth-century construction sites,” in Eike-Christian Heine and Christoph Rauhut (eds.), Producing non-simultaneity: Construction sites as places of progressiveness and continuity, London; New York, NY: Routledge, 2018, p. 23.

18 Armelle Choplin, Matière grise de l’urbain: la vie du ciment en Afrique, Genève: Mētis Presses, 2020 (vuesDensembleEssais).

19 G. A. Bremner, Johan Lagae and Mercedes Volait, Fabrications, vol. 26, no. 2, 2016, special issue Intersecting Interests: Developments in Networks and Flows of Information and Expertise in Architectural History, p. 227-245. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/10331867.2016.1173167.

20 For a rare exemption see: Johan Lagae and Robby Fivez, “‘Tout le Congo est un Chantier’: Notes on the Archive of a (Post)colonial Construction Firm,” in Nina Berre, Paul Wenzel Geissler and Johan Lagae (eds.), African Modernism and Its Afterlives, Bristol: Intellect, 2022. Engagement with the contractor's archive as a distinct category of an archive, beyond the private and the public, is also at the center of the ongoing research project “Conquering (with) Concrete. German Construction Companies as Global Players in Local contexts” (January 2020-December 2024, funded by VolkswagenStiftung at IRS Erkner).

Haut de page

Pour citer cet article

Référence électronique

Monika Motylińska, Robby Fivez, María Ignacia Jeldes Olivares et Paul Sprute, « Swimming in an ocean of materials »ABE Journal [En ligne], 23 | 2024, mis en ligne le 27 septembre 2024, consulté le 10 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/abe/16278 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/12ebm

Haut de page

Auteurs

Monika Motylińska

Head of Research Group “Histories of the Built Environment,” Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner, Germany ORCID ID: 0000-0002-7464-4218

Articles du même auteur

Robby Fivez

Post-Doctoral Researcher, Vrije Universiteit, Brussel, Belgium ORCID ID: 0000-0003-4566-0259

Articles du même auteur

María Ignacia Jeldes Olivares

Doctoral Researcher, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner, Germany ORCID ID: 0009-0004-3156-1959

Paul Sprute

Post-Doctoral Researcher, Leibniz Institute for Research on Society and Space, Erkner, Germany ORCID ID: 0000-0001-6853-9924

Articles du même auteur

Haut de page

Droits d’auteur

CC-BY-4.0

Le texte seul est utilisable sous licence CC BY 4.0. Les autres éléments (illustrations, fichiers annexes importés) sont « Tous droits réservés », sauf mention contraire.

Haut de page
Rechercher dans OpenEdition Search

Vous allez être redirigé vers OpenEdition Search