Abstract
Nannini, S. A review of Antoine Picon, The Materiality of Architecture. Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press, 2020. Choi, D. A review of Neil Jackson, Japan and the West: An Architectural Dialogue. London: Lund Humphries, 2019. Ungureanu, C. A review of Natsumi Nonaka, Renaissance Porticoes and Painted Pergolas: Nature and Culture in Early Modern Italy. London & New York: Routledge, 2019 (2017). Redford, S. A review of D. Fairchild Ruggles Tree of Pearls: The Extraordinary Architectural Patronage of the 13th-Century Egyptian Slave-Queen Shajar al-Durr. New York: Oxford University Press, 2020. Volmert, M. A review of Susan Stewart, The Ruins Lesson: Meaning and Material in Western Culture. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago and London, 2020.
Highlights
Its tangible nature cannot be ignored; the building derives from a distinct environmental and social context and comes to embody countless cultural meanings. Building materials and their varied historical connotations have been the subject of numerous material and construction histories that focus on either the development of specific materials in a given temporal epoch or building knowledge shared within a particular territory
The book consists of the English translation of the previously published La Matérialité de l’architecture (Picon 2018), as well as an updated introduction and conclusion
How do we understand materiality within the contemporary phenomena of global extractivism and the relentless plundering of natural resources? How can we analyze the clashes between the different regimes of materiality of hegemonic and oppressed societies? Can we extend the concept of materiality to expand our view from a human-centered to a multispecies perspective? Perhaps in the coming years we will acknowledge that architecture belongs to a realm that is much bigger than our own needs for expression and meaning, one that encompasses current social challenges, global emergencies, and natural crises
Summary
The wide range of case studies from Western architectural history gives the reader the impression that some examples have been and almost retrospectively selected to match the author’s theoretical definition of materiality (see chapters 3 and 4). This observation is intended not as a criticism of Jackson’s points, but as an example of how complex the question of Japan and the West has become, and of how thoroughly Japanese designers have created their own architectural culture that combines, refracts, and problematizes these terms.
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