Voices

As far as possible hand throwing gave way to production in moulds.

I designed an exterior stair for a house in Casey Key, Florida, that Eric fabricated out of fiberglass in his boat shop in Bristol, Rhode Island. Located in a hurricane zone, the house's remote site is prone to extreme winds, salt water, and solar exposure. The lightweight stair made out of fiberglass weighs less than 300 pounds, can be carried by two people and transported in one piece. The tread consists of seven layers: three on top and three at the bottom with a balsawood core in the center. The stair hangs with ¼ in / 63.5 mm fiberglass rods, constructed like fishing rods, supported by the roof.

LIGO's instruments showed without doubt that a series of gravitational waves, arriving after billions of years of travel from the universe's outer edges, had passed by and through Earth and, for the fleeting moment of their passage, changed our planet's shape.

Structural laminated glass, composed of three sheets of chemically tempered glass and layers of polymer film, is used for all five surfaces of the box and allows views unobstructed by structural members or opaque floors.

A spinning cloth pad at the arm's end, smeared with a variety of progressively less and less abrasive substances (from diamond slurry to jeweler's rouge to cerium oxide), was then lowered onto the face of the glass plate.

As a transparent building material, glass plays a key part in architecture, because its invisibility means that it can almost dissolve the material quality of the building. It forms an effective spatial conclusion, while fulfilling the basic human need for daylight.

Glass is a case in point in that it possesses the potential for a wide range of phenomenological effects and is highly sensitive to the way in which it is handled. Its potential for transparency is dependent on the manner of its exposure to light, the angle from which it is being seen, and the chemical and physical characteristics given to it in its manufacturing. Its eventual appearance (or disappearance) is dependent on factors beginning with its initial chemical recipe, through parameters of its installation, and finally in the temporal conditions at the moment at which it is being viewed.

That unboxing, handlebar-straightening and assorted nut-tightening marked the end of this bike's journey of over twenty thousand kilometres to start its working life speeding me to and from work.

So accurate was Henry Maudslay's bench micrometer that it was nicknamed 'the Lord Chancellor,' as no one would dare have argued with it.

John 'Iron-Mad' Wilkinson, whose patent for boring cannon barrels for James Watt marked both the beginning of the concept of precision and the birth of the Industrial Revolution.

It had a japanned surface on its cast-iron body, covered in gold, flower-patterned ornamental scrollwork — modified from motifs obtained in a pattern book and applied to the surface by female painters. This decoration allowed it to blend into the living area of the domestic environment.

At one end of the spectrum is cast iron or pig iron (so named because when it was first made it would set in a series of channels and moulds resembling a litter of piglets being nursed by their mother). This is a brittle metal with about 3–4 per cent carbon. At the other end is wrought iron, soft enough to be beaten with a hammer and very pure, with infinitesimally small quantities of carbon. In the middle is steel. In steel, those carbon atoms nestle neatly between the iron atoms creating a strong, immoveable lattice. Too much carbon and the structure of the lattice is imperfect, so the metal can easily shatter (cast iron). Too little and the iron atoms can slide over each other without much resistance (wrought iron). Counterintuitively, you want your iron to be nearly pure, but not entirely pure.

Smelting is necessary, for by this means earths, solidified juices, and stones are separated from the metals so that they obtain their proper colour and become pure, and may be of great use to mankind in many ways. When the ore is smelted, those things which were mixed with the metal before it was melted are driven forth, because the metal is perfected by fire in this manner.

Copper is the great, unseen substrate that supports the modern world as we know it. Without it, we are quite literally left in the dark. If steel provides the skeleton of our world and concrete its flesh then copper is civilisation's nervous system, the circuitry and cables we never see but couldn't function without.

NOX worked with GKD Metal Fabrics to construct a facade made of Escale, a stainless pliable mesh that becomes rigid only after locking into its supporting steel structures.

Iron is used not only in hand to hand fighting, but also to form the winged missiles for hurling engines, sometimes for lances, sometimes even for arrows. I look upon it as the most deadly fruit of human ingenuity. For to bring Death to men more quickly we have given wings to iron and taught it to fly.

Manufacturing has become like the sewage system: essential for our lives, yet out of mind until things go wrong.

China has produced more steel in the past decade than the United States has since the beginning of the twentieth century. China's ascent to the pinnacle of steel production is much the same as its story elsewhere in the Material World: near-total dominance.

It was out of the relatively small-scale, craft-based operation of concrete construction that the next significant development, steel reinforcement, emerged. The story here was marked by an almost total absence of theory, and was conducted by inserting pieces of iron and steel into the concrete and hoping for the best. Architects and engineers showed no interest in these developments at all, remaining largely aloof and indifferent to them long after they had become accepted within the building trade.

Steel, lightweight, wholly reliant upon specialists from outside the traditional building trades, had many advantages in the modernity stakes over reinforced concrete — heavy, reliant upon carpenters to make the formwork, and with a need for much unskilled labour to realize it.

With improved methods of steel pressing, the 'white' goods or kitchen appliances they produced changed from having an iron frame to being made entirely without joints.

Henry Ford's ability to combine three factors: the inclusion of armory practice in his manufacturing; the use of sheet-metal stamping; and the use of line assembly. He evolved a system of manufacture that perfected the concept of standardization, expressed in his belief that all his cars should look identical.

The development in steel which had one of the most dramatic impacts upon furniture design, however, was that of seamless tubular steel. This technique was developed by an inventor called Mannesman, and it provided a new material with the combined advantages of being light, strong and, above all, modern. The appropriation of tubular steel by German and Dutch furniture designers associated with the Bauhaus, and the designs of Mart Stam, Marcel Breuer and Mies van der Rohe in this material have repeatedly been chronicled.

The design approach and methodology developed there was understood as overcoming styles, although in fact, their strict application gave rise to a new style, which became the symbol of a small intellectual and progressive stratum of the population, who demonstrated it in their houses and apartments through tubular steel furniture and spartan bookcases.

Zirconium came much later. It's more of an aesthetic metal for me, with its ability to grow a black zirconium oxide layer.

Although lithium-based batteries can store many times more power than lead-based ones, lithium in its solid state has an unfortunate habit of bursting into flames when batteries using it go through multiple charge/recharge cycles. Creating a battery that used lithium in ionic rather than metallic form solved this problem. And that's why the batteries that power nearly all our electronic devices and EVs are called lithium-ion.

A new technology that was lighter, could store more energy and was quicker to recharge than lead acid was developed: the lithium-ion battery. The second was our tragically late realisation that curbing CO2 emissions to ensure our survival on this planet would probably require us to stop driving around in fossil-fuel-burning mobile power stations.

This is a magical metal: alongside hydrogen and helium it was one of the three primordial elements created in the Big Bang, making it one of the oldest pieces of matter in the universe. No other element has quite the same combination of lightness, conductivity and electrochemical power. No other metal is quite as good at storing energy. So light it floats in oil, so soft you could cut it with a kitchen knife but so reactive that it fizzes and bangs when it makes contact with water and air, it is one of those materials you don't ever see in its elemental form outside of a chemistry lab. And this reactivity helps explain why lithium is at the heart of the most powerful batteries, and therefore the heart of the twenty-first-century world.

It takes an enormous machine to allow for the making of something so infinitesimally tiny as a computer chip.

This is engineering at an unbelievable level of precision and complexity.

After oxygen, which attaches itself to pretty much everything else, silicon is comfortably the most common element in the earth's crust. Given this ubiquity, it's perhaps unsurprising we've found so many different things to do with it. We dig and quarry and blast more sand out of the earth than any other material. Yet the economic enigma of sand is that in certain guises it is very precious, so much so that the European Union deems its purest, most elemental forms a critical raw material.

Decades of growth, gone in sixty seconds.

The perceived value of a material is not always inherent within itself, but in the care, difficulty, and craft of its treatment within a culture. Taking a material outside of its established architectural application and studying its properties helps to reconsider its perceived value. Similar to Shigeru Ban's repurposing of paper tubes, an architect can find architectural value in a material where there was none.

Plastic water bottles are rigged with tape to the body, to the chest, shoulders, and arms, protecting against the blows of the nightsticks. One type of street-level citizen-making, with materials from the local deli, is set against the police force's sophisticated design, equipment, and training.

Radio cabinets soon became an obvious medium for plastics, both because they were an easy shape to get out of a mould and because they were new products without an established visual identity.

Suppliers have gradually acknowledged the urgent need to look at alternative, rapidly renewable resources. Nowhere is this more obvious than in the plastics industry, which is looking for alternatives to petroleum-based polymers.

Plastics are the most recent group of materials in building history. Their development from natural raw materials such as rubber started in the mid-19th century, but their use in architecture did not reach its provisional peak until the futuristic designs of the 1960s. Plastics had a poor reputation until the late 1980s because of technical faults in the material, but this has now largely been overcome.

The vast majority of hydrocarbons still end up in the tanks of vehicles, and most natural gas is used to generate power and heat. Yet the remaining 10 per cent — the by-product of refining oil and gas — plays a disproportionate role in our lives. These products clothe us and feed us. They help keep us clean and healthy, and are embedded in the vast majority of items available for purchase today. They are among the newest human creations we know, yet it is impossible to imagine the world without them. They help us conserve energy but they are produced from a fossil fuel.

There is polypropylene, flexible enough to be used as the lid of a flip-top bottle but hard enough to be formed into furniture.

Kuma, in his work, challenges us to look at stone in a way that is truer to its new life as a wall component.

Michelangelo's sculptural mimetic modulation is exemplified in the Pietà. The continuity of the marble surface aptly represents both cloth and skin. The highly refined polish possible with Carrara marble takes advantage of reflected light. The level of light reflections, similar over the different surfaces of the Pietà, accentuates the continuity of form, giving softness to the stone.

Concrete is modern. This is not just to say that now it is here, when before it wasn't, but that it is one of the agents through which our experience of modernity is mediated. Concrete tells us what it means to be modern.

From many of the usual category distinctions through which we make sense of our lives — liquid/solid, smooth/rough, natural/artificial, ancient/modern, base/spirit — concrete manages to escape, slipping back and forth between categories.

An element of revulsion seems to be a permanent, structural feature of the material.

Concrete's inherent backwardness, its earthbound origins in the peasant process of pisé, is never far away, and always ready to reclaim it back from the engineers and technicians.

Concrete is mud. I work with concrete not against it. I like mud.

Concrete is the universal building material of our age. It has marked the development of 20th-century architecture decisively. It is an ambivalent material: used in liquid form, it is valued for its strength as artificial stone. Outwardly it shows the formwork rather than its own structure. Some people like concrete for its purist aesthetic, others find it brutal and inhuman.

Go back three centuries and you'd be much more likely to have close, even personal connections with those who made the things you needed — from tailors to potters, butchers to bakers, blacksmiths to carpenters. I am not naively painting some rose-tinted picture of pre-industrial revolution life, but a shorter distance between production and consumption had some advantages. Local production made visible to the immediate community any waste or pollution being generated in the process; we would know about poor working conditions because the people enduring them would be from our village or town.

Nothing should be made by man's labour which is not worth making or which must be made by labour degrading to the makers.

Although he worked with others on designs for furniture, Morris was, in the end, a designer of surfaces, and his textiles, wallpapers and carpets testify to his skill as a pattern-maker.

Imagine learning how this abundant material is now used in the design of bicycle frames. Its lightness, stability and elasticity has made it an ideal material to withstand the stresses and strains of cycling and to absorb any vibrations from the road. How have perceptions of these everyday materials shifted so dramatically and what are the factors that led this everyday plant material to be reimagined in new ways?

Fashionable furniture of the eighteenth century was dominated by the use of mahogany.

As the humidity affects the properties of massive wood, the use of plywood, chipboard, or MDF — materials made to limit the movement of the fibers — can be of great help to take shortcuts. A cabinet drawer made from massive wood requires a lot of knowledge of the wood's properties, whereas the equivalent made from plywood less so.

Wood draws little heat out of the human body when touched, and so is experienced as pleasant, sensual and warm.

It is not this or that tangible steel or brass machine which we want to get rid of, but the great intangible machine of commercial tyranny which oppresses the lives of all of us.

Matter is the wild part of 'raw material,' before it is domesticated into cultured materials, aligned with human purpose. Even if I just need a plank to use as an improvised cutting board, the wood I will find in my local hardware store will probably be pine or cedar, not ebony or sandalwood.

New materials and new techniques broadened the vocabulary of the designer.

Metal was not the only material to encourage the emergence of a modern furniture aesthetic. New forms of machine-processed wood, such as bent and sheet plywood and laminated wood, also encouraged designers to experiment with new forms. The Scandinavian designers Alvar Aalto and Bruno Mathsson provided some of the most striking experiments in this area, and Marcel Breuer, working for the British company Isokon, also produced some memorable items.

Swiss bike maker BMC offers light, strong bicycle frames that are nanocomposites made of carbon fibers, resin, and carbon nanotubes. Traditional carbon fiber frames have been found weakest in the areas between the fibers. With the inclusion of carbon nanotubes, the strength-to-density ratio of the resin/fiber matrix increases significantly, resulting in lighter components and/or improved strength.

It is filled with gears that allow for the adjustment of the tool or tools to tiny fractions of an inch, to permit the exact machining of the parts to be cut.

The connection of disparate surfaces by co-planarity or blushing generates 'teething' across surfaces. The term 'teeth' describes any connection where surfaces are tangent or have coincident control vertices.

The absolute and decisive effect of formwork upon exposed concrete means that it is how this is built that largely determines the appearance of the result.

Formwork carpentry has been the Achilles heel of concrete's claim to need no skill. From concrete's nineteenth-century origins, formwork was the one stage of concrete production where it was impossible to dispense with skilled labour — and since this compromised the claims that concrete represented an 'alternative' mode of construction, advocates of concrete generally made no reference to this element of the work.

On an architectural scale, concrete is the only material available without inherent form, making it capable of taking on the modulations imposed upon it. While metals and plastics can be cast as well, this process is often too expensive to play out in architecture. Metals, glass, plastics, stone, and wood are all available as products with industrially produced form, in largely orthogonal geometries that makes products inexpensive to the building trade. These preformed orthogonal geometries can be manipulated to create modulated forms just as fluid in appearance as concrete.

The extruded glass tubes with a prismatic internal profile gather, concentrate, and display ambient light while refracting views and reflections.

While metal had developed as a replacement for wood in the move towards large-scale production, plastics were developed as an even cheaper alternative. As such, they gradually replaced metal, particularly as the material for the body-shells of technological products. As early as 1929 Raymond Loewy had used bakelite as the material for his restyled Gestetner duplicating machine, and quite quickly pressed metal was replaced by this new material, which was cheaper and easier to manufacture in bulk.

It is something made by other men, men of a different race, a race of smiths, of metallurgical, industrial men. Architects still work with water; they model on the spot; they are sculptors who work through others. This different race does not work on the spot; it works with fire instead of water and does not model but forges. Afterwards it builds up a gigantic mechanism; it works with bolts and wrenches, with welds, with hammers that do not chisel but pound.

Designers usually want less recalcitrance in their materials. Unpredictable matter is cumbersome when trying to align complex plans with industrial production, and designers often treat their materials as they treat their laborers. Predictable standards are needed.

Oily, noisy, visceral, precise, profitable, sophisticated, metal-bashing manufacturing. This is analogue manufacturing at its best.

Cloud Gate is set apart by the extreme precision achieved and the erasure of the panel through continuous welding.

In Predator, 250 CNC-milled foam panels are fabricated in order to serve as molds for the vacuum-formed plastic sheets. Vacuum forming, a type of thermoforming, uses heat to permanently change the surface of a plastic sheet.

Topological surfaces are modeled as curve networks: curves that pass through or hang from control vertices, or points, in two directions. The U and V directions describe the bias of the curves. By duplicating two curves in the same position and then spreading the control vertices apart we were able to place shreds or slices that pull apart and then fuse back together on the surface. In this way the geometry of the apertures and openings is coincident with the geometry of the surface.

As with most bikes of this type, the frame is made from a set of welded aluminium tubes. The spoked wheel rims are pressed from aluminium, and the gears and brakes have been bought by the bike company pre-assembled from a specialised manufacturer (in this case the Shimano Corporation of Japan). Various other bits — mudguards, lights, seat — are bought in from other dedicated suppliers.

The opposite end of the spectrum today is the Monobloc plastic chair. Available for less than three dollars throughout the world, it signalises a supposed equality among its owners. The idea of democratization expressed here is reflected in the prodigious volumes in which it is produced: the number in existence around the world is estimated to exceed one billion.

The pieces designed by Magistretti, Gardello, the Castiglioni brothers, Vigano and others at the 1946 RIMA exhibition of Popular Furnishings were simple and inexpensive, modelled on traditional types such as the deck chair and the safari chair.

Firmly in the tradition of classical modernism, Dieter Rams followed the motto 'Less design is more design,' a direct reference to the 'Less is more' of Mies van der Rohe, whose affirmation of the International Style was so influential for architecture after World War II.

Lighting design provided a dual opportunity for expression in the exaggerated praying-mantis forms of the lights themselves, and in their use for creating shadows and environmental effects.

Apple is currently the example par excellence. Steve Wozniak, one of the company's founders and Steve Jobs's technical partner, still wonders how the company became 'a question of style.'

With plastic packaging we no longer had to melt down as much sand into glass or chop down as many trees and turn them into paper and card. Plastics could protect endangered species much as kerosene had protected the world's sperm whale population in the early days of oil.

One of the first American institutions to pick up on the concept of product semantics for training was the renowned Cranbrook Academy near Detroit. Eliel Saarinen and Charles Eames had taught there in the 1930s and 1940s; graduates included Harry Bertoia and Florence Knoll.

The addition of a chromed surface to steel in small consumer goods also became a feature of the 1930s. It served as a means of preventing steel from rusting and as a means of turning mass-produced goods into decorative items.

But its standards were disastrously imperfect, inaccurate, and wrong.

The pencil of nature (that is what Fox Talbot called photography) would also become the pencil of architecture.

Herzog & de Meuron's Eberswalde Technical School Library engages with the process of concrete's transition from liquid to solid with the use of cure-retardant.

A concrete structure is very like a photograph.