ASA JOURNAL Vol.2 | 2018

All the prerequisites for every man-made object should
same as the rhetoric of modernist architecture elsewhere?
architectural forms generated by the structural principle, but
Both Semper and Bötticher placed a higher value on
lie in its material, purpose and construction, its form
A quick sketch of the 19th-century attitudes towards materials
they also need to be in accordance with the nature of the
artistic symbolism. Unlike Viollet-le-Duc who regarded the
should be consequent upon these prerequisites and not
in the following discussion will give an idea just how differing
materials used to make them. It is this proposition of French
imitation of a form used in one material to another as ‘un-
upon an independent preconceived idea. But above all,
ideas about materials have been.
Rationalists that each material brings out its own ‘truthful’
truthful’ to the nature of the materials, Semper argued that
workmanship should be as sound as possible; this
became the indispensable condition […].(2007, Vol. 1: 148)
After Muthesius returned to Germany, he was the one
who drove German architectural discussion forward by
turning to practical issues of craftsmanship, construction, and
‘Let brick to be brick, stone to be
stone, every material speaks in its
own language’: French Rationalist
In France, Rationalists held that architecture derives from a
form that helped to formulate one of the most well-known
axioms of modernist architects that new material would lead
to a new form of architecture.
‘To forget the material’: Gottfried Semper
and a process of symbolisation
the development of architecture derived from this very process
of metaphorical transformation; only as the nature of the
materials is ‘translated’ can symbolic meaning emerge. Just as
the meaning of the word spoken in one language can be translated
into another language, so too a particular symbolic
meaning in architecture is transferable between different
materials that he found integral to British arts and crafts
architecture.
However, this is not to say that Modernism was originated
in Britain (as Nikolaus Pevsner does in Pioneers of
Modern Design: From William Morris to Walter Gropius).
Though his association between the Arts and Crafts Movement
and the development of modernism is in certain respects still
valid, recent studies have given a much more comprehensive
view of the origins and development of modernism.
What is more intriguing is about the material – for if
it is so indispensable to architecture, we should ask how it
became an issue in architectural discourse, historically. Since
the mid-1980s onwards, the question about material has
returned to an architectural discussion so frequently that in
any talk on architecture or any building visit, it is almost
impossible not to hear somebody talk about ‘material’ or
‘materiality’. Our possible discussions about architecture
concerning material today such as ‘the true nature of the
material’, ‘the truthful expression of the material’ or ‘to put the
materials into limits’ as well as using the term like ‘dematerialisation’,
might lead one to take it for granted that they are a
part of an architect’s innate abilities, although this is far from
accurate.
The definition of architecture as an art of material was
a 19th-century creation. Although architects used materials
to make buildings for centuries, before the 19th century it did
not occur to any architect to describe their work in terms of
materials. The opportunity is taken here to look historically
at its basis and at the way in which it had been discussed in
relation to architecture. What then, we may ask, does it means
to say that architecture is the art of materials? Can we see the
determined system of structure. Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879,
fig 2) proposed that ‘all architecture proceeds from structure,
and the first condition at which it should aim is to make the
outward form accord with that structure’. (1959:3) In other
words, what is built takes second place to the system that was
adopted to build it. Structure, for Viollet, is irreducible, permanent,
surpassing beyond the life of the building itself; though
buildings decay, their structures endure, and it is possible to adopt
a structural system of old buildings. An example of this is the
system of vaulting of the thirteenth-century Gothic cathedrals
for a creation of new architecture. (fig 3)
Such a manner of reworking something old and translating
into a new form does not, according to Rationalist
principle, apply to materials. Viollet-le-Duc proposed that the
form of architecture, apart from being the outcome of the
structure, needs to communicate the characteristic of the
material of which it is made of. Viollet-le-Duc made this point
clear when he put it as follows:
Does it then follow that if we would make use of the
novel materials […], we should content ourselves with
substituting arches of cast or plate iron for arches of
stone? No, we may adopt the principle, but while adopting
it, since the material is changed, we should change the
form. (1959: 54)
Viollet-le-Duc’s question was in opposition to the then
current convention when a reproduction of the past styles was
common. What Viollet was against here is the mimicry of a
form used in one material for another material. Criticising
Auguste Boileau’s church (fig 4), whose form is that of Gothic,
but made out of cast iron, Viollet said ‘one should not give to
cast iron the appearance of stone, for any change of
The second distinctive idea of materials that contributed to
modernist discourse belongs to the building culture of the
nineteenth-century German-speaking countries. In his theory
of style, Gottfried Semper (1803-1879, fig 5) proposed that the
ultimate goal of architecture is to bring out symbolism. While
this impulse for the symbolic is to be realised in the actual
physicality of the work, Semper, however, argued that it is
crucial to forget about the properties natural to the materials
in order to reach a level of symbolic creation. ‘The destruction
of reality, of the material’, Semper said, ‘is necessary if a form
is to emerge as a meaningful symbol, as an autonomous human
creation’. (2004: 439) A little further he continued:
Only complete technical perfection, only the judicious
and proper treatment of the material according to its
properties, and above all only the consideration of these
properties in the act of shaping form can cause the
material to be forgotten, can liberate the artistic creation
from it, can elevate even a simple landscape painting
to become a high work of art. […] the appear of a work
of art should make us forget the means and the materials
by which and through which it appears and works
and be sufficient to itself as form – to demonstrate this
is the most difficult task of a theory of style. (2004, 439)
Semper’s rejection of the physical properties of materials
is perhaps best illustrated by another German theorist, Carl
Bötticher, when he gave an example of stone:
the intention here is not to characterize the stone as dead
stone but, on the contrary, to let the dead substance of
the stone fade away […] As soon as the stone is covered by
a form analogous to its idea (i.e., an art-form), the concept
of the stone has disappeared and that of the analogue
media. (fig 6)
‘Bring forth the materials’: Ruskin and
Heidegger
The next architectural idea of materials, we now consider, was
proposed by the nineteenth-century British architectural
thinker John Ruskin (1819-1900, fig 7). In The Seven Lamps
of Architecture, Ruskin’s view of materials was that the material
on its own was not active in the creation of architecture. While
Ruskin would have agreed that different materials possess
different physical properties and that no material is quite the
same as another, for him, what was lacking in raw materials
were intellectual thought and human labour. For Ruskin, only
by these extrinsic elements employed in the fabrication process
can unanimated materials be rendered into a sophisticated,
lively object of architecture, and it is in this capacity of turning
‘inert substance’ into a ‘life’ that set architecture apart from
other forms of production. In The Lamp of Life, Ruskin put his
idea as follows:
this is especially true of all objects which bear upon
them the impress of the highest order of creative life,
that is to say, of the mind man: they become noble or
ignoble in proportion to the amount of the energy of
that mind which has visibly been employed upon them.
But most peculiarly and imperatively does the rule hold
with respect to the creations of Architecture, which
being properly capable of no other life than this, and
being not especially composed of things pleasant in
themselves, – as music of sweet sounds, or painting of
fair colors, but of inert substance, – depend, for their
dignity and pleasurableness in the utmost degree, upon
the vivid expression of the intellectual life which has
been concerned in their production. (1865: 123)
concern with materials as having a theoretical context specific
materials must bring about a change of forms.’ (Viollet-le-Duc,
takes its place. (as quoted in Herrmann, 1984: 143)
to a particular place, in a particular time, or was it just the
1885; as quoted in Legault, 1997: 25) For Viollet, not only are
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วารสารสถาปัตยกรรมของสมาคมสถาปนิกสยาม
ในพระบรมราชูปถัมภ์ Issue 02 / 2018
Academic Journal of The Association of Siamese Architects
under the Royal Patronage
วารสารสถาปัตยกรรมของสมาคมสถาปนิกสยาม
ในพระบรมราชูปถัมภ์ Issue 02 / 2018
Academic Journal of The Association of Siamese Architects
under the Royal Patronage