The Materials Book

The Materials Book
Ilka Ruby, Andreas Ruby (Editors)
Ruby Press, January 2020



Paperback | 6-1/2 x 9 inches | 400 pages | English | ISBN: 978-3944074320 | €38.00

Publisher's Description:

With the world’s population growing by 2.6 people per second, by 2050 we will need twice as many homes, highways, streets, and schools–all kinds of built infrastructure—if we are to maintain our standard of living. That will require vast quantities of construction materials and untold emissions of carbon dioxide, both for building new structures and heating, cooling, and maintaining them over the decades. While people in construction have a growing sense of the environmental toll of their business, the shift toward more sustainable standards can seem frustratingly slow. Yet the good news is that the scale of the industry means construction can be both a problem and a solution, as even small changes in the way we build can have an outsize impact on global carbon output.

The Materials Book offers essays, case studies, and a catalog of building materials by more than 60 architects, engineers, and scientists from the world over on environmentally mindful and socially responsible use of materials and resources. The ideas range from centuries-old traditions to newly developed bio-materials, from low- tech, artisanal methods to advanced digital technologies, from incremental shifts to massive, top-down changes. There’s no single solution, no silver bullet, but rather a palette of ideas that, taken together, can serve as a guidebook for those who want to build in a better way—not in some distant future, but right now.

dDAB Commentary:

The title of this book and the simple design of its cover appear to indicate that it takes a general — if not generic — position to its subject. It looks like it contains information on materials, specifically in relation to buildings and also, as the quote indicates, with a sustainable bent to the use of materials. But I know that the "essays, case studies, and a catalog of building materials by more than 60 architects, engineers, and scientists from the world" arose from a highly specific, singular event: the 6th International LafargeHolcim Forum for Sustainable Construction, which took place one year ago in Cairo. I know because I was there; I was in the audience for the three-day conference, invited by the LafargeHolcim Foundation and summarized in two parts for World-Architects. (I won't go into detail on the conference here, so those articles are worth glancing at for background.)

While the facts of the book's origin should not diminish the contributions or the book's message, they do indicates how strongly The Materials Book is wed to an event whose curation (what was the theme of the conference? who was invited to speak? who ended up speaking? how did they respond to the theme? etc.) becomes that much more important. Put another way, by the time the definition of a theme and solicitation of speakers — the theme of the conference, by the way, was Re-materializing Construction — was done, even before the conference was held, the book's content was well on its way to being determined. Conferences are a mix of presentations and networking, the latter seeing people in attendance responding to the former, but publications devoted to them tend to omit the second aspect, instead exclusively presenting "papers" of the presentations.

Such is the case with The Materials Book, minus two pieces: an epilogue by Simon Upton and "A Collection of Building Components and Materials" by Something Fantastic. The first is the transcription of the talk he gave at the end of the conference, a critical response to the events he attended and conversations he had; it's the closest thing to what's missing from other conference publications and it fittingly provides the cover quote. The photo essay by Something Fantastic builds upon the numerous contributions of the conference participants, giving the book a strong alignment with the photogenic creations of contemporary architects. (The rest of the book has a fair number of images, but it's not a visually arresting book otherwise.) There are many commendable materials in "A Collection," but I'm guessing some people may glance at the cover and expect 400 pages of it, not the 100 provided. Nevertheless, the other 300 pages offer plenty to ponder: numerous positions on how architects can build now and in the future more intelligently and more sustainably.

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Author Bio:

Trained as an architect and an architecture historian, respectively, Ilka Ruby and Andreas Ruby work simultaneously as critics, curators, moderators, publishers and teachers, they exercise their practice as “discourse engineers”, dedicated to communicating architecture beyond the usual suspects of the discipline to a broad audience.

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