11 minute read
Material World
“Domestic timber use has continued to outstrip domestic supply: currently, 80% of timber and timber products used in the UK are imported, and the UK has continued to demonstrate reluctance to reckon with this imbalance. Despite the continued efforts of the Forestry Commission, established under the 1947 Forestry Act by the post-war government, the UK’s forest cover remains well below the European average.“ - Extract from the exhibition film on timber. © Ben Cruise
The Building Centre was founded in order to understand the impact of materials – Vanessa Norwood introduces its new exhibition which celebrates the organic.
In 1925, the architect George Grey Wornum asked Frank Yerbury, then secretary of the Architectural Association, for space in the school’s basement to show a client for whom he was designing a house three brick samples. The client left but the bricks stayed, with materials added to form a growing collection. The materials bureau became a resource for the school’s students, flourishing until it became apparent that a larger space was needed. The Building Centre was born. 158 New Bond Street became the Building Centre’s first home and where it opened its doors to the public on Wednesday 7 September 1932.
Frank Yerbury became the first Managing Director, and held the ambition that the Centre would connect the world of manufacturing with the practice of architecture, with the aim of demonstrating the best contemporary products and materials available. In a unique offering, the Centre urged visitors to ‘discover here how to create useful and beautiful structures’ with product displayed in sections ranging from floor coverings to glass. Yerbury was a passionate advocate for new architecture. It’s easy to trace his influence in the early output of the Building Centre. A 1936 exhibition ‘Women in Architecture’ made manifest Yerbury’s intention that the Building Centre should use its platform to expand further discussion and inclusion in the profession. An enthusiastic photographer, Yerbury was one of the first to publish photographs of the work of Le Corbusier in the UK. In 1959, Yerbury was able to share his admiration for the architect with an exhibition first shown at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool. The show featured models, drawings and photographs of works by Le Corbusier. In just five weeks, over 37,000 people visited the exhibition at the Centre.
An image of the low-cost housing competition that asked entrants to design threebedroom cottages. The winning proposal by one Mr N.E Leeson was built in London’s Aldwych
© The Building Centre
Materials use was central to the Centre’s output. An ambitious early project saw the Centre secure support from the Prince of Wales to launch a low-cost housing competition that asked entrants to design threebedroom cottages. The winning proposal by one Mr N.E Leeson was built in London’s Aldwych, with the pair of brick cottages visited by over 20,000 people before being closed in September 1933. In response to the project’s success, the Building Centre introduced a low-cost housing section in its materials library. In 1937, Yerbury stated: ‘The basis of the Centre must always be an Exhibition of Materials and the policy should be that only such things are shown are of value to the building industry and the public’. During the decades that followed, the Building Centre expanded its materials library, with the intention of appealing to both a professional audience and the public.
Yerbury understood the need to see and touch materials to best understand their role in the built environment. In my four-year tenure as Creative Director at the Building Centre, the public programme created a platform for contemporary architecture’s leading practitioners to showcase materials that are both beautiful and sustainable.
Commissioning and curating a series of exhibitions focusing on the materials that make up our built environment referenced and honoured Yerbury’s intention that the Centre would exist to ‘stimulate public interest in building’.
The public programme became a place to see, learn and discover more about how best to responsibly make our built environment. In 2019, ‘Forest of Fabrication – dRMM: pioneers of timber architecture’ demonstrated the possibilities of modern timber construction through the lens of Stirling Prize-winning architectural practice dRMM. The exhibition featured twenty-four of dRMM’s projects that pushed design boundaries through their exploration of the opportunities and challenges of timber structures. The show had a second iteration at RIBA North in Liverpool.
‘The New Stone Age’ exhibition of 2020 – featured in the Landscape Journal of the same year – shone a light on stone’s serious sustainability credentials. With the ability to reduce a project’s embodied carbon by an incredible 90% compared to typical steel or concrete frames, ‘The New Stone Age’ was a celebration of structural stone, of its potential and beauty as well as its inherent sustainability. Curated by Amin Taha of Groupwork, Steve Webb of Webb Yates and Pierre Bidaud from The Stonemasonry Company Ltd, the exhibition surveyed the contemporary use of structural stone, helping to become a catalyst in the conversation about stone.
More than ever, there is a pressing need for the materials that make up our built environment to adhere to best practice with regard to environmental impact, labour issues and transparency of supply chain. The new show I have commissioned at the Building Centre is: ‘Homegrown: Building a Post Carbon Future’. This features three specially commissioned films made by Material Cultures, reimagining how we use land at a local, regional and national scale. Material Cultures’ brilliant and timely investigations into how material and industrial cultures shape our world are more relevant than ever. A not-for-profit organisation led by Summer Islam, Paloma Gormley and George Massoud, Material Cultures’ work aims to demonstrate that low carbon local materials can be more affordable and durable that globally-sourced, petrochemicalderivative materials.
Exhbition curators George Massoud, Summer Islam, Paloma Gormley
© Ryan Prince
Material Cultures note that our fertile landscape is constrained by pressures from farming, woodland and housing, all of which need reimagining as we move into a post- carbon future.
‘Homegrown’ asks how we can critically reassess our relationship with the built environment by engaging with our landscape and its materials holistically. The project explores the relationship between materials and supply chains, and addresses the opportunity and potential of locally grown, plant-based construction materials that are cultivated across the UK. Reorientating the construction economy towards plant-based materials is going to be critical to transforming the industry for a post-carbon-built environment.
Hazel stump after coppicing. “For timber to play a meaningful part in the future of construction, we will have to get into the habit of using it sparingly, treating material-hungry mass timber products as rare luxury, rather than a standard part of the construction palette.” - Extract from Timber film
© Material Cultures
Uniquely, this exhibition exposes the consequences of the biobased material supply chains that exist today, envisioning how they might impact our landscapes, cultures of building and ways of organising.
The exhibition presents a holistic view of sustainable construction, rethinking our relationship to each other and our landscapes. In a nod to the Building Centre’s origins, Homegrown displays a miniature materials library of UK grown biomaterials alongside those made with agricultural waste from UK farms or waste by-products of national industry.
Climate change and the awareness that our planet’s resources are finite necessitate a radical shift in thinking. Were Frank Yerbury here today, I imagine he would be concerned about the challenges of the climate emergency and aware of the vital role materials play in building a better and fairer future for us all.
Maria Dragoi interviews
George Massoud one of the members of Material Cultures
You just released a book, ‘Material Reform’. How does it sit amidst your upcoming exhibition at the Building Centre and continuing practice?
Our upcoming exhibition at the Building Centre expands on some of the themes in our book – how the construction industry is complicit in our environmental and social crisis, through its extractive systems of design, production and inhabitation of buildings, and how a shift to biobased regenerative construction materials is necessary to repair the damage we have done. We focus on straw and timber, and their operative role in a decarbonised future from the scale of the molecular to the territorial by producing three commissioned films all of which explore the impact of our material cultures on our land. We also plan on exhibiting a prefabricated thatched building fragment that demonstrates the potentials for using bio-based materials at scale.
The book is a series of ongoing conversations we are having in the studio – themes, questions and concepts we engage with to address the degenerative impact of our industry. The work we do in design, education and research rejects extractivist economics and rethinks our relationship to the land for the benefit of all life.
There seems to be a trend in associating sustainable materials with downscaling and moving local – do you agree? What does this mean when competing with big industry?
Not necessarily – there needs to be a cultural shift to see the systemic transformation we are advocating for – its goals, power structures and rules need to change. It is difficult to imagine a regenerative future without reimagining our relationship to land – access to it, how we use it and its management. A shift away from the extractive models and cultures of consumption that have proven to be destructive for people and the integral ecosystems we are part of. I don't think a low-impact approach and industry are in opposition to each other. Smaller scale industries that can be replicated everywhere create a more resilient biosphere in our regional environments.
Inherently, locally manufactured materials build value into the economic and social systems in the places in which we build. The shorter supply chain also means less energy is spent in transporting materials. It also requires the distribution of construction and manufacturing skills across an economy, not just in urban or manufacturing centres. These are all things that are good for rural economies, but they are also good for our buildings – the less energy we spend in building the better, and a more resilient construction skills economy can coalesce around more locally sourced natural materials.
Having the option to specify sustainable materials is crucial for practitioners – how do you see these techniques being implemented on a larger scale? How does that shift happen within industry?
Well, we first need to move away from a “sustainable” mindset to a regenerative one – we should expect much more than mitigating negatives. Architects should be held accountable for the materials they are specifying, and their long-term implications. If a product is branded “green” or “sustainable”, we should interrogate its networks of extraction and production – rebranding certain products, or offsetting carbon emissions is not enough.
The entire industry and its supply chains need to be involved in a transition to more circular and biobased construction economy, from contractors to policy makers, saw-mills to construction skills academies. The most effective levers, however, are in the hands of the state – policy level change is one of the strongest tools we have to incentivise change in what is an otherwise conservative industry.
Architects are uniquely engaged with different actors along the supply chain and across the industry. Through our own work and the way we engage with other actors we can demonstrate both best practice and also demand better practice from our collaborators.
What are some common misconceptions about working with sustainable materials?
People think that buildings made of natural materials do not last. This is ironic considering some of the oldest buildings in the world are made of natural materials. It is difficult to move away from this mindset – modernism did a very good job at using materials such as glass, steel or concrete to represent permanence, durability, power and control.
What do you hope to see for the future of mainstream material culture?
Scaling-up is impact – we are developing building systems that facilitate the application of biobased materials at a larger scale, taking advantage of developments in fabrication technology.
What can people not involved in industry or architecture do to take steps towards a more sustainable future?
Untangle, learn and expose the destructive cultures of our current modus operandi!
‘Homegrown: Building a Post Carbon Future’ was made possible by the kind support of Built by Nature.
Vanessa Norwood
A curator, writer and consultant, and was the Building Centre’s Creative Director from 2018 to 2022
Maria Dragoi
A writer, curator, and painter. She is interested in the intersections between technology and material cultures, housing, and ecology.
