16. Materials

Materials

Materials are significant to understanding a building’s forms and why it is organized the way it is. Materials can carry meanings due to long time associations. They can create emotions in one who experiences a building. They are also significant in determining how a building can be constructed. Stone is good under compression, and so it had to be arranged in arches or other less tensile arrangements when used in building construction initially. For example, Stonehenge in Salisbury, England, uses a post and lintel construction, a simple technique of balancing a large piece of material over two pieces of material generally oriented vertically. The society that built it had limited knowledge of how to use stone, so they were limited by their knowledge and the material itself in what forms they could create. In the massing composition, small stones were used and arranged together to create specific ideas; in this case, “expand.” The close up in the image shows the difference in the composition of the rocks better. These stones were used because of their contrast and to create forms that both expressed the idea and lacked a uniform appearance, making them more interesting and thus using the form of the materials to their greatest extent.

From top to bottom:

A close up of a composition study of mass that is intended to show the idea “expand.”

The Stonhenge monolith in Salisbury, U.K. Photo by Andre Pattenden.