Architectural Design V-IX: Material Gesture - Stone (A. Holtrop)

Abstract

It all comes down to this: stone is a piece of rock made usable for men – a portion of rock used as building material.Rocks can be defined as extensive mineral bodies, composed of one or more minerals in varying proportions. Minerals are the building stones of the earth’s crust. They are stony mixtures of one or more elements (from copper, to iron, sulphur, gypsum and carbon).

Objective

When we take all aspects of the material into consideration – the geology, the sourcing, the industry, the different properties, the craftsmanship, the specialised techniques and the cultural significance – we can deploy the full potential of the inherent qualities of the material itself and our way of working it in what we call MATERIAL GESTURE. In this design studio, you will define your gestures of making and working with material(s) through research and experiment, and in response to the topic of the studio. You are required to produce an architecture that results from your specific engagement with the material and the spatial condition you construct with it. The architecture that results from this approach does not reference or represent something, but simply attempts to exist as a physical spatial reality in its own right. Your research should be supported by the knowledge made available by our studio, and engaged through you with the use of available resources and facilities at departments of the ETH and from external specialists/fabricators. Throughout the whole semester, and for your final presentation, we require that you work with physical (fragment) models of your building in the actual material(s). It is important, in this design studio, not to make a complete building, but to show and support the found values of the material engagement in a spatial way, based on the full potential of the inherent qualities of the material itself and your way of working it.

Content

Rocks can be defined as extensive mineral bodies, composed of one or more minerals in varying proportions. Minerals are the building stones of the earth’s crust. They are stony mixtures of one or more elements (from copper, to iron, sulphur, gypsum and carbon), that man has found in the earth’s surface and its rocks. Running to a depth from a minimum of four kilometeres under the oceans to one hundred kilometeres under the continents, the lithosphere constituting the ‘crust’ is made up of rock produced by solidified magma. The three main types of rock are igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, and all result from a continuous geological cycle of being formed, worn down into pieces, and then formed again. The importance of sourcing the raw material brought architects and sculptors to the ‘other’ site. Bernini had builtd a house next to one of the travertine quarries in Tivoli (close to Rome) to supervise the selection of stone with which he built most of his architecture and sculptures. He contributed to a period spanning more than twenty centuries, in which travertine is the construction material for many monumental buildings in Rome, such as the Colosseum. Michelangelo, until his death in 1564, repeatedly spent many months in the marble quarries of Carrara, in order to secure the best sections of stone for his sculptures. He even had a road built to transport the gigantic blocks, which ended near what is today the bathing resort of Forte dei Marmi.

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