Building Identity: Architecture’s material significations - session co-chair

How do building materials shape identity? Building materials have the power to transform the urban landscape and nourish human imagination. Beyond technical factors and availability, materials are loaded with significations. They carry associations that constantly evolve through new layers added by changing historical, socio-cultural, economic and technical factors.

As architecture invariably invokes power relations, material identity frequently runs parallel to them. The Roman marble trade is a well-known case of building materials in service of imperial power, laying a blueprint for materials to act in concert with colonial hegemonies. Beyond identifying with their place of extraction or production, building materials can also assume abstract values such as modernity or progress, as when copper was promoted by Anaconda Mining Company as a ‘Friend of Freedom’ by having been used to clad the Statue of Liberty (Scappettone 2018).

Moreover, materials such as granite, in close relation with local geology, have been pivotal in strengthening the project of nation-building, as during the National Romanticism of Nordic countries in the late 19th-century (Ringbom 198). Examples abound when considering building materials in defining inter-cultural relations, often with shifting cultural agencies, as in the use of imported Dutch clay tiles by Ottoman royalty in 18th-century Istanbul (Theunissen 2009). Materials can also become a place of productive cultural hybridisation, like brick for the ‘mudejár’ (Araguas 1987), a 19th-century invention to define the specificity of Spanish architecture in the 13th-16th centuries.

Such associations tell a story of contaminations and exchanges, of technical and cultural transfers. Cultural identity is not understood as a static entity - a signifier and a signified - but as affective and provisional, a process of negotiation, channelled through national, ethnic, and even highly personal histories.

The proposed session considers building materials as elements that participate in the shaping and representation of such identities from the early modern period to the 20th–century. More broadly, it is interested in how material identity is constructed vis-à-vis political and social relations, and how building materials have been used to assert, subvert or maintain such relations.

In recent years, there has been a renewed interest in the notion of materiality and its various interpretations in the history and theory of architecture (ex: Materiality in the History & Theory of Architecture, Ghent, 2022/23). At the same time, the complex and controversial question of ‘identity’ has made a strong comeback in art history (ex: Against Identity? Discourses of Art History and Visual Culture in Italy at the KHI-Florenz, 2021; Portraiture and the Construction of Identity, Universität Bonn, 2023), archaeology and anthropology (Conney et al. 2011, 2020; Brosius/Polit 2020)

This session aims for productive art historical discussions on materiality and identity as applied to the history of architecture. The issue of identity in architecture has been traditionally addressed through the notion of style. We would like to challenge this view and ask: What does it mean to think about cultural identity and architecture through the optics of building materials? What historiographical and methodological approach does it imply?