Building Material 19 Art & Architecture excerpts: Material Imprecision by Elizabeth Shotton

Material Imprecision

“…I began to wonder how I could use paint merely as material, as an industrial found object; I did not want to use it to make something else, to create an illusion…”
Richard Serra, Torqued Ellipses

There is a sense of delight about the primitive character of the concrete at the Monastery of Sainte-Marie de La Tourette. Yet perhaps delight is too passive a word to describe the condition, it is closer to revel: the impression that Le Corbusier is revelling in the rawness of the surface. One can still sense the very plasticity, the viscosity of the concrete in its prior state as it seeps unevenly down the formwork. A condition captured in stasis as an embodiment of experience and memory of its other nature.

Concrete is more often used in an illusionary way, detailed and executed with precision to ensure a surface that bears no association with either the material or the process. Yet it is an approach which effaces the very nature of the material itself. In contrast, the way in which the inherent duality of concrete is celebrated throughout Le Corbusier's work suggests a love of both the tectonic of the material and the hand of the maker, eschewing precision in deference to a more tangible embodiment of process.

Architects do not, as a rule, make but rather speculate about making, leaving the act itself to others. It is perhaps this distance from the process that leads to the common treatment of material as an instrument of graphic effect rather than an expression of material consequence. In contrast Serra, as a maker of both painting and sculpture, could readily understand the evocative power of the material itself. Serra’s attitude toward the exploration of paint as an artefact in and of itself is suggestive of a different reading of Le Corbusier's approach to making, that as a painter Le Corbusier could also have appreciated the nature and expressive potential of material. While the transfer of form and image between his work as a painter and his architecture is easily recognised there is perhaps another common preoccupation, that of a desire for a more candid expression of material consequence and the processes of making. As Le Corbusier himself once wrote, ironically in his publication Precisions, “Techniques are the very basis of poetry.”


Biography: Elizabeth Shotton

“In chronological order: economist, architect, architectural educator, writer, displaced Canadian.
That’s really all I can say about myself...”