Stone Now Cuts Like Cheese

In November 1851, the German architect Gottfried Semper articulated the material crisis facing the arts. Semper had spent the previous year in London, helping design the Canadian, Danish, Swedish, and Ottoman pavilions at the Great Exhibition. The exhibition displayed industrial machinery and industrially-produced goods against colonial subjects and their crafts—maintaining a juxtaposition between the industrial and the primitive, colonizer and colonized. While this display of imperial confidence aimed to assert the superiority of the West, it also disguised a profound uncertainty about the materials produced by industrial civilization and the consequences of such malleable matter.

Semper understood architecture’s power to lie partly in the durable local customs of material use, lost now in the face of rapid industrial invention, and partly in the encounter between the “harsh, resistant material itself and the softness of the human hand”—asking what role material plays “now, when we can cut through the hardest stone like bread and cheese?” Industry rendered all materials plastic: effortlessly moldable in the hand of the architect and devoid of connection to history or place. To reveal the double impact of plasticity—that materials have lost both their resistance and their situatedness—Semper relies upon a racialized framework. “For a complete historical picture, for cultural cross-comparison, and for general reflection alike,” he writes, “one only has to consider… all those works… which have been produced by peoples at a most basic level of human culture.” For Semper, the plight of the arts in modern times is defined in part by their comparison to the modes of primitive production also on display at the Great Exhibition.

The Great Exhibition imagined an age of plenty that depended not only on a command of new materials but also on their ability to command the imagination. For modern architecture, this power derived from the embrace of industrial production and materials, as Le Corbusier put forward in his 1923 book Toward a New Architecture.Le Corbusier, Toward a New Architecture (Mineola, NY: Dover Publications, 2013), 18. The power to shape the imagination was also strongly exemplified by the development of plastics. The mentality of progress—the timelessness and placelessness of the material that Semper identified—is the same one exploited by the oil industry in converting its own forms of excess and waste into ubiquitous and disposable plastics.

In Plastic Matter, Heather Davis explores “the ways that matter is understood to be plastic, in both the metaphorical and material senses, [and] the kinds of philosophical assumptions that fostered the conditions for plastic to emerge in the world in the first place.” The concept of plastic matter, Davis writes, “speaks to how the materiality of plastic has been imposed on to our expectations of matter more broadly, how matter itself has come to be produced as inherently pliable, disposable, and consumable.”Heather Davis, Plastic Matter (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2022), 9. This mentality results in a spatial dislocation organized along the same colonial lines as the 1851 Great Exhibition; the places and races of colonial subjugation in Semper’s day now bear the brunt of the environmental and health burden of our plastic mentality, in which the perceived malleability and disposability of matter underwrite an ethics of discard and waste. Since architects, too, are guilty of plastic thinking, and have indeed largely embraced it since the rise of modernism, architecture itself depends upon a willful blindness around these spatial arrangements.

The oil industry is banking on the failure of political institutions and the discipline of architecture to engage with the temporal and spatial blindness of plastic thinking. In The Future of Petrochemicals, the International Energy Agency estimates that, in the United States and Europe, the per capita consumption of fossil fuels due to the use of plastic will, by 2050, far outstrip consumption for transportation.International Energy Agency, The Future of Petrochemicals: Towards More Sustainable Plastics and Fertilisers (Paris: International Energy Agency, 2018), 97. The oil major BP recently predicted that 95 percent of the growth in demand for oil between now and the year 2040 will come from plastics.David Roberts, “Big Oil’s Hopes Are Pinned on Plastics. It Won’t End Well,” Vox, October 28, 2020, link. It may seem that the discourse around the future of architecture in 1851 could hardly resemble contemporary debates. However, the concerns with materials and production that preoccupied Semper after the Great Exhibition offer a way to understand how architecture is embedded in the world today: its material networks and its connections to colonial pasts, imperial presents, and environmental futures.