Material Variance - by Lola Ben-Alon (Paperback)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

Raw building materials are inherently variable. This variability shapes global supply chains, labor relations, infrastructure​, and trade networks. And yet, within the context of building design, materials are often treated as static commodities. Material Variance resists this perception, unfolding instead a framework for designing through and with living matter that is uncertain, messy, and dynamic. The book insists on materials not as passive inputs but as unruly agents, shaped by and shaping the political, ecological, and cultural processes around them.

Convening material researchers, building scientists, architects, and artists, Material Variance aims to collectively expand architecture and design's material lexicon and unsettle its disciplinary boundaries. The book interrogates the assumptions of refinement, standardization, and technocratic control to advance alternative fabrication practices, alchemical processes, and methods for working with indeterminate matter. From poetic field recordings to scientific analyses, the book opens up a space for thinking across theory and practice, across geological particles and living species, and across various scales, forms, and practices.

This edition of Material Variance features three distinct covers, each one printed with a unique matrix, ink, paper stock, and tip-in, extending the notion of variance to production of the object itself.

With contributions from David Benjamin, Ethan Bordeau, Olga Beatrice Carcassi, Caitlin Charlet, Felecia Davis, Andrés Jaque, Leslie Lok, Mae-ling Lokko, Claudia Marais, Adam Marcus, V. Mitch McEwen, Ruth Morrow, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Ronald Rael, Jonsara Ruth, and Laia Mogas-Soldevila.

About the Author

Lola Ben-Alon is a material designer, engineer, and scholar of architectural technology. She is Assistant Professor at Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), where she directs the Natural Materials Lab and the Building Technology curriculum. Her research examines raw earth- and plant-based materials through design experimentation, fabrication, and environmental life cycle studies. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Architecture Biennale, Tallinn Architecture Biennale, Indian Ceramics Triennial, and Craft Contemporary Museum in Los Angeles, and published across design and scientific journals. Ben-Alon's scholarship bridges craft and technology, material traditions and ecology, advancing dialogues between architecture, science, and the natural environment. She holds a PhD in Architecture from Carnegie Mellon University and degrees in Structural Engineering and Construction Management from the Technion.

Andrés Jaque is Dean and Professor of Columbia University's Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (GSAPP), and founder of the New York- and Madrid-based architecture practice Office for Political Innovation (OFFPOLINN). He holds a PhD in architecture, and is a practitioner, writer, and curator, internationally known for pioneering architecture as an entanglement of bodies, technologies, and environments. His work approaches materiality as relational, transscalar, and intrinsically political. His books include Superpowers of Scale (Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2020), PHANTOM. Mies as Rendered Society (Fundació Mies Van der Rohe, 2013), and Mies y la gata Niebla. Ensayos sobre arquitectura y cosmopolítica (Puente Editores, 2019).