Travellings - Getting a grip on material trajectories

Abstract

Traced through all the transformations that affect them - in the manner of a cinematographic tracking shot or a meticulous investigation - the trajectories of building materials reveal the various demands placed on the circuits of the material economy. Over and above the production processes that give them form, materials undergo legal, commercial and normative formatting in order to meet the expectations that their use implies. While the resources of ethnographic surveys make it possible to describe such trajectories and account for these various requirements, such an approach also sheds light on the roles that designers play and could play within such trajectories. It is this general question that drives the present article. It is structured around a very specific case, that of concrete aggregates, and thus reveals, in its very elaboration, but also in the programmatic perspectives it outlines, the modalities of a very specific crossroads between architecture and the human sciences.