Dematerialization

Definition

Dematerialization names the historical and design process by which the material is progressively relieved of its determining role — in culture's registers, in perception, and in the designed interior itself. The concept enters the wiki through Frank Jacobus's chapter, whose title announces its direction: "Toward the immaterial interior." Its deep premise is a cultural gradient: "the major shifts in cultural relations and perceptions always seem to tend toward the abstract and immaterial in their progression." As society mechanizes, "one by one, concrete entities are replaced by their abstract counterparts" (Mumford via Jacobus); registers of thought move from stone to paper to bits; and "as our modes of register become more ephemeral so do our modes of experience, affecting both how we perceive and how we create our built environment."

The concept's terminus is Jacobus's closing thesis: "The long-term effect of this, if it follows similar past trends, will be further dematerialization, until eventually the idea of material has been entirely severed from that which is physical. To use Giedion's words, material may soon be completely 'torn out of the frame within which it once had meaning.'" Its engine is the divorce of the corporeal from production: "As tools have developed in such a way as to slowly divorce the corporeal aspects of the human body from the process of production, imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities away from a particular kind of awareness of material, toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality." The chapter's stance is deliberately non-lamenting — "None of this writing is meant to paint a grim picture of these new forms of reality" — but insists designers "must be as conscious as possible as to what motivates their decisions."

The Four Contemporary Forms

Jacobus's catalogue of dematerialization in the design disciplines ("it could be argued that most contemporary critical practices have accepted or are celebrating forms of dematerialization… in one way or another"):

Transarchitectures and interactive surfaces — "Transarchitectures, for instance, explore the relationships between virtual and physical space. Interactive surfaces are a direct and literal example of this phenomenon, wherein the wall as a static, physical artifact begins to deliver a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself. We've begun to expect more from the physical surfaces that surround us." See transarchitecture, interactive-architecture.
The dematerialized datum — energy-harvesting floors "capture and store the energy created by human movement over the surface… a conversion of the tactile into the overtly intellectual. Floors can no longer simply be a place to live or stand; what they deliver physically is now a given; their new value will arise from what they deliver virtually and intellectually."
The graphic envelope — Herzog & de Meuron's Eberswalde Library: "the physical materiality of an exterior building surface disappears through a new graphic reading that hybridizes concrete and glass into a single unified envelope… many contemporary examples seem to eliminate the physical material entirely in favor of the new depth of readability in the graphic itself… a graphic field replaces what would otherwise be read as physical (and knowable) material." And VitraHaus: "uses the typological 'knowable house form' and suspends and stacks replicas of itself at odd angles so as to reduce its physical material reading… 'House' is here being delivered as symbol; its grounding is no longer a physical or material phenomenon, but is instead purely intellectually and culturally rooted." See typology, law-of-cladding.
Forced dematerialization of materials — "the vast majority of building materials today are lighter and reduced versions of their former selves. So even when we do not aim to dematerialize, technologies are forcing our hands in this regard. Stone, once a hulking, thick structural mass, eventually became a moderately thick surface that relied only on itself for support. Now, stone is an incredibly thin veneer supported by an often invisible building frame; this again is an evolving form of dematerialization."

The Concept's Prehistory

The chapter gives dematerialization a deep history, not a digital birthdate:

The book was the first dematerializer of built culture: information "once conveyed through the weight of stone was now transportable by hand"; the neoclassical interior, "though still retaining their physical mass and concreteness in the form of carved stone, were but a picture of a former age… Their very physicality was denied by their lack of locality. More photograph than building… the first examples of the effect of technological advance and dematerialization on interior spaces." See cultural-registers.
The clock dematerialized time: "Time, this mostly invisible and abstract instrument, can so affect, control, and order the lives of so many collectively" — "Time took on the character of an enclosed space: it could be divided, it could be filled up, and it could even be expanded by the invention of labor saving instruments" (Mumford, quoted) — and "gave rise to new conceptions of abstract space, interchangeable and relatable over any distance, transportable in the minds of humans." See mechanization, temporality.
Mechanization dematerialized the interior: Giedion's shift from medieval spatial comfort "determined by the unity of the proportions, materials, and form of the room's shell" to the nineteenth-century space "defined much less by the plan and sectional volume and more by the objects within" — "Space had become neutral, a backdrop for the smaller designed objects that began to dominate our lives." See comfort, mechanization.
Symbol devaluation — Giedion's arc: mechanization mass-replicated historically rarified symbols so that "the original symbolic meaning was lost in the panoply, a dematerialization and devaluation of the symbols themselves," until they "soon disappeared." The predicted terminus: "until eventually the idea of material has been entirely severed from that which is physical… material may soon be completely 'torn out of the frame within which it once had meaning.'" See obsolescence.

Key Thinkers

Frank Jacobus — the concept's source and cataloguer: the four contemporary forms, the mechanization genealogy, and the "immaterial as a new purveyor of reality" thesis.
Sigfried Giedion — the historical warrant: Mechanization Takes Command on mass-replicated symbols' dematerialization and devaluation, medieval vs. nineteenth-century space conception, and material "torn out of the frame within which it once had meaning."
Marc Manack — the counter-programme from the same practice (SILO AR+D): where Jacobus traces the interior's dematerialization, Manack's fabricating conception re-materializes the interior's distinction from architecture through digital fabrication (complementary source).
Herzog & de Meuron — the chapter's exemplar practitioners: Eberswalde Library and VitraHaus as built dematerializations (not yet paged — see log).
Jean Baudrillard — the theoretical convergence the wiki supplies: the sign-system interior and "purely signified warmth" as dematerialization at the scale of the room (see Structures of Atmosphere).

cultural-registers — the succession dematerialization tracks: stone → paper → bits, each register more ephemeral than the last.
mechanization — the historical engine: "As society mechanizes, one by one, concrete entities are replaced by their abstract counterparts."
transarchitecture — the contemporary form: Novak's architectures of "the relationships between virtual and physical space," with hypersurfaces as "continuations of the ceaseless evolution of architectural space conception."
interactive-architecture — the interactive surface as dematerialization's "direct and literal example": the static wall delivering "a deeper and more complex space than that of the physical interior itself."
augmented-reality — the hybrid register: virtual and physical space overlaid, the interior's dematerialization managed as designed hybridization (Qureshi's continuation of the same condition).
digital-architecture — the production system of the dematerialized interior: digital media as the third cultural register's tools.
simulation-hyperreality — the critical counter-register: "the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality" (Jacobus) against Baudrillard's simulacrum — the wiki's question of whether the immaterial purveys or replaces the real.
comfort — the interior-side history: comfort migrating from the room's shell (medieval) to its objects (nineteenth century) as space "became neutral."
abstraction — the cultural gradient: "concrete entities… replaced by their abstract counterparts," from coinage to "merely numbers."
obsolescence — the symbol-devaluation arc: mass replication's "dematerialization and devaluation of the symbols themselves" as the register's extinction mechanism.
law-of-cladding — the surface doctrine exceeded: where Loos's law forbade imitating another material, the contemporary graphic surface "eliminate[s] the physical material entirely."
representation — the dematerialized interior as a picture: the neoclassical interior "More photograph than building," the graphic field replacing knowable material.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Toward the immaterial interior (Jacobus 2018) — the founding source: the four contemporary dematerializations (interactive surfaces, energy floors, graphic envelopes, thinned materials), the mechanization genealogy (book, clock, money, interior objects), Giedion's symbol-devaluation arc, and the closing thesis that "imagination has been victorious in shifting sensibilities… toward an acceptance of the immaterial as a new purveyor of reality."
Notes on Digital Nesting (Goulthorpe 2002/2006) — the digital vanguard's self-audit that Jacobus's dematerialization thesis presupposes: the movement's projects judged "in their capacity as 'images'" (complementary source; see evolutionary-architecture).
Spatial therapies (Qureshi 2018) — the discipline's management of the same condition: the "post-analog" shift as "a deprioritization of the physical… representing an existential crisis for architecture" (complementary source).
Internal disconnect: Material memory in the John Portman originals (Marinic 2018) — the concept's renovation register: SOM's 2004 glass-ring mezzanine walkway "dematerialized one of the most obtrusive aspects of the Renaissance Center base podium design" — subtraction as sympathetic intervention — and the reflective glass skin that "turns its exterior surface into a mirror of the urban context. Further dislocating the complex within the city as if to dematerialize it, the interior space has no exterior, no 'definitive' exterior." Dematerialization here is ambivalent: the glass skin's dematerializing dislocation is the Baudrillardian primacy of the interior ("this lack of a definable exteriority underscores the subliminal reading and primacy of the interior"), while the mezzanine's dematerialization is the one renovation the chapter praises (see atrium-hotel, simulation-hyperreality).
Jean Baudrillard: The Defence of the Real (Butler 1999) — the book-length secondary study that reads Baudrillard "in his own terms": the paradox of the sign (paradox-of-the-sign), simulation as the realization rather than the loss of the real (simulation-hyperreality), seduction as the limit to simulation, and the doubling power of theory (doubling, the-real, double-strategy).
source-notes/voordouw-2018-topology-and-interiority

Open Questions

Is dematerialization a severing ("the idea of material… entirely severed from that which is physical") or a re-layering (Jacobus's own examples remain physical artifacts delivering virtual value — the energy floor is still a floor)? What would a fully dematerialized interior even be?
The chapter dates the first dematerialization to the neoclassical interior ("More photograph than building") — centuries before digital media. Is dematerialization then a property of reading (a graphic/symbolic mode of reception) rather than of materials? And can a building be dematerialized for one visitor and material for another?
Jacobus's non-alarmism ("None of this writing is meant to paint a grim picture") leaves unanswered the wiki's spectacle/simulation critique: if "the immaterial [is] a new purveyor of reality," is that purveyor accountable to anyone (cf. communicative-capitalism, data ownership)? What would a resistant practice to dematerialization look like — and is Manack's re-materializing fabricating conception it?
The Giedion arc (mass replication → symbol devaluation → disappearance) predicts that "ways of thinking about space… bound to ideas that originated within book culture" will disappear. Has the room — the interior's founding unit — already begun this disappearance, and is the wiki's "alternate receptacles for interiority" (Taylor) the symptom?
Does dematerialization have a politics of labour? The chapter's deepest claim — tools "slowly divorce the corporeal aspects of the human body from the process of production" — echoes Arendt's animal laborans/homo faber split (homo-faber): whose body is divorced, and who gains from the divorce?