Materials Science for the Spiritually Exhausted

B. Lintel assembled this anthology in response to what she describes as a gap in the existing literature: there were many books about materials, but none of them seemed to have been written by someone who understood that choosing materials is exhausting, and that the exhaustion is part of the process.

The contributors include practicing architects, material scientists, and one philosopher who has no formal training in architecture but who Lintel invited because, she writes in the preface, 'he understands what it means to commit to something that might be wrong.'

The sections cover concrete, glass, timber, steel, and earth — the five materials that appear most frequently in projects where the architect is still thinking about the choice five years later. Each section ends with a piece titled 'What You Are Choosing When You Choose This,' which Lintel describes as optional reading. It is the most annotated section in most readers' copies.

The book is dedicated to every architect who has stood in front of a material sample wall at the end of a long day and understood, for a moment, that the wall was also looking at them.