Architecture is predicated on the extraction of materials from the earth. Today, three of the most commonly used buildings materials – concrete, steel and brick – require colossal quantities of limestone, sand, aggregates, iron ore, clay and shale to be literally dug out of the ground and transported to places where they are fabricated and used. The amounts beggar belief: over 100 billion tonnes of raw materials each year, a number that has tripled since 1970 and which continues to grow exponentially. A 2020 report in Nature revealed that, for the first time in human history, the mass of everything made by humans exceeded that of all living biomass (the latter being around 1.1 teratonnes). Just a century ago, less than 3% of the planet was human made. Following this trajectory, we might have reason to believe that, sometime in the 21st century, the surface of the planet will be one great mass of metals, asphalt, plastic, bricks, aggregates and concrete. A planet like Issac Asimov’s Trantor in his Foundation series of science-fiction novels, where a single conurbation spans the globe. That prospect may seem far-fetched, but it aptly conveys a sense of the extraordinary speed at which some humans are now altering the very material fabric of the earth itself, a process that will have very significant geological implications. 

^{Joseph Gandy, Architecture, Its Natural Model, the only surviving painting in his series Comparative Architecture, exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1838. Photo via Wikimedia.}

My new book, The Matter of Architecture, argues that the built environment is, at root, a geological construct. It is bound up with geological processes that generally escape our notice because they operate very slowly. The seven chapters of the book take some of these processes – intrusion, metamorphosis, crystallisation, mineralisation, morphology, sedimentation and erosion – to mine architecture for its geological meanings. It starts from the premise that Earth materials are lively, following Jane Bennett’s assertion in Vibrant Matter (2010). Here, she argues for the vitality of such things as stones, metals, bones, and even energy, and finds a historical precedent for her thinking in the 17th-century philosophical treatises of Baruch Spinoza.

The latter’s concept of conatus (meaning effort, endeavour, impulse or striving) is key here: this refers to the tendency of things – from stones to humans – to persist in the world. For Spinoza and Bennett alike, this persistence demonstrates the presence of an ‘active impulsion’ that propels the mineral, vegetal and animal worlds alike. In the history of philosophy, this tendency to ascribe agency to matter has been characteristic of a number of different strands of thinking, including animism, monism (in Spinoza’s case), vitalism (for example, the concept of élan vital in the work of Henri Bergson) and panpsychism (more or less eco-philosopher’s Freya Mathews’s position). Bennett’s argument is that ascribing vitality to substances normally regarded as inert isn’t so much about projecting our human characteristics onto other, quite different things, but rather that our preoccupation with ourselves (anthropocentrism) is a much more pressing problem than any of our flawed attempts to identify with other things (anthropomorphism).

^{The Cave of Crystals in the former Naica silver mine in Mexico, discovered in 2000. Photo via Wikimedia.} 

Bennett’s idea of the inherent vitality of the mineral world is central to my book. It develops this by focusing on the symbolic meanings ascribed to:

• caves and other underground spaces (Chapter 1)

• prehistoric stones and mounds that remain powerful sites of fascination (Chapter 2)

• the growth and development of crystals (Chapter 3)

• the transformation of organic bodies into inorganic ones (Chapter 4)

• the violent geology of plate tectonics (Chapter 5)

• the histories embedded in both rocks and human buildings (Chapter 6)

• the slow attritional action of weather that produces ruins of both rocks and buildings alike (Chapter 7)

All of these geological processes, and the spaces and structures they create, go on in the world irrespective of any human interaction with them; they long precede and will long outlive us. Yet they also impact directly on us and the built environment we create. At the most basic level, human bodies are a product of the mineral world - we owe a huge evolutionary debt to tiny marine organisms that first began to build their own skeletons some 500 million years ago.

^{Skeletal structures created by radiolaria illustrated in Ernst Haeckel’s Art Forms in Nature (1899). Photo via Wikimedia.} 

Minerals are also key protagonists in many famous stories in human history: to name but three, the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, Thaleäes inventing geometry through his study of the Egyptian pyramids, and the Black Stone of the Ka’ba in Mecca. For literary theorist Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, stone suggests a rich variety of metaphorical meanings that we have inherited from early human history. So, on the one hand, we speak of things that endure as ‘rock solid’; on the other, we are consistently attracted to stones because of the mysteries they hold. Indeed, even geologists – ostensible purveyors of rational objectivity – often affirm the inscrutable qualities of their chosen objects of study. For example, Jan Zalasiewicz has argued that a single pebble holds a history that stretches back millions of years – a history that we can only begin to apprehend through a leap of the imagination. That this history is literally present in the very materiality of each and every stone means that they are as unfathomable as interstellar space. 

^{The London Stone, with contemporary accruements, Cannon Street, City of London, June 2023. Photo via Paul Dobrazczyk.} 

Cohen sees imagination as one way of expanding our sympathies towards the mineral world. As an example, let’s consider one of London’s most peculiar monuments, the so-called London Stone, a piece of rock preserved in a glass-walled niche in the wall of an unobtrusive building on Cannon Street in the City of London. This stone is a fragment of the medieval – perhaps even the Roman – city preserved as a monument that is as inscrutable as it is enduring. Cohen reads the London Stone as possessing agency. It speaks, albeit mutely, of a city that is ordered around it. When I visited the stone, two construction workers were using the narrow ledge next to the monument as an impromptu table, their takeaway coffees and lunchtime sandwiches resting beside the centuries-old stone. As I took a photograph from across the street, the two men politely moved out of the way, taking their food and hot drinks with them. I thought it would make a better picture with these objects still present, so asked them to hold off. Was there an unconscious interaction at work here between stone and humans, myself included? It is hard to say, but what’s clear is that, however intangible or unacknowledged, by sheer fact of its endurance the London Stone has become a powerful symbol of immortality. No wonder it is said that so long as the London Stone remains safe, the city around it will continue to flourish.

The point of ascribing material or symbolic vitality to rocks like the London Stone isn’t to undermine scientific rationality, but rather to assert our kindredness with matter, as opposed to our separation from it. In relation to architecture, this has the effect of blurring the boundaries between what we build and what nature does. For example, Chinese architect Wang Shu deliberately referenced the formation of mountains in his design for a history museum in Ningbo, just south of Shanghai. Completed in 2018, the exterior walls of the museum resemble striated rock – in part a result of Shu’s decision to use materials sourced from demolition sites in the local Chinese province, namely millions of pieces of brick, roof tiles and other assorted rubble infilled with quarried earth. Shu’s approach was also inspired by mountain landscapes depicted in traditional Chinese scroll paintings, such as Li Tang’s well-known Wind in Pines Among a Myriad of Valleys, dating from 1124, the time of the Song Dynasty. Thus, Wang described what he saw as a huge ‘valley’ in the central area of the museum, and the principal entrance as ‘cavelike’. In designing an artificial mountain, Wang was not trying to mimic geology but rather to find a way of mediating human experience of natural landscapes in a similar way to historic Chinese scroll paintings. In his view, these paintings turn mountains into ‘mega- structures . . . that are both visual and experiential and [which] merge . . . or even vanish into the natural environment’.  

^{Wang Shu’s Ningbo History Museum, completed in 2018. Photo via Wikimedia.} 

The real mountains that are mirrored in the Ningbo History Museum rise around 50 km west of the city and are visible from the upper floors of the museum itself, the highest peak, Siming Mountain - at 1,012 metres - the nexus of a geological park created in 2012. Here, boulders have weathered into zoomorphic forms, such as a locally famous example shaped like a duck.

Mountains, it seems, can resemble other things, just as buildings can resemble mountains. Shu’s sophisticated reading of the relationship between geological processes and human buildings is grounded in a longstanding cultural reading of mountains as accessible to human life only as they are imagined as architecture, as having a front, back, and sides. This is precisely what makes mountains, and more broadly the mineral world, so appealing to humans. We might believe that they are created by ‘blind’ geological forces that are not, in human terms at least, intentional. Perhaps what we recognise in them is indeed a form of design. In this mode of understanding, our appreciation of the geological world, derives from a recognition that our designs inevitably share something of those of the geomorphic world; that everything, in reality, is designed – just not necessarily by us.