Architecture’s New Philosophy: Matter That Thinks, Feels and Resonates

What if the materials in a building were not passive stuff waiting to be shaped, but active collaborators with their own form of intelligence? That is the provocative proposition of a new open-access essay by Ilaria Di Carlo, published as a Comment in the journal Architectural Intelligence on 17 June 2026. Entitled “Multi-materiality. An aesthetic and philosophical excursus about the Art of Resonance,” the piece does not report experiments or measurements. It is a work of theoretical synthesis, drawing on philosophy, art history and contemporary computational design to argue that the mixing, grading and fusing of materials marks a profound shift in how architecture conceives matter itself.

The essay’s central claim is that multi-materiality should be understood not as a technical innovation but as a philosophical and aesthetic condition. In Di Carlo’s framing, matter is no longer a neutral substrate or an assemblage of discrete parts; it becomes an active, affective and processual agent within a wider ecology of relations. The “art of resonance” of her title names a practice of listening to the intervals between substances, allowing form to emerge from the reciprocal vibration of differences rather than imposing unity from above. Beauty, on this account, becomes a function of mixture rather than purity, and coherence arises through variation and affective exchange.

To build this argument, the essay assigns each of its theoretical sources a specific conceptual function. Manuel DeLanda supplies what Di Carlo calls the ontological grammar, framing multi-materiality through material expressivity, gradients and emergent assemblages. Isabelle Stengers contributes a cosmopolitical orientation, shifting design from control toward composition with forces that exceed the human. Emanuele Coccia radicalizes mixture as a condition of life and perception, Rachel Armstrong provides the operational bridge between philosophy and practice through morphogenetic and metabolic processes, and Kostas Grigoriadis anchors the discussion in contemporary computation, where his notion of “thick interfaces” shows how code and material behaviour co-evolve.

The historical sweep of the essay is one of its most striking features. Di Carlo traces the logic of material gradation back to the Pantheon in Rome, built under Emperor Hadrian between 118 and 128 AD, which she identifies as one of the earliest examples of continuously varying material properties within a single structure. The Roman builders moved from dense travertine and mortar at the base to light tuff and pumice at the top of the dome. This distribution, she stresses, was performative rather than ornamental: the continuity of the binder ensured structural coherence while the gradual substitution of heavier with lighter aggregates orchestrated a smooth material gradient, anticipating what engineers would much later call functionally graded materials.

From there the essay follows technological thresholds in material fusion. The bronze alloy of copper and tin, and later the carbon-infused transformation of iron into steel, did not merely expand the catalogue of available substances; they altered the ontological and visual grammar of architecture. The Home Insurance Building in Chicago, erected in 1885 and demolished in 1931, is cited as the first steel-frame skyscraper, a structure whose fusion of skeletal frame and lightweight cladding made possible the vertical city. In the 1970s, Japanese engineers developed the first modern functionally graded materials by fusing metal and ceramic into a single volumetric continuity, and researchers at MIT subsequently formalized the concept with a vocabulary of gradients, diffusion and transition zones. Matter, Di Carlo writes, ceased to be assembled and began to be tuned.

The essay also finds the aesthetics of fusion anticipated in art well before architecture absorbed its consequences. As early as 1912, the Futurist artist Umberto Boccioni proclaimed the right of “twenty different matters to compete within a single one to produce a plastic emotion.” Di Carlo locates the most radical expression of this principle in Alberto Burri, whose 1961 work Rosso Plastica transformed industrial polymers into living surfaces, erasing the distinction between support, image and substance. Reading Burri through Gilbert Simondon’s concept of transduction, the propagation of a structural change through a material milieu, she argues that his molten plastics and scorched surfaces show form being individuated within matter’s own energetic tensions rather than imposed upon it.

Contemporary examples bring the argument into the present. The essay illustrates its claims with prototypes fabricated in Research Cluster 8 of the Architectural Design MArch programme at The Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL, supervised by Dr Kostas Grigoriadis. These include topologically optimised multi-material prototypes, fused metal-and-glass and plastic studies, and dual-material 3D prints in which bio-compounds made from discarded crustacean shells fused with discarded plastics are robotically extruded to generate lattices with variable properties. A further figure shows procedural studies transforming the structure of functionally graded material components into voxel density models, part of a transdisciplinary exploration of visualizing such materials in design software. A fused metal and glass sample produced by Grigoriadis in 2019, as part of a Built Environment Fellowship for Google and XL Construction in California, also appears.

Beyond history and practice, the essay’s most ambitious move is ethical and political. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s notion of the “distribution of the sensible,” Di Carlo argues that multi-material aesthetics reconfigures what counts as visible, audible and significant, dissolving historical hierarchies between noble and base, natural and synthetic, organic and technological materials. She reads contamination not as failure but as resonance, invoking Anna Tsing’s axiom that “purity is not an option,” and connects the argument to Lynn Margulis’s account of symbiogenesis, in which evolutionary complexity emerges through collaboration and cohabitation rather than isolated competition. Concepts such as Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble,” Maria Puig de la Bellacasa’s “matters of care” and Nancy Tuana’s “viscous porosity” are marshalled to frame design as an ethics of attunement rather than control.

Even recent chemistry enters the argument. Di Carlo points to metal–organic frameworks, the porous crystalline architectures honoured by the 2025 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, as what she calls a compelling material metaphor: built from the hybrid coordination of metals and organic ligands, these structures breathe, absorb and release, embodying relation and permeability rather than purity. She also cites Emanuele Coccia’s proposition that the world exists as atmosphere, arguing that multi-material architecture produces microclimates and sensory envelopes in which porous concrete, bioplastic, glass and algae membranes modulate the spaces around them.

Readers should be clear about what this publication is and is not. It is a conceptual essay, explicitly described by its author as a critical narrative review and conceptual synthesis rather than an exhaustive literature survey or an experimental study; it advances no measured findings, quantitative data or testable predictions. Its value lies in the framework it offers: a way of seeing graded concretes, fused polymers and robotically extruded bio-compounds not as isolated technical tricks but as expressions of a longer intellectual lineage running from the Pantheon’s dome through Burri’s burned plastics to today’s computational fabrication. Whether one accepts its philosophical vocabulary or not, the essay makes a case that will resonate well beyond its discipline: that the future of making may depend less on mastering materials than on learning to listen to them, and that in design, as in ecology, impurity may be the condition of creativity rather than its corruption.

Subject of Research: A philosophical and aesthetic essay on multi-materiality in architecture and design, framed as an art of resonance.

Article Title: Multi-materiality. An aesthetic and philosophical excursus about the Art of Resonance

Article References: Di Carlo, I. (2026). Multi-materiality. An aesthetic and philosophical excursus about the Art of Resonance. Architectural Intelligence, 5(1), Article 15. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44223-026-00124-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44223-026-00124-8

Keywords: multi-materiality, architecture, aesthetics, philosophy of matter, functionally graded materials, resonance, design theory, new materialism, contamination, porosity, ethics, 3D printing