FOA's material- Material FOA

The architectural education of FOA took place in the 80’s, in a time that the main research aimed to peripheral fields of architecture such as sociology, politics and economy. FOA recognized that this kind of analysis was not effective enough in a context that was gradually becoming more and more complicated and fluxionary. So, they gave more emphasis to the construction, the materiality and organization of their projects. In that way their proposition for the way of analyzing and composing architecture focuses on the geometry, the construction, the organization, the materiality, the technique, the tectonics and the technology.
FOA’s main theoretical aspect aims directly at the reality. Their “design ethics” propose that architecture concerns the need and not the excess. With a dose of irony, they call their way of thinking “theory of excuse”, because they tend to follow a design path only if they find a pragmatical point to start, such as the function, the structure or the circulation. And though their architectural production consists of parametrical and digital procedures materiality and construction are very active from the very beginning of the design.
Very important is the definition that FOA give for the notion of material. Material is considered anything that can be used to the production of architecture. Everything used for that production has the properties of material that is coherence, density, weight. As an example they mention the function of a project. They try to approach it as something that has natural and geometrical properties such as weight, friction, hardness, resistance and texture. In that way function can be considered as just another construction material. Their target is to surpass the social and linguistic meaning of function and to extract its materiality. In this way the notion of material is very widen- as flows, function, natural and artificial materials, functions, even representations compose new complex materials that can perform many different tasks at the same time.
And this is what is considered to be the edge of the architectural evolution in the architecture of FOA. As they say the construction of even more sophisticated and cohesive materials is what they think they should do as architects in the non-standard way of designing.