Grain of truth

We routinely feel emotional about materials — often subliminally. Which is why new substances and techniques for manufacturing have provoked vivid writing, particularly during the design-reform debates of the 19th century. Think of John Ruskin on the evils of cut as opposed to blown glass or his views on wrought iron as opposed to cast iron — the latter emblematic in his view of a ‘sophisticated, unkind, uncomfortable, unprincipled society’. For the designer Gottfried Semper man’s very inventiveness was a loss. We were losing our understanding of discrete materials. Then there was, and is, our perfectly justified anxieties about the plastics family, beautifully chronicled in Jeffrey Meikle’s American Plastic: A Cultural History. Plasticity was already a worry in the 19th century in the context of papier-mâché, rubber and gutta-percha: pourable or mouldable, they could be used to imitate respected traditional materials such as wood or stone or bronze and were distrusted on that account.