Making Matter What Too Often Does Not Matter is the companion publication to the Danish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, where an ongoing restoration project poses a pointed challenge to architecture's culture of demolition and new construction.
About This Book
What can dirt, debris, and salvaged fragments tell us about the buildings they might yet become? This book takes that question as its organising principle, structured around an extended dialogue between architect and curator Søren Pihlmann and poet Adam Dickinson. Moving across scales from microbes to concrete, from metaphor to steel, it makes a case for site-derived architecture as both practice and ethics. The 200 colour illustrations ground what is an unusually lyrical and multifaceted text, one that treats materials as protagonists rather than passive inputs. For architects grappling with adaptive reuse and the ethics of the existing built environment, this is a rare cross-disciplinary contribution from the 2025 Biennale season.
Key Features
- 212 pages featuring 200 colour illustrations spanning restoration documentation and material analysis
- Extended dialogue between architect and curator Søren Pihlmann and poet Adam Dickinson
- Published by Walther König, 2025
What You'll Discover
- Why the authors argue it is no longer viable to keep demolishing and building anew — and what a practice of working with the existing demands instead
- How a site-derived approach reads potential in materials typically discarded: dirt, debris, concrete, and steel
- The role of poetic and unconventional modes of analysis in understanding material and architectural potential
- A cross-disciplinary framework that moves between architecture and literature to articulate a new ethics of restoration
About the Author
Adam Dickinson is a poet whose contribution to this volume forms part of an extended dialogue with architect Søren Pihlmann, who served as curator of the Danish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. Pihlmann's practice centres on site-derived approaches and the ethics of working with existing materials and structures.
Specifications
- Format: Softcover
- Pages: 212
- Dimensions: 16.5 x 20.8 cm
- Language: English
- ISBN: 9783753308111
- Publisher: Walther König
- Publication Date: 2025
Perfect For: Architects, theorists, and students engaged with adaptive reuse, material ethics, and the intersection of architectural practice and cross-disciplinary thinking.