Escapably Modern
Particleboard is a microcosm of modern architecture. Refined in the mid-twentieth century as a response to postwar material scarcity, particleboard is made by compressing loose woodchips with a binding agent, usually phenolic resin, to create standardised panels and planks. The resulting lengths are often covered with other materials, such as natural wood, in the case of engineered hardwood, or plastic laminate, for ready-to-assemble furniture.

Operating as a modular material, particleboard and its derivatives repeat standardised modes of production and assembly. They repurpose sawdust, shavings, and other wood scraps to save costs, incorporate advanced resin technologies, and operate in unseen structural roles under a surface of ornamental flourish. In this way they embody and facilitate a modernist approach that favours efficiency and functional design.

In concealing a synthetic, homogenising logic beneath an aesthetic veneer, products made from particleboard enact the larger modernist inclination to conceal the standardised interior structural components of a building. Prefabricated load-bearing elements are obscured behind superficial cladding. Such practices are functional and efficient in the context of methods that rely on resource-intensive supply chains, but they are not sustainable in the long term. Prefabricated components often require long-distance transportation. Their reliance on non-renewable resources like plastics presents challenges for disposal when these materials reach the end of their life cycles. By hiding their structural interiors, modern buildings create a disconnect between the perceived value of the disguised materials supporting the building and those composing the conspicuous veneer. It is difficult to appreciate the merits, consequences, and material journeys of hidden components. By extension, the concentrated focus on beautified or fashionable surfaces leads to a skewed sense of design and taste. Misalignments and errors can be masked behind cladding, which makes the architect less accountable. Trendy surfaces that disguise homogenised structural components give a false sense of innovation and uniqueness.

The production and use of particleboard mirror the shift in architecture away from a holistic approach to building and design and toward a compartmentalised approach in which technicians take care of the structural details, including ventilation, the electrical, and plumbing, and the architect is reduced to someone with good taste deciding on visible aesthetic features. This specialised approach is symptomatic of the broader industrialisation of architecture, which has meant less emphasis on integrated design, as technological complexity and the use of mass production have increased. Progressively consigned to project management and matters of conceptual design, the modern architect has typically prioritised the creation of aesthetic experiences. Technical details and structural integrity have been left to specialists.

As part of his site-derived architectural practice concerned with making legible and usable the material journeys of resources, Pihlmann wants to win back some of the technical domains of building design. He has featured exposed plumbing and ventilation components and even insulation in his projects. He has made the expressive capacity of structural components central to his building philosophy and aesthetic approach. Transparency, rather than concealment, is his guiding principle.

These alliances extend to scientific research in pursuit of bio-based binders to replace phenolic resins and the problems posed by the toxicity of chemicals, such as formaldehyde. Collaborating with the University of Copenhagen, Pihlmann is involved in ongoing work to find a usable, organic binder from other industrial waste streams. Lignin is one promising candidate. A reinforcing component of cell walls responsible for the strength and durability of plant tissues, lignin is extremely abundant in plant biomass, second only to cellulose. It is usually removed in the paper production process because it causes yellowing and brittleness.

By producing his own particleboard and developing bio-based binders to do so, Pihlmann is not only making the materials of the site available for future use but is adding to those materials by introducing recyclable organic polymers such as lignin. He also avoids locking away materials contaminated with toxic chemical resins. The materials are free to continue their journeys. The site is left with even more usable resources for future transformations.

If particleboard is a microcosm of modern architecture, it is not surprising that it constitutes a site for alternative interventions into architectural methods and thinking for someone like Pihlmann. A defining feature of his work is the repetition of analyses and experiments at altered scales. He transformed the pavilion in Venice into a laboratory and workshop. He scales down his approach in reimagining the composition of particleboard, collaborating with resources, reframing margins and peripheries, and making legible the past journeys and future potentials of such inescapably modern materials.

Otherwise Obscured Interiors
Prior to modern building methods, you worked with what you had. Stones gathered from riverbanks and fields. Trees felled and milled on the land to be settled. The Chinese added sticky rice to mortar for heightened durability when building the Great Wall during the Ming Dynasty. For centuries, Inuit in the Arctic built houses out of packed snow (pukaangajuq), stacking the carved, inward-leaning blocks in a rising, spiral, crystalline dome.

Using what was close at hand, the Romans, in pursuit of better-performing structures, mixed local animal blood and volcanic ash from nearby beds of pozzolana to make concrete. They transported it far and wide, hardening the pathways of administration and dependence through aqueducts, temples, baths, and bridges. As a robust substance with reactive ingredients that are easy to transport and easily supplemented with resources that do not require a comprehensive understanding of local settings, concrete lent itself to widespread distribution. Its portability, durability, and strength, compounded by the Roman example, made it an attractive tool for the imperatives of future empires. With its overcast stratus and monumental mien, concrete became the footprint of the modern imperialist. Mussolini littered North and East Africa with it. The collection of dismantled Soviet heads in the sculpture garden near Druskininkai, Lithuania, is testament to the insistent countenance of cement, the many Stalins still stained unevenly by rain and snow. The exploitation of colonies for resources and markets fueled the industrial revolution, its imperial iterations, and, later, the great accelerations of the twentieth century, housed everywhere in carapaces of concrete — revealed most starkly, perhaps, in the image of the swaddled core of the nuclear reactor.

Concrete made a place for placeless modernity. Like the Baudrillardian simulacrum, an image built upon images, concrete makes an image of rock where there is no rock. It makes something appear from nothing by disguising its origins. In this way, it enacts a fantasy of architecture: the dream of alchemy; invention ex nihilo. A building whose materials define and impose a place rather than emerge from it.

What does an architecture attentive to its materials look like? Such an approach does not require a return to bygone methods. In fact, distinctions and hierarchies between “old” and “new” need to be rethought, and instead, attention must be paid to the potential of elements at hand and their ongoing transformative journeys. Instead of clearing a building site of its existing supply of wood, metal, or even concrete, we must design a practice sensitive to the metabolic journey of these materials, alive to the idea that resources are finite and subject to continual transformations. The job of the architect is to safeguard as many existing materials as possible from destruction, reconfigure them for renovated use, and treat them as limited communal resources borrowed for the moment in whatever building is taking shape but ultimately made available for future use in alternative forms. The journey of materials must not stop.

This attention to the metabolic life of materials — their lively pasts and germinal futures — must be taken seriously. What stories do existing resources tell about the buildings they might become? The task is to get closer to things, to read the tensile strengths and weaknesses of cobblestones or cracked concrete remnants, to look for the potential in soil ecology and other forms of available information, to take stock of the capacities of all available items.

Looking into the materials of the site, like looking into the body, is an ethics of attention. There may be pollution in the soil as there might be in the body. But it may also be possible to learn from the substances and their biological circumstances as a means of imagining more complex relationships with places and with our bodies in places. In Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway emphasises kin-making as a productive way to reconfigure relations to the earth. We might extend Haraway’s injunction to “make kin” to a renewed sense of raw materials themselves as vibrant collaborators and contributors to architecture.¹ To treat raw materials as partners, rather than as disposable waste giving way to the imposition of conventional components and common-place methods, requires a more attentive and creative approach, one open to subtle signals from the body of the site.

The collective body of work in architectural design has long been concerned with the architecture of bodies. Vitruvius adjusted the ascending diameters of columns to compensate for the increased distance of a raised glance. Leonardo da Vinci conceived of an amphitheater focused on carrying a preacher’s voice to the ears of the most far-flung congregants. Le Corbusier based the “Modular,” a scale of proportions designed to bridge the metric and imperial systems, on the height of a man standing with his arm raised. The Japanese Metabolists of the 1970s sought to integrate biological processes into emerging architectural technologies. More recently, Beijing-based MAD designed the headquarters of a Chinese fashion group with a building exhibiting an internal skeleton and an external skin. Human anatomy has inspired countless building forms. Juhani Pallasmaa, who has written extensively about the role of bodily senses in architecture, has devoted his designer’s zeal to door handles and their haptic and psychological interconnections. Pallasmaa observes that as humans, “we tend to interpret a building as an analogue to our body, and vice versa.”² According to Pallasmaa, architecture has for too long privileged the sense of sight at the expense of other senses.

In his book The Eyes of the Skin, he argues that “the inhumanity of contemporary architecture and cities can be understood as the consequences of the neglect of the body and the senses and an imbalance in our sensory and value system.”³ He praises attention to embodied human instincts in the work of Frank Lloyd Wright and Alvar Aalto as well as the heightened sensory experiences manifested in the architecture of Glenn Murcutt and Peter Zumthor. To this list we might also add Anupama Kundoo and her sensory concerns with spatiality and intimacy.

The tendency among these architects has been to work with sensory experience to compose a certain atmosphere. Soren Pihlmann’s approach to sensory experience, however, is more longitudinal and protensive, concerned with the narrative of sensations as they are expressed in materials over time. By making the histories and transformations of site resources legible, Pihlmann reveals the diachronic variance of textures and surfaces along with their inherent stories and traces from the past as they are reconfigured and made available to the future.

This complicated approach to architectural sensoria is in keeping with the increasingly complicated understanding of the senses in general — their biological histories and distributed capacities. It turns out that humans have smell receptors in the kidneys. Strangely, these receptors are tuned to metabolites from bacteria. “Smelling” in this case is part of a complicated network of communication between gut microbes and bodily organs. Other unlikely bodily tissues also contain olfactory receptors, such as the spinal column, where pH is detected, and the lungs, where “bitter taste receptors” regulate the dilation of the bronchial air passageways and the frequency with which hair-like cilia wave mucus, germs, and other particles up toward a cough.⁴

Even the senses we think we know are complicated. In addition to the familiar rods and cones in the eye, there is a third specific retinal cell that plays no part in forming the images we see. Instead, these cells communicate with the master clock in the hypothalamus that coordinates circadian rhythms, preparing arousals and appetites for the oscillating cycles of day and night.⁵ In addition, our sense of vision regularly looks briefly inward: during every systolic contraction of the heart there is a diminution of visual information received by the brain.⁶ Is the brain looking somewhere else in this instant? What does it see?

Interoception refers to the capacity of a body to sense its internal signals. It is a form of perception at the conscious and subconscious level integrating information from internal organs and viscera with brain activity and behaviour. Broadly speaking, interoception encompasses the processing of sensory information from internal 36organs, tissues, and cells. This might manifest itself in a growling stomach after prolonged periods of not eating, the sensation of thirst, goosebumps in the cold, or the urge to urinate. The same can occur with changes in emotional states. Your heart is pounding in your chest. You feel as though it has skipped a beat as you lean in for the news. You hear the blood rushing in your ears as you try to find the right words. Butterflies crest in your stomach when the phone rings. You can’t say exactly why, but you feel in your gut what you need to do.

Interoception is one way of thinking about a “gut sense” or the way in which our moods, self-awareness, and general health are influenced by visceral and other physiological mechanisms, which are in turn influenced by conscious and unconscious experiences of external sensory environments. Temperature, diet, light, and sound pollution, for example, can alter the metabolism of a body and its interoceptive responses to internal signaling.

A site-derived architectural practice, like Pihlmann’s, that pays close attention to the materials at hand might be said to be interoceptive. The careful attention that the architect gives to the “body” of the site — its soil, old cement, cracked tiles, and other debris — with an open mind toward their potential contributions to the future building, constitutes a form of sensitivity to the otherwise obscured interior of the site. What are the messages lurking in the signals of the raw materials? Such sensitivity might be called interoceptive. As a practice, an interoceptive approach pushes and complicates the phenomenological interest in expanding sensory attunement beyond the dominant visual register. It engages the peripheral senses themselves, the signals already internal to the site of the building-to-come, the raw materials with their own potential contributions waiting to be sensed.

About

Build of Site, curated by Søren Pihlmann, is the official contribution to the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2025. The project operates at the intersection of construction and exhibition, using the occasion to initiate long-term improvements to the pavilion while exploring methods for repurposing surplus materials directly on site.

Rather than producing a temporary installation, the exhibition channels its resources into the renovation of the pavilion. This work is based on findings from a 2016 analysis that identified structural and environmental challenges, including recurring flooding and an increasingly unstable floor. Renovation began prior to the opening and will continue after the exhibition closes, involving upgrades to floors, doors, and windows.

Bio

Adam Dickinson is a writer and professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at Brock University in Ontario, Canada, where he teaches poetics and creative writing. His creative and academic writing has primarily focused on intersections between poetry and science as a way of exploring new critical perspectives and alternative modes of poetic composition. He is the author of four books of poetry, one co-edited anthology, several chapbooks and many more articles and book chapters.

Notes

1Donna J. Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Duke University Press, 2016).

2Juhani Pallasmaa, The Eyes of the Skin: Architecture and the Senses 4th edition (Wiley, 2024), 28.

3Ibid, 13–14.

4Hannah Landecker and Chris Kelty, “Outside In: Microbiomes, Epigenomes, Visceral Sensing, and Metabolic Ethics” in After Practice: Thinking through Matter(s) and Meaning Relationally, vol. 1, ed. The Laboratory: Anthropology of Environment and Human Relations (Panama Verlag, 2019), 57–58.

5Ketema N. Paul, Talib B. Saafir, and Gianluca Tosini, “The role of retinal photoreceptors in the regulation of circadian rhythms,” Reviews in Endocrine and Metabolic Disorders volume 10, no. 4 (December 2009), 271–278.

6Lisa Feldman Barrett, “We have more than five senses: A neuroscientist explains the hidden abilities we often overlook,” BBC Science Focus, March 29, 2024, https://www.sciencefocus.com/the-human-body/how-many-senses-do-we-have.