Architectural Theory Review

ISSN: 1326-4826 (Print) 1755-0475 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ratr20

“What the Wood wants to do”: Pragmatist

Speculations on a Response-able Architectural
Practice

Pauline Lefebvre

To cite this article: Pauline Lefebvre (2018) “What the Wood wants to do”: Pragmatist
Speculations on a Response-able Architectural Practice, Architectural Theory Review, 22:1, 24-41,
DOI: 10.1080/13264826.2018.1413407

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2018.1413407

Published online: 03 Jan 2018.

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 Article

“WHAT THE WOOD WANTS TO DO”: PRAGMATIST

SPECULATIONS ON A RESPONSE-ABLE ARCHITECTURAL
PRACTICE

Pauline Lefebvre
FRS-FNRS Post-Doctoral Fellow at Faculté d’architecture La Cambre-Horta, Université Libre de Bruxelles,
Brussels, Belgium
Email: paulefeb@ulb.ac.be

Departing from observations collected in an architecture firm, this essay investigates the way in which an
architect expressed his concerns for what the material he intended to use “wants to do”. Adopting a speculative
and pragmatist perspective, I detect there a possibility of thinking about architects’ responsibility as a moral
exchange with beings involved in the design process. The text addresses two interpretations of that situation
that could hinder the possibility of a more relational architectural practice. The first reduces the designer’s
formulation to a rhetorical means to expose his ability to take constraints into account. The second interprets
it as the expression of the architects’ moral obligation to respect the material’s intrinsic nature. Two diverging
notions of responsibility are at stake, which are here contrasted with a third one. Built on a materialist view on
ethics, the ethological perspective allows the acknowledgement of what the material and the designer become
capable of together.

Keywords: architectural theory; ethics; ethnography of design; materialism; pragmatism

Article History: Received 22 November 2017; accepted 1 December 2017

INTRODUCTION: FROM DESCRIBING ARCHITECTURAL PRACTICE TO

SPECULATING ON THE RESPONSIBILITY OF THE ARCHITECTS
27 February 2017, 5 pm. An internal meeting started in the conference room.1 The team in charge
of refurbishing an office floor in Manhattan had invited the founding partners of the architecture
firm for a “charrette”, to collectively discuss the design of the only custom piece of furniture in the
project: the reception desk. Lately, the desk had undergone a major change. While it had first been a
simple (budget-conscious) volume made out of wood, the clients had expressed their interest in (and
ability to pay for) a more appealing, luxurious object. This discussion had led the project manager
to redraw the desk as a more rounded, facetted volume (Figure 1). The “charrette” was the occasion
for the partner in charge to express his doubts about this option. He identified a tension between

Architectural Theory Review, 2018, Vol. 22, No. 1, pp. 24–41

https://doi.org/10.1080/13264826.2018.1413407
© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 What the Wood Wants to Do   25

the general shape of the desk and the construction technique it seemed to require, even though he
was “not sure whether authenticity had to be a priority in this project”. He argued that the facetted
form was calling for 3D-carving the object out of a mass of wood, rather than assembling multiple
boards. To his colleague who retorted that it was possible to 3D-carve wood, he replied that, by
adopting this method, they were “trying to make the wood do something that it doesn’t want to do”.
The “charrette” had ended shortly after the architect expressed this concern, which had therefore
remained unanswered. A few days later, the team gathered again around the reception desk and
finally looked into an alternative (Figure 2). The partner reiterated his worries about fabricating
the desk in solid wood. He was considering the possibility of switching to stone instead. During the
discussion, he was progressively adding resulting concerns, and modifying the design accordingly.
The size of the slabs and the rich texture of the stone called for the use of larger surfaces, therefore
reducing the number of facets. The luxurious aspect of the desk could be conferred by the veins
in the marble instead (Figure 3). Also, the architect argued that the facets should be used more
“rationally”, i.e. to accommodate functional requirements only. They could help the transition when
the desk had to turn a corner and transit from one level of use to another (sitting and standing).
During this short design meeting, the desk thus fluidly changed material and shape, following
various requirements that were put on the table one after another.
Later, in May 2017, I eventually interviewed the architect about the successive changes of materi-
als in this specific project. By then, the desk had turned from stone to wood again. The architect still
had doubts about that choice, as he repeated to me why 3D-carving wood first appeared problematic
to him: it would “make the wood do something that it doesn’t want to do”. I asked him what he
meant by this curious formulation. He seized a wood sample on the shelf behind me and explained:

So you start—imagine this as a thicker bark [showing the wood sample]—cut-

ting into it, and you know that any kind of 3D-carving will do something of this
nature: you’re gonna cut against the grain, in very different ways. And, what
you’re doing to that piece of wood, when you’re doing that, is that you’re messing
with its inherent structure. Right? Because these grains are pretty much part of
the composition of the structure and you know that very quickly this thing will
want to kind of react: “So if you’re gonna cut me this way, I’m gonna start delam-
inating [at] these pieces, because I have no strength to hold this [part] anymore”.
And so, in your surface, you start getting these openings and, you know, cracks.
It’s gonna start cracking. And then it’s gonna say: “Well, you know, because I have
this much wood here but [I’m] this thin in this area, I’m also gonna start cupping
this way because I have more muscles right here, and this is my weak spot”.

During this interview, the architect reaffirmed that wood “wants to do” certain things more
than others. With that formulation, he is allocating agency (volition and action) to the mate-
rial. In his explanations, he is also freely mixing an account of what he himself “knows” about
how the wood will “react”, and a symmetrical exchange with that same wood, which is given
the ability to voice its own concerns. As an observer, I had been trying to understand how the
26  
Pauline Lefebvre

Figure 1. Model of the reception desk as discussed for the first time during the “charrette”. Courtesy of SITU, 2017.

Figure 2. Photo of the meeting table where the team is changing the desk from wood to stone. Photo by the
author, 2017.

Figure 3. Rendering of the new version of the desk after the internal meeting at which it changed to stone.
Courtesy of the architects, 2017.
 What the Wood Wants to Do   27

architects were dealing with constraints: what forms these constraints were taking, what force
they were given, and what means were required to deal with them. I was therefore interested
in the fluidity with which the architect was ready to modify the original shape and material of
the desk to accommodate programmatic and technical requirements. I was particularly struck
by—and will here focus on—the curious way in which the architect was addressing his concern
about the wood, by voicing the concerns of the wood itself.2
I collected these scenes in the course of a participant observation in an architecture firm
based in New York. I was investigating the opportunity to situate architects’ political and moral
engagements within their daily practical decisions, rather than in the expression of their real-
ised work or in statements about their position. I formulated this hypothesis in reaction to
the many discussions around a “new architectural pragmatism”,3 which anxiously interrogated
the possibility—and risks—of architects refocusing on practice and on the specifics of design
at the expense of broader social and political preoccupations. The objections against what has
also been called a post-critical turn emphasised the necessity to define forms of criticality that
are more embedded in practice.4 My own contribution to this recent controversy has been to
look into the philosophical tradition of Pragmatism, to speculate on a more embedded—less
distant—form of engagement, based on turning one’s attention to consequences and on the
conduct of a constant inquiry of these consequences with those they concern. It is also this
philosophical legacy that eventually led me to further investigate architects’ engagements within
their daily practice, in the wake of the adoption by recent ethnographies of architecture of “a
pragmatist approach”.5 The precise question that drives my fieldwork is whether architects’
responsibility can be situated in the way they respond to the various concerns that emerge in
the course of the design process.6
The scene I investigate in this essay—the particular way in which the architect responds to
the material’s concern—is a striking opportunity to further speculate on such a form of respon-
sibility. The operation is a “speculation” in the sense proposed by Didier Debaise and Isabelle
Stengers, when they draw the traits of a speculative pragmatism along the lines traced by Alfred
North Whitehead and William James.7 They explain that a speculative pragmatism is driven by
the necessity to insist on the possibilities that can be detected in a situation and can potentially
enrich it. They argue that this task is even more urgent when such possibilities run the risk of
being discarded and the situation impoverished. I detect such “a possibility that insists”8 in the
architect’s formulation about what the wood wants: the possibility of a more relational design
practice. And I identify at least two ways in which this scene could be interpreted, which would
undermine this promise. To introduce these interpretations before further developing them, I
will make use of two caricatured figures: the Rationalist and the Moralist.
The Rationalist would interpret the architect’s formulation as a manifestation of the archi-
tect’s expertise: he knows the characteristics of the wood and draws on his knowledge. The
designer cannot rationally believe that “the wood wants to do” anything. If his words attribute
volition and action to the wood, if he lets the wood speak in the first person, it is only as a way
to dramatize his argument, in order to convince his peers. It can only be a rhetorical trick,
28  
Pauline Lefebvre

without further significance. The Rationalist would not refuse to read the situation as a matter
of responsibility. But he would turn this responsibility into an exclusively human endeavour, by
which the designer responsibly weighs the benefits of a material and the techniques associated
with it. The Rationalist would thus use this scene to show how, for these architects, a good design
is one that takes into account material constraints, among others, and optimizes the design to
hold these all together.
The second character, the Moralist, would have a very different interpretation. He believes
the architect’s formulation is the manifestation of his moral values. The architect is willing to
respect “what wood wants”: he regards wood as a natural material with given preferences that
deserve reverence. The Moralist would point out to his readers that the architect mentions to
his colleagues that considering wood’s “inherent structure” is in line with the way they value
“authenticity” as a firm. The Moralist would thus use this situation to show how, for these archi-
tects, a good design is one that uses plain materials and respects their nature by conforming to
the shape they require.
Both these characters appreciate how the architect is willing to accommodate (take into
account or respect) the material’s claims (its characteristics or its intrinsic nature). But neither
fully acknowledges the demanding relationship with the wood as described by the architect. In
the first case, wood is reduced to a passive object of knowledge (obscuring the experimental,
mediated, and relational way by which this knowledge was established).9 In the other case, wood
is reduced to a generalised and abstracted nature, which deserves unconditional respect in the
name of established moral values.
In the architect’s account of the deal he needs to make with the wood in order to design (and
fabricate) the reception desk, I detect yet another possibility that insists. My speculative take
on this scene invites an examination of design (and the knowledge and values it involves) in a
more relational way. This approach can be attributed to a third character: the Ethologist.10 The
Ethologist considers that what is at stake in this situation are beings’ “capacities for affecting
and being affected”11 and, more importantly perhaps, also how they become capable together.
The Ethologist does not critically dismiss the Rationalist’s and Moralist’s views; she rather
cautiously builds on their respective propositions in order to mark important contrasts.12 Like the
Rationalist, the Ethologist appreciates how the scene displays the necessity of holding together
various claims in the design process. Like the Moralist, the Ethologist believes that this situation
is highly moral. Unlike the Rationalist and the Moralist, she insists on how, in this particular
instance, the architect’s concern is entangled with a claim expressed by the piece of wood itself,
obliging them to discover fruitful ways of collaboration.
These three characters manifest different views on responsibility: in the first case, it is a matter
of optimizing various constraints to make the best out of them; in the second, it is a matter of
being authentic by respecting wood’s essence; and, in the third, it is a matter of dealing carefully
with a material with regard to what it is capable of, and of becoming capable of designing and
making a desk together. Using these contrasts, I propose to portray architects’ responsibility as
a “response-ability”, in the sense developed by Donna Haraway:
 What the Wood Wants to Do   29

Such a capacity [to respond, that is, responsibility] can be shaped only in and
for multidirectional relationships, in which always more than one respon-
sive entity is in the process of becoming. That means that human beings are
not uniquely obligated to and gifted with responsibility; […] responsibility
is a relationship crafted in intra-action through which entities, subjects and
objects, come into being.13

This proposition is even more radical than the idea that architects are responsible for respond-
ing to various claims, among which those of the wood. It touches on, but goes beyond, the
recognition of the wood’s agency, acknowledging its reactions to the fabricator’s actions in a more
active—more symmetrical—way.14 It is about considering this agency (how the wood acts on
the designer) as a moral claim (the wood is expressing concerns).15 Yet, it resists the moralistic
idea that responding to these claims is a general matter of respect. Response-ability is shared by
wood and the designer; they are both at stake—as much as the desk—and the deal they make
will be productive only if they all accept to be transformed by what remains, in Etienne Souriau’s
words, a highly “questioning situation”.16

TAKING INTO ACCOUNT, HOLDING TOGETHER: BEING INVOLVED

Let’s now consider more carefully the first proposition, based on the Rationalist’s interpreta-
tion, which consists in saying that architects’ responsibility lies in taking into account as many
constraints as possible. The scene is interesting in this sense because the architect’s formulation
clearly adds a constraint. In what directly followed, the architect accedes to the requirements
dictated by the chosen material and determines the form accordingly. The fact that the material
is taken into consideration so early in the project, and that it is able to counterbalance aesthetic
criteria, is itself of interest.
Architecture is often accused of caring about form at the expense of other aspects, such as use,
but also materiality. Furthermore, the architect’s role has too often been reduced to intentionally
giving form to indifferent matter:

By characterizing matter as inert—as that which is given form—the image of

the architect as a kind of mythic form giver is reinforced and the processes
and labour of construction are covered over. The very resistances that matter
has to being formed are ignored. […] Of course materials are themselves
active; it is a transaction, rather than a one-way operation, that occurs in the
shaping of stuff.17

The situation under scrutiny here is manifesting precisely the kind of “resistances” and “trans-
action” that occur when the architect chooses to use wood for shaping the desk. However, what
followed in this design process confirmed how fragile such a negotiation remains:
30  
Pauline Lefebvre

10 March 2017, 9 am. A few meetings later, while the desk had been turned to stone and its
shape simplified, the team convened with the other partners again (Figure 4). One of them looked
at the different versions of the desk, and declared that he preferred the earlier shape: “it simply looks
better”. The architect in charge reminded him of all the arguments that had led the team to abandon
that option, but, by the end of that meeting, the desk took back its former rounded facetted shape.
In the following days, the previous digital model was inserted into the latest renderings of the
reception space (Figure 5). In the course of one late-night work session, the architect posted a
dozen versions of the desk, differing from each other only by their material appearance, applied in
Photoshop. In this rapid waltz of colours, patterns, and file naming, nothing seemed to remain of
the thorough exchange between the material and the designer.
This moment in the design process, when the transaction with the wood was transitionally
eclipsed, is a fierce reminder of the way architects can easily resort to hylomorphism, “a discourse
in which form must be realized in matter, with the material being seen as merely interchangea-
ble”.18 During that meeting, the appearance was stressed as a more important criterion than the
fabrication technique. If architects’ responsibility lies in taking as many constraints as possible
into account, the risk is that one constraint will start weighing more in the balance than others.
Another, related, project demonstrates that phenomenon very acutely. A few years earlier,
the firm had already been commissioned to build a custom facetted desk, but, that time, as fabri-
cators rather than designers.19 The client wanted a series of metallic facetted tables. He originally
envisioned them cast in bronze, but had to give up because of the prohibitive cost. The architects
were asked to come up with a solution that would leave the idea intact, but substantially reduce
the budget. Eventually, the desks were made out of CNC-milled urethane foam, reinforced with a
gypsum hard coat and covered with sprayed on iron powder-infused resin (Figure 6). When I asked

Figure 4. Photo of the meeting table with a printout of the latest rendering of the desk, sitting next to stone
samples. Photo by the author, 2017.
 What the Wood Wants to Do   31

Figure 5. Selection from the many iterations of the reception space posted on the online collaborative platform
used by the team. Courtesy of the architects, 2017.

the architect about this desk, he confessed that “this desk also had its material issues”, eventually
admitting that “it is not a very materials-conscious project”[…]
In that case, cost and shape were not negotiable; “materials-consciousness” could therefore
not be a priority. It is precisely the question of priority that is central in a version of responsi-
bility that is based on the obligation to “take into account”. In the scene described at the start of
this essay, the architect wonders out loud: “maybe authenticity is not a priority in this project?”
But, this time, he decides to insist. He puts on the table the hard negotiations to be held with
the wood if the facets are retained. Maybe, in this case, where they are the designers and have
control over the shape and fabrication technique that goes with it, he cannot let go of that
concern.
Another shortcoming is the mostly formal way in which materials have been taken into
account so far. In the case of the desk under scrutiny, it is the shape (the facets) that calls for
specific fabrication techniques (3D-carving) in the first instance; another material (stone) later
calls for another shape (larger facets), as the rich surface of the material might create the desired
visual effect (look luxurious). As I observed on another occasion, the turn towards the effects of
architecture (its performance) undertaken by this generation of architects does not necessarily
come with a much-needed pragmatist inquiry into the broader consequences of each design
option.20 This is part of the promise of a materialist approach to architecture. In Katie Lloyd
Thomas’s terms, this involves the “refusal to consider materials in purely visual (and static) terms
and an insistence on examining materials as part of a network of forces and actions”; a call for
architecture to “explore materials in this way if it is to use them responsibly […] and to reach an
understanding of how materials may be productive of effects, both experiential and political”.
21
Taking materials into consideration early in the design process is a chance to add concerns
beyond their technical requirements to achieve a given form. It is as knots of many entangled
issues—as “matters of concerns”, to borrow the term proposed by Bruno Latour to depict things
as unstable and contested assemblies22—that materials increase architects’ responsibilities and
encourage a more ecological approach. They bring along a series of issues that architects can add
32  
Pauline Lefebvre

Figure 6. Images posted by the firm on Instagram during the fabrication of the metallic facetted desks (August
2013). Courtesy of the architects, 2013.

to their list of constraints. As matters of concerns, materials can potentially confront the architect
not only with their structural performance and visual effects, but with their social, economic,
and environmental consequences (in terms of labour, costs, availability, toxicity, waste, etc.).
In the process under scrutiny, the issue of waste is, for instance, a potential concern resulting
from the fabrication technique chosen, one that had not been addressed by the architects to that
point. The technique of 3D-carving does not just “make the wood do something that it doesn’t
want to do”, it also turns a large amount of this material into dust, which—depending on the kind
of material—is not only waste, but can also be highly toxic. Will that issue eventually be raised
if the architects maintain the design as it is? Considering wood as a matter of concern—or even
as a matter-of-care, as Maria Puig della Bellacasa invites us to do23—allows the investigation of
a broader spectrum of consequences, including those that have been neglected so far. And this
investigation definitely participates in an increased responsibility: architects are encouraged to
trace, hold together, and take care of as many concerns as possible.
But this sort of responsibility is not yet “response-ability” in Haraway’s sense. It can still
remain quite unilateral (the architects are responsible on their own) and asymmetrical (the wood
is not responsible at all). Thereby, it replays the modern categories dividing intentional respon-
sible human beings and passive static objects. The idea of taking into account can all too easily
be reduced to a sort of accounting (weighing benefits and losses), while response-ability—“the
moral sensibility needed here”—“will not be stilled by calculations about ends and means”.24
What is still to be accounted for in the situations I expose is the moral exchange between the
wood and the designer by which both will be defined: the designer as a designer able to work
with wood, the wood as a construction material able to make a desk, and of course the desk
itself, which slowly and uncertainly comes into a fuller existence.
 What the Wood Wants to Do   33

COMPROMISED VALUES AND NATURES: MAKING DEALS

If we are to call the situation under scrutiny “moral”, we also need to face the risk of slipping
into a moralistic account. This kind of slippery slope is often interesting, as it forces us to slow
down. The danger here is made even greater when the architect mentions that he is driven by a
“value” the firm established for itself—“authenticity”. Not only does this value look like a moral
imperative adopted unilaterally by the architects, but it is reminiscent of modernist precepts
such as the call for “being true to materials”.25 The scene is thus moralistic—in a very modernist
fashion—insofar as the designer manifests a will to respect wood’s nature, or “inherent structure”,
to conform the shape of the desk to the material’s abstract and generalised essence. This moralistic
view doesn’t allow for a situated account of the situations observed: who is active here? What
resistances are played out and how? What are the various concerns expressed? How do they
relate? What are the ways in which a satisfying deal is made possible?
The architect introduces his concern for the wood by referring to “authenticity”. This value is
at the centre of the discussions the partners have when they try to define the specificity of their
practice. They had recently engaged in such a conversation in preparation for their collaboration
with a Web designer commissioned to reimagine their graphic identity (Figure 7). During the first
meeting, the partners introduced the firm, not so much around the five values they had defined,
but with a presentation of their past and current projects. In the middle of the description of their
latest realised work, one of the partners explained that the firm has “no stylistic agenda” and is
instead driven by the need to address the quality of materials in terms of performance. He added
that this trait is what makes their specificity. Another partner replied that this might then actually
capture their “stylistic preference”: they are “more interested in performance and use than in the
appearance” of their design. A third partner finally confirmed that such “authenticity” is a quality
they pursue in all their projects.
The partners use the term “values” to name the major characteristics of their practice that
they want to highlight. However, my observations of this branding effort show how the “values”
are established based on what the architects have been doing (previous projects), what they
want to continue doing (target clients and commissions), and what they believe they can deliver
(services and skills).26 Their “values” are no a priori moral imperatives established ahead of their
experimentations, but the result of these, just as much as they are a lure for desired futures.
What appears very clearly in the discussion is that the partners call “authenticity” the empha-
sis they place on performance rather than appearance. The architects valorise how things work
(in terms of techniques and of uses) rather than what they look like. In this way, they confirm
their tacit affiliation to the various recent trends in architectural theory that share a shift from
expression to performance.27 These movements have sometimes been compared to a revival
of a certain strand of modernism: by emphasising performance over expression, they would
resurrect some kind of functionalism, calling for form to follow function.28 However, such a
pragmatic preference for effects over meaning, is actually also an opportunity to revisit the
dogmas and ideals that supposedly characterised certain modernist approaches to design, the
notion of “truth to materials” being one of them:
34  
Pauline Lefebvre

Figure 7. Photo taken by the firm associate in charge of marketing at the end of the branding workshop, which
resulted in defining five “values”. Courtesy of the architects, 2016.

[Frank Lloyd] Wright sanctioned many compromises in order to realize the

spiral ramp of the Guggenheim. […] Because Wright, unlike the architects
of the modern movement, was not ideologically committed to structure as
symbolic construct […] he gained a pragmatic, improvisational freedom that
allowed the realization of this unprecedented space. Contrary to the received
notion of Wright working “in the nature of materials”, at the Guggenheim he
was more concerned with effective means to realize the building than with an
expression of the intrinsic properties of concrete as a material.29

The same can be said of Louis Kahn, who—not unlike the architects I am observing—famously
addressed the brick he wanted to use for his design, asking it “what do you want, brick?” and
letting it stubbornly repeat, “I’d like an arch”, when the architect threatened it with a concrete
lintel. Despite his idea that the architect has to “consult nature”, Kahn mentions that “to express
is to drive”, repeating the active role of the designer in the face of the materials he chooses to
use.30 And the brick architecture he was realising at the time—in particular the Indian Institute
of Management in Ahmedabad (1962–1974)—attests to a careful negotiation with the material,
ending in a rich composition of arches and concrete lintels.31
When “authenticity” is associated with performance, it is thus less a matter of respecting the
material’s integrity (its nature, what it is) than of understanding what it can do—what it is capa-
ble of—and of negotiating fruitful compromises with it. A materialist approach to construction
materials also runs along those lines: it aims to counter the idealist version of matter that had
predominated, for example, around Frampton’s notion of “tectonics”.32
 What the Wood Wants to Do   35

This New Materialism is inherited from contemporary readings of Deleuze’s philosophy.33

In his class about Spinoza, Deleuze explains how his Ethics is more of an Ethology, “a practical
science of ways of beings”. He explains how radically different it is from a Moralistic view: while
the latter defines beings for what they are, Spinoza’s Ethics “defines people, things, animals,
anything, by what each one can do”. Deleuze emphasises the force of this proposition:

Imagine these sorts who arrive and who proceed completely otherwise [than
moralists]: they are interested in what the thing or the animal can do. […] An
inanimate thing too, what can it do, the diamond, what can it do? That is, of
what tests is it capable? What does it support? What does it do? […] [When]
we define things by what they can do, it opens up forms of experimentation. It
is a whole exploration of things, it doesn’t have anything to do with essence.34

This is the Ethologist’s perspective I described above: when the architect insists on what the
wood wants to do, he might not simply be manifesting his skills or expressing his respect for the
nature of materials. An ethological perspective on his formulation makes a case for a responsi-
bility relying on “a cultivated discernment of the web of agentic capacities”.35
The fact that the architect I am following is not attached to the nature of the wood, but ready
to engage in a moral exchange with it—by which all parties will be transformed—became clear
at the end of the interview I conducted with him afterwards. After explaining what the wood
does when the fabricator cuts without regard through its grain, the architect mentioned what
the wood of its own volition wants:

It [the wood] really wants to be a trunk. [He laughs.] It doesn’t want to be a flat
board. Because […] You can look at this flat board and see what it’s doing: it’s
doing that, right? [He is showing me how the wood sample is warped.] And it’s
because the grain in a trunk, it doesn’t […] it wants to keep growing to become
part of some kind of a circumference.

The architect knows very well that if the wood is respected for its intrinsic nature, no design
will ever come out of their encounter: the wood will remain a trunk; the designer will have no
material to work with; the desk will never come into being. The question is more about finding
a way to make the desk happen without forcing the wood too much, and perhaps by compro-
mising on the architect’s established “values”.

The smart way? What’s a way to understand what this material is […] I’m sure
there are other ways of […] Yeah. [Sighs.] You know when we glue up these
boards we already try to understand all these things. Because when you take this
board and this board […] [He takes another one off the shelf and puts them
against each other.] So if you would glue them up you’d actually glue them like
36  
Pauline Lefebvre

this (Figure 8). Because this will want to keep curving this way, right? So you
try to balance, you try to resist, you try to see, like […] “we know what’s gonna
come, so we need to try like to engineer this natural material”. You’re basically
making plywood out of it.

And this is what the architects eventually turned to later in the design process. Instead of
giving up on wood and switching to stone, they decided to use pre-engineered wood used
for flooring: “you’re trying to be smart by using an existing product as opposed to creating
something from scratch”. Because, indeed, plywood, this pre-engineered—artificial rather than
supposedly natural—material, is already the result of a fruitful negotiation between man and
wood, to make the wood do what it wants as well as what the designer wants, while leaving
neither untouched. But this is yet another story, which deserves to be continued with the eth-
ological approach suggested here.

CONCLUSION: THE ETHOLOGICAL APPROACH TO ARCHITECTURE

This essay is one attempt among several (most of them yet to come) to collect situations within the
sites of architectural practice, and depict them with what I have called an ethological sensibility.

Figure 8. The process used by the firm to 3D-carve white oak in the context of another project. Courtesy of
the architects, 2014.
 What the Wood Wants to Do   37

Such attempts rely on conducting fieldwork among architects, to observe their daily practice,
and interrogate the way in which they take various constraints into account. More specifically,
the aim is to choose scenes that attest to a symmetrical, or relational, approach to design and
fabrication with regard to the various ingredients, or beings, involved. The case presented here
shows how these architects are eager to consider not just material constraints (how wood is
optimally used), but the material’s concerns (what wood wants to do). I argue in favour of an
approach that insists on the difference between the two, thinking in terms of concerns rather
than constraints.
To dramatize and problematize this distinction, and stress how much descriptions matter,
the essay establishes a contrast between the ethological perspective adopted and other possible
takes on the situation. If I favour the ethological perspective, it is because it pays more respect
to the actual words and concerns of the architect, and to the moments of negotiation to which
they refer and from which they stem. Furthermore, this approach produces and encourages
richer accounts in the study of architecture, while avoiding processes of demystification (the
rationalist explanation) or of mysticism (the moralist imperative). It makes room for the pos-
sibility of more response-able architectural practices, based on such acknowledgement, and
enactment, of the relational aspect of design.
Parts of these arguments have already been put forward in recent architectural theory, most
notably with the introduction of a materialist approach to the relation of architects to construc-
tion materials. Here, these arguments are applied and expanded to everyday practice and design
decisions in the context of a relatively common architectural project, thus not limited to the
specifics of craftsmanship or new technologies and materials.
Practically, the ethological approach is based on reports of architecture-in-the-making rather
than already-made, when negotiations are in play and the relational aspect of design can best
be detected—and amplified by way of speculative descriptions. But it also calls for adopting a
certain perspective in these descriptions. The posture is pragmatist insofar as it believes in the
fact that different accounts have very different practical consequences: what does it change if
design choices are informed by actual deals, struggles, collaborations among the various actors of
the design process; if architects are not response-able on their own, but together with the many
entities they negotiate with? This is where speculation also comes into play, cherishing those
situations that enrich our experiences rather than impoverishing them. There is need for more
speculative pragmatism, for accounts that detect and trace architects’ and other beings’ concerns
as they manifest in practice, because they can be a lure for ever more response-able practices.

Acknowledgements:  This research was supported by the Belgian American Educational

Foundation (BAEF). I am deeply grateful to the firm that allowed me to conduct my research
in their studio and shop. I thank Michael Ghyoot and Nicolas Prignot, who were key partners
in discussions during the preparation of this essay, as well as Uri Wegman for his constant
support and for the editing.
38  
Pauline Lefebvre

About the Author: Pauline Lefebvre is presently (2017-2020) FRS-FNRS Chargée de recherches
at Faculté d'architecture La Cambre-Horta de l'Université Libre de Bruxelles. Her work revolves
around the recent success of pragmatism in architectural theory and practice, with a focus
on the way architects’ political engagements reconfigure in this context. Her work has so far
been published in Clara Architecture-Recherches, Architecture Philosophy, and Footprint.

Disclosure Statement: No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

NOTES
1. The parts in italics are reports from the fieldwork that I conducted in an architecture firm based
in New York from October 2016 to May 2017. This participant observation was conceived in the
wake of previous ethnographies of architecture that applied the actor-network theory in the field
of design study. The descriptions are based on three sources: direct observations, with extensive
notes and photographs taken in the firm; posts on the online collaborative platform used by the
designers; and recorded interviews.
2. The empirical material chosen for this essay depicts the way the designers mobilise past experi-
ences of dealing with the wood in the shop when making design decisions in the studio. Because
of this specific focus, the mediated exchanges between the designer and the wood are described
exclusively in the way they are mentioned by the designers during the design process.
3. William S. Saunders (ed.), The New Architectural Pragmatism: A Harvard Design Magazine
Reader, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
4. See, for instance: Jane Rendell et al. (eds), Critical Architecture, London: Routledge, 2007; Isabelle
Doucet and Kenny Cupers, “Agency in Architecture: Reframing Criticality in Theory and Practice”,
Footprint, no. 4 (2009), 1–6; Isabelle Doucet, The Practice Turn in Architecture: Brussels after 1968,
Burlington, VT: Routledge, 2015.
5. Albena Yaneva, The Making of a Building: A Pragmatist Approach to Architecture, Bern: Peter
Lang, 2009; Sophie Houdart, Kuma Kengo: An Unconventional Monograph, Paris: Editions Donner
Lieu, 2009. These are instances of the recent ethnographies conducted in architects’ design studios
and informed by the actor-network theory.
6. Pauline Lefebvre, “From Autonomy to Pragmatism: Objects Made Moral”, Architecture Philosophy,
2, no. 1 (2016), 23–37.
7. Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers, “L’insistance des possibles. Pour un pragmatisme spécu-
latif ”, Multitudes, no. 65 (2016), 82–89.
8. With “a possibility that insists”, I use my own, adjusted, translation of the French expression by
Debaise and Stengers: “l’insistance des possibles” (Ibid.).
9. About the active exchanges involved in making, see, for instance, Tim Ingold, Making:
Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture, Abingdon: Routledge, 2013. In the field of archi-
tecture, discussions about craft have recently multiplied, often around new technologies and the
 What the Wood Wants to Do   39

tighter relation they allow between the design and building activities, or between the digital and
material realms.
10. I want to thank Vinciane Despret, who formulated this proposition when we presented a similar
argument, together with Michael Ghyoot, in the Groupe de Travail Pragmatisme of Association
Internationale des Sociologues de Langue Française, in the summer of 2016 in Montreal.
11. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, San Francisco, CA: City Lights Books, 1988, 125.
12. I refer to the Ethnologist as a “she” on purpose, to stress the fact that this materialist perspective
is developed in alliance with feminist studies of science and technology. In architecture as well, see
Karen Burns, “Becomings, Architecture, Feminism, Deleuze”, in Hélène Frichot and Stephen Loo
(eds), Deleuze and Architecture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013, 34–35.
13. Donna Haraway, When Species Meet, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008, 71.
In this passage, Haraway refers to Karen Barad’s feminist theory of intra-action: Karen Barad,
Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning, 2nd
edn, Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007. Haraway formulates this proposition while she is
questioning the ethical relationship between the scientists and their animals in the laboratory. The
exchange between the designer and the wood addressed here is of course of a very different kind.
14. Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory, New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005. In architecture, see how Albena Yaneva describes the active and
creative exchanges between the designers at the OMA and the foam they model: Albena Yaneva,
Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, Rotterdam: 010
Publishers, 2009.
15. Emilie Hache, Ce à quoi nous tenons: propositions pour une écologie pragmatique, Paris: Les
Empêcheurs de Penser en Rond, 2011; Lefebvre, “From Autonomy to Pragmatism”.
16. “One of the most notable ways in which the work-to-be-made is present in this dialogue
between the man and the work is in the fact that it establishes and maintains a questioning situation”.
Étienne Souriau, The Different Modes of Existence: Followed by On the Work to Be Made, trans. Erik
Beranek and Tim Howles, Minneapolis, MN: Univocal, 2015, 232. In Souriau’s description of the
artistic process, every participant’s existence is at stake at all times: not just the work-to-be-done, to
which Souriau grants an oscillating but insistent presence, but also the artist and her or his material.
17. Katie Lloyd Thomas, Material Matters: Architecture and Material Practice, London: Routledge,
2006, 3–4.
18. Ibid.
19. The firm in which I conducted fieldwork has a fabrication department, which runs parallel
to the design studio. This characteristic plays a role in the way these architects manifest material
concerns so early in the design process: they are skilled craftsmen, themselves engaged in active
exchanges with materials and tools. It is not without consequences for the possibility of adopting
an ethological perspective, and establishes tight connections with the recent discourse around
craft in architecture. However, I do not stress this specificity, in order to potentially expand the
conclusions beyond firms engaged in craftsmanship or in the development of new digital and
manufacturing tools.
40  
Pauline Lefebvre

20. Pauline Lefebvre, “What Difference Could Pragmatism Have Made? From Architectural Effects
to Architecture’s Consequences”, Footprint, no. 20 (2017), 23–36.
21. Thomas, Material Matters, 5.
22. Bruno Latour, Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy, trans. Catherine
Porter, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004.
23. María Puig de la Bellacasa, Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds,
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
24. Haraway, When Species Meet, 75.
25. This precept is associated with the (moral and formal) purity advocated by the Modern
Movement, and is traced back to the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement of Pugin and
Ruskin. See, for instance, Paul Greenhalgh, Modernism in Design, London: Reaktion Books, 1990.
26. Christophe Camus, Mais que fait vraiment l’architecte? Enquête sur les pratiques et modes d’ex-
istence de l’architecture, Paris: L’Harmattan, 2016. As a result of his ethnography of an architecture
firm, Camus noted how architects’ expertise builds up progressively as they are able to point to
past achievements.
27. I think here of the post-critical turn, characterised by some as “a new architectural pragmatism”
(see, e.g., note 3 above), which relates to the emergence of digital design and fabrication, as well
as to new forms of practices based on more hybrid business models. But I also include certain
discussions around a New Materialism in architectural theory, as they share this shift from mere
expression to performance: “the message is that we should be concerned less and less with symbolic
content—what a building might “mean”—and more and more with performance and material
behaviours”. Neil Leach, “Design and New Materialism”, in Elizabeth Grierson, Harriet Edquist,
and Hélène Frichot (eds), De-Signing Design: Cartographies of Theory and Practice, Lanham, MD:
Lexington Books, 2016, 214.
28. See, for instance: Cornel West and Rem Koolhaas, “Critical Mass: Urban Philosophies”, AV
Monographs, no. 91 (2001), 15–33. In this discussion, Rem Koolhaas refused to be affiliated with
pragmatism because he identified in it a potential revival of the modernist doctrine, “form follows
function”.
29. Stan Allen, “The Guggenheim Refigured: The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum”, in Practice:
Architecture, Technique and Representation, Abingdon/New York: Routledge, 2000, 121.
30. Louis I. Kahn, Louis Kahn: Essential Texts, New York: W. W. Norton, 2003, 270–271.
31. Michaël Ghyoot and Pauline Lefebvre, “Des architectes et des briques”, paper presented at 20th
Congress of AISLF, Montreal, Canada, 4–8 July 2016.
32. Andrew Benjamin, “Plans to Matter: Towards a History of Material Possibility”, in Thomas,
Material Matters, 13–28.
33. For a discussion of New Materialism, see, for instance: Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, New
Materialism: Interviews & Cartographies, Ann Arbor, MI: MPublishing, University of Michigan
Library, 2012.
 What the Wood Wants to Do   41

34. Gilles Deleuze, “Gilles Deleuze Spinoza cours du 02/12/80”, transcript by Christina
Rosky, La voix de Gilles Deleuze en ligne (Université Paris 8), http://www2.univ-paris8.fr/
deleuze/article.php3?id_article=131 (accessed 11 May 2017); translation by Simon Duffy,
https://www.webdeleuze.com/textes/190 (accessed 20 November 2017).
35. Jane Bennett, Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2010, 38.