A material needs to be able to stand up to the forces exerted upon it, or else it cannot function as a designer envisions. The physical properties of a material-its strength, resilience, malleability, density, opacity, and so forth-are fundamental to its use. But delving beyond the fact that wood, for example, was used to build houses in early America, and exploring the details of how it was worked, and by whom, expands their understanding of the material’s meanings and its properties. All designers begin with some aspect of this knowledge, whether through precedent studies, architectural history courses, or everyday experience. The history of materials extends beyond understanding extraction and preparation to learning about the ways that materials have been used in the past. For example, mahogany was deeply embedded in colonialism and the slave economy of the West Indies, where it was harvested in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, until its astonishingly rapid deforestation in favor of sugar plantations worked by the enslaved. Complex economic and social systems underlie the history of extraction. Other materials, like clay, are broadly available and relatively easy to work (figure 2). The skills involved in extracting and processing some materials are specialized and may be carefully controlled. Some materials are quite rare, such as metals that occur in profitable quantities in only a few places on earth, or plants or animals that require a very specific ecosystem.
Exploring the history of a material requires learning about processes of extraction and the social and economic structures that permit the material’s components to be extracted, processed, and transported. All materials need to be mined or harvested, and then processed into a usable substance (figure 1).
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