[Published by e-flux – November 2019]

Mark Jarzombek
The Quadrivium
Industrial Complex

How do we decolonize material from the arrogance of our metaphysical presumptions?

It will not be easy. Architecture today is addicted to four basic products: steel, concrete, glass,
and plastic. Each is a figure in the hyper-industrial world in which we live. We are living in the
golden age of the Quadrivium Industrial Complex.

Though imagined by Modern Architecture, it was only in the end of the twentieth century that
the Quadrivium became unquestioned universals, made so by great global corporations in
alliance with the rise of neoliberal globalization. Cheap steel was produced first in Korea then in
China. Holcim came to dominate the global concrete market, selling concrete by the ton. The
heavier the concrete the better—as far as profit is concerned. Steel became stronger, allowing
less material, longer spans, and quicker construction time. Sheets of glass have become
stronger and more resistant to e-radiation, and are now the cheapest way to cover a building’s
surface. And rubber and other oil products including foams of various types hold the glass in
place and keep the water out. Never in human history have to many different materials been
mobilized so effortlessly.

Yet this golden age will not last forever. There is already concern that the world is running out
of the right type of sand for concrete.1 And the shelf-life of rubber for caulking and window
mullions is no more than thirty years, forcing buildings to be re-glazed all over again. As one
specialist wrote: “Modern glazing systems provide high performance and durability when
they’re manufactured and installed correctly, and require very little maintenance in the first 10
to 20 years in service. Unfortunately, this is when the party often ends.”2

Imagine a world without the Quadrivium. Elites would still live in buildings of stone or brick—
assuming those materials were relatively nearby—and there would perhaps be some iron
ornamentation, but the rest would be living in structures made of sun-dried brick, wood scraps,
earth, thatch, and bamboo. Forests would be decimated for beams or posts. Quarries would be
abuzz with activity, and millions of people would be employed at river edges making bricks.
Nation states as we know them would be different. Steel alone lies at the political foundation of
Europe and the United States. Thank god for the great Quadrivium! Skyscrapers in the desert?
No problem.

In the thirteenth century, huge portions of the globe consisted of oceans, savannahs, deserts,
ice flows, and rainforests. These ecological zones were not mastered by so-called civilizations,
but by the people European colonialists often called primitive and savage. These zones sat on
extraordinary wealth. And as it turns out, they still do. Lumber from the forests, gold mines on
sacred land, copper in the mountains, oil in the Arctic. Modernization will not end until the
furthest reaches of the globe have been placed into the orbit of the Quadrivium. All humans
today are complicit in this reshaping of the earth into its chemical constituencies.

Steel comes, of course, from ore and an array of toxic chemicals, extracted from mines in
dozens of places around the globe. Concrete, glass, and rubber are no less complex in their
constitution and fabrication, each compressing within its materiality a vast array of chemicals.
Should we map even a single building backward, against the grain of its production—back to its
molecular origins—we would find a dizzying global operation. Yet it all ends with heaps of stuff
at the building site, waiting to be moved, lifted, and, assembled by impatient contractors.

1
Greg Brown, “A global sand shortage could cause damaging effects to our rapidly urbanizing
world,” Business Insider (Jan 16, 2019)
Brian Hubbs, “The Inevitable Issue Most High-rise Owners Face,” RDH Building Science Inc
2

March 10, 2014 https://www.rdh.com/blog/the-inevitable-issue-with-igus/

The Quadrivium celebrates itself as a sign of mankind’s industriousness. It is set in motion by
little more than a line stretching across a computer screen, activated by single tap on the
“Send” button. A few electrical pulses and the supply chain responds with alacrity.

Designing even a large building today can almost be done in our sleep, so to speak. Most of it is
automated through spreadsheets, CAD drawings, and computational algorithms.

Tons of the great Quadrivium wind up in landfills. Building material accounts for half of the
solid waste generated every year worldwide and the volume is expected to increase to 2.2
billion tons every year by 2025 – more buildings means more buildings to throw away.3

Let’s make a monument to our ingenuity; to the digital, chemical, corporate enslavement of the
planet. Let’s call it: Architecture! (A bizarre word in this context, since its ancient Greek
meaning derived from the by-now obsolete trade known as carpentry.)

Architecture is zombified space, dressed up here and there in the shiny armor of “design
excellence.”

Every inch of architecture is a stich of our guilt.

This guilt only becomes worse when we ask the wrong questions. Louis Kahn once famously
wrote “What does a brick want to be?” No question has even been more injurious to the field
of architecture than this one. It assumes that the brick is mute and that the architect can divine
its inner ambition. The question is spoken by a master addressing a slave. The brick, tricked into
thinking it has an inner voice, now, in the silence of its response, welcomes its shaped, load-
bearing servitude to the architectural mind.

The question should have been “What does a brick have to say?”

Perhaps more relevant to today’s architecture: “What does a steel beam have to say?”

Would it tell us of the mines that sent contamination down into the streams below? Would it
tell us of the lung cancer that the miners contracted breathing in cadmium fumes? Would it tell
us of the corruption that was needed to quicken its unloading at the dock? Would it tell us of
welders who sweated over their beads? Would it tell us the jokes of workers who sat on its
beam a thousand feet in the air? Would it tell us the magic of the great chemical bonds that
define its molecular existence? Would it tell us the governing logic of its alloy? Would it tell us
of the great heat of the forges, or the cool spray of the presses? Would it tell us of its fear of
water and fire?

3
Adam Redling, “Construction debris volume to surge in coming years,” Recycling Today
(March 5, 2018) https://www.cdrecycler.com/article/global-volume-construction-demolition-
waste/
Would it tell us of its hatred for glass? Would it tell us of its humiliation by the fire-retardant
materials that cover its body supposedly for its own benefit? Would it tell us of its disgust for
sheetrock? (Though sheetrock might have a very different perspective on the matter!) Would it
tell us of its dreams about Eiffel, or its nightmares about being packed in aluminum cladding?
Would it tell us of the arrogance of the architect or the builder who has never once run a finger
along its smooth edges, who never once asks it what IT has to say, who never put an ear on its
surface?

Would iron tell us of the exploding super-nova some trillion light years away where it was first
formed before tumbling through space for billions of years before violently colliding with our
planet? Would glass speak of its ancestral rock that was formed three million years ago? Would
it sing of its astonishing metamorphosis from non-transparent to transparent? Would concrete
remind us that the ancient Inka world for stone was ‘flesh” and that it was only recently that we
see its constituent elements as dead minerals? Would oil speak of its hundred million-year long
warm, dark slumber, of its rude awakening, and of terrifying journeys through pipes, heating
chambers and extrusion machines? Would it lament the absence of a monument to its
polymorphic capacity to hold the world together almost invisibly in the form of Epoxys, seals,
foams, gaskets, and tubing? Would it tell us how underappreciated it is by the other members
of the great Quadrivium? In an opera it would be the tragic figure. Maybe that is why it curses
its colleagues with a thirty-year limit.

The Quadrivium Industrial Complex denies the speech-carrying capacity of materials that it
produces. It embodies a paternalist modernity that houses the world in architectures of silence.
Even Sustainability is often little more than a perpetuation of Quadrivium’s teleological
assumptions, filling in the blanks toward a world under its complete domination.

How do we set up other forms of communication within the worlds/universes of its ‘materials’?
How do we extricate ourselves – as designers - from the by now naturalized linkages between
rationality, modernity and coloniality? How do we dismantle the historically-conditioned,
scientifically-grounded, unresponsive, corporatized core of Quadrivium Industrial Complex – in
anticipation of its demise and collapse?