Discover Bjarke Ingels’ manifesto for his Domus 2025

Life is animated matter. Life on Earth has evolved through adaptation. Life adapted to our material environment. Until the moment we discovered tools, technology and architecture. Then we acquired the power to adapt our material environment to life. We no longer had to hide in a cave to seek shelter from the elements. We could cut, carve and stack rocks to create our own cave. And suddenly we had to ask ourselves: What kind of cave do we want to live in? Through those questions and their answers we have adapted the surface of our planet to the needs and desires of human life. The Danish word for design is formgivning – which literally means form giving – because to design something is to give form to that which has not yet been given form. In other words, to give form to the future. Because when we design an artefact, a space or a place, we are giving form to the world that we would like to find ourselves living in, in the future.

You can look at the evolution of human history as a tale shaped by the materials we have known how to harvest and process. As evidenced in how we name the epochs of human history – the Stone Age, the Bronze Age, the Iron Age – our capacity to manipulate matter is perhaps the greatest force driving the development of our culture. The world of the Anthropocene is formed in the shape of our human ideals and dreams. In the mindset of Paul Virilio, you can view cities as temporary decelerations of matter at the intersections of the constant material flow of people and goods. The orchestration of that material flow is our art form. 

When asked to formulate a manifesto as guest editor for Domus 2025, I felt rather than forcing the many voices of artists and architects into the ideological straitjacket of my own set of values – what if we shifted the lens from idealism to materialism? By reclaiming the term materialism from the realm of empty consumerism, we aim to bring it back to the practice of formulating our future through form and matter. We want to go on an odyssey through the material world. Starting with solid rock and ending with the flow of electrons: Stone, earth, concrete, metal, glass, wood, fabric, plastic, plant, re-source, immaterial.

We hope to return to the fundamental material nature of what we do. Unlike other art forms, architecture is not about representation but accommodation. It doesn’t refer to life but makes space for it. It doesn’t discuss the world but produces it. Architecture is essentially all the immaterial processes of society solidified in physical form. Our focus on material allows us to manifest radically different world views side by side, without distinction or discrimination. Like an editorial oxymoron, the materialist manifesto strives to allow seemingly mutually exclusive voices to be heard through the tectonic possibilities of each respective material. Every project becomes a literal material manifestation of contradictory discourse.

In a time where polarisation threatens to silence critical conversation through isolation or cancellation, the materialist manifesto can serve as the substrate for truly diverse dialogue. Our material odyssey will make space for collisions of clashing world views, so on the pages of Domus you will find side by side the traditionalist and the avant-garde, craftsmen and technophiles, the ornamental and the austere, the expressive and the tectonic, the global and the local, the pragmatic and the utopian. Conflicting ideas, united by matter.

Opening image: Yellow quartzite bifacial hand axe Erg Murzuk, Libya Lower Palaeolithic (Acheulian), ca. 500,000 years before present. Photo Andrew Zuckerman