The Life of a Sample
The intercom rings and someone lets the parcel man into the office. He carries a compact, heavy cardboard box, wrapped in clear sellotape with a large ‘fragile’ sticker on it. “This one is for you” – the office manager lets me know. The thrills of Christmas morning run through those who hear it. At my desk, the unwrapping begins. Cutting knife, bubble wrap, and delivery note aside, a long-waited material sample arrives. “It’s not that nice, actually” – says a colleague. I agree. Anticlimactic.
We live amongst samples in the office. They sit on the windowsills, serve to elevate computer screens, lay as doorstops, spread across people’s desks, lean against the walls – sometimes dangerously so in narrow corridors – and some have made their way to become the office’s hip cutting boards and coasters. The sample shelves, the ever-tidying-up conundrum, have been full for quite a while now. The shelves are also the first thing one sees when walking into the office.
This time around, electromagnetic waves travelled 149.4 million kilometres across space to meet water and loam and rearrange stardust into recognisable matter. Once a 20-metre tall, 130-year-old hardwood has been harvested, dried out, milled, treated and reduced to a pocket-size, easy-to-handle 10x10cm tile for our inspection. It is the first time the project’s drawings and CGI are represented in physical form. These tangible, tactile fragments compliment what the digital realm cannot yet stir up in our imagination. We use them to discuss, create and, at times, reject design iterations. Until next week’s client meeting, this one will rest in a drawer along with its oiled, lacquered, smoked, veneered, composite, and painted counterparts.
Together with other bits of stuff, one may say these samples make up the ruin of a building that is yet to occur. “A building under assembly is a ruin in reverse,” someone once said in 1976. Ruins are full of potential. They tell incomplete stories, alluding to the future as well as the past. Ruins evoke fantasies, desires; their fragmented forms amplify architecture’s allegorical capacity. And what about the countless projects that never see the light of day? Their samples are the ruins of constructions which will only ever have existed in one’s creative mind: the aftermath of what has not been.
The day has arrived to select a few samples, wrap them in bubble paper, carry them downstairs, place them in a cab, and drive to the client’s boardroom. “Did we get sign-off?” – a teammate asks once we are back at the office, half a day later. Yes, the tiny pixel of a sample will expand exponentially to cover the interiors of an entire room.
After the sample serves its function for the imagination, testing of finishes, client approvals, office furniture, and is finally thrown into the disposal basket, what happens next? I would like to think it doesn’t slip into the reoccurring cycle of consumption, obsolescence and waste. There is carbon stored in the sample and carbon has been generated to transport the sample. This one, luckily, will be transformed into a wood-based panel, wood fuel, or paper pulp, to be inspected by someone else in another office in another time. Today before lunch, by the click of an email, I order two more samples, to be delivered by the end of the week.
This article was written by Roberto Boettger, from 6a.