In actual fact, the “out there” is a field consisting of electromagnetic radiation and a rippling admixture of invisible wavelengths. It is not a conscious model of reality. Thanks to the cognitive neurosciences we now know that the external world we experience is a mental model generated by neuronal networks, an information architecture in the brain in which billions of nerve cells firing away are connected to one another and constantly constitute new activity patterns that spawn the flow of conscious experience. Material does not exist but is first formed in the human brain into a representation of the material that can be perceived through symbolization. Material is constructed. Image, material, and object are one.

The dancing patterns created by the permanently firing neurons within the central nervous system create a complete mental model that is constantly formed, distorted, and agitated by sensory perception and cognitive processes. If we focus our attention on our thought processes we catch ourselves in the state of knowledge. You know that you know something; you think that you are thinking something. You become aware of yourself and experience the certainty of existence. At the end of childhood, you were still able to experience that. In such a state of awareness, you transcend the fundamental subject/object structure of experience, i.e., you go beyond one area and into another. Namely, into that of forming metaphors: The combination of notions where one triggers the other. Using one thing to designate another thing is symbolic transfer. Forming metaphors is in other words the process where one phenomenon is transferred from the context of its meaning into another. Poetic production is at work here.

Forming metaphors helps increase the focal length and depth of field of human perception. The expansion of the field of vision unfolds in exploring the profile of the field and the traces of the terrain through to images of the future. This goes hand in hand with gaining new semantic contexts. Thinking and acting metaphorically means grasping the customary use of material as a metaphorical image of transformation and development. To give material reality new meaning, as it has moved to the periphery of our minds owing to everyday routines, we must distance ourselves from our habits. By relieving it of use and meaning, we let material become foreign, value-free, and cold. Intuitively, temporarily the properties of an object such as its color, surface texture, and the outlines of a coherent visual model are blurred. The separation of figure and background becomes opaque, mixed up as if through a kaleidoscope. Like an infant who explores an object by turning, twisting, and throwing it, and by putting it in its mouth, or like a cat that before pouncing deliberately looks past its prey, we cast aside intention to trace the properties and behavior of the materials and ignore the rules by which the material would be played. We watch the material closely in order to find out in what direction it might develop. However, by abandoning intention we are able to spell the material out in detail. The urge to feel alive, to lead a more interesting and fulfilled life persuades us to imagine futures and devise ideas of a coming life. Conscious insights form complete mental models in tangible space — a feeling of being here. We recognize and experience how the real can be construed differently and is only one special case out of many possible ones. This means that we need to rethink the real in order to proceed onwards to possible futures. As said, by dissolving predefined functions we experience material that we had hitherto approached from a practical and less sensory angle anew, from an unknown side. Discerning the provisional status of the familiar allows for a revolutionary expansion of its properties. Precisely through decay and the transition to something new, things (and the images of them) exist within a diffuse formal order and promise both the new and something sketchy.

This stimulates our sensory and image -based productivity to come up with new ways of thinking and acting. Curiosity prompts us to explore and research the properties of the material and search for images with which we can convey a new sensitivity for the material states in which we live. A process design adjusted to reflect this provides the tactics and strategies for spin-offs and fusion, for up-, re- and pre-cycling, meaning for operating in metabolic processes that need to be designed anew. This sets a construction process in motion that is aimed at a rational, more human form of design and provides aesthetic-utopian added value. The aura of a promised future shrouds this appropriation of material. Where the preconscious and the just conscious as well as acute contemporaneity with concrete-practical notions of the future takes material form in practical, useful structures, there the idea is transformed into material.

The culture of our built environment includes all manner of lifeworlds and a complex interaction of all milieus and defines their identities. The emergence of a culture of building occurs both at the ideational level and also concretely, in material form, in other words is linked to its realization through construction, meaning haptically tangible. Down through the centuries the materialization has, on the one hand, changed, while on the other hand it has stood the test of time, in keeping with the requirements and needs of those who bring life to and use cities, the countryside, and buildings – be it as protection, as a place to work or live, or for social representation. Global climate change is for its part also stimulating thought on how we wish to live in the future and research into the subject.
The Fritz and Trude Fortmann Foundation for the Culture of our Built Environment and Materials focuses on the relationship between that culture of buildings and the conditions under which it is lent material form. It promotes the development of construction materials and methods that are viable for the strong future as well as research on the ecological, functional, and atmospheric properties of materials.

A material history of art and architecture that examines the influence of construction materials on forms and styles has not to date been written. It is likewise unclear whether there is such a thing as the technical determinism of materials. At least, today’s buildings with their curtain-wall facades no longer show whether they rely on a wooden, steel, or concrete load-bearing structure. Indeed, the traditional hierarchy of materials – masonry, wood, concrete, and iron – has been flattened out. Moreover, so many different materials are used in construction that only the trained building physicist will be able to distinguish between the new, flexible compounds and the traditional types of stone and steel, between tintedglass facades and dyed metal panels.

This generates new freedoms, but also a new form of tyranny. For this reason, the Fortmann Foundation prioritizes support for projects that research the production and use of materials. The emphasis is on creating a corrective so that the great dream of a progressive, self-organized intrinsic life of materials does not flip over into techno-magic and material fetishism. However fascinating the Ancient Greek idea of entelechy still is, the risk remains that we hearken only that in materials which we ourselves associated with them in the first place. For this reason, the Fortmann Foundation supports committed scholarly and artistic basic research that combines the economic rationality of using the materials with the standards society sets for a sustainable culture of the built environment.