Post-ductility: Metals in Architecture and Engineering

Metals, as surface or structure- as the generators of space, play a role in nearly every strain of modernisation in architecture. They define complete geographies of work, production, and political life. Non-architectural metals delivered in cars, and hard goods in the United States and worldwide have all been sourced as the engines of the sprawling late twentieth-century city in all of its forms. But in the received aspects of architectural history, metals, and in particular steel, remain less diluted; they are presented as intrinsic to the profession as material precedes concepts- they are carriers of architectural meaning.