The case for one material, all the way through.
For three years I have been writing about buildings that refuse to layer. Cast in one pour, finished in one tone, they make a single argument and stop.
The first time I stood inside the Plantahof Auditorium in Landquart, I waited for the building to do something else. It did not. The wall was concrete, the ceiling was the same concrete, the bench under me was concrete, and the daylight arriving through a single high opening was, by the time it reached the floor, also a kind of concrete — flat, even, without flattery. I sat there for twenty minutes, then walked out and sat in my rental car and wrote: one material, all the way through, is not a constraint. It is the argument.
What the cast-in-place decision actually costs.
Pigment is mixed into the wet batch before the pour, not painted onto a finished surface. The reddish wall at Villa Além is red because the cement is red — because the iron oxide was weighed against the kilo of mix, not the square meter of wall. This sounds romantic and is, in practice, brutal: you cannot correct a tone after the formwork is struck. The decision is sealed inside the wall, and the wall is now the building.
A single-material building does not hide behind finishes. It tells you, in one continuous voice, what it is made of, and asks you to either accept that or leave.
I keep returning to a sentence the engineer on the Atelier Bardill project told me, almost in passing, while we stood in the courtyard waiting for the rain to stop: "You are not deciding what the building looks like. You are deciding what the building is."