Books of Interest
Material World: The Six Raw Materials that Shape Modern Civilization, by Ed Conway, 2023
A globe-trotting journalist’s materialist dig into the global industries of sand, salt, iron, copper, oil, and lithium. The sand chapters are especially compelling, describing how one of the most prevalent materials on earth can become so precious, when processed to the nth degree.
Chip War: The Fight for the World’s Most Critical Technology, by Chris Miller, 2022
This book explains the essentials about the evolution of the silicon chip industry, whose remarkable, nearly ephemeral physical medium of microscopic integrated circuits/semiconductors/microprocessors is the infrastructure of the information age. In a lucid and global corporate way, this book almost does for the hardware of the digital age what Richard Rhodes did for the atomic bomb, or Daniel Yergen for the oil industry. With things changing so fast, propelled by the current craze for AI, a new afterward in the trade paperback edition released in September, 2025 gets us up to date, to that point at least. The book could be an important hard copy back-up for archeologists digging through the ruins after China and the US fight to the death over the TSMC plant in Taiwan.
Material Acts: Experimentation in Architecture and Design, by Kate Yeh Chiu and Jia Yi Gu, 2025
This catalog of an exhibition curated by the authors is a remarkable journey into a panoply of innovative materials. It presents the work of individuals, research groups, offices, and ateliers working with things like responsive bimetals, actuated elastomers, delaminated and non-dimensional lumber, jammed gravel, mycelium columns, bacterial cellulose sheeting, biocalcified paper foam, algae-laden hydrogels, printed adobe, fired-on-site masonry, waste plastic cladding, and more. It presents a formidable challenge to the dialectical industrial adage that “if it is not mined, it is grown.” The exhibition was held in 2024 at Los Angeles’ Craft Contemporary, a museum and exhibition space dedicated to craft-making.
Plywood: A Material History, by Christopher Wilk, 2017
Plywood is one of the most common, sustainable, and versatile building materials. Used to make floors, walls, roofs, shelving, cabinetry, and furniture, many of us are literally surrounded by it. And used as a form for concrete, it further shapes our built world. From its humble beginnings as 3-ply cross-grained veneers used in door panels, crates, and furniture, it was shaped into airplanes, cars, and boats through the 1940s, when it was deemed an “essential material” for World War II. After the war it found its way deeper into building construction, eventually competing with other emerging 4x8 foot sheet materials, like OSB (oriented strand board), MDF (medium density fiberboard), drywall, and other composite boards, in the 1970s. Among them all though, plywood endures, with integrity. This book tells the story of plywood in erudite words and images, including some of the American side of the story, but focused on design, since it was published in conjunction with an exhibit at the Victoria & Albert Museum in London.
The Apocalypse Factory: Plutonium and the Making of the Atomic Age, by Steve Olson, 2022
As a radioactive element, plutonium does not appear in nature. If any existed on the earth prior to humans, it would have decayed and disappeared long ago. It was “discovered” in the cyclotron at Berkeley in 1940, by Glenn Seaborg and others, as element 94, two steps away from its source, uranium (element 92). Its potential use as a fuel for nuclear bombs was clear enough, theoretically, to create the plutonium production plant at Hanford, Washington, as part of the Manhattan Project, which supplied the 13 pounds of plutonium239 used for the Trinity test, and more for the Fat Man bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Hanford went on to produce most of the plutonium in the US in its nine reactors until 1989, when the site became the most complex environmental clean-up project in the nation’s history (total cost for clean-up estimated to be half a trillion dollars or more). This book is the latest to tell the tale of this end-of-the-world elemental metal made from scratch, as much as 1,000 metric tons of which exists on planet now (very carefully stored, one hopes).
Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, by Alexander Clapp, 2025
A impassioned and ground-truthed overview of the global trash industry confirms, once again and with vigor, yes, it’s getting worse in unimaginable ways. Why do we make so much unnecessary stuff? Perhaps it's because while we may individually be rational and thoughtful people, we are collectively insane.
After Spaceship Earth: Art, Techno-Utopia, and Other Science Fictions, by Eva Diaz, 2025
A Lippardian art-historical curatorial romp/rodeo through post-Buckminster Fuller fallout, roping in contemporary artist projects by the likes of Mary Mattingly, Nils Norman, Oscar Tuazon, Connie Samaras, N55, Hito Steyerl, Trevor Paglen, Tom Sachs, Matthew Day Jackson, Jane and Louise Wilson, Tavares Strachan, Stewart Brand, Sun Ra, Octavia Butler, and many, many more. The best bits are about domes, as social space, projection space, expanded cinemaspace, moviedromes, geoscopes, network sensoriums, McLuhanesque teaching machines, global expo geodesics, and SAGE radometics. Despite remarkable depth and breadth, the author’s Venn-diagramming leaves more out then in, of course, affirming the existence and importance of parallel universes.
Transformation of a Landscape, by Victoria Sambunaris, 2024
The latest tranche of big images from one of the great contemporary landscape photographers of the American West. Interesting thoughts and essays in additional sub-publications tucked into a pouch inside the hardcover binding.
Wild Visions: Wilderness as Image and Idea, by Ben A. Minteer, Mark Klett, and Stephen A. Pyne, 2022
Ah, wilderness, that “self-willed” wild place. This book gets at it from the POV of photography, and the format is neat: several chapter galleries, each with a text essay, some images picked by photographer Mark Klett, and a discussion. It narrows down towards the inevitable conclusion that wilderness might have dissolved into a notion, but then steps back. While it is perhaps debatable that wilderness is everywhere, or exists only in outer space, one area where wilderness is not likely to be found in abundance is in American wilderness areas.