Mass: Brief Notes on the Solid and the Light in Architecture

Abstract

What do we understand by mass in architecture? Are we sure we talk about the same thing? The polysemy of the concept of mass inside and outside the discipline makes it convenient to clarify it to avoid some misunderstandings, or perhaps to further increase the confusion. In their first entries, the dictionaries define ‘mass’ as the physical magnitude that expresses the amount of matter of a body. Mass is different from weight. They are not synonyms, although our common use tends to turn the two words into such a thing.  Mass also means a lot of something: mass production, mass culture, mass destruction, and also mass concrete, mass housing.

This text briefly reviews some historical episodes and proposes a series of notes on the amount of matter ­–the solid and the light– in architecture, discovering a forgotten but more convincing and real meaning of what ‘mass’ is for architecture.