Every studio has a material library and most of them are a graveyard. Samples arrive, get admired, get shelved and are never opened again, because nobody can remember which drawer holds the thing they half-recall from two years ago.
The rule
Nothing enters our library without a maintenance note attached to it. Who makes it, what it costs per square metre, what it does under water, under heat, under a fingernail, and what it looks like after five years. If the supplier cannot answer, the sample goes back.
This sounds bureaucratic. In practice it has halved the size of the library and multiplied how often it is used, because every sample on the shelf is a sample somebody has already interrogated.
“A sample without a maintenance note is a photograph, not a material.”
Ageing shelf
One bay of the library is given over to samples that have been deliberately abused — left in the sun on the terrace, soaked, oiled, scratched, handled daily for a year. It is the shelf clients spend the longest in front of, and the one that settles most arguments.
Demo editorial — written for this build
