Abstract

This article highlights the role of synthetic plastic in forming and reproducing architectural self-identity in western architectural discourse in the liberal capitalist postwar era. Progressively, it argues, plastic bifurcated into two ever-widening sets of conceptual meanings and discipline-specific uses, referred to here as the banal and the interesting. That is, plastic came to be treated one way in everyday building (banal plastic) where it quietly proliferated beneath architecture’s radar, and as something altogether different in architectural discourse (interesting plastic). Even when ignored or denigrated in architecture, plastic remained a palpable, ghostly absence, mirroring architectural identity. 

Part one identifies historical moments and throughlines that represent the deep transformation petrochemicals and plastics have had on buildings, building practice, and everyday life in industrial economies. These include the explosive growth of industrial plastic production after the Second World War, plastic’s heyday in Pop Art, its subsequent disappearance from architectural discourse, and lastly its limited resurgence among a niche, globalised avant-garde. Part two focuses on the centrality of plastic to two predominant architectural theoretical positions of the 1980s and 90s: phenomenology and post-structuralist neo-materialism. This section argues that, while ostensibly set in opposition to one another, these schools of thought have each reinforced, in different ways, the bifurcation between banal and interesting plastic in architecture. A brief concluding section argues that this split between the interesting and banal helps explains why the discipline’s role in the present plastic crisis has been primarily characterised by reactivity, ineffectiveness, and collusion. 

Keywords: Plastic, Synthetics, Production Studies, Sergio Ferro, Subsumption

How to Cite:

Weiner, M. G., (2026) “Plastic: The Banal and the Interesting”, field 11(1), 55–85. doi: https://doi.org/10.62471/field.208