Science & Tech Quote by Ben Nicholson

Matter still being “the best way” to think about architecture reads like a grudging compliment, the kind that gives away its expiration date. Nicholson, a modernist painter steeped in abstraction and the tactile intelligence of materials, is basically admitting that the old regime of wood, stone, steel, weight, and gravity remains the dominant language of building. But he can already feel that language thinning out. The phrasing “at this present time” is unusually procedural, as if he’s filing a report from the edge of a shift he doesn’t fully trust.

What makes the line work is its double allegiance: Nicholson stays loyal to the physical world (“matter”) while conceding that a new, less material kind of thinking is arriving. “I’m not so sure for very long” is the tell. It’s not a prophecy dressed up as certainty; it’s an artist registering a change in cognition before the culture has a name for it. The computer isn’t just a tool in this view. It’s a mental environment.

“Radicalizing” does the heavy lifting. He’s not saying computers will make architecture faster or more efficient; he’s saying they’ll push thought toward the abstract, the modular, the simulated. Buildings begin as models that can be endlessly iterated, optimized, and rendered before they ever meet a site. Subtext: when representation gets powerful enough, it starts competing with reality as the place where design decisions are made.

Coming from an artist, the remark also carries a quiet anxiety: if architecture stops being primarily about matter, what happens to the sensual, resistant, human scale of making? Nicholson is watching the center of gravity move from material constraints to informational ones, and he’s not pretending that won’t reorder the world.