Book Launch: Material Variance edited by Lola Ben-Alon
Thursday, November 19, 2026
6:00pm – 8:00pm
Book Launch:
Material Variance edited by Lola Ben-Alon
Thursday, November 19, 6–8 pm
303 Bond Street, Brooklyn
Join us for a collective reading and conversation celebrating Material Variance, edited by Lola Ben-Alon and published by Columbia Books on Architecture and the City (CBAC). Alongside the debut of the book, the event will feature the unveiling of LEEFO, a site-specific installation by Lola Ben-Alon’s Natural Materials Lab at Columbia GSAPP.
Moving beyond the traditional panel format, the evening will stage cross-readings in which contributors read excerpts from one another’s texts, opening up unexpected connections and exchanges across their practices and perspectives.
CBAC editors Isabelle Kirkham-Lewitt and Joanna Joseph will introduce the evening, followed by readings from Lola Ben-Alon, Felecia Davis, Andres Jaque, Mae-Ling Lokko, V. Mitch McEwen, and Jonsara Ruth, and a sound installation by Ethan Bourdeau. The gathering will close with a conversation around the questions, resonances, and tensions emerging across the book.
About Material Variance
Raw building materials are inherently variable. This variability shapes global supply chains, labor relations, infrastructure, and trade networks. And yet, within the context of building design, materials are often treated as static commodities. Material Variance resists this perception, unfolding instead a framework for designing through and with living matter that is uncertain, messy, and dynamic. The book insists on materials not as passive inputs but as unruly agents, shaped by and shaping the political, ecological, and cultural processes around them.
Convening material researchers, building scientists, architects, and artists, Material Variance aims to collectively expand architecture and design’s material lexicon and unsettle its disciplinary boundaries. The book interrogates the assumptions of refinement, standardization, and technocratic control to advance alternative fabrication practices, alchemical processes, and methods for working with indeterminate matter. From poetic field recordings to scientific analyses, the book opens up a space for thinking across theory and practice, across geological particles and living species, and across various scales, forms, and practices.
This edition of Material Variance features three distinct covers, each one printed with a unique matrix, ink, paper stock, and tip-in, extending the notion of variance to production of the object itself.
With contributions from David Benjamin, Ethan Bordeau, Olga Beatrice Carcassi, Caitlin Charlet, Felecia Davis, Andrés Jaque, Leslie Lok, Mae-ling Lokko, Claudia Marais, Adam Marcus, V. Mitch McEwen, Ruth Morrow, Jorge Otero-Pailos, Ronald Rael, Jonsara Ruth, and Laia Mogas-Soldevila.