Once they make it fire-retardant, then it doesn't look like fiberglass anymore. So people in our office will send things to fabricators, asking if they would make samples. Things go back and forth, back and forth. There's a great deal of struggle. It's not just picking stuff out of the storage room.
Materials emerge from a particular place and from some very dull grunt work.
We think about materials for a building as much from the inside going out, as from the outside going in. We start with what is particular to a problem. For example, with the folk art museum, which right now has a very strong presence, we tried to find a material that would be unique in a certain way and would have a sense of the human hand being involved in making it. Now it's true that all manufactured materials have some hand involved, but it's not always so visible. The challenge was to establish a direct relationship between what you see and how it was made, so you make a connection between the hand and the finished object.