Journal No. 01 - Facing Surfaces

“Surfaces are not finishes. They are origins of meaning.”

We often speak of surfaces as though they conclude something - as if the work of architecture, or design, reaches its endpoint once the surface is sealed. But surfaces do not end anything. They begin everything.

In Bruno Latour’s view, every object - every stone, every shard of earth, every tile, participates in the network of existence. Matter is not passive. It acts. It insists. It resists the modern illusion that only humans make meaning.

When we face a surface, we are not gazing upon decoration; we are encountering agency. Every texture holds a reply - to the craftsman’s hand, to the pressure of the kiln, to the weight of geological time. The relief of a tile is not a pattern but a form of conversation: between fire and earth, between maker and material, between the visible and the buried.

To face a surface, then, is to stand before a participant. We are looked at by what we have made. It measures us - our patience, our attention, our care. In that encounter, authorship dissolves. There is only correspondence.

The surface remembers. It records every gesture: the cut, the glaze, the waiting. And through these traces, it carries forward what Latour might call the invisible negotiations between worlds - human and non-human, mineral and temporal.

plonc. exists within those negotiations. We do not design onto material but with it. The tile becomes an intermediary - a mediator between geology and architecture, between the silence of the earth and the noise of modern construction.

To face a surface is to face what has always been looking back. In that reflection, design recovers its oldest task: not to impose, but to listen.

Watch the original plonc. Studio film - Facing Surfaces