Focusing on matter as the premise of an architect's imagination, each chapter identifies and graphically illustrates how material imagination defines the conceptual premises for making architecture.

An Introduction, Matthew Mindrup; Part One The Material of Architectural Conceptions; Chapter 1 Material Intuitions: Tracing Carlo Scarpa's Nose, Carolina Dayer; Chapter 2 Extracting Desire: Michelangelo and the forza di levare as an Architectural Premise, Jonathan Foote; Chapter 3 Phenomena and Idea, Steven Holl; Chapter 4 The Resistance of Factures in Drawing-out Architectural Constructions, Matthew Mindrup; Chapter 5 Mythic Geology: Under the Surface at Palazzo del Te, Tracey Eve Winton; Part Two Construction Matters; Chapter 6 Architectural Encounters between Material and Idea, Paul Emmons; Chapter 7 Displacing Matter, Manuela Antoniu; Chapter 8 Jørn Utzon's Reverie of the Eye: Surfaces of the Sydney Opera House, John Roberts; Chapter 9 On the Dissolution of the Modular Imagination, Dan Willis; Part Three Imaginative Perceptions of Architecture; Chapter 10 Glass, as Light as Air, as Deep as Water, Ufuk Ersoy; Chapter 11 Found Spaces and Material Memory: Remarks on the Thickness of Time in Architecture, Jonathan Hale; Chapter 12 The Return of the Ruin: Modernism, History and the Material Imagination, Jonathan Hill; Chapter 13 Adventures in Angelic Material Imagination: The Baroque and the Digital as Recounted by Putto_1435, Alessandro Ayuso; Chapter 14 Communication Material: Experiments with German Culture in the 1930 Werkbund Exhibition, Sandra Karina Löschke; Chapter 15 Unfinished Architecture: Urban Continuity in the Age of the Complete, Nicholas Temple;