What if materials could speak? In Material Perception: Ceramics, contemporary architectural ceramics transcend their role as mere cladding to become language, structure, and narrative. Through sculptural forms, surfaces that change with light, and compositions that evoke natural textures, the exhibition invites visitors to pause, observe, and question what we often take for granted: the materials that surround us.
APE Grupo participates as a strategic collaborator in the Material Perception: Ceramics exhibition, led by the MaP+S (Material Processes and Systems) research group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design. The exhibition is part of the European Cultural Centre (ECC) programme, a renowned international event held alongside the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale.
Open to the public until 23 November at the historic Palazzo Mora, the exhibition offers a critical reflection on how we perceive and value materials in contemporary architecture, with a special focus on ceramics as structural, aesthetic, and cultural matter. As Martin Bechthold, director of the MaP+S group at Harvard’s Graduate School of Design, explains, “The intention is to break the habitual way we look at materials and provoke a moment of pause, where the visitor can observe what normally goes unnoticed.”
Thanks to APE Grupo’s support, all ceramic pieces in the exhibition have been developed with advanced contemporary materials, allowing the Harvard team to experiment with new forms of spatial and conceptual expression.
A Critical Reflection
The Material Perception: Ceramics exhibition delves into how we perceive materials in contemporary architecture. The proposal centres on ceramics as a vehicle to question notions of authenticity, materiality, and memory, at a time when much of the built environment is dominated by materials that mimic others.
The exhibition invites a reinterpretation of ceramics as architectural matter and cultural language, capable of generating new aesthetic, structural, and sensory narratives. Through sculptural compositions, it offers an experience that combines art, science, and architecture.
The exhibition features a series of pieces encouraging a rethinking of ceramic material from multiple perspectives: structural, perceptual, symbolic, and sensory. All have been developed from APE Grupo’s ceramic pieces, enabling work with advanced, high-precision ceramics and hyper-realistic finishes that replicate natural materials like stone, wood, or marble. “Ceramics have an extraordinary ability to adopt other material languages. It’s not imitation; it’s cultural and technical transformation,” explains Professor Bechthold.
In this sense, the exhibition also addresses an ethical dimension of design: the emotional durability of materials, their ability to generate attachment and permanence over time. “Designing materials that people want to keep for decades is also sustainability,” concludes Bechthold.
Ceramic Sculptures
Among the most representative elements are the ceramic sculptures, large-format pieces exploring the structural, expressive, and conceptual capabilities of the material. Some adopt stepped vertical forms, hyperbolic geometry, and post-tensioned construction to demonstrate that ceramics, treated with technical rigor, can acquire load-bearing behaviour. Others lie at ground level as abstract milestones and autonomous objects, where ceramics abandon their traditional role as cladding to become spatial protagonists.
The exhibition is complemented by an interactive wall installation that transforms the visitor’s perception through light, colour, and temperature. Based on neuroscience, photobiology, and thermal perception research developed at Harvard GSD, this piece applies the so-called hue-heat hypothesis, suggesting that materials—like colours—can generate subjective sensations of heat or cold, influencing our perception of comfort. “We didn’t want a decorative installation, but a piece that translated scientific research into a tangible bodily experience,” comments Bechthold.
The installation consists of a ceramic surface with a translucent onyx effect, organised in a double folded geometry that reacts to the viewer’s movement through a circadian chromatic transition. The colour gradient reproduces the day’s light rhythm: from cool blue tones, associated with dawn, to warm hues evoking sunset. More than an aesthetic piece, it functions as a perceptual architectural device, translating scientific findings into a tangible experience. Additionally, it invites reflection on how certain materials can enhance environmental comfort through passive strategies, without technological intervention.
The exhibited pieces are not understood as functional objects but as spatial and material experiments. By being decontextualised from their usual use in floors or walls, they invite the visitor to reconsider their perception of ceramics: not as background, but as form. Not as surface, but as idea.
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