Truth or Fake
The role of approaches in designing a building is just like telling a story, in such a way that the story will be also express with the materials of the building. In different aspects, like materials or shape, color or light. If the story that told is clear, the building will be more interesting and beautiful.
Architects nowadays always do research and study tend to solve any issues that happening everyday by design the story of building as detailed as possible. And next on is to transform their detailed story into physical forms by the architect himself. The transformation makes the story into physical and technical aspects, which reveal themselves through the actual materials, the actual structure use of which the building is going to build.
The choice of the material and their appearance is the way the story will be read by its users. If the story is unable to express by the material and design, the building most likely have lost its goal to tell its characteristics to the users. It may causes people misunderstanding of the architecture. This means that the decisions of uses the right material may lessen or increase the beauty of a building and in telling the story which architect wants to express.
In architecture would always talk about when using natural raw resources, and deceptions material would against the natural characteristics, like using wood but making it look like stone, as it was never supposed to be wood. Or using bricks, but plastered it, and draw lines as it look like stones.
The ways that use deception materials is by not only defying its natural characteristics, but also letting the material imitate other materials characteristics. In green architecture studies, this would mean that wood should reveal itself as wood, in texture, in strength, in the way it should be use.
However in this modern era, deceptions in the case where imitating one material using another could be not wrong. Some might be a consideration of budget costing, or can be a new solution of protection and technology, there is somewhere in relations between honesty and deception, for instance cladding or laminating. In my opinion there might be reasons to mix one material with another, and that is for certain purpose like additional protection, hygiene, durability and safety. In case like use a complete masonry wall in interior Kitchen or exterior facade, both these people would always love to covered with aesthetic marble or any tiles instead of cement plastering. In this case, the users or architect should find out the reasons and possibilities in the purpose to apply.
Another example, if a steel column is needed to keep the building standing, but needs concrete covering for fire safety, that might be a reason to clad steel in concrete. But the same question is back, can the column be made of concrete only, but covered by steel.
Conclusion, the use of materials anyhow had seems to be important influence and topic on the way users experience architecture. The honesty in materials forms of the building are the words an architect used to tell the story, and the choice of the materials and their appearance is directly read by its users. If the story is less clear, less honesty, it will be less to express its characteristics or identity.
