Quiet Materials
- Copenhagen
- Ida Krøyer
- Publications
- 2025
The book exists because a client asked us why we kept specifying the same lime plaster, and the honest answer took forty minutes. Quiet Materials is that answer, written out properly.
Each of the eleven chapters takes one material — lime, oak, brick, wool, alabaster, paper cord, travertine, urushi, oiled steel, thatch, undyed linen — and follows it from where it comes from to what it does in a room. The writing is not technical. It is about behaviour: how a material takes light, how it sounds, how it feels at four in the morning, what it looks like after a decade of being wrong for the job.
The photography was made specifically for the book rather than drawn from project archives, which turned an eighteen-month project into a four-year one. We photographed lime kilns in Jutland, an alabaster quarry outside Zaragoza, a Kyoto lacquer workshop across three seasons and a Suffolk thatcher who let us follow one roof from cut to ridge.
The object itself is deliberately plain: a coarse undyed linen case, blind-blocked, sewn sections, uncoated paper, no jacket. It is heavy and it opens flat. There are no captions on the plates — the material is named at the head of its chapter and then left alone.
It is not a monograph. There are no plans in it and only four of our own projects appear, none of them credited on the page.