Why we are called Matera

Matera is a portmanteau, a word that blends the meaning of two others, materials and architecture. The portmanteau takes its name from a kind of travel bag that folds open into two parts. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s Carrier Bag of Fiction, she describes how it was probably the carrier bag and not the weapon that humans developed first. Something to carry our young in or to gather and hold precious items.

In Spanish and Portuguese Matera is a vessel to hold life-sustaining findings, often related to nourishment. The root of Matera is “mater”, which comes from the Latin for mother.
This root is central to words related to motherhood, nurturing, and foundational sources of life across many languages.

As Le Guin points out, these precious things we gather and carry might be wild grains and berries, but they might also be stories. Architecture, as Le Guin describes, is a practice of making containers of this kind. A home is a container for people and a shrine or a museum, a container for stories.

In Italy Matera is the name of a city formed of cave dwellings with formal facades, a kind of architectural portmanteau, both in and on the rocks. It is perhaps the oldest continually inhabited city in the world.

For us, the name carries a reminder that the built environment must be an extension of the earth itself—using materials that come from it, are shaped by it, and will eventually return to it, all while sustaining the precious things within it.

Our Matera is a container for gathering precious things too. Materials, people and ideas that will help us to tell stories about architectural possibilities and material futures.