Materialism: What 127 Objects Are Really Made Of

Materialism asks a simple question with a complicated answer: what is this object actually made of, and how much of each material does it take? The studio’s research team spends months sourcing exact material breakdowns before a single block is cast.

The newest addition to the series, unveiled this spring, breaks apart a full-size electric vehicle into stacked blocks of aluminium, lithium, copper, glass and rare-earth elements — each block sized precisely to the material’s real proportion of the whole.

“People expect it to be about waste,” says Ralph Nauta, “but it’s really about awe — how much is packed into the things we don’t think about.”