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ON SITE r e v i e w
architecture urbanism design
infrastructure construction culture
35
the material culture of architecture
number 35 spring 2019
www.onsitereview.ca
Clive Crowder, Nigel Henderson’s Streets: Photographs of London’s East End 1949-53 . London: Harry N. Abrams, 2017 ISBN - 10:1849764999 ISBN - 13:9781849764995
Guy Nordenson and Terence Riley, editors. Seven Structural Engineers: The Felix Candela Lectures. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008 ISBN-10: 0870707035 ISBN-13: 978-0870707032
Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, Mark Dorrian, editors. Critical Architecture.
London: Routledge, 2007 ISBN 978-0-415-41538-5
Isabelle Hayeur, Raymond Beaudry. Dépayser / Strangeland Montreal: Isabelle Hayeur, 2019 ISBN : 978-2-9808422-1-4
David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture . Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005 ISBN: 9780262621946
Robin Wilson. Image, Text, Architecture.The Utopics of the Architectural Media. London: Routledge, 2015 ISBN paperback 9781138573260 ISBN 9781472414434 ebook ISBN 9781315587820
John MacArthur. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. London: Taylor & Francis, 2008 ISBN10 1844721418 ISBN13 9781844721412
Alexander Eisenschmidt, The Good Metropolis: From Urban Formlesness to Metropolitan Architecture. Birkhauser 2019 ISBN-10: 3035616329 ISBN-13: 978-3035616323
Eileen Gray & Jean Badovici, E1027- Maison en bord de mer Marseille: Editions Imbernon, 2015 ISBN: 9782919230099
Robin Wilson and Nigel Green, Brutalist Paris Map . London: Blue Crow Media, 2017
Koen Van Balen and Els Verstrynge, editors. Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions: Anamnesis, Diagnosis, Therapy, Controls.
Leuven: CRC Press, 2016 ISBN-10: 1138029513 ISBN-13: 978-1138029514
These books are either by past contributors to On Site review , or are particularly important to the contributors in this issue and are mentioned within their articles.
Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Oren Sagiv, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, editors. Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018
Stanford Anderson, Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004 ISBN-10: 1568983719 ISBN-13: 978-1568983714
Complete Set of Architecture and Design Map s. bluecrowmedia.com
ON SITE r e v i e w
Spring 2019
I n the realm of architectural publishing we see a lot of successes: the professional journals publish the best, the most technologically advanced, the most culturally significant of the new. Critique happens in the letters. Theoretical journals also reveal a kind of success, usually academic successes, the kinds of discussions that are presented at symposia, or, before that stage, as theses and dissertations: original thought, often, carefully crafted to advance an academic career that can change the education of architects and in consequence, the profession. In theory. On Site review has always carved a middle ground, taking professional success with a grain of salt — it is never the brainchild of just one architect but massive teams of designers, engineers, bankers, construction companies, politicians, shareholders, planning offfices. Even the building of a house involves an interdependent team. At the other extreme, the abstract and theoretical discussions that are advanced academically, often fly above daily experience of architecture. There is a connection, but life is short – sometimes, usually, that connection is difficult, abstruse, personal, complex – not many people have the facility or the theoretical underpinnings, or the academic incentives to figure it out. On Site review has taken a three-year hiatus from its 20 years of publication and with this issue, 35: the material culture of architecture , proposes a discussion of architecture that starts with the material of architecture. 35: the material culture of architecture
contents contributors
Stephanie White
The material culture of architecture: Grenfell Tower Brick: the material of Eladio Dieste Developing form within the materials of architecture The culture of wood construction Yucca indigo willow The culture of materials Leaves willow lichen Material gestures The materials of the model On concrete Forensics of nuclear landscape The hard and the brutal: a journey through Parisian Brutalism The uninscribed surface The power of the material object Epilogue: boundaries and the materiality of architecture Postscript: Olinger Architects, T-Wall housing, Iraq call for articles: On Site review 36: our material future who the contributors are
2 3 6 7
Ted Cavanagh Nicole Dextras
12 13 14 16 17 24 26 32 40 46 50 54 55 56
Stephanie White Richard Collins Stephanie White Andrey Chernykh Robin Wilson Yuxin Qui Jonathan Ventura Johathan Ventura and Sharon Danzig
I would like to acknowledge that this issue was created on the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, the traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Selilwitulh First Nations.
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W hat is it that turns a material fact into a rules-based credo: material into materialism, capital into capitalism; the transition hardens the options available to the initial, existential event, often turning it to dogma, doctrine, a fetish. This impulse is at its heart political — one can be feminine (a cultural construct in early twenty- first century gender discourse), or one can be feminist, an entirely different political stance with different consequences and discursive options. So too with material: materials in architecture are just that: the materials used to make buildings, streets, cities, sometimes deliberate, often inadvertent and unavoidable. Materiality, in architecture, describes material qualities: texture, colour, transparency — qualities of surface through which we interact with the materials that make up buildings: we touch the brick, check our hair in the glass, clean the moss off the concrete. Materialism is the overweening desire to accumulate the materials that are considered of worth, whether or not they are useful. Worth, as materials go, becomes cultural, not the materials themselves, although they become marked by association. In so far as materialism was the accusation once hurled at the Joneses and all those who wanted to keep up with them, materialism in architecture occupies a particular niche: the choice of materials to raise the status of a building. This is the Grenfell Tower example. The materialism of the aluminum cladding was the material culture of architecture stephanie white the case of Grenfell Tower, London, 2017
circumstance. Come 50 years later, the model and the architecture has long been discredited. Its facelift solution was two-fold: increase insulation and make it look glossier by covering the outside with gleaming silvery aluminium insulated panels. It is these panels which are the material expression of a cultural appreciation of architectural style; not architecture, but the look of architecture. That these panels were a cheapjack product is another consequence of ideological change where government is less responsible for the care of its citizens than in the postwar era, therefore there is less money allotted to housing, social welfare or community support. Government is concerned, however, with appearance. Things must look successful, not crumbling, to attract investment. Council towers all over Britain have been newly clad in insulated panels, many of which fail fire tests. This is what material culture is: a sense of ourselves through the materiality of our choices. It isn’t about art, or architecture, or practices deemed progressive, or even conservative in the sense of conserving what one has. It is about both inadvertent and conscious practices that establish stature and identity, for better or worse. n
more than an earnest choice of insulation panel; it was meant to raise the status of a block of council flats to ameliorate its presence in a very expensive district, Regent’s Park. The materiality of the aluminum cladding was visual, flammable and inexpensive. Grenfell Tower technical facts and political speculations: designed and built in 1967 in concrete, a marginal amount of insulation on the inside walls. Despite the valorous critical re-evaluation of Britain’s extensive postwar brutalist movement, housing towers such as Grenfell looked old and ugly. What was revealed in the weeks after the fire was the diverse and rich life contained between its old and ugly concrete floors and walls — not the tight old London working class communities that had gone through the Blitz and who until Windrush and the empire coming home were white and deeply rooted in London as a place. No, Grenfell 2017 was hugely diverse: the new London which because of the numbers of 1960s council towers still has economic diversity built into its heart. Nonetheless, Grenfell flats were cold, its architecture a failed socialist model: some new clothes were needed. This is where a discussion of the material culture of architecture becomes relevant. The 1967 architecture was straight-up modernism: concrete was exposed, potential fires were contained within each concrete unit, each unit had fresh air, long views and floor- by-floor communities of similar economic
Grenfell Tower before the addition of insulated aluminum cladding. Designed in 1967 by Nigel Whitbread for Clifford Wearden Associates, built 1972-4.
Grenfell Tower cladding after the fire of 14 June 2017
Grenfell Tower renovation, 2012-16, Studio E Architects
theconversation.com/fact-check-is-the-type-of-cladding-used- on-grenfell-tower-actually-banned-in-britain-79803
www.mylondon.news/news/west-london-news/ grenfell-tower-before-fire-tore-13189075
www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/all-warnings-fell-deaf- ears-10620149
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brick: the material of Eladio Dieste stephanie white
E ladio Dieste was a Uruguayan engineer who developed reinforced brick shell construction for large span installations such as factories, workshops, storage and agricultural buildings. The Church of Christ the Worker, 1955-60, in Atlántida, with its vertical rippling walls, is almost the only example of his brick work most of us know about, but he worked up until the late 1990s. Ceramica armada or reinforced masonry was Eladio Dieste’s material, a material arising from the particulars of Uruguay over his lifetime, from 1917-2000. Dieste has lingered on the edges of the discourse of modernism, overshadowed by the Latin American triumphs of Neimeyer in Brazil, Barragan in Mexico. Dieste’s work was grounded in Montevideo and only toward the end of his life did he work outside Uruguay. Hector Abarca, architect and archivist, describes a lecture Dieste gave in Lima in the 1990s — ‘attended by few… it was a lot of maths and old b/w slides. Real archival material not well appreciated in the 1990s.’ There is not a diversity of material to be found on Dieste, however the richly definitive resource is Stanford Anderson’s Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art of 2004, assembled from a symposium Anderson held at MIT in 1999 after he visited both Uruguay and Dieste for the first time in 1998. It includes analyses of his many projects, the technology of ceramica armada , his innovations, historical appraisals, Dieste’s own writings plus technical appendices that explain everything about vaults and reinforced and pre- stressed brickwork. Stanford Anderson’s lecture, ‘Eladio Dieste: A Principled Builder’, was published in Seven Structural Engineers: The Felix Candela Lectures , the Museum of Modern Art, 2008, also prohibitively costly if you can find it. There is a copy on the MOMA website. Julian Palacio, on a 2012 Norden Fund grant, went to Uruguay to visit Dieste’s work. His 2014 lecture, ‘Material tour de force: the work of Eladio Dieste’ is on the Architectural League NY website. In 2017, Heinz Emigholz made the film Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917- 2000) . It was streamed on MUBI in November 2018. The film visited 29 Dieste buildings still standing in 2017, from bus terminals to warehouses, gymnasiums and garages; some churches, a shopping centre, but mostly huge brick arched shells in semi-rural, semi-derelict districts. Emigholz arranges the film as a series of stills: a fixed camera in a number of locations — static and silent except for the wind blowing the trees and grass, dogs wandering in and out of the frame, traffic sounds, children, barking, but very little activity and none of the forced dynamism of a moving hand-held cine-camera. And oh, how inadequate is that little description for the solitary beauty of these
Eladio Dieste, Horizontal Silo, CADYL Agricultural Cooperative Limited 1976- 1978 Young, Rio Negro, Uruguay Span 28.5m, length 120m, height 15m, area 3420 m2. Capacity 30000 tonnes of grain This grain silo is located in an area of extensive agrarian production. The work was left unfinished for economic reasons, but was adapted to operate partially, without full capacity or the installation of the mechanized loading and unloading system. The roof is formed by a set of double curved vaults resting on a reinforced concrete edge beam founded with vertical and inclined perforated piles filled at the site. The vaults are made of hollow ceramic bricks (vaults 25x15x15) joined with sand mortar and portland, finished superficially with a layer of mortar of 3 cm painted white to reflect the solar radiation. Filling the silo was to be by a bucket elevator and conveyor belt hung from the top of the vault. The floor of the silo was designed as a triangular hopper buried at a height of -12.37m with the slope of its sides sufficient to discharge the grain by gravity to a lower tunnel, located at -14.10 m. This explanation from www.fadu.edu.uy/ eladio-dieste/obras/young/ The Stanford Anderson book ( Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art) has drawings of the cross section and foundation details on p110. The fifth image down (left) shows the top of the hopper, but a concrete floor was poured when the project was curtailed by economic circumstance. It is easy to get completely transfixed by Dieste’s engineering feats: they are magical and paradoxicallly practical. However, we are thinking about material culture, and this horizontal silo, forty years on, is still full of grain, still a silo. Emigholz’s film, which is without dialogue, just printed building names and dates, puts this silo into a peaceable landscape where agricultural rhythms pass days full of birds, wind, trucks and dogs, men with shovels and ladders, weight and angles of repose of grain.
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , D 2017, 95 min Streetscapes – Chapter IV / Photography and beyond – Part 27 / Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917– 2000)
Film Galerie 451 filmgalerie451.de
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buildings as Emigholz filmed them. They go on and on, one after another, great ribboned caverns, the background to a fruit packing plant, or a big garage full of cars and mechanics, or a wool warehouse stacked with stinking filthy fleeces in great bundles on their way to huge steaming washing vats, overhead conveyer belts, tatty bits of wool falling through the air, men in singlets heaving fat bales around — it is mediaeval, the scene under a Sistine chapel of waving brick. One of the most beautiful scenes in The Buena Vista Social Club was Ruben Gonzalez on an upright piano playing for a class of elegant little Cuban gymnasts in the Ballet School and National Centre for Gymnastics, a stained and crumbling classical building, formerly the Merchants Association on the Paseo del Prado. The building was beautiful – cream and shadowed, arched and colonnaded, a space originally meant for something else but, by necessity and opportunity, a ballet school – colonial architecture, colonised by one of the arts of the revolution, ballet; a colonial art, but revolutionary in its insistence despite blockades, poverty and the passage of time. Dieste’s buildings strike me the same way. Revolutionary design for conventional use. These are not specimen buildings, they are, in Uruguay, fabric. The material culture of mid-century industrial Uruguayan architecture: brick. Brick. Julian Palacio, in his 2012 Norden Fund lecture, puts Dieste’s use of brick in the context of both a Latin American tradition of adobe block, and a ‘push back against the Modern Movement’s machine aesthetic and use of industrial materials such as concrete, steel and glass’. Dieste was influenced by Joaquin Torres Garcia and his universal constructivism movement to develop ‘a modern Latin American language that would permeate all of the creative arts’. This is the language of de-colonisation twice over: the development of an architecture that was not colonial Spanish, but also not international modernism, itself, allegedly, a de-colonising architecture. Thus structure not decoration; brick not concrete. It is interesting to consider the economic conditions of Uruguay during the arc of Dieste’s career. The Batlle era, 1903-33 used a collective leadership model based on the Swiss Federal Council: a presidency (ministries of foreign affairs, the interior and defence) that shared power and responsibility with a national council of administration (education, finance, economy and health). It seems prodigiously progressive: social welfare, nationalisation of foreign-owned businesses, taxes waived for low incomes, a national telephone network, unemployment benefits, an 8-hour work day, all of this before 1915. The split executive model lasted until a military coup in 1933, a fallout of the Depression. Uruguay’s subsequent prosperity increased
Solsire Salt Silo (1992-94), Montevideo. One of several horizontal silos. The lenses are set at the peak of each section of vault, the point of zero stress because although the roof acts as a longitudinal vault, each lateral section is an independent structural element. All stresses are carried to the side footings, allowing the end tympanum walls to be completely glazed, as below.
Deposito per la lana ADF, Juanicó. Canelones, 1992-94
all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min Streetscapes – Chapter IV / Photography and beyond – Part 27 / Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917–2000)
Film Galerie 451 filmgalerie451.de
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through its role supplying beef, wool and leather to the Allied forces in WWII –Allied, because nineteenth century Britain was briefly involved with Uruguay in conjunction with its role in Argentina; Britain’s WWII debt to Uruguay was paid off by nationalising long-established British-owned rail and water companies. The end of WWII and the loss of such a lucrative market plunged Uruguay into inflation and civil unrest. The collective executive model was briefly re- introduced, but Uruguay never recovered its enviable status of a prosperous Switzerland of the South: it struggled through the 1950s under increasingly repressive military rule, then in the early 1960s came the Tupamaros insurgency, a direct response to the poverty many Uruguayans found themselves in. The US Office of Public Safety began to operate in Uruguay in 1965, teaching ‘security’ protocols of intimidation and torture. It is tragic reading this history, the 1970s and 80s were a violent period of military rule that mirrored neighbouring Argentina, including a cessation of civil rights and, inevitably, desaparacidos. This was Dieste’s time. His first work was in the mid-1940s, his last in 1994. He started out in a prosperous era which subsequently collapsed: Atlántida, was built in 1955, by which time there clearly wasn’t the money to build in anything other than the most available, least expensive building material. It happened to be brick, augmented with tiny amounts of steel, and the thinnest of concrete coatings. A viable brick industry depends on geology; not everywhere has clay. Uruguay is a triangle between two rivers, Rio Plat and Rio Uruguay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Much is flat grazing land, and at the inland point of the triangle is higher, volcanic ground: the north margin of the Patagonian micro-plate where it meets the South American continental plate. A collision in the Permian age laid down a deep layer of volcanic ash and calcite in coastal marine swamps and lagoons, which under subsequent pressure resulted in a deep clay deposit. This has made for both a fertile grassland ecology for cattle and sheep, and an endless supply of brick-making material. Reinforced brick: this is how it works, after all the engineering calculations of course. Moveable formwork, a Dieste innovation, supports one full arch at a time. The surface of the formwork has on it a wooden grid that places each brick. In the spaces between each brick a steel grid is laid and then mortared in. The formwork drops away below, leaving 3-4” brick/reinforcing/mortar fabric with a thin screed of concrete weather protection on the outside. There are a wide range of arch and folded plate configurations. The arches generally spring from a horizontal edge beam datum, increasing their lateral and longitudinal radii to the centre, and then subsiding to a parallel edge beam on the
other side of the space. Calculating the greatest and least points of compression allows a variety of profiles providing clerestory lighting – it is so interesting how stress is in constant flux across the surface — not in motion, but in calculation. The arches themselves are either pre-stressed or held by tie-rods, not Dieste’s ideal. His ongoing project was the most minimal and integrated solution to the roofing of space with the most economical of means. As each site, each function and each orientation is different, each site was an opportunity to do yet another magical structure. Sometimes the longitudinal walls are absent and the whole structure is supported by short end plenums, other times the ends are open, or glassed, and the roof spans the short dimension. There are a number of shelters that butterfly off a single column. Purely vertical walls are laid conventionally, however within this construct of the vertical wall, they ripple and lean – this the how the Atlántida church was done: the walls start as a straight line which then expands to a deeply waved wall which nonetheless maintains its centre of gravity along the original baseline. As an engineer it was the engineering that was the project; brick was the material of default, rather than choice. But he made a virtue of that default, exploiting brick and the way it was laid, shaped, mortared, coursed; its internal strengths and weaknesses, the precise optimal size of a brick related to its shear values. He calculated the optimal size of reinforcement, the strength and dimensions of the mortar, the way to pre-stress a fabric, not just a beam, and the precise points where there is zero tension in a curved structure which allows a lens that can be filled with glass. Given the economics of Uruguay over Dieste’s career, the use of brick was perhaps not a choice, but a given. Brick was the material culture of the region, and what Dieste consequently did with it is rooted in this fact. His focus was not diverted by a plethora of building materials giving endless choices and variations. The influence of the straitened economics of postwar Uruguay comes up in almost every essay on Eladio Dieste along with that modernist virtue of an economy of means. It is possible that straitened economies are the enablers of a kind of genius, which, when paired with a sense of place and material produce truly unique architecture. The material culture of architecture is based on an economic and political culture responsible for the supply of materials. While institutions of the state appear to have been given a generic, and for Uruguay, an expensive international style, Dieste was building factories, garages, churches, gyms. Brick was his, and their, material. n
from the top: Municipal Bus Terminal, Salto 1971-74 Service Station, Salto 1976 Camino de los Estudiantes, Alcalá de Henares, Spain 1996-98
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developing form within the material culture of architecture
stephanie white
T he following article by Ted Cavanagh discusses the changing use of wood in North American culture under three design strategies: the nineteenth century development of dimensional lumber, the twentieth century development of wood product manufacture, and a proposed twenty-first century use and re-use of wood as sustainable product, as outlined in the work of the Coastal Studio, a summer program at the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Coastal Studio’s ongoing project is the development of innovative design and construction techniques that marry new technologies with traditional methods and materials. It emphasises lightweight, complex structures that have minimal environmental impact, and construction strategies that can be simply communicated to local craftspeople. Why I have positioned the wood vaults of Coastal Studio with the work of Eladio Dieste, is because they both have taken a common local building material through a complex array of conditions including economic stringency, sustainable product, faith in engineering rather than art, and, in both, a desire for the lightest, most minimal, most elegant solution to spatial volumes. Coastal Studio has been working for over ten years on structures that use either short or thin pieces of wood, both of which are relatively useless to a construction industry that presently operates with dimensional lumber – 2 x 4s, 2 x 10s, 4 x 4 posts, 4’ x 8’ sheet material and custom-dimensioned laminate beams. Out of a deceptively simple program: a place for children at summer camp to eat their lunch, say, and a seemingly clear form: vault of some sort that responds to the folds and hills of the local landscape, comes a complexity of material detail and construction that has little precedent. This isn’t some sort of luddite experiment in vernacular building, rather it uses sophisticated modelling – structure is engineered and tested with software such as Rhino, Grasshopper and Kangaroo – that is then translated via the medium of semi-predictable, weather-impacted, hand-workable wood into buildings of great delicacy and responsiveness. The structural forms themselves have precedent, the lamella roof for example was patented in 1910, the double curve of the gridshell dates from the late 1890s in Russia, but neither they, nor vaults in general are commonplace in North America — contemporary examples tend to be exhibition buildings in Europe and Japan (Buro Happold and Edward Cullinan Architects’
2002 Weald & Downland Open Air Museum; Shigeru Ban, Buro Happold and Frei Otto’s Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000). Perhaps North American forest product management, timber processing, standardisation of product and construction industry obduracy preclude innovation and experimentation in commercial projects. Coastal Studio is one of the places that such research can and does occur. Brick vaults too have a long history; the Catalan vault, a method of laying un-reinforced layers of tile each at an angle to the one below, was used extensively in both Europe and the United States at beginning of the twentieth century, but the construction skills were lost as the century progressed. Dieste used traditional masonry but also developed a construction method that did not rely on traditional masonry skills. The building of the moveable wooden formwork is as critical as the science of post- tensioning (common in concrete work) and the engineering of multiply-curved self-sustaining surfaces. Dieste’s work did not rely on just one threatened skill set, vulnerable to industrial change, but on a diversity of skills. Each of Dieste’s buildings was a research project, approaching issues of site and program in a different way from the last, always aiming to have thinner shells, longer spans, more daylight, less material. These appear to also be the aims of Coastal Studio. The projects from both Coastal and Dieste stand in the public realm and are seen and used by local communities. Each project seeds the idea that architecture can be responsive, sustainable, beautiful, unusual and useful in communities that rarely see or are given anything other than industrial product. Dieste’s grain storage shed is hedged about by steel silos, the kind one can see in agricultural landscapes across the world. The Cape Breton vaults of Coastal Studio are no doubt just down the road from a steel building storing graders and snowplows. Working outside convention reveals the conventions themselves, the taken-for-granted material culture that renders itself invisible. The vernacular is only vernacular to the outside, inside the culture it is the culture, and is rarely interrogated. As the examples of Dieste, Coastal Studio and Richard Collins’s work on p17 show, each step, each decision, requires interrogation, testing and evaluation. If this happens within a material culture of architecture that provides ready building material at low cost (because it is the lingua franca of local construction) then this very act of interrogation is the thing that advances the architecture. n
images: dalcoiastalstudio.com
from the top: Ross Creek lamella under construction, 2010 Camera Obscura, Cheverie, brick shell in construction showing formwork, 2012 Cheticamp Farmers Market, 2014-15, in use 2015 Cape Breton Highlands National Park Pavilion, under construction 2015 all projects, Coastal Studio, Halifax Nova Scotia, a student design-build program under the direction of Ted Cavanagh, the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University
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the culture of wood construction ted cavanagh
W ood reinvents itself every century. The material remains the same but the building culture changes. Currently, the material culture of wood is realigning. Are we headed to a cellulose fibre future, or a mass timber redux? Or, is it a future of diversity with no singular popular way? Wood construction is ubiquitous, historic, ephemeral, malleable, sustainable, unpredictable, vulnerable to weather, insects and fire. Material culture is inherently social, not just technical, and new technologies are based in
it demands dexterity, care and judgment before and during production. Like other products of industrial alienation, there is a loss of ‘nearness’ and a reduced potential for ordinary interaction with wood in this form. As with lumber, early versions of this new wood product often merited the public’s sceptical view: ‘The early plywoods were glued with vegetable or blood glues, and having virtually no moisture resistance, became almost a term of abuse. The introduction of phenolic glues changed all this and, incidentally presents an interesting picture of the way in which the public image of a material can be changed.’ 3 It can take as long as 50 years before a new product becomes mainstream. Today plywood is perceived as stronger than wood, and an ideal, stable, planar substrate, more obviously manufactured than lumber. As a result, it is open to ambivalent interpretation: sometimes as material, sometimes as product. ‘Traditionally, a material was thought of as an elementary system whose task was to give structure to a more complex system. Only design could then put together various appropriate materials, formed according to different geometries, so as to produce objects capable of performing complex functions…’ 4 When materials themselves are designed products, then this concept starts to become much more complex. In his stackable plywood chairs, Aalto found it necessary to re-produce plywood manufacture, customising the process rather than using the stock components of standard production. Both structure and aesthetic appearance required this level of engagement in the process of manufacture. A different strategy is where designers accept the planar nature of plywood and investigate the formal potential of planes and their details of intersection. Materials and components of industry as stock items assembled into a kit-of-parts is open- ended, plug-in, replicable and economically opportunistic. Re-designing the components and materials of the building for improved efficiency, ergonomics or aesthetics restocks the shelves of industry. The developing, changing, relationship between wood products and industry, taste, commodification and production leads me to the current project of Coastal Studio, a twenty- first century project that sits at the genesis of a third design strategy, neither the acceptance 1 Charles Cleaver, ‘Early Chicago Reminiscences’, Fegus Historical Series 19 (1882): 40 2 Gwendolyn Wright, ‘Dilemmas of Diversity: Vernacular Style and High Style’, Precis 5 (Fall, 1984) p118 3 J E Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials, or why you don’t fall through the floor . London: Pelican Books, 1967. p 151 4 Ezio Manzini, editor. The Material of Invention . Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989. p 39 5 Coastal Studio, a summer program at the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University. dalcoastalstudio.com
design strategy research
roles and neighbourhoods, a dramatic increase in household goods and appliances, and new considerations of health and efficiency of domestic arrangements. The coincidence of these transformations with the introduction of a new building technology created a set of associations (as tropes, as limitations, as possibilities) between technology and culture – between the ‘American home’ and the limitations and possibilities of frame houses. I have co-opted Gwendolyn Wright’s description of the vernacular to apply to this innovative, hybridising commercial culture of building: ‘People have to choose which elements from high culture and traditional culture have meaning for them. They have to decide how to allocate a limited budget; they say what matters to them now, and what still matters from the past. And so they create new cultural forms. The values that determine what to accept, what to reject, and what to alter draw from a variety of sources. These are both positive and negative, innovative and conservative. They include political liberalism, religious conservatism, folklore, ethnic traditions, the desire to be different, and the messages of advertising or social conventions.’ 2 Building innovation advanced in the early 1800s in the context of a double hybrid – the coincidence of vernacular building from many cultures and the many overlaps generated by the ascendant commercial culture of the time. Twentieth century wood products were based on engineering principles. Plywood, glue-laminated beams and parallel-strand materials are derived from innovative structural understanding, analytical processes and a new spatial appreciation. Plywood is a material of the twentieth century: engineered, laminated and effectively isotropic, material qualities quite distinct from timber or lumber. Softwood laminate or ply can be reunited with itself and, with the addition of glues, produces a material with improved structural properties. This improvement comes at the expense of material flexibility. More rigid and more brittle than lumber, it is more difficult to form and transform. Its decreased workability requires a different set of tools and processes. However, its isotropic nature suited twentieth century engineering theories and any limitations were glossed over easily in favour of plywood’s predictability and uniformity. Plywood is a good example of a modern industrial commodity. Value is added to a basic material in the production process while changing our understanding of that material’s properties. Plywood’s processing is complex;
social consensus … as history shows. Lumber was essentially a new and
experimental product for house structure in the early nineteenth century. Lumber products were based predominantly on milling, a formal and linear process that produces dimensional lumber, sash and moulding. Building components are defined by dimension, profile and section. Dimensional lumber reacts differently than timber or even planks: posts made of the entire cross-section of a tree are stable, and timber that squares the cross-section is only slightly less so; planks tend to instability in one direction as they slice across growth rings; and 2x4 lumber that cuts growth rings on all four faces can bend and twist. Selecting lumber needs a trained eye; seasoning and storing it is just as critical; assembling it into a building must allow expansion and contraction. It was probably the potential for buildings to tear themselves apart, as much as to collapse structurally, that made early balloon frame houses so risky to build. Lumber was described as dimensionally inadequate, as mere stuff, as sticks. Architects bridled against its impermanence, often for good reason: ‘In its green state … in drying it will shrink, warp and twist in every way, drawing out the nails, and, after a summer has passed, the siding will gape open, letting the wind through every joint. Such was the stuff used for building in 1833 and 1834.’ 1 Lumber is politically and economically a nineteenth-century commodity. Its production combines aspects of agricultural harvesting and mining – basic extractive industries that depend on the boundless resources of the land, that privilege monocultural production and that define numerous by-products as waste. Its industrial processing is simple and linear; it follows an assembly line sequence – a harvested product is made to conform to the mechanical exigencies of production. Giedion cites the wood-frame slaughterhouse of nineteenth- century Cincinnati in Mechanisation Takes Command and by 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright was praising lumber as the supreme product of the machine. The predominant site of lumber’s application – the nineteenth-century home – accommodated significant socio-cultural revisions, including an ascendant bourgeois domestic morality, a spatial reconfiguration of room and use, a social reorganisation into family units, gender
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and use of stock items, nor the reprocessing of manufacturing techniques, but rather the investigation of a raw product – the wood lath. 5 In a series of design-build projects over the past decade Coastal Lab has investigated simple vault structures that shelter a variety of community activities. There is a progression of vault form from the 2010 Ross Creek lamella – a 120m barrel vault, to the 2012 Camera Obscura brick shell in Cheverie – a 20m 2 decreasing catenary vault, to the 2014 Cheticamp Farmer’s Market 80m 2 wood gridshell, to the 2015-present 300m 2 gridshell for Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Each project has been an exploration of material, structural principles and construction within an architectural program of unserviced shelter from rain and wind, in particular, southeasterly suettes which blow from plateau to coast, often at 200 kilometres an hour.
all images:dalcoastalstudio.com
Ross Creek lamella, 2010
Camera Obscura brick shell in Cheverie, 2011-12
Farmer’s Market grid shell in Cheticamp 2014-15. top: overlay of survey, engineering and architectural models
The 2012 vault is masonry and is less constrained than the lamella vault, moving from semi-circle to a catenary form and from a constant cross-section to a shrinking one. The repetitive material unit is face-brick, three layers thick that with mortar creates a three-inch thick shell that works in compression. It is based on a nineteenth technique developed by Rafael Guastavino 7 and has been updated by the use of digital modelling. This parabolic brickshell frames the tidal landscape, acting as a camera obscura, a device which records the rising tides of the salt marsh at the mouth of the river.
Gridshells are structures made of thin wood members. There is a reiterative process of calculation that creates structural hybrids between grid and shell, allowing the thin laths, the material of the grid, to act like a shell. Underpinning gridshell construction is a set of simple premises: each lath is continuous in cross section, the wood grain is straight, each lath spans the entire distance, each lath is locked where it crosses another lath, the lath is restrained at each end. It is simple carpentry. While lath was occasionally used in the twentieth century, it required complex mathematics and intricate physical models. The advent of three-dimensional structural software has allowed more complex visualisation and form-making within the time limitations of a design-build studio with a different cohort of students each summer. Wood lath as a structural material depends on the type of wood, the cross-sectional profile of the lath (the strength of wood along its grain is aligned to act extremely efficiently), node connections, the structural performance of the overall form, the springing of the shell and the roof-to-wall connection.
The first barrel vault was made from a thousand similar metre-long pieces made from locally harvested full-dimension 1” x 6”. The one- inch thickness for each piece was the minimum dimension to prevent wobble at its butt joints. Zollinger designed this technique in the 1920s, reconsidering nineteenth century material in a twentieth century way. 6 Our twenty-first century update was made thinner and lighter using a hand-held circular saw, a double-mitre chop saw and CNC-made bolt holes. The length and degree of angle at the end of each piece pre- determines the overall width of the vault and thus the building. It is interesting how dimensional lumber limits building form. In this case, a semi-circular cross-section is the only possibility with this construction technique.
6 German engineer, Friedrich Zollinger, 1880-1945, who developed the lamella roof. 7 Spanish engineer and builder, Rafael Guastavino, 1842-1908, who introduced a version of the Catalan tile to the United States in 1885. 8 Wood with rectangular cross-section bends easily in one direction. Planking occurs when trying to twist or force curvature in the other direction.
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all images:dalcoastalstudio.com
Cheticamp Farmer’s Market, 2014-15
The type of wood has been consistent through both the Coastal Studio gridshell projects: hardwood keeps the cross-sectional area of the wood lath manageable – we experimented with ash, but now use red oak. White oak would be better in weathering, but is only available in Quebec, an unsustainable thousand kilometres away. Our red oak lath is locally-sourced, green (not kiln-dried) and milled fresh, while it retains a high moisture content and so can bend. It is cost and energy efficient because it isn’t kiln- dried and we can get it from small local sawmills. There are many different types of grid shells. The project looked at here, the Cheticamp Farmer’s Market, was our first, and has led to the more complex Cape Breton Highlands National Park building still in construction. The farmer’s market tested the basic properties of the wood chosen to make the grid shell. The scale of the project – a pavilion that accommodates 20 merchant stalls – was workable for small groups of students. It consists of two concrete walls with a gridshell spanning between and has a crescent-shaped floor plan with open ends for optimal circulation. The orientation and form of the pavilion deflects wind and the cladding is strategically placed to reduce uplift. Such a
structure draws upon the strong local boat- building and woodworking culture and its use of locally sourced greenwood echoes the bentwood forms of the region. We tested a series of laths with different thicknesses and found that 3/4” was the thickest that a twelve-foot lath could be to loop back on itself without an explosive failure. This was an advance on structural tables that required 1/4” material to achieve the curvature we needed. 3/4” – three times that recommended by the tables – bent to failure at a curvature far in excess of what our project required and probably contributed to the ability to connect the lath as it twisted or planked 8 through some tight situations. In hindsight, even thicker wood lath would have been better; the tests could have been made more precise by investigating shallower curves, curves closer to the actual design. For structural integrity the laths are continuous from one support to another, meaning that a six-metre span is composed of diagonal laths up to twenty metres long. Because of practical problems with finger-jointing in thinner lath (green wood shrinks as it dries to its eventual moisture content), scarf joints were used. Several times during the project design
decisions were made based on a combination of factors: expense, remote location, available fabricators and the skill set of our crew. We were working with unusual applications, outside the experience of local or even North American practice. The glue, for example, specially formulated to bond with green wood, had to be imported from Europe and is normally used with large presses in factory conditions. Another issue was grading. During the milling process, each individual lath is inspected to ensure its integrity. An acceptable lath has a relatively straight grain pattern without too much deviation and little to no knots or cracks which would compromise the integrity of the entire system. Inspection is based on a structural ideal of a semi-isotropic material; an example of the organic having to conform to a standard. Grading is a convention that only accepts wood for which there are grading rules. In our case, there were no graders available for milled hardwood in Nova Scotia. As our millwright had softwood grading credentials, the engineer specified the softwood grade for the initial quality inspection. This kind of detail reveals the industrial and bureaucratic culture of wood construction that we conventionally work with and within.
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During milling, inspection and assembly, our wood remained relatively wet, bending easily into its desired shape. It then dries to create the strength and rigidity of the structure. The laths in a grid shell are connected at nodes where they cross; this connection allows the shell to hold its planned shape as there is only one possible set of coordinates that spatially locates each node. However, during erection it is necessary to allow the nodes to move: the node connection has to be fixed in its final location but must slide along the other laths as the shell is lifted into place. We tested lashing as an effective structural connection, something based on a project in which we participated in Iqaluit in 2013 (part of Canada’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale) where the komatix , or sled, has lashed joints rather than mechanical fasteners – lashing responds better to dynamic loading and the uneven terrain a sled must traverse. For us, lashing was an effective way to slide and then cinch the laths during the stages of lifting before fixing the laths in their final configuration. Cheticamp Farmer’s Market. Node exploration — clamping, lashing, bolting; testing each node fastener as lift, lash, clamp, rest, then repeat. As it rests, the wood confodrms to its new curve. The gridshell is erected slowly; this process takes a few days as the oak sets into position with time. Interstitial lath block noeds in their final position a combination of lashing and clamping right: the build up of 3/4” lath members as they approach the bolt connection to the concrete base. The cladding is translucent polycarbonate.
all images:dalcoastalstudio.com
Deciding where and how the shell attaches to a vertical wall determines the visual delicacy of the roof. The clearest solution is a simple bent steel plate embedded in the concrete side walls with a single bolt connection to each wooden lath. The number of single bolt connections from the bent steel plate to the lath can be cut in half if the lath is paired at a node with one going in a perpendicular direction.
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Coastal Studio works with buildings that have unique and discrete construction processes. The structures themselves are lean, the process is critical and nuanced, and innovation is necessary as there is no convention to adopt. Conventional construction has valuable lessons, but is more difficult to read and observe than it is to analyse lean and innovative construction. Models of an innovative building process emphasise structural and architectural performance; observation and testing are critical to the development of new construction methods. The various models built for our projects are observed and read closely. Each is only a partial representation of reality – models over-represent certain aspects so that readings and observations of folds and adjustments can lend direction to redesign. Each model adds valuable information. At the same time, each model adds variable information. Often models conflict. It is up to the designer to negotiate this diversity of readings in order to interpret a best possible path, and to anticipate and negotiate a realised project.
That said, these projects themselves are 1:1 models of an untypical and commercially untested construction method and a not yet easily sourced wood product. It is for these reasons, plus the circumstances of their making as a studio project, that reinforce their model status at the same time as they fufill a program, meet health and safety rules, insurance, maintenance and public use. Today, models are definitely closer simulations than they were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And, engineering theory is starting to exploit wood’s complex nature. Imagine counting on the structure of grain travelling twenty metres — a principle known by carpenters now expanded to a scale previously unimagined. It is here that the students working with me start to perceive the nature of materials for this century. Innovate by understanding materials, working with carpenters. At the same time, work with engineers to understand light-weight structures. It produces true prototypes, not yet efficient in terms of process but definitely a sustainable practice in terms of material. n
all images:dalcoastalstudio.com
above, from the top: The plan shows the building fitting into the landscape. The 300m 2 grid shell roof will shelter a theatre and reception area. It flows into landscaped berms to the north and south. Gabions create an amphitheatre in the steep mountainside to the east. Larger concerts are held in the meadow to the west. Curved 350mm heavily-reinforced concrete walls were built the first summer and stood Serra-like through the first winter. A huge 1:4 model was tested by suspending sand-bags from each node. This helped the engineer verify the computer model. The model was allowed to recover between tests. above left, from the top: A light, open-web stainless steel truss ties the wood shell to the concrete walls. The wood lath is formed into two gridded mats attached at the nodes. Unlike the Farmers Market, the laths were draped individually over a two-and-a half storey scaffold. The shell will be clad in sheet aluminum.
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