twenty years old, such as Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, were totally discredited as the social ambitions of the architecture did not match at all the political and social fears of race and poverty. Architecture as a material bank references a pre-industrial model where buildings were assembled and dis-assembled by hand. Rau extends it to industrial processes, with the circularity potential of each material as the pre- condition for its use. This has the potential to redevelop modernism without the extravagance of material exploitation that came so easily to the West, where the environment was assumed to be infinitely patient, self-healing the wounds we inflicted by fire, by mining, by impermeable cities, by voracious appetites. An architecture of circularity assumes an impermanence to buildings whereby they can be constantly in flux, parts replaced, parts repurposed. This points out how much our future will necessarily be the polar opposite to the both the still, eternal, unmoveable architecture of Chandigarh, and the wrecking ball. an architecture of intentional material archaeology Two projects that understand the complexity and contradictions in the use of concrete are Wang Shu’s Ningbo History Museum of 2008, and Frida Escobedo’s Serpentine Pavilion of 2018. When much of China seems to be the playground of capitalist architectural excess: an excess of ambition and money, the new China seemingly free of inhibiting content, we have Wang Shu building from the rubble of villages destroyed to make way for new projects. Ningbo History Museum is built from tile, brick, concrete and stone salvaged from other buildings, sites of collapse, rubble: each piece comes with a fragment of history and unrepeatable form, giving an elasticity to its use: fit is unpredictable but follows very old techniques. New concrete, and it is extensive, is poured into bamboo formwork. There is a patience both to assembly and to the concept as a whole: the building evolves from its materials. Wang Shu is reclaiming China’s deep past — not historicism, but a sophisticated historical thinking. Frida Escobedo’s architecture in Mexico uses common, often salvaged, found materials; for the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion in London, she didn’t import her palette from Mexico, but looked for its equivalent: mundane inexpensive materials easily accessed. She found UK-manufactured concrete roof tiles and stacked them into semi- transparent walls that shade and shadow, define and obscure: a complex architecture made of a materially insignificant building product. Wang Shu was building a museum, a strongbox of treasures; Frida Escobedo was building a pavilion to be taken down after four months. Both treated an insignificant (because so everyday) material culture of a local architecture and rendered it fugitive, other- worldly and exceptional. n
TopFoto IPU447438. www.topfoto.co.uk
concrete’s longue durée The 1962 UPI photograph above is headlined: ‘First farmers for 2500 years to settle Gilboa in Israel’ and captioned: ‘David’s Curse Lifted, Mizpeh Gilboa, Israel. Two of the new settlers at Mizpeh Gilboa are pictured mixing cement and sand for their new houses. So far six permanent buildings have been erected in the settlement plan according to the settler’s choice. Water is still brought up by tankers from Nurit, but a pipeline [from] Beisan Wells is planned.’ 5 The headline indicates the myth of terra nullius prevalent at the time of the 1967 War: that no one lived in this new land, and if they did, they weren’t taking advantage of it. It also shows how concrete allows relatively unskilled fabrication: a couple, sand, rock, cement and tankered-in water. And yet the results are so permanent that they take on the inevitability of geology. It is the re-mineralisation that cement goes through that so distorts the legitimacy of construction. Thomas Rau proposes that nature is a bank and if we treated it as such we wouldn’t exploit it as we do. 5 Every building should be considered as a bank of materials, valuable because finite, like currency, which circulates over and over again through time and society, an idea that presupposes a certain salvageability as whole material units rather than the pulverising demolitions that usually happen when a building reaches the end of its usefulness (not necessarily its life, but the limits of appreciation of its value). It is assumed that buildings have a life span. Le Corbusier’s work at Chandigarh is a hugely complex architecture built with a single material, concrete, which once cast cannot revert back to its original ingredients – the chemical reaction when water meets quicklime cannot be undone. Correctly built, this kind of architecture is forecast to have an infinitely long lifespan; deconstruction and reuse of the materials is not considered. Unlike concrete buildings regularly demolished in the western world, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh project persists: there has been little development pressure to constantly rebuild in what was once the de-colonising, developing, third world. The utopian socialist roots of modern architecture that meant something in the developing world, passed out of fashion in the developed world where it is now seen as a style (or a necessary utility), not as something for social good. Indeed, by the 1970s, projects just
Shaun Fynn
Fernando Guerro
© 2018 Iwan Baan
from the top: left: ‘First farmers in 2500 years to settle Gilboa in Israel. TopFoto IPU447438. above: Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Nacional da República, Brasilia, 1958 Le Corbusier, Secretariat, Complexe du Capitole, Chandigarh, India, 1952. www.studiofynn.com Wang Shu, Ningbo History Museum, Ningbo, China, 2008. Fernando Guerro, photographer. ultimasreportagens.com Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Pavilion 2018. © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura, www.fridaescobedo.net
5 Thomas Rau and Sabine Oberhuber. Material Matters , 2018. Dutch version only. thomasrau.eu
On Site review 35 : the material culture of architecture
25
Made with FlippingBook interactive PDF creator