The architect's library: books, shelves, cases, collections, displays, exhibitions and READING.
ON SITE r e v i e w our material future 36: 2020 the drawing of things — micro-urbanism —
material memory
Carlo Ratti + Matthew Claudel The City of Tomorrow: Sensors, Networks, Hackers, and the Future of Urban Life New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016 ISBN 10: 0300204809 ISBN 13: 978-0300204803
James Corne + Alex S MacLean Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. ISBN-10: 0300086962
Marjanne van Helvert, editor The Responsible Object, a history of design ideology for the future
Amsterdam: Valiz, 2016 ISBN 97894-92095-19-0
Sabina Tanovic Designing Memory, the
architecture of commemoration in Europe,1914 to the present Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019 online ISBN 9781108760577
Jonathan Hughes and Simon Sadler, editors Non-plan: Essays on Freedom Participation and Change in Modern Architecture and Urbanism London: Routledge, 2000 eBook ISBN 9780080512853
Bruno Latour Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regim e Cathy Porter, translator Cambridge UK: Polity Press, 2018 ISBN-10: 9781509530571
Łukasz Stanek Architecture in Global Socialism: Eastern Europe, West Africa, and the Middle East in the Cold War Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2020 ISBN 9780691168708
Antony Buxton, Linda Hulin, Jane Anderson: editors InHabit: People Places and Possessions Bern: Peter Lang AG, Internationaler Verlag der Wissenschaften, 2016 ISBN 10: 3034318669 ISBN 13: 9783034318662
Tomás Maldonado Design, Nature, and Revolution Toward a Critical Ecology [1972] Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019 ISBN 9781 517907006
ON SITE r e v i e w our material future 36: 2020
Two things: new material technologies and the science of the climate crisis. We can demonstrate how things might be, we can devise more truthful forms of analysis, and we can turn to the state of the globe upon which our two feet stand: is it burning? is it underwater? is it forcing better methods of de-salination; of managing drought, of drainage? As architects, is it all about infrastructure, the managing of systems of delivery of the substance of life? or is it about amelioration at the most intimate level: how we live? Each essay in this issue addresses a different tipping point, from how we can better understand the ecology where natural meets man-made infrastructure, to recovering joy and optimism. The destructive global systems and ideologies that have brought us to the inter- related climate and governance crisis are focussing the mind: what must we save and how? This is not a rhetorical question, but a very real material one, tied directly to our physical well-being. In concentrating on the material capacity of the future to be resonant, practical, survivalist, one can neatly side-step the virtual, electronically-connected world wherein memory, fantasy and AI intertwine to replace the physical in importance. The material world offers shelter from the elements; the mind is otherwise engaged. As networked technology opens the door to projections of the past and the future, virtual and material reality will continue hand in hand, but it is material reality that is on fire.
contributors
contents
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Introduction to our material future
Stephanie White
the drawing of things
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Let It Rain, 2019: umbrellas and umbrella-ism
Dom Cheng
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Material Memory: With words as their actions, 2014-2019, Ottawa
Lisa Rapoport, PLANT
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New Material Anatomies: Formworks’ Murmur Wall, San Francisco
Maya Przybylski, J Cameron Parkin
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Tools for Drawing the Land: Guelph’s agricultural hinterland
Emily Bowerman, Nadia Amoroso, Nathan Perkins
micro-urbanism
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Micro-urbanism: methodologies of Dorrian and Hawker’s Metis
Stephanie White
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Tianguis of Mexico City: informal markets and urban configurations
Joseph Heathcott
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At the Foot of Lion Rock, Hong Kong
Joanne Lam
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We are Needed: the death and resurrection of value-oriented designer
Maria Portnov, Jonathan Ventura
material memory
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Materialising Memory at Rivesaltes, France
Lejla Odobasic Novo
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WA/VE: structural recycling of cultural artefacts
Robert McKaye, Stoyan Barakov
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Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium: preservation and restoration
David Murray
front inside cover books On Site review 37: lines, borders, walls, contagion back inside cover exhibitions
contributors Call for articles
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our material future stephanie white
In this issue, eleven essays are divided into three categories: the drawing of things , whereby no matter what the need or desire is for more change, more analysis or more interpretation, drawing is the vehicle. The second category is micro-urbanism , where the city – how to make it, how to change it, how to use it, is the subject. The third category is material memory , three essays on very specific material entities, as unlike each other as can be. I’ll start with this one.
material memory The more uncertain the times, it seems the more certainty comes to dominate a political and social discourse that sits alongside a swiftly changing technological, industrial and corporate reality. The past is another country, as it always was, and while many long for that prelapsarian place, they spend much of their present intertwined with the smart technology that organises their day to day existence. The past, often an appalling struggle, is now carefully curated to read like an aspiration. Alexa tells jokes that were hoary in the fifties, while she locks the doors at night. David Murray’s description of The Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium, its origin story, its decline and its present restoration raises such issues. A mid-century modern building of local building skills, modest budget and dressed as a space ship, it housed an extremely sophisticated projector that replicated the night sky in more detail than one could ever see. Its dome, a trope for the sublime since Boullée, is also the dome of heaven, in play since the Renaissance. Its terrazzo, mosaics and ceramic tiles are more suited to the Mediterranean of Galileo than Edmonton’s climate, and its magical, near-transparent curtain wall anchoring the edge of a concrete cantilevered roof was not quite resistant enough to freeze-thaw cycles. The ethereal grounded in the earthly. Murray stresses that nostalgia alone does not justify restoration: this is a building for children and the child in us, thus valuable for its ambition: science is something that must be introduced early and forever listened to. Lejla Odobasic Novo’s visit to the Rivesaltes museum in France, placed in a derelict 80-year old transit camp for refugees and displaced persons, is just as demonstrative an architecture as Edmonton’s 60-year old planetarium placed in a le Nôtre-inspired park celebrating the British monarchy. Rivesaltes pulls the dread and uncertainty of a camp for the stateless and reifies it; the planetarium tries to float away from its placid setting. Both speak about a future where things are different, where tears are wiped from their eyes, and there is no more fear. Rivesaltes is a monolith pressed into the ground; it does not float. It too must be listened to. Materials contain cultural memory and future aspirations. Rivesaltes sinks its concrete into the ground from whence it came. The Planetarium optimistically deployed materials that indicated the future freedoms in the public imagination of the early 1960s. Robert McKaye and Stoyan Barakov’s WA/VE is of a different order – the making of building systems out of discarded materials. WA/VE points paper magazines that once carried potent cultural messaging on their pages towards their intrinsic paper-ness. As they found, materials can be stubborn. One can draw what you think they should do, but they can rebel. Materials are not just there to do our bidding.
this page: Queen Elizabeth II Planetarium opening announcement in the Edmonton Journal, 1960 Rivesaltes Museum: path to the past which runs beside the museum of the present WA/VE cells made from suggestively interleaved magazines facing page: the regional impact of the forestry industry in Ontario With Words as Their Actions, Ottawa FUTUREFORMS studio, working on Murmur Wall Let it Rain Tianguis furniture sourced from local catalogues in Mexico City Jerusalem 2018 - Haredi man warning his community of stores that sell impure cellular devices Hong Kong, Add Oil!
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The drawing of things Emily Bowerman’s drawings of semi-industrial conditions in and around the agricultural hinterland near Guelph, Ontario, bring some of the outlines of landscape urbanism to bear on the analysis of impacted landscapes. This is very much a drawing process, where history, statistics, geography, economics, land use and land fallow are laid graphically into a single drawing. Critical conjunctions that appear on the drawing would fail in text, or at least would be buried in words. Logocentricity does not necessarily clarify, often it obscures, diverts. There are connections between the Guelph drawing process and that of Metis, discussed in the essay on micro- urbanism. Connections are made, visually, that lead to connections of meaning. It is in the process of drawing that invention occurs. As with materials, drawing itself can be wilful: things happen on the page beyond one’s intellectual control. Lisa Rapoport and PLANT’s project, With Words As Their Actions, is a set of curved screens installed on an Ottawa subway platform that carry oral history texts about nineteenth-century Ottawa. This is text, the text is words, the words were spoken. Ephemeral speech, uttered before sound recording, becomes, ultimately, letters removed from large stainless steel sheets. Air blows through them. They can be touched. Like drawing, this too is a process of translation: an idea, a word, a thing is inscribed, becomes physical. Becomes material. Becomes stainless steel. Maya Przybylski and J Cameron Parkin’s work is specifically about software-embedded design, where data and algorithms are considered architectural elements of form and material assembly. Her drawing of Formworks’ 2018 Murmur Wall is a diagram of software connections made evident, and evidence that such connections have material and spatial consequences. How such consequences are evaluated depends on the computational literacy of architects, something that is increasingly generational. The practice of architecture is in the process of re-prioritising starting points. No longer the scribble on the back of an envelope made form, it starts with a complex array of conditions and connections. Dom Cheng’s Let It Rain, the first piece in this issue, starts with the complex condition of anomie and finds a small object, the umbrella, and its capacity to open and close, bump into other umbrellas and to create a safe space beneath it, as a germinal builder of community. His project relies on common will, the need to connect, the desire for sociability. His drawings show how this might happen: a kit of parts, assembly, a product. Deceptively simple. micro-urbanism Three essays are in this section – Joseph Heathcott’s aerial view of Mexican markets, Joanne Lam’s registration of street memory and media-recorded protests in Hong Kong, and Maria Portnov and Jonathan Ventura’s resurrection of the value-oriented designer who walks streets so unloved that it demands a manifesto. No matter what global forces blow around the world, like climate change they eternally play out on local terrain.
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let it rain, 2019
dom cheng
Dom Cheng © dominiquecheng.com
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Dom Cheng © dominiquecheng.com
but is there an opportunity to reimagine this everyday apparatus as a catalyst for connection with a simple modification that would allow them to attach to each other ad infinitum? Makeshift gathering spaces could form freely simply by result of our proximity to one another.
When it rains, we intuitively look for some form of protection. Moments as such are often fleeting in nature and rarely opportunities for connection. However, what if we allow the fundamental laws of attraction and some degree of chance to dictate the boundaries of social interaction. Umbrellas are conventionally used singly in isolation
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Dom Cheng © dominiquecheng.com
Bubble Ideas - Eliminate Loneliness International Competition 2019 - Second Prize Winner www.bubblecompetitions.com
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Umbrella-ism
‘When I say the word “umbrella”, you see the object in your mind. You see a kind of stick, with collapsible metal spokes on top that form an armature for a waterproof material which, when opened, will protect you from the rain. This last detail is important. Not only is an umbrella a thing, it is a thing that performs a function – in other words, expresses the will of man. When you stop to think of it, every object is similar to the umbrella, in that it serves a function. A pencil is for writing, a shoe is for wearing, a car is for driving. Now my question is this. What happens when a thing no longer performs its function? Is it still the thing, or has it become something else? When you rip the cloth off the umbrella,is the umbrella still an umbrella?’
Umbrella as shield: A two-fold transformation of the tool to 1. deflect the onslaught of tear gas and pepper spray attacks used by the anti-riot brigade, and 2. to conceal the identity of protestors under a veil of anonymity for fear of persecution. Umbrella as unifying device: To the extent that they can be combined ad-infinitum to connect and mobilise various activist groups, they can also isolate and retreat with relative ease. A protective canopy that can grow, shape-shift and dissolve as such is a palpable weapon for generating spaces of power. Umbrella as symbol: Every political movement needs a polarising element or ‘powder-keg’ moment to rally the masses. The umbrella was adopted as a symbol of solidarity and defiance against the government the moment its potency as a political weapon was realised. The poignancy of a sea of umbrellas marching through Hong Kong is arguably as emblematic as that of the lone unarmed civilian standing in solitude against a succession of military tanks in Tiananmen Square.
If we accept the notion that the relationship between an object and its function is as fickle as the structure of language, then the possibilities are boundless. In many ways, the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong is a linguistic turn that has enabled a common everyday tool – the umbrella – to be weaponised in a variety of ways for the purposes of peacekeeping and political change. At the core of the conflict is a ruling government struggling to transition political systems against a pro-democratic population adapted to legislative autonomy (socio- economic, cultural and political). Indeed, the lesson learned from past instances of political regression has been that policy advancement is best achieved through non-violent means and negotiation. This is evidenced by the choice of armament – tear gas, pepper spray, water cannons, rubber bullets and bean bags – used by both parties, and their strength of will to prevent feuding heads from escalating to a civil war. The umbrella has been a constant force and symbol by demonstrating an unwavering capacity for peace, connection and understanding.
Paul Auster, City of Glass, p77
Dominique Cheng (b 1979) is a Toronto-based architect/artist/writer. In 2020 he founded NONUMENT – an interdisciplinary design practice committed to creating works and experiences that are layered in meaning, specifically/spatially located and impeccably executed. His work has been widely published and exhibited in North America and Europe. dominiquecheng.com
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material memory lisa rapoport - plant architect inc
When we started our work as PLANT in the mid-1990s we were lucky to work on a series of projects that called into question how we would approach our understanding of the landscape, and what the role of material was within that dialogue. At the time, we observed that people did not seem to understand their local landscapes from an ecological, nor from a cultural point of view. They did not have a deeply felt tie to the land at a time when environmental concerns were just beginning to resurface after the 1960s. We created a series of architecture, landscape, furniture and installation projects whose aims were to heighten people’s awareness of their landscape, their environment, with a particular interest in the traces that past and present culture left or were leaving on the land. We believed that people must be engaged in their environment before they would take a role in sustaining it. Engaging meant staging personal and collective experiences on the
site where Conversations often figured prominently as project names and subjects. The cultural, aesthetic, historic and social framing of the place would lead to a deeper revelation of that landscape, including its systems and ecologies. Nearly 25 years later, with society’s significant collective knowledge and fear of climate change, we believe that this is still just as relevant. There is an abstractness to the global crisis that needs to be bridged with a deeply ingrained visceral connection and intimacy with local place. On Site ’s call for articles posited, ‘that the beloved tropes of narrative, identity, myth, textuality…are luxuries we can not afford right now; they seem irrelevant in the face of both the present and our future.’ We do not think this is precisely true – we think the material future is a step in the continuity of the material past. Although narrative, identity, myth and textuality
are abstractions, we have explored their capacity to be concrete, experiential and physical – in effect material. For us, material exploration has always meant exploring how material experience influences and reinforces memory. What we touch with our hands and feet – the materials that wrap around us – make a memory impression through our body experience. Heaviness, lightness, roughness, smoothness, light absorbing, reflective, solidity, laciness, materials that come from the site or site processes, or are revealed on the site, material that grows and diminishes with time, can tell a visceral story that recovers the past and re-presents in the present. I titled this article ‘Material Memory’ because just like muscle memory which creates synaptic grooves, we feel material memory creates permanent mental maps of place and community, both more relevant than ever.
At Sweet’s Farm’s 85 acres (1994–1997) this exploration was cultural and process- based, and included reconfiguring 1000 mink cages into a dining room in a clearing; an annually growing twig fence made from the forest management cuttings that measure this practice; wooden furniture, paths and look-outs made from natural tree-fells – all to create a loose itinerary for exploration. Each of these elements helped create an immersion in the material-ness of this landscape, and allowed the family that owns it and their visitors to know it through their material experience.
In 2007, we won the competition for a monument to honour the service of US veterans. The Dublin Grounds of Remembrance eschewed a traditional monument in favour of a park promoting the act of habitual walking and social gathering, reinforcing a journey of remembrance and creating new significance for a piece of remnant land. Starting at a copper loggia that frames a ravine and gathering space, the walking route uncovers the natural site, and re-contexualises an adjacent revolutionary- era cemetery. A 510 foot-long bronze handrail shaped to hold your hand back, along with a limestone path with alternating granular and smooth surfaces, guides and paces the walk. The changing sound of shoes on the ground, the hand polishing the bronze, the punctuated end points, all reinforce this walk as an act of remembrance.
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With Words as their Actions 2014–2019
Two examples from this period illustrate this, Sweet’s Farm , 1994-97, and Dublin Grounds of Remembrance of 2007, both on the facing page. An integral part of these projects was finding the worth, the lost or buried meanings on the site. These were each assembled pieces of land – delimited by surveying and ownership concepts rather than being defined by inherent ecological, geological, phenomenological or cultural meanings of the sites. Our own direct exploration of these sites, and our desire to deeply ‘know’ the sites eventually became the subject and programme for future users, to guide their immersion in the site. These projects were deliberately designed to make you slow down and notice. The projects encourage a daily/habitual use of the site, to experience the nuances of change, to understand that using the site creates history on the site, and unites past histories with emerging histories, to build material memory. The projects were a form of story making and story telling.
In our current instantaneous culture this slowness of story telling is even more difficult. It is in this context that we created With Words as their Actions (2014–2019) the winning entry for the Lyon Station Art competition, part of Ottawa’s new underground transit system. In this project we have created a materially immersive experience that revels in the act of story/ history telling, and in who tells the stories. It immerses the viewer in a tactile, textual, visual and exploratory material experience for seconds to only a few minutes, although likely on a regular basis. Each subway station’s artwork was given a theme. The Lyon station theme was Bytown – Ottawa’s name prior to its becoming the Nation’s capital in 1855. Founded in 1826, Bytown was a bustling place for industry, (primarily timber) as it was strategically located at the junction of the Ottawa River and the newly built Rideau Canal. How could we reveal Bytown in this remote place – far below grade at the lower concourse level, far from the nineteenth century? Our first stop was the library and archives to try to understand what actually happened between 1826 and1855, the short life of Bytown. Our best source was the Ottawa Historical Society where we discovered an excellent essay presented by Anne Dewar in 1953 called ‘The Last Days of Bytown’, a careful and colourful documentation of all aspects of life in Bytown on the eve of becoming Ottawa, from road conditions to civic amusements, the state of the city coffers to the editorial and advertising content of its newspapers. This was interesting enough, but led us to a new exploration into how this history came to us.
Anne Dewar was a member of the Ottawa chapter of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society, which was founded in 1898. This historical society was Ottawa’s first, and from the late nineteenth century until after World War II, all of its members were women. While their husbands were building with wood, stone, rail ties and financial capital, the society’s members were building an edifice of words and stories. In 1955 they decided to include men in their membership and it changed to its current name – the Historical Society of Ottawa. However, in 1898, 72 years after settling the area, these women recognised that an oral passing of history was no longer sufficient, that the material culture of the settlement was being lost through the generations: ‘Friday June 3, 1898. At 4pm, thirty-one of Ottawa’s most prominent women assembled in the drawing room of the Speaker of the House of Commons’ apartment in the Centre Block on Parliament Hill. The purpose of the meeting: To form an Ottawa branch of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society. Lady Edgar called the meeting to order and the ladies took their seats... Among the attendees at that meeting on June 3 were the wives of a number of prominent men who represented both political parties as well as the senior ranks of the public service and the upper echelon of the city’s business community.’ — The Historical Society of Ottawa website Their task was to speak across centuries, but they were also women of the nineteenth century. Did they bring their knitting, their needlepoint, deftly stitching while participating in the excited and perhaps radical chatter of creating the society, tasking themselves as the keepers of history? Their research was carefully documented, but the texture and excitement of their conversations – the oral aspect of them sharing their research – is lost. With Words as their Actions attempts to capture this ‘speaking across centuries’ by collapsing time and memory threads (the actual historical content — the history of Bytown, the moment of founding, the 1953 presentation of Dewar’s work, the present and the utterly contemporary fast-paced experience of the subway) just as the thirty-two women would have hoped, passing on oral history while doing ‘women’s work’. The artwork immerses us in their salon and their words; we feel part of their oral history.
Mrs McGarvey, an 1898 founder of the Women’s Canadian Historical Society. charcoal sketch, right, and in stainless steel, above.
PLANT Architect Inc
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With Words as their Actions has three components – the text, the bookmarks and the lady heads. Anne Dewar’s 5,000-word text (over 6000 in the French translation) is water- jet cut in a 72–foot long curving stainless steel curtain that weaves in and out of the station’s columns. Alternating lines of text are cut through on one side in English in Roman letters, interwoven with the French translation in italics cut through from the other side. The nearly 12,000 words subtracted from the steel, the curvaceous- ness of the metal and the alternating line work make a lacy curtain that recalls the intricacy of hand embroidery, knitting and other fabric arts traditionally considered women’s work. Long, sinuous and lacy, the sculpture mimics a long drawn out story with its many asides. As you move along, in it and around it, it quickly transforms from solid to sheer. You need to walk it to read it. You want to run your hand along it like a kid running along a curtain. Meant to be read in small increments in the few minutes that you have at the concourse level of the station, the sculpture encourages repeated readings over multiple trips to eventually get the whole text. The text cannot be instantly consumed, but instead mulled over, slowly building a mental image of the Bytown that was. Like nubbles or drop stitches in the fabric, bookmarks create a structure for how to do that: each paragraph is marked with a turned out drop cap letter (like mediæval manuscript chapter openings), creating a pattern of ‘bookmarks’, allowing you to pick up where you left off the next time you are at the station. Dewar’s text is a vast inventory that allows for (or is even best enjoyed when) dipping in small doses. The lady heads are silhouettes of the society’s 1898 founders, paying tribute to these women who kept Bytown alive. The silhouettes were drawn and extrapolated from the few extant photographs in Canadian archives – in some cases only a single photo exists – of each individual woman. Their names are etched into their collars. Some were prominent in their own right like Lady Edgar and Zoe Laurier, some by association with their husbands, and others were young and unmarried and have virtually disappeared from history. In the sculpture, their silhouettes are gathered in conversation presiding over the curtain, passing knowledge to each other as equals. Although referencing Victorian era silhouettes, these are drawn as profiles rather than being solid (shadow) heads, the transparency allowing a layering that reads like the ladies are talking across the room, with the viewer immersed
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in the conversation. This constantly changing view means the conversation is not frozen, but seems alive. With Words as their Actions knits together past histories from the end of Bytown and its history up to1855, to the women gathering 43 years later in 1898 when enough history was made to fear its potential loss, to the writing in 1954 of ‘Last Days of Bytown’ recording that history. Collapsing these together, the sculpture presents history as it is made: by collective effort, after the fact, through the act of story-telling and by means of a persistent rereading and re-presentation in the present. However, unlike an archive or a historical museum, the artwork embodies this as a physical experience, etching a new groove. For us, what started as a giddy exploration 25 years ago – a deep dive into the physicality of materials and landscape – has broadened as we have become more instrumental in our approach to memory in all manner of project types. We have come to understand that illuminating a landscape or a history was just the first step to the goal of reinforced and embedded collective memory of place and community. It is one that demands deeply impressed material experience – a form of persistent storytelling.
With Words as their Actions is a permanent artwork at Lyon Station on the O-Train Confederation line LRT and is part of the City of Ottawa Art Collection. An exhibit about the artists’ processes is on at Transformations: 24 artists, 13 stations, 12.5 km in Corridor 45|75 , Rideau Station, O-Train Confederation Line LRT, Ottawa, Ontario from September 2019 to January 2020.
PLANT Architect Inc
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new material anatomies
maya przybylksi – j cameron parkin
François Dallegret’s accompanying illustrations to Rayner Banham’s 1965 essay ‘A Home is not a House’ 1 depict a mechanical invasion by bringing complexes of ducts, wiring, HVAC units, plumbing and conduits into our material perception of architecture. In particular, Dallegret’s Anatomy of a Dwelling , facing page, isolates the material presence of the mechanical systems proliferating in domestic architecture and imagines a scenario where these systems eventually supplant entirely all other domestic architectural elements. While the pairing of text and illustrations work in service of Banham’s fight against gratuitous architectural monuments, it’s Dallegret’s presentation of new material anatomies to which we respond here. By removing the surficial, most familiar architectural elements of a dwelling – the walls, floors, windows and doors – and exposing the back-of-house, these anatomical drawings expose and shed light on new elements, namely the often ignored and concealed mechanical elements that architects can and should engage. Learning from Dallegret’s techniques, we present an updated anatomical account of built work which doesn’t focus on the mechanical invasion of the 1960s but instead materialises the digital invasion of present day – where through the continued growth in responsive (or sentient, adaptive, interactive, … or even smart) architecture, there is a proliferation of software-embedded design (SED), where hardware and software work together with physical assemblies to mediate the physical environment. These projects can take on many forms ranging from corporate- driven, top-down initiatives focused on the optimisation of municipal services and business-oriented activities, to bottom- up citizen-oriented projects aimed at empowering individuals in creating new inclusive ways to organise, use and shape the places they live. Projects like these are manifested in a variety of formats including immersive experiences, participatory platforms and responsive architectures.
One such project, Murmur Wall by FUTUREFORMS, visualises data streams, harvested from online activity, moving through a weave of steel and acrylic tubing in pursuit of an ‘artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking and feeling’. 2 Murmur Wall was first installed in the gardens at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco in 2015. In such practice, architects are increasingly bundling digital components, such as code, algorithms and data, together with physical assemblies, thereby adding complexity to how projects operate in the real-world. Projects are now complex entanglements where physical and digital elements work together to control, actuate and animate built form. While Dallegret needed only to peel away material layers to uncover the physically present mechanical systems, exposing the anatomy of SED projects calls for engagements with elements such as data and code, typically perceived as immaterial, lacking a physical dimension – a form of ephemera that lives in clouds and moves around the world through carefully choreographed pulses of light. We are working to resist the immaterial readings of these digital components. For us, the code/data bundles driving SED work are not decoupled from a project’s physical dimension and instead should be thought of as soft materials, materials in and of themselves, and thus constituting part of a project’s material assembly. This reconceptualisation brings these custom computational elements back into the domain of the designer; explicitly managing their effects becomes part of the design solution. Motivating this reconceptualisation are key offerings from the field of Software Studies which position software, its actual lines of code, not just its effects – as a material practice with both social and spatial outcomes. 3
Software Studies recognises the design and implementation of both software and built environments, and the people that populate them, as constituting, mediating and shaping forces of everyday life. Emphasis on the social implications of code implementation has recently come to the fore in discussions around the embedded biases in artificial intelligence systems where the computational processes encoded are being shown to reflect the concerns, preferences and prejudices of those designing and implementing the systems. As a result, these implicit biases have the potential to ripple out, affecting everything from hiring decisions to road maintenance schedules. MIT’s Algorithmic Justice League is one outfit working to expose this coded gaze and counteract its impacts. 4 Looking at SED through a soft material lens, new obligations emerge for designers: SED work transforms computational components from studio instruments (often used in design development phases to refine geometry and optimise fabrication) with limited impact once the project leaves the studio, into persistent and active agents charged with continuous mediation of a project’s functioning in time and space. As producers of the material assemblages that constitute their design work, these designers need to be literate and to possess agency with respect to the social, cultural and political effects across the entire assembly – and this includes not only the physical material outside the computer but the digital material inside the machine and the connection between the two. We are exploring new ways to examine SED projects through analytical and representational techniques that recognise a project’s internal material assembly as an interrelated hybrid construction of both hard and soft materials. Our anatomical analysis of FUTUREFORMS’s Murmur Wall is presented on the next spread, pages 14-15.
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The drawing exposes Murmur Wall’s material assembly as an entanglement of physical elements – its steel and acrylic tubes, and virtual components – data sources and algorithms. The drawing also situates the project in spatial and social contexts by presenting it within a site – which oscillates between the specific area around the installation as well as its wider relationship to the city around it. We see this analytical approach serving designers by identifying the invisible forces shaping the outcomes of their project as a new set of opportunities and challenges within the project’s assembly – with which we must engage. It foregrounds a new set of project elements that need new treatments and considerations, not only in terms of their technical operation but their social and ethical implications as well. This work is supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRC) and developed by DataLAB at the School of Architecture at the University of Waterloo with research assistants Alice Huang and Vincent Min. 1 Banham, Reyner. ‘A home is not a house’ Art in America 2, no. 4, 1965 2 Johnson, Jason Kelly and Nataly Gattegno. Murmur Wall https://www.futureforms.us/ murmur-wall (Accessed Oct 3, 2019) 3 This argument is articulated in key offerings from the field of Software Studies which position software – its actual lines of code, not just its effects – as a material practice with both social and spatial outcomes. Titles include: Fuller, Matthew. Behind the Blip: Essays on the Culture of Software JSTOR. 2003 Mattern, Shannon. ‘Interfacing Urban Intelligence’ In Code and the City. Editted by Rob Kitchin and Sung-Yueh Perng. Routledge. 2016. pp 49-60 Fuller, Matthew, editor. Software Studies: A Lexicon. Cambridge Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2008. 4 https://www.media.mit.edu/projects/ algorithmic-justice-league/overview/
FUTUREFORMS
FUTUREFORMS Murmur Wall, installed at the Buena Yerba Center, 2015 below: François Dallegret, Anatomy of a Dwelling , 1965
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Maya Pryzyblski and J Cameron Parkin
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tools for drawing the land emily bowerman - nadia amoroso - nathan perkins
Landscape architects explore landscapes through a variety of means: how we see a landscape and consequently understand it is the product of familiar tools and processes that too often are habitual, influenced by expectations of production efficiency. Here, we examine landscape forms, patterns and materiality through aerial photography and maps to visually document and understand a place. We have developed a set of tools and processes, influenced by MacLean’s and Corner’s 1996 publication, Taking Measures: Across the American Landscape , that lead us to different ways of seeing the land and its identity. 1 It is a product of our evolutionary heritage to seek information from our environment for the very real rewards of finding shelter and security, and the penalties of not doing so. We start with aerial photographs that tell a story about patterns and form not normally experienced from ground level. Aerials and maps reveal site history — occupation, forms and paths that have left their traces. Form and material are not static elements within a landscape, rather they are dynamic processes. Our maps illustrate aggregates, crops and plant species not only as elements, but as processes of materialisation on the land — planting, harvesting, extraction: identified land use operations that have caused habitat loss, exploitation of resources and the overuse of agricultural plots. Structures, materials and landscape forms will persist until urban encroachment absorbs agricultural and rural land. While extraction and cultivation are necessary to sustain human life, they irreversibly impact rural landscapes and their communities. A reconsideration of the relationship of landscape to human industries is required as extraction and cultivation processes render irreversible impacts to geographies, ecologies and sociocultural dimensions of landscape. Marc Antrop, in his 1998 essay ‘Landscape change: plan or chaos?’ states that ‘landscape holism is closely related to structural aspects, which reflect order and chaos’, and that the main force behind change is ‘the reorganisation of the existing structures to optimise their functioning’. 2 Separate landscape components are not representative of overall change within the landscape; small changes within the
landscape do not necessarily alter its holistic appearance, its type or identity. If the reorganisation is how change happens, then structural changes to existing frameworks are necessary. The reconfiguration and repurposing of site features leads to emergent paradigms that operate beyond site features themselves. The dissection of landscape features reveals fragmentation to be a persistent characteristic. Our use of collage in this project illustrates contrasting landscape features, materials and functions between seemingly unaltered natural areas and the meticulously managed areas of landscapes and waterscapes. The hay fields map shows the scale of forest patches that offer refuge to migrating animals. Expanding extraction and cultivation processes render irreversible impacts to ecologies. These maps re- envision existing site conditions to prompt rehabilitation and reconfiguration at a territorial scale. Neil Brenner observes that maps unveil operations within the hinterland, areas beyond the city, that support ‘putatively front-stage operations of large population centres’. 3 The formation of patterns within the landscape, Brenner believes, reveals the true impacts of industrial supply and demand continuums. Measured features include spatial analyses, cyclic processes, coordinates, volumetric data, private and public boundaries, and cultural elements intended to inform design and planning agendas. Identified elements offer grounds to compare and contrast forms and conditions. Cartographic patterns and textures animate landscape features that speculate on the larger landscape system and extract data to support reconfiguration, reclamation or adaptation for the future. Existing site conditions, conceptually re-envisioned, prompt rehabilitation and reconfiguration at a territorial scale. For example, the pollutive impacts of quarries permeate watersheds beyond the quarry site itself. To identify characteristics, materials and structures within the quarry site prompts questions about how these elements influence the larger water system. These maps reveal past histories, current site conditions and the larger systems, institutions and territories in which the mapped landscape exists.
While aerial images present physical facets of landscape, maps are agents of deconstruction, extraction and emergence. The aerials serve as the operative imagery whereby measurements, patterns, colours and textures emerge as landscape conditions: the grounds from which cartographic observations are made. These maps do not render rigorous landscape decision-making, instead they are an interpretive medium for the narration of constructed, ecological, socio-cultural and historical facets of a site. Narratives emerge through the identification and mapping of site features, coupled with archival investigations and external research of site geographies, history and cultural constructs. To respond to current site conditions, there is value in understanding the progression of space and time, from past to present. Cyclic patterns within the maps correlate to natural landscape processes that inform future approaches to adaptation, development and manipulation that suits site contexts. The aerials and maps expose patterns and textures of the residual landscape as a means of marking the past which will persist into the future.
Drawings by Emily Bowerman, BLA and MSc Rural Planning, supervised by Nadia Amoroso, both of University of Guelph, School of Environmental Design and Rural Development. Aerial photographs capturing the visual elegance of farm-lands and industrial sites surrounding Guelph, rarely seen from the ground, were taken by Nathan Perkins, University of Guelph School of Environmental Design and Rural Development, from his gyroplane (C-GNHP).
1 Corner, James and MacLean, Alex S. Taking Measures Across the American Landscape. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996. Foreword by Michael Van Valkenburgh. 2 Antrop, Marc., 1998. ‘Landscape change: plan or chaos?’ Landscape Urban Planning . 41. pp155–161. 3 Brenner, Neil. (2016), ‘The Hinterland Urbanised?’. Architectural Design, 86: 118-127. doi:10.1002/ad.2077
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on site review 36: our material future
Concrete Cast Pipe Storage
Nathan Perkins
This map explores the dichotomy of concrete pipe sections above and below ground. On the surface they are static, separated and orderly; below grade they become connected and dynamic. Pipe measurements delineate scale; row lengths are measured. Concrete and aggregate materials: the ratio of sand, aggregate and cement is calculated for each row to indicate the process of extraction of aggregate, the application of new pipe configurations, and
their insertion into the ground. Surface, subsurface and strata indicate the space that the drums occupy once they are in the ground. Pipelines lead to and from Toronto along Highway 401. A list of invasive species enabled through the construction process highlights the consequent eradication of native species. The map exists as an indicative and coded composition of landscape features, materials, forms and patterns that refer
to development along the 401. Linearity is a defining characteristic. While the pipes in the photograph are currently static and uninstalled, situated with fairly predictive motives for a pipe network, their impact to the future landscape is unpredictable. The map speaks of industrial expansion and urbanisation, persistent activities within the Greater Toronto Area.
Emily Bowerman
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and off farms, even at the level of microbial diversity in soils. Opportunities exist to invest in ecological performance, particularly within landscapes of conflicting uses, such as agricultural matrices. Landscape itself serves as a kind of infrastructure, equally as valuable as the crops it produces. An optimised landscape infrastructure has the potential to remediate and restore values, particularly in rural farm communities; to promote the tree canopy, to manage waste water from agricultural run-off and enhance the ability for wildlife to move within the landscape. This map offers a means of communication to illustrate and grapple with current conditions that must be interpreted in a way that promotes a renewed ecological responsibility within the landscape. For example, recognising landscape patterns such as habitat fragmentation, could initiate a monitoring program or programs to support farmers to enhance biodiversification. The map serves as a graphic tool to represent landscape analysis and inventory data.
Nathan Perkins
Hay Field, Guelph
This map dissects features within the agricultural matrix to distinguish between agricultural plots and forested strips for wildlife habitat and refuge. Such patches and corridors allow passage across the agricultural landscape. Agricultural plot sizes in relation to the size of forested areas, tree species, rows of crops arranged to optimise sun exposure – all are noted. The contrast between crop areas of high sun exposure and the inner shaded rows are illustrated by the black and hatched linework in the centre of
the map. Various textures show the different stages of wheat: grain, hay and straw. N-P-K notation indicates the nutrients required to support soil vitality. Agricultural landscapes exist not as an agglomeration of contrived landscape plots for human benefit, rather they offer ecological performance values that, if we invest in them, will give back to us. The map indicates existing conditions of fragmented habitats, emphasising the importance of maintaining a biodiversity of species on
Emily Bowerman
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on site review 36: our material future
Utility Pole Storage Site, Guelph
Nathan Perkins
Emily Bowerman
The purpose of this map is to reveal the progressive history of the lumber industry in Ontario. Modern forestry has strong ties to traditional harvesting methods and abilities to read land, soil and growing conditions. The map displays the territorial impacts of forestry on the Ontario landscape at a regional scale. Suggestions are made regarding lumber delivery destinations and the impact of the forestry industry on many
smaller rural communities economically dependent on forestry such as Waskami Lake. Some of the key measurements taken across the site include the patterns and scale of woodpiles and tree species used to manufacture utility poles. Varied piling patterns are indicated in the left corner of the map along with a side profile of trees to showcase the materials in the natural state versus the harvested state. Image
extractions of the wood piles and some of the historic elements are paired with direct measurements across Ontario to reveal the regional impact of the forestry industry. The landscape is highly disturbed and managed; the map does not necessarily offer instruction on how to manage current conditions on site, rather it provides an interpretive narrative of forestry operations within the region.
on site review 36: our material future
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micro-urbanism
stephanie white
Our material future appears in many of these pages as responsive urban networks that are mapped, extended, made significant, for surely most of them right now are near-invisible. Micro-urbanism: the micro- details of living in the city. If the twentieth century was dominated by macro-urbanism, large plans, sweeping zoning and transport systems, perhaps the twenty-first, seeing where all that got us, will concentrate on a smaller scale. Burnham’s ‘Make no little plans; they have no magic to stir men’s blood’ may be changed, legitimately, to ‘make no large plans; they will surely go wrong, and in spectacularly destructive ways’. We’ve done with magic and men (singular, heroic, blood up); more to the point might be standing with feet on the ground, in a specific climate, in a particular place, in a crowd, trying to survive. The starting point. In this issue we have Murmur Wall by FORMWORKS, an LED skeleton into which one whispers wishes, hopes, desires, confessions which travel through an invisible infrastructure. 1 Maya Prybylski maps this infrastructure as the networks that define a spatial community. Dom Cheng’s sheltering umbrellas hook together like colonies of algae the size of a city. Joseph Heathcott writes about Mexico City’s street markets, another linked-unit structure, that spread like mycelia across a diversity of urban patterns. Joanne Lam’s Hong Kong streets, resonant with memory, now resonate to water cannon and tear gas. Off the streets, protesters can be kettled, in buildings, in tunnels, the streets persist as public concourses. Maria Portnov looks more closely at streets, and finds them shambling and often unloved, certainly underdesigned. These case studies look for both the facilitators of, and the obstructions to, community, communication and the communal subsets of the city. This is micro-thinking at its finest grain, rather than macro-zoning according to broad demographics, market facilitation or traffic access. It is something finer, more particular, more intimate. 1 Murmur Wall is an artificially intelligent, anticipatory architecture that reveals what the city is whispering, thinking and feeling. By proactively harvesting local online activity—via search engines and social media — Murmur Wall anticipates what will soon matter most to the city. www.murmurwall. net. 2 On www.metis-architecture.org one can find a number of projects that explore the cultural layers of a city, its topography, its geology and its material presence.
Micro-urbanism 1: Metis, a research unit founded by Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker at the University of Edinburgh in 1997, focusses on the city and the complexity of its representation. In a lecture given by Dorrian at the University of Bristol, he describes the methods of Metis, and explains at some length his working processes. One of the early projects on the Metis website is Micro-Urbanism , a 2001 competition for a corner of Parliament Hill in Ottawa. The Bristol lecture is gripping; I am waiting to hear about the Ottawa project, which comes last, and he literally brushes the slides away and doesn’t say a word about it. However, the Ottawa project is the ground plane of the enormous carpet laid for Metis’ On The Surface exhibition in Aarhus and Edinburgh, so must be foundational.
courtesy of Metis
Clearly too complex to describe in a website caption, the project description nonethless outlines this project’s intentions: ‘Seen from the air, Ottawa is a city marked by the co-existence of two urban/landscape phenomena: the abstract city grid that replicates equivalent spatial units, and the river whose edge produces a series of specific spatial conditions. The relationship between the three city blocks of the competition site and the highly figurative parliamentary buildings is grounded in this broader duality. Before the latter, the weave of the city grid spreads out like a textile. This project, a hybrid programmatic proposal that incorporates cultural and governmental facilities, concerns the development of the large urban site forming the southern edge of Parliament Hill. The architectural strategy is developed from the notion that the city (and, by extension, the land beyond) might in some way be gathered up or folded onto the site, with all the density and compression that the metaphor implies. Through the topology of the folds, a new urban continuum would be established, one that draws together and rearticulates the space of the parliament and the space of the city. In the project, the existing buildings on the site are edited in order to break down the cellular nature of the existing morphology and produce a notional texture of minor architectural elements, which are then re-inscribed within the new structure. The grain of the lot lines that extend beyond the site, striating the city fabric, is retained.’ 2 Calvino is used to structure meta-texts which narrate certain channels through the city. With the maps and photographs that come in the competition package, Metis uses a set of mathematic operations based on the happenstance of geography and topography, so the starting point of a project is rooted in the materiality of place, which is then extrapolated into a series of registration lines that spin and fold into three-dimensional networks, out of which Metis recognises potential envelopes that could become potential volumes that might be read as potential architecture. Thisa project sets out a methodology that one can discern in subsequent projects: the projection, rotation and folding of planes, lines and dots that eventually return to the in situ ground plane. Points of intersection become charged, the starting point for design in a volumetric universe. And, subsequentially it is driven by narration as an obligation and an ordering factor.
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on site review 36: our material future
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