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On Site review issue 10 2003 publisher

Introduction: Architecture + Weight Michael Carroll and Ana Rewacowicz, guest editors Issue 10 of OnSite is devoted to the notion of weight and architec- ture.The array of articles attempts to balance both – the heavy and the light . Architecture can be expressed through permanent immobile buildings grounded to the earth, or ephemeral portable structures that rest lightly on its surface. This issue alternates between these opposite viewpoints. We feature side by side, the weighty sheet metal constructions of Jacques Bilodeau with Peter Yeadon’s speculation on architecture in the age of nanomatter; construction photographs of Rick Joy’s minimalist rammed earth houses stand in contrast with Marie-Paule Macdonald’s overview of transportable environments. Our contemporary architectural neurosis is articulated by Paul Lau- rendeau in his article,‘Architecture Psychoanalysed’. Whether heavy or light, Buckminster Fuller’s question still holds — ‘How much does your building weigh?’

The Association for Non-Profit Architectural Fieldwork (Alberta)

guest editors Michael Carroll Ana Rewakowicz editor Stephanie White

cover images: Susan Dobson Martin Ruiz de Azua

contributors

Battersby + Howat Architects Jacques Bilodeau Michael Carroll Ella Chmielewska Susan Dobson Aliki Economides Kevin de Forest Julian Haladyn Juan Manuel Heredia Paul Laurendeau Filiz Klassen

Tom Martin Marcus Miller

Myron Nebozuk Patkau Architects Ana Rewakowicz Rick Joy Architects Owen Rose Saucier + Perron architectes Hayub Song Terry Tremayne Lois Weinthal Stephanie White Peter Yeadon Carl Zimmerman

Mark Guard Architects Marie-Paule Macdonald

design & production Black Dog Running printer Makeda Press, Calgary

Lot 15. From the series Home Invasion , 1998/99 by Susan Dobson.

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C anada P ost A greement N o 40042630 ISSN 1481- 8280 copyright O n S ite R eview and the A ssociation for N on -P rofit A rchitectural F ield - work (A lberta ) ALL RIGHTS RESERVED T he use of any part of this publication reproduced , trans - mitted in any form or by any means , electronic , mechanical , photocopied , recorded or otherwise , or stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law , C hapter C-30, R S C 1988.

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Sonar SURGE — Ingrid Backmann, Lorraine Oades, Ana Rewakowicz Blurring Figural Notations Terry Tremayne p retend for a moment that you have no stylus, no gauge and only the vaguest of reference points. Imagine you have almost no concrete position at all, no object to copy and no material ground upon which to draw or place it. All you perceive is the phenomenal quality that surrounds and envelops built form.You are not lost but might as well be. First you hear a sound in isolation, you are alone, and then a dialogue,

Sonar, a multimedia project, was installed in July- August 2001 by SURGE in the abandoned piscine St-Michel. Consisting of a grid of copper piping that sprayed a mist over an empty pool, the work essentially re-activated the building and provided refuge from the heat of summer.

ness on the resolute materials that build a frame, if not the ground, for architectural events.This is the effect of sound and of light, and in the case of Sonar , the effect of dissolving the substance of architecture into its corresponding image — the effect of establishing the interplay between the weight of architectural substance and its spatializing non- material qualities. The image that supports the weight of this pool is an image of space where sound in concert with light defines the bounds of form, its tempo, timbre, tone, intensity; another way of saying material, a parallel representation of space, temporary, immanent, a near formless image.To eventualise phenomena is to give some form to this oscillating process of dissociating expectation from recognition.We watch, we listen and reach out for some indication of a change in phase, some indication that we are still there within tangible space. In this place you might almost disappear but for the affirmative realization of touch and the stereophonic sound of your incessant breathing. Form is eventualized and recedes, dissociates itself temporarily from the empty tank that frames our experience. But these fleeting impressions will always move off, one step ahead of us as it were.We are resolute.We are not flecks of colour only, nor mute disembodied specks of light, or objects that creak in the dark.We are neither built of fragments of larger things nor fully imaginary visages. Our ground remains immutable. Unlike water vapour we can not disappear.We experience our weight as if everything depended on it. 

humidity, a dim light and moisture, polyphony. At just that instant distance and isolation give way to spatial definition. You look down and find yourself inside an impressionistic picture of weightlessness. You reach out and locate yourself in an architecture of brief, albeit re-affirmative, encounters that added together direct you back towards the door. Installed in the ageing and near-forgotten public pool, La Piscine St- Michel, Sonar intervenes in the moments that separate building from experience; an empty pool tank from its phenomenal appearance. La Piscine St-Michel becomes the pictorial ground upon which an image of desire is redrawn — a desire to refigure this abandoned architectural shell and move beyond programmatic and material expectation into an interstitial image of informal atmospheric space.This blurring image marks the transition from being physically attuned to base needs — gravity, ground and air, to being suspended in an image of interiorized phenomenal space. Sonar is not solely concerned with the grounding of material architec- ture, the ground of stereotomy and of its resistance, impenetrability and weight. It also reveals the spatialising effects of phenomenal weightless-

Terry Tremayne is a critic currently living in London, England. This text is taken from a longer review of Sonar.

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Contents

great weight J ulian H aladyn and M iriam J ordan : Visiting the Hall of Ancient Masters of Shilluksa, South Korea. C arl Z immerman : Industrial Landmarks of Britain. J acques B ilodeau : 925 des Carrières, Montréal M ichael C arroll : The Weight of Architecture. Four case studies. P atkau A rchitects : Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Mon- tréal, Québec S aucier + P errot : Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario B attersby + H owat : Gulf Island Residence, Mayne Island, BC R ick J oy : Adobe House,Tuscon, Arizona O wen A R ose : Fire, Air, Water and EARTH. great plans K evin de F orest : The Architecture of Air: Yves Klein’s leap into the social void. P aul L aurendeau : Architecture Psychoanalysed P eter Y eadon : Architecture in the Age of Nanomatter E lla C hmielewska and A liki E conomides : Weighing the Words, Reading the Architecture M arcus M iller : Expo ‘67 and the Weight of Utopia. S usan D obson : Home Invasion great perversity M yron N ebozuk : La Maison Cigale, Edmonton L ois W einthal : Lightweight Architecture, Heavyweigh Interiors great lightness S urge : Sonar , Montreal A na R ewakowicz : The Reality of an Inflatable Utopia M arie -P aule M acdonald : Romantic Nomads F iliz K lassen : The Malleability of Matter: design flexibility and the re-thinking of fashion, industrial design and architecture M ark G uard : Transformable Apartment, Soho, London great bridges S tephanie W hite and T om M artin : Log Stringer Bridge,Youbou, BC. great books J uan M anuel H eredia and H ayub S ong review David Leather- barrow’s Uncommon Ground.Architecture,Technology and Topog- raphy .

michael carroll

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7 8 11

terry tremayne

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ana rewakowicz

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paul laurendeau

16 18 20

julian haladyn and miriam jordan

susan dobson

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22 24 28

kevin deforest

marie-paule macdonald

30 34

lois weinthal

marcus miller

36 38

filiz klassen

4 40 45 48

hayub song

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juan manuel heredia

myron nebozuk

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stephanie white

tom martin

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Visiting the Hall of Ancient Masters of Shilluksa, South Korea Julian Haladyn

o n a very hot summer day in South Korea, Miriam Jordan and I took a bus from our village of Bubal to Shilluksa, a Buddhist temple site in the neighboring town of Yoju. We had visited this site once before in the winter, but wanted to see it again before returning to Canada. In the middle of Shilluksa is a small- scale temple called the Hall of Ancient Masters or Chosadang. Built between 1468-69, during the Choson period, this little Buddhist hall is quite a simple looking structure, especially in comparison to the larger and more elaborate buildings within the same complex. It is painted in the same brightly coloured traditional pattern character- istic of Korean Buddhist temples. The feature that makes this Hall unique is the fact that it has no main supporting beam; instead the weight of the structure is held up by a series of smaller interlaced beams that spread out the distribution of the weight evenly. This has the effect of making the physi- cal structure of the Hall appear to disintegrate. With no single point supporting the weight of the building, entering the architectural space of the Hall becomes a Buddhist experience of nothingness. In the open space of the Hall — which I enter only after removing my shoes — the interlaced ceiling dissipates any sense of weight that the structure may have, while simultaneously accenting the materiality of the architectural elements themselves. This can be seen in the use of heavy corner brackets. This contradiction captures the Buddhist sense of nothingness within the architectonic lan- guage of Chosadang, in which the structure of the Hall appears weightless by drawing atten- tion to its physicality.

I had to sit in the Hall for a while to figure this one out. 

Julian Haladyn is an artist, writer and curator in London, Ontario. In 1997 he studied traditional Korean painting under LeeYoung-Hwan in Ichon, South Korea. He shared the position of Visual Arts Coordinator at the Forest City Gallery with Miriam Jordan, June 2002 to Febru- ary 2003. He is presently enrolled in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program in Vermont.

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Carl Zimmerman’s Industrial Landmarks of Britain

s mall, very detailed models provide the material for these photograhs. Empty of mid-Victo- rian occupation that such indus- trial buildings would have had, we are faced with the powerful deter- minism of such industrial spaces and their absolute utility. Lost Hamilton Landmarks , 1997, exploited both the authority of the gallery and the presumed authenticity of photography to present a fabricated and personal compilation of Hamilton’s public buildings. The current series, Industrial Landmarks of Britain ,

draws on a monumental classical heritage and dwells to an even greater extent on the ramifica - tions of physical mass and scale. Industrial Landmarks imagines a Victorian worker’s state at the apogee of British wealth and impe- rial ambition. The photographs themselves are very large — 40” x 72”: heroic proportions for imagined heroic buildings of an imagined state- sponsored programme of monu- mental public architecture. We are presented with pure metaphor for an alternative history. 

Buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that bridge of tradition  to future generations... My theory was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials (eg. stone and brick) and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.

Carl Zimmerman is a photographer/ installation artist living in Orangedale, Cape Breton. He was recently artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin. Although it wears a correct Beaux Arts dress... something about it seems to go straight back to pre-history; glimpsed at twilight or in the early morning it looks as if an unknown race of giants might have quarried it up in great chunks out of the living rock. Brendon Gil, essay for exhibition catalogue, The U.S. Customs House on Bowling Green , 1976.

Albert Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value, from Inside the Third Reich , 1970

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j acques Bilodeau’s work is substantial. His furniture and interiors present his material of choice —sheet metal. My first experience of Jacques Bilodeau’s work was his folded sheet metal furniture featured in the media lounge of the Biennale de Montréal 2000. Its minimal aesthetic matched with its comfort made it one of the most engaging pieces of the Biennale. One of his most recent projects, his studio/residence at 925 des Carrières in Montréal, continues to exhibit this distinctive architectonic sensibility. 925 des Carrières both inhabits and extends an existing industrial build- ing sited near an incinerator just north of a swath of railway tracks in mid-town Montréal.The understated exterior, clad partially in sheet metal, announces Bilodeau’s occupation of this marginal, industrial land- scape. On entering, it becomes clear that this is a place of quite repose and imaginative experimentation. Large sheets of metal hover above the concrete floor. This horizontal, blackened, sculptural assemblage is both a work of art and a surface to be occupied — a background for gastronomical delights served from Bilodeau’s fully equipped industrial kitchen. To maintain the studio’s highly edited ambience, large sheet metal sliding doors and free standing partitions screen behind-the-scene gadgetry, including the studio storage area crammed with fragments of industrial machinery and hospital equipment. It is apparent that this designer is a modern day alchemist transforming found materials into evocative creations that defy easy categorisation. An object or surface might be a lighting fixture, a piece of furniture or a fragment of a building. However, and more importantly, it all bears Bilodeau’s spirit of invention matching ‘high’ design with a witty sense of the everyday. Asked how he achieves the subtle lustre on the large horizontal and vertical expanses of sheet metal he replies nonchalantly. One can only imagine the ritualistic applications that give a distilled shine to his weighty creations.

925 des Carrières by Jacques Bilodeau Michael Carroll

b ilodeau’s work is concerned with the representation of emptiness. At the same time, it discloses the relation- ship of conflict that we maintain with such a representation. There is the unmentionable emptiness that dwells in us and desperately urges us to cram our interior environments with objects. 

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Jacques Bilodeau was born in 1951 in Garthby, Quebec. His cur- rent studio resi- dence is located 925 des Carrières in Montreal. His work has been published in such magazines as World Space Design, Japan (1989) and Inte- rior Magazine, USA (1988).

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Building Weight: Four Architectural Constructions Michael Carroll

a s a culture we are obsessed with weight loss. Fashion dictates. Thin, lean and muscular bodies saturate our media-savvy culture. Industrial designers obsess with sleeker more aerodynamic profiles. Everything from laptops, to cellphones, to computer chips are, with every passing season, more wafer thin. The residues of this are also evident within architectural culture.Archi- tecture has become increasingly transparent and ‘invisible’ finally disap - pearing into a misty vapour as realized by Diller+Scofidio in their Blur Pavilion , the critic’s choice of the 2002 Swiss Expo. However, with this disappearing acting comes a realisation, that architec- ture in its most fundamental state is, and continues to be, weighted to and imbedded in the earth — immobile. It is weighted literally through becoming real . In the process of the word becoming flesh there is an inevitable weight gain. Even Ricardo Scofidio states, in reference to the design of the Cloud , ”It’s incredible, the structure that’s required to make this nothing.” 1 Witha quick glance of the contemporary architecture scene it is clear it has been inundated with the weightlessness of the digital and the virtual worlds of the computer. However, with the fall of the Dot.com industry and the demise of blob architecture, there is a hint in the air for the return of the real, an architecture of resistance, rooted to the ground, an architecture centred around notions of materiality, physicality and actual experience — beyond the thin veil of the screen. In the support of a weighty architecture that is earth bound, that doesn’t mind a couple of extra pounds, our eyes quickly shift to four architecture studios that revel in the notion of the real with an emphasis on tectonics, materiality and connection to the particularities of the places their projects inhabit — in both an immediate and an extended sense.

On|Site offers you an anti-magazine stance. We feature not the com- posed image of the finished project but an inside look at the construc - tion of four projects. We consider the unfinished building in the midst of the gritty construction site as a kind of reverse ruin that engages the imagination of both the professional architect and the average passer-by. Construction photographs, usually taken by the architects themselves, show the building’s foundation, its structural skeleton, and its interior/exterior wall assemblies to reveal a de-laminated architecture. Architecture in this light is not understood as a hermetic product to be distilled and consumed but an open-ended process — an assemblage of spaces and surfaces to be inhabited. This article highlights four projects currently under construction in North America.Two are institutional buildings: the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec that currently stands as an elegant concrete shell in the midst of Montreal and is designed by Patkau Architects of Vancouver, and the earth bound Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario by Saucier + Perrotte Architects of Montreal. We also look at two houses, the first a Battersby+Howat house, carefully scribed into its site on Mayne Island, British Columbia and lastly, in the heat of the Arizona desert, a weighty rammed earth house by Rick Joy Architects of Tuscon. In parallel with the descriptions and photos are excerpts from David Leatherbarrow’s recent book, Uncommon Ground and Daniel Willis’ The Emerald City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination 2 .  1 Ned Cramer. ‘All Natural’ Architecture July 2002 p. 53 2 Leatherbarrow, David. Uncommon Ground, architecture, tecnology and topography . MIT Press, 2002. Willis, Daniel. The Emerald City and other Essays on the Architectural Imagination. Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Blur building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzer- land. Diller+Scofidio, 2000. ‘An inhabitable cloud whirling about Lake Neuchatel —’

Michael Carroll is a founding partner of atelier BUILD and an adjunct professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture.

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Bibliothèque du Québec Montréal, Québec 2003 Patkau Architects

on the middle ground, neglected or appropriated by the layout of a building: ‘Could not this neglect of the middle ground also, and more largely, allow us to think again about what it means to “design” a buildng in a location? For this to be so, topics of design such as distance, measurement and finally “space” would have to be reconsidered, as would design itself. If one could rethink the field or horizon of architecture along these lines, it would be possible to discover and devlelop practices of project making that acknowledge the existence of latent settings without trying to make them into something they never should be, permanently on show. Were we to try to conceive such spatial structure, we would accept the challenge of imagining a terrain with gaps or unclaimed areas, a discontinuous field, an uncommon ground. . . a mosaic field built up situation by situation, not taken for granted, like space, as an extended receptacle wanting infill.’ David Leatherbarrow,‘Architecture and Its Horizons’, Uncommon Ground , pp 18- 19

a five storey provincial library, la bibliothèque du Québec holds general collections, an historic Québec collection and a variety of public spaces including a lecture theatre, cafe, gallery, garden and bookstore. The collections are housed within two large wooden rooms, each with different characters. The Québec collection is in a grand room, inwardly focussed, with the stacks at the perimeter and reading areas within. The room for the general collection is a storage container for the various materials of the collection with reading areas outside its boundaries. — paraphrased from www.patkau.ca

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on the grand abstraction as a premise of design: ‘An articulated field or horizon was never intended to be abstract, it was meant to be concrete or practically and topographically specific.’ David Leatherbarrow,‘Building Levels’, Uncommon Ground , p 62 ‘Close proximity annuls aesthetic distance. At the back a practical field replaces or temporarily subordinates visualised objects, or exhanges one kind of visuality for another. The loss of the object allows for a gain in the nearness of things, their immediacy and their ability to sustain practical affairs; and this in turn promotes non- or pre-aesthetic engagements. Such a realisation … demonstrates participation in the whole, recognising it as a mosaic of opportunities.’

David Leatherbarrow,‘Back to Front, or About Face’, Uncommon Ground , p 78

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t he design is inspired by the nebulous spaces occupied by the subjects of theoretical physics, at once micro- and macro-cosmic, rich in informa- tion and of indeterminate form and substance. Between city and park, the Perimeter Institute expands and inhabits the improbable space of the line tht separates the two. The building defines the secure zones of the institute’s facilities within a series of parallel walls, embedded in an erupting ground plane that reveals a large relecting pool. The north façade, facing the park across this pool, reveals the institute as an organism, a microcosm of discrete elements. The south façade, facing the city across train tracks and the city’s main arterial road, presents the institute as a unified entity, but of enigmatic scale and content. Entry to the institute is possible from both the north, along the reflecting pool, and south, under the new ground. Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Waterloo, Ontario. 2003 Saucier + Perrotte architectes

Initial conceptual sketch (west view) showing the Institute expanding and inhabiting the space of the line that separates city (right) and the park (left).

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‘Years ago one of my teachers told me that the under- standing and interpretation of the site is more than half the solution. The Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis wrote that architectural concepts must be conceived in situ; architecture, he said, germinates from its site.‘

David Leatherbarrow. ‘Back to Front, or About Face’, Uncommon Ground , p. 91

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Staehling Residence Mayne Island, BC. 2003 Battersby + Howat

. . . the act of building is not the work of restoring regional identity or unity, by recreating and coordinating its familiar signs: instead, construction is described as an agency of topography’s perpetual becoming, a process unimpeded by the absence of an ‘origin’ or ‘natural condition’… David Leatherbarrow. ‘Preface’, Uncommon Ground . p. ix

t his retreat simply leaves fashion aside and concerns itself with nothing but the marks left by time in the soil, with the wind, the sun, the view and of course, the budget and program to respect. Each of the constraints encountered, each of the materials use, induces its own expression which modulates the plan, the volumes and the architectural vocabulary. Maio Saia, in Canadian Architect , December 2001. p5 To minimise impact on the site, new construction is limited to previously altered land and existing infrastructure —septic field, well, roads and paths.

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‘I can offer a tentative answer to my question regarding the weight of archi- tecture: architecture, at the present time, would do itself a great service by becoming both more real (heavy) and more imaginative (light).’

Adobe Canyon House Patagonia Region, Arizona, 2003 Rick Joy Architects

Daniel Willis. The Emerald City . p 58

t his project used engineered soil and water from a well on the site in a very dry mixture (about 10% moisture content). Foundation and floor slab are concrete; inside the formwork, 10” of earth are compacted down to 5”, and the steel firebox and steel plate window jamb embeds are cast into the walls. Once the wall footings were in place the rammed earthwork, including the setting of forms, took approximately 3 to 4 weeks. The process is relatively simple, and a contractor can direct a group of day labourers how to do the work, and then they build it. The house is perched on the edge of a rippled ridge where water has eroded the land over time. It is approximately 1200 sq. ft. and is only

used for part of the year. Large gates on the porches allow the building to close upon itself when the owners are gone, to complete the box. The larger porch also acts as the carport when the clients are gone. In the main open spaces are the living, dining and bedrooms. The living room looks out toward a beautiful view of the ridge beyond the valley. The kitchen, bathroom and meditation/yoga space, and laundry/storage make up the smaller mole-like corners. 

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f ire drives our industrialised world to the detriment of the air, water, and earth; however, its weight needs to shift. Concern about our air and water is giving new importance to the old technology of rammed earth construction. Stratified rammed earth walls have a primal beauty that speak of time and place. They are solid, acoustically sound, tactile, healthy and very locally sourced. Not only the Great Wall of China. The Hakka people of the Southern Chinese province of Fjian have been building communal rammed earth dwellings for centuries. About fifteen percent of homes in France are made of earth.Australia is heavy with rammed earth. And in North America, some architects and builders in Arizona and British Columbia are casting it as a normal construction material. According to the Cement Association of Canada, typical concrete con- tains 7 to 15% of cement and 16% water. Stabilised rammed earth walls have a cement content that ranges from 3 to 10% and an approximate water content of 8%. Nonetheless, reinforced rammed earth walls can be more than two-times thicker than their concrete counterparts, ranging from 300 to 600 mm (12’ - 24’). Time has shown that the world’s oldest earth walls are roughly composed of 70% sand and 30% clay (Easton, p. 91). Structurally, rammed earth walls can be considered to share the same characteristics as unreinforced masonry. Today, reinforced rammed earth walls can be engineered to be earthquake resistant, multiple storeys and durable for centuries. Rammed earth walls also share the same thermal characteristics as concrete and brick. In Northern climates such as Canada, these thick walls still have to be insulated. A British Columbia company,Terra Firma Builders Ltd, has developed an insulated wall system where 100 mm (4’) of rigid insulation is built into the centre of the wall. Fully insulated, the walls then offer an interior thermal mass that can maximise passive solar gains and better regulate household temperatures. Similar to straw bale construction, rammed earth walls are built upon reinforced concrete foundations; they are capped with a steel, concrete, or timber ledger; and also have wide roof overhangs to help protect them from driven rain and snow. Clear, non-toxic water-based sealants can be applied to interior or exterior walls to keep them dry. Another aspect of this natural building is the probability of shrinkage cracks, honeycombing, voids and efflorescence. These imperfections are part of the expected finish of earth walls and their appearance varies with local soil conditions. Unlike air-entrained concrete, wet rammed earth will spall when subjected to freeze-thaw cycles. Constructed in forms similar to concrete formwork, these walls are literally rammed. Earth lifts of 150 to 200 mm (6”- 8”) are placed in the forms and then either physically or mechanically rammed solid. The repeated application of these lifts is what gives the walls their stratified effect, similar to sedimentary rock. The strata can be further enhanced with coloured sands, oxides, etc. Electrical conduits, niches, windows and door frames are also incorporated into the formwork. The process is labour intensive and although human labour is an environmentally neutral activity, this can add to construction costs. And no, the walls wonít crumble if you kick them. The natural inherent appearance of the rammed earth requires little finishing. Contrary to the cold look of concrete, rammed earth walls provide a warm healthy environment that replaces the manufactured and chemical components of typical framed buildings. Naturally fire resistant, rammed earth technology is as old as human dwelling and as relevant as our next breath.  Owen A. Rose Balancing the Humours

further references: Easton, David. The Rammed Earth House . Chelsea Green Publishing Co,White River Junction,VT, 1996. King, Bruce. Buildings of Earth and Straw . Ecological Design Press: Sausalito, CA, 1996. ‘ Earth Work’ Architecture . December 1998. BPI Communications, New York. ‘ Sheppard’s Pie’ Architectural Review . April 1998. Emap Construct, London. ‘ Earthly fortresses’ Architectural Review . February 1996,Vol CXCIX No 1188. Emap Construct, London. ‘ B.C. firm builds niche out of dirt’ Globe and Mail. August 24, 1999.Toronto. ‘ Feet on the Ground’ Natural Home Magazine. May/June 2003. Natural Home, Loveland, CO. http://www.rammedearthworks.com/ http://www.hahaha.com.au/rammed.earth/links.htm

http://www.sirewall.com/ http://www.rickjoy.com/ http://www.terra-ram.com/

http://www.rammedearth.com/ http://www.earthhomes.com/ http://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/contents.html http://www.ramseal.com/ http://www.bedrosians.com/glznseal.htm http://www.cement.ca/cement.nsf

planted roof

concrete ledger capping wall

reinforced rammed earth cavity wall

ecosourced 100 mm (4’’) rigid insulation

wood framed casement window

hidden steel lintel

triple-glazed thermal glass

reinforced concrete founda- tion wall

Schematic Rammed Earth Wall Section

Owen Rose can be found at www.ecosensual.net

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Kevin deForest, Drawing after Yves Klein’s Architecture of Ai r, photoshop, 2003.

The Architecture of Air Yves Klein’s leap into the social void Kevin deForest

t he legacy of Yves Klein is often identified through the filter of a strategically self-generated media sensationalism which overshadows his nuanced utopian exploration of the immaterial as a reflection of social freedom. The contemporary relevance of Klein’s all too short career is manifold, both in his wily social engagement in the presentation of his work, as well as with his level of enigmatic material innovation. Klein’s medium of choice for the Architecture of the Air projects (1958-1962) was the elements. He proposed a series of large scale outdoor projects with walls of fire and water and a roof of air made by pressurized air streams that arch over a vast ground plane.The air emanated from blowers and was then gathered with collecting pipes. This enclosed micro-climate became the epitome of Klein’s use of the immaterial void as a reflection of social space.The air roof is anti- architecture, the dematerialization of the Miesian glass wall taken one step further in a playful and positive destruction of the Modernist grid. Innovatively using the atmosphere as a construction material, it precedes Diller and Scofidio’s Blur Building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, by nearly a half century. The elemental purity of these projects was tied to a complex social engagement. As a hybrid strategy located on the boundary between pure and impure, Klein very consciously presented much of his materi-

ally elemental work through the populist vehicle of bad taste. His notoriety was established in the public eye by a sensation-hungry news media through which he strategically garnered publicity around many of his exhibits and performances. As social critique, the Architecture of Air project proposes a model of radical societal restructuring. In his New Eden, the open plan organisa- tion of the ground surface delineates unwalled zones of residential, leisure and work areas. All mechanical components of the design are placed underground, metaphorically burying the technological aspects of civilisation, concealed from view.Thus the open ground surface of these environments reflects a sense of boundless freedom.The absurd playful - ness of this freed society without walls advocated a radically impersonal state of being, abolishing both personal and familial privacy. The majority of this work was never realised due to financial restraints and Klein’s death in 1962 at the age of 34.The medium throughout his diverse body of work is the immaterial, the void as a potential space of societal freedom. His work survives as the traces or remnants of this hybrid notion, merging high with low, metaphysics with public relations, and the everyday with the fantastic. 

Kevin Ei-ichi deForest has been a participant at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Holland (1989-1991) and a resident artist at Seika University, Kyoto, Japan (1997-1998). Recent exhibits include Summer Jam at Satellite, New York City (curated by Franklin Sirmans) and Americas Remixed at La Fabricca del Vapore in Milan, Italy. He currently lives in Montreal.

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According to architects, architecture has reached a limit. For a psychoanalyst, the architect has forgotten his art.

Architecture psychoanalysed

Paul Laurendeau

d isillusion with virtual materials and blob forms can only be tempo- rarily rescued by a new imaginary vision condemned to future destitution. Likewise, concepts of heaviness, lightness, transparency, grav- ity and weightlessness will be impotent if they are used a priori . Art is not a recipe . This essay outlines the uneasy and problematic gap between ideas (the symbolic dimension — language) and the real (the experience of the work itself, or what cannot but not happen).This division arises when built buildings are not as exciting as they were intended to be; when the theory that supports them gets overthrown by experience. Architects do not have the discursive tools to analyse how language paralyses and short-circuits their action.To re-establish continuity between language and experience is no easy task in the current architectural context where design and construction are most often deprived of a discursive relationship caused in part by the inherent problem of transmission. Universities structure their teaching of art along the divisive avenue of science. In science, to approach reality with a hypothesis produces predictable results that are useful at best. In art, reality cannot be reduced to objectivity and testing. Art is not about verifying a conscious idea. A thesis, in a school of architecture, is the selection of a topic in absentia , a premise developed into an architectural project expected to reflect this premise as proof of learning. This process is nonsense if architecture is to be poetic, expressive of a meaning that can only be interpreted but never imposed. In love, people that build a theory to find the ideal lover will only be met by anguish. People engage and make their own those things that trigger their desire. They build their narrative from experience, from the residues, the signifying fragments of perception. Why then do we construct theory to drive the making of architecture? To sublimate sexuality and not have to admit it — to not articulate the truth without repressing the sexual, the ex-centric position where we unconsciously either are or have , and from where we assume that another will stand where we are not, or for what we do not have, to make operative this illusion of unity. Establishing a question before making the artwork is a fallacy that often leads to baffling intellectualization. Architects use theory as an insurance policy. They should not attempt to catch meaning before making it. To assume that the world is a mirror of thought and to then modify the world to equate it with thought is pure psychosis. A psychotic takes seriously what he thinks and entertains a non-dialectical (a frozen) relation with his ideas. Political regimes that work in this way proclaim laws for the masses as an extension of a dictator’s intentions and

world vision, creating the illusion of mastering perception.The individual, in this position, is greatly destabilised when reality presents a hole in knowledge that cannot be logically stitched. In history, architecture has at times been structured as such, creating spaces where a sense of orientation is impossible to maintain without a set of instructions. University pavilions, built in the 1960s and 70s as applied theory, are perfect examples: walls get covered with signage to compensate for a lack of spatial meaning. Words at the rescue of buildings! Centuries ago, scientists positioned god as the cause of their experi- ments when presenting their work to the sovereign, until they realised that reality worked on its own. In art, no one yet can say that an absence of hypothesis leads to production that cannot be interpreted. Interpretation, the architect has no control over.

Create a building as if it means nothing. Transfer the burden of interpretation to the other. See what sense people make out of it.

* * *

semblance

true

reality

Three realms unite consciousness: the real, the symbolic and the imagi- nary. They are not equivalent; they overlap and are held in a Borromean fashion. The Borromean knot is made of three pieces of string tied together without passing through one another. If one is removed or cut, the two others become free. The real , the symbolic and the imaginary cannot work without one another. They are separate but dependant entities. Ideas (imaginary) never quite correspond to experience (real). Reality (symbolic) lies somewhere between the real and the imaginary. It is perception con- noted by an image. A neurosis is when the symbolic and the imaginary would like to operate on their own, disregarding the real which inevita- bly resurfaces as an imperative that overthrows a dream — a real(ity) check.

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The use of geometry is a way to write the law in the real (i.e. without using words).

l aurendeau sees architecture as a geometrical poem made of space. His work can be described as an integration of broad and grand volumes that create a strong impact. He believes definable forms are essential for a building to be imaginable. Architecture is a spatial testimony of each society’s social structure, a cultural necessity that always finds expression. It is because man talks that he builds for reasons other than his survival. Buildings create places, places he gives names to. In speech, words become reality.What the architect receives as his mission is symbolized by a program, a singular representation of this social structure. As a member of a school of psychoanalysis, Paul Laurendeau knows that words build partial truth while sustain misunderstand- ing. When he listens to a client, he never takes things at face value. For him, architecture does not start with words but with forms. It is another language, an imaginary one. Avoiding the initial thought process, he creates volumes, models and drawings until he witnesses the appearance of an object he desires. He does not impose conscious knowledge (an idea) to create form, as according to him, the effects of consciousness are only temporary. To do without thinking does not exclude the production of knowl- edge, as knowledge is unconscious. His work is about repetition: making representations and reworking elements that are prone to symbolization, perfecting the form to make it metaphorical of a lost object. Architecture starts to exist with the emergence of the signifier of its function, when socially it is reintegrated in the discourse that caused it.

Working unilaterally from symbolic to real subordinates perception to thought and leads to a denial of experience in order to preserve a theory unbroken. Any great psychotic, one day, sees the world slip under his feet. To prevent buildings from becoming uneasy intrusions in an otherwise perfect idea, architects should proceed as follows, from real to symbolic : Create a space without thinking and develop the aspects that are prone to symbolization. Start again, and again with what holds your desire, until matter appears united by the laws of the signifier, i.e. poetry. *CAUTION* A model or a drawing is a metonymical object — in other words, a partial representation of another object. The distance between the substitute (the partial object) and the actual building (the representative of the part) is bridged by a mental image. To be as effec- tive as their model, realised buildings must themselves be the model, the metonymy of another object. What this is will not be written.

A possible room for a psychoanalyst with two chairs not quite facing one another (for preliminary inter- views that can last for years in some cases) or the divan facing away from the analyst’s chair (when transference installs itself).This room is divided in two by a black color and illustrates one kind of geometrical proportion.

The following operations order space and make it readable (to the unconscious) after the model:

alignment geometry opening proportion repetition scale specularity symmetry

The occurrence of these properties in nature is highly noticeable and, if organised, becomes unnatural. Structured, these features appear as a sign — a sign of culture.They are the ones architects would use to construct their self-image. Architecture, like human sexuality, is anything but natural, it is purely cultural. Culture is the real ordered by the law of the signifier, i.e. language . Artistically created, human expressions become metaphorical, reminiscent of something beyond their material- ity. Architecture is the art of making geometry (a sublimated word) habitable, the metonymy of a lost object, impossible to recover. For an architect, the making of a building holds more meaning and is closer to truth than any theory he formulates.This is why, since he cannot say the truth, he makes a space out of it. 

Paul Laurendeau is an architect, member of the Order of architects of Quebec and member of the Lacan School of Montreal.

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The Transgenic Zoo , by Peter Yeadon, illustrates this article. The Zoo would be situated in downtown Toronto. It would cover an extensive stretch of land that would be available after an expressway and rail lines are buried.The work considers architectural possibilities for new nanotech and recombinant bio- genetic materials.

i t is a challenge for architects to think small.We have been through the glorious Machine Age, the Space Age, the Digital Age and the Informa- tion Age. But none of it has prepared us for what has been emerging from the nanotech sector during the past decade. Nanotechnology is technology that is developed at the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a metre.These are technologies of a molecular scale and, as in those previous epochs, architecture will likely follow and embrace these atomic feats after they have become commonplace.

They are, in a sense, neither bulk nor molecule and open a window into the fuzzy size region where bulk solid state properties rise out of the molecular noise.

Dr. Moungi G. Bawendi, Keck Professor of Chemistry Department of Chemistry and Center for Material Science and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Who among us could resist working with a programmable substance that would appear to assume any shape, colour, and density? String could become wood. Glass could transmogrify into concrete, and then be instructed to return to glass. Paint could become leaves.The opening in that wall could follow you around the room.What is it, if it can become Architecture in the Age of Nanomatter Peter Yeadon

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Dwellings in the Zoo use carbon nanotubes to create bedroom scopes for viewing the stars at night. The scope is situated above the pillow and extends above the clouds and pollution.As the room is made of programmable matter, which is discussed in this essay, it can be any substance.This lack of material identity is used to register a memory of place by having the program- mable matter configure around the movement of the body in space.The void, which is the space, is the result of all previous movements that one has performed within the room.

anything? This is one of the significant problems that nanotechnology has now introduced to architecture through the emergence of utility devices that self-assemble and programmable matter , a nanotechnology that can alter matter at the atomic level. It has been more than a decade since Dr. J. Storrs Hall of Rutgers University proposed the possibility of a utility fog which can change from this to that.The fog would consist of foglets , silicon micromachines that are the size of dust. Each foglet would have twelve arms that would be capable of joining hands in various configurations to form substances of any shape and density, and the foglets could be programmed to change. Some scientists believe this might be achieved in ten years if atomic friction forces can be overcome.We can already make micro-electro- mechanical systems (MEMS) from silicon, such as microscopic gears,

pumps, and motors. Zyvex Corporation in the United States specialises in the research and development of MEMS.

But let’s think smaller than MEMS, a thousand times smaller. In addition to building tiny, mechanistic machines, Nanoscientists are now working on designing atoms that change the very substance of matter. Each known atom has a unique number of electrons, protons, and neutrons (including zero). Platinum has one less electron than Gold, and Gold has one less electron than Mercury. Nanoscientists are now able to trap electrons, confining their movements in three dimensions within a structure that is known as a quantum dot . Dr. Paul L. McEuen has been working with forming quantum dots at the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University.

left: The Transgenic Zoo includes a number of mixed develop-ments wherein humans live and work alongside animals in their habitats.This image shows a collection of nanomem- brane windsocks that filter pol - lutants out of the air by allowing only certain molecules to pass through.

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