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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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