what is the durée of architecture?
ON SITE r e v i e w 43 : 2023
architecture and time
Brittany Giunchigliani
how long does it last?
dust breeding small slow landscapes
man ray and marcel duchamp
Elévage de Poussière (Dust Breeding) is attributed to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920. Image found in Sophie Howarth, editor, of Singular Images . London: Tate Publishing, 2005
from David Campany’s essay in Singular Images : Micro or macro Dust Breeding resembles, to borrow the French title of another Man Ray image, a terrain vague . It looks like a waste ground or disused area, perhaps the overlooked edge of a city. It is an indoor image alluding to the outside, particularly when titled View from an Aeroplane . Modern Europe saw the terrain vague as a site of anxiety: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ warned T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland . In North America there is more terrain vague than anything else. There, it appears more as a motif of boredom or entropy. Dust has a place in both schemes. It is abject, liminal, bodily stuff that threatens the modern and rational order. It is also a sign of dead time passing. https://davidcampany.com/dust-breeding-man-ray-1920/
ON SITE r e v i e w 43 : 2023
time
how long does it last?
contributors
content s
4 5 6
masthead: how we operate
Stephanie White
A fragmentary introduction
Stefano Corbo
Beyond Throwaway Achitecture . Time as a political act
12 18 24 28 3 1 32 38 42 46 52 54 57 58
Brian Holland
The Afterlives of Temporary Architecture
Tim Ingleby
Flowers in the Snow. Architecture, entropy and temporariness
Brittany Giunchigliani
What We Build Together. Material expression of ritual and care in southern Chile
Anne O’Callaghan
Temporary
Stephanie White
Engaging with difficulty: Building Critique
Suzanne Harris-Brandts and Ervin Goci
Formalising Tirana
Tiago Torres-Campos
Architecture Passes. Noticing entropy, anxiety and indeterminacy
David Murray
Lee’s Food Market, an unlikely story of longevity
James Moses
The Ethics of Lasting. Middleton Inn revisited
Jeffrey Olinger
45 High Street, Reading Massachusetts
David Murray
The Short Life of Two Tiny Buildings
David Murray
On a lighter note
call for articles:
On Site review 44 : PLAY
3
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
rebuilding
fine print
On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, which promotes field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial.
F I E L D
N O T E S
Always quite liked that for Abbé Laugier, the muse of architecture was female, and there she is, holding her divider, classical architecture in ruins at her feet. For us, it is not the primitive hut that is interesting, it is the water tower.
For any and all inquiries, please use the contact form at https://onsitereview.ca/contact-us
ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved. The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. these are listed in the website menu in three groupings: issues 5-16, 17-34 and 35-39. editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Mitchell Press, Vancouver BC subscriptions: libraries: EBSCO On-Site review #3371594 at https:// ebsco.com individual: https:// onsitereview.ca/subscribe back issues: https://onsitereview.ca This issue of On Site review was put together in Nanaimo on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw Peoples who continue to live on this land.
both Alessio Mamo/The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/01/ ukraine-rebuild-bucha-prompts-corruption-reconstruction
Two images from The Guardian of April 1, 2023, the top a church in Dolina after Russian bombing, and above, the ongoing mending of bombed apartments, this one in Kharkiv, at the beginning of the invasion.
Two significant typologies, both buildings from previous eras, the pre-soviet and the soviet, both damaged. The church can be reconstructed, in the way carpet-bombed Dresden was after WWII, but there is a political question whether future resources will be spent in this kind of reconstruction of a past that Ukraine wishes to leave behind: its historic, oft-unwilling, affiliation with the Russian Empire in its many guises. Given the schism between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches, perhaps the rebuilding of a church on the site will be a different expression of faith. The apartment building isn’t being reconstructed as an iconic building, rather it is being mended immediately. This is the difference between houses and housing. Houses come and go; housing is eternal. The two have entirely different time frames. g
4
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
on site review 43 on time a fragmentary introduction
stephanie white
This issue started by thinking about architecture through the Annales School lens of history: the longue durée , cultural history factored by land, geology and climate (where structural questions arise about architecture’s longevity – is it all temporary?); histoire événementielle , a series of events (in architecture particular buildings have long been the subject of most critique – how long does this famous building actually live for?); and the formation, development and demise of social movements – a middle ground between spectacular events and millennial histories: the long era of modernism, for example. This last one I am most interested in terms of the instant recognisability of late colonial architecture. I was reading about E R Braithwaite and his 1959 autobiographical novel To Sir, with Love, and found he had attended Queen’s College in Georgetown, Guyana, then still a British colony. And there was the building: a white, brise-soleiled, low horizontal stamp of indubitable tropical colonialism.
What exactly is modernity in the context of de-colonisation? It became an imperative in Africa and the Caribbean for public housing, schools, administration buildings – a sort of cheap, egalitarian architecture for institutions; a casting-off of hierarchies, whether colonial or social or ancient. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry were the exemplars of this kind of postwar architecture: rather than the bludgeoning architecture of empire, they turned to the environment: weather, climate, materials. The AA had a department of Tropical Studies within it, revisited at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism of the 1980s continued this direction. Admittedly influenced by the Frankfurt School and its critique of capitalism and globalisation, he proposed an architecture of place, culture, climate: more direct responses to locale than theoretical approaches to society, politics and capital economic contingency. An architecture of place, culture and climate sits in the Annales sense of a longue durée , where architecture concerns itself with material fundamentals that transcend both events and social movements, no matter how new or old they might be. Now, forty years since critical regionalism was floated, it seems to divert architecture’s possible response to division and strife. We cannot ignore the state of the world in 2023. We can no longer rely on climate as a touchstone. The neo-colonialism of trade pacts and treaties work much as did the old colonialism. Any idea of a social contract is near extinction. What is the architecture for this? At this point, just as my fingertips were touching what I thought was critically momentous, all the critically momentous essays for this issue of On Site review came in and I got totally distracted as I read, edited and conducted much, no doubt annoying, correspondence with the contributors. Now that the layout is done, I return to my introduction to this issue. Time, being a concept deep and fathomless, has in this issue become largely a discussion of the temporary: whether it is achieved or resisted, whether it is a valid direction for architecture or simply cheap. Is time an eternal background factor to all we do, or is it a series of events we can control? There is something for every position here. Is architecture itself a series of events over a long history of civilisation? or is architecture a rather monotonous background to other more vital forms of civility and incivility? or, is architecture the face of social and political movements and revolutions: an evolutionary flag? These are not rhetorical questions, rather they are topics addressed in this issue. Each contributor has sent us a very specific discussion, either of specific buildings or building systems. Collectively they speak about architecture’s place in a series of endings, from climate to political systems, from cultural hegemonies to a misplaced trust in globalisation.
The underphotographed Queen’s College, Thomas Lands, Georgetown, Guyana, 1951-1997 when it was partially destroyed by fire. J P Ferreira, 1960
Most empires start to have qualms at a certain point; their end beckons, and there are various remedial attempts to re-frame the colonial enterprise. The high point of British Empire was achieved towards the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, but it had started four hundred years earlier with Queen Elizabeth I, covering civil war, the industrial revolution and the rise of global capitalism. WWI, The Great War, dealt imperial hubris a death blow. By the end of the Second World War the process of literal decolonisation had begun, resulting in bloody wars of resistance: resistance to colonial status in the colonies, and resistance to this resistance on the part of Great Britain, eventually re-naming its empire The Commonwealth, and tying negotiations for independence to the Queen and to resource extraction, the main reason for having colonies in the first place.
g
5
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
Beyond Throwaway Architecture time as a political act
stefano corbo
In a recent article published on the Italian magazine Casabella 1 , Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani summarises the current debate on reuse and sustainability in architecture in a paradigmatic case study: the refectory of the New College in Oxford, originally opened in 1376. The refectory has a generous roof, whose timber carpentry was built with oak beams – 60 by 60 centimetres in section and 13 metres long. Around the year 1860, it became clear that the wood had been attacked by insects and needed to be replaced; the problem was to find a sufficient number of exceptionally thick, long beams. At first this seemed to be impossible, and that the building would be doomed to demolition. Then someone recalled that the College owned wooded estates, and an inquiry was made regarding large oak trees. Soon it turned out that there was an entire forest planted 500 years earlier, precisely to provide the timber needed for the replacement of the roof structure. The original builders had foreseen the deterioration of the wood and prepared for its reconstruction. Magnago Lampugnani’s anecdote isn’t meant as a nostalgic celebration of the good old days, nor is an invitation to think of architecture as something necessarily ever-lasting. On the contrary, the refectory project is first of all a metaphor of the inextricable connection between architecture and time – the unstable tension between duration and decay, permanence and disappearance, firmness and fragility. Over the centuries, such tension has translated into different (built) forms: spoliation, appropriation, ruination, the quest for the ephemeral or for continuous change. In late antiquity, for example, most of the buildings erected in Rome were made almost entirely from spolia of other constructions – not only plundered artworks, but also reused building components such as columns, capitals, arches, etc. The act of spoliation was not simply driven by pragmatic reasons – to save labour, or scarcity of materials. Spoliation was also ideological, in the sense that appropriators of stones from the Roman Empire considered themselves as the prosecutors of that imperial glory: stones were the symbol of the past but also the foundations of the future.
For millennia appropriation has represented a less violent but more systematic way of incorporating the old into the new: Rome’s Theatre of Marcellus of 13 BC was first transformed into a medieval fortress and later converted into a palazzo for the Savelli family in the 16th century. Or, to remain in Italy, Rimini’s Tempio Malatestiano , designed by Leon Battista Alberti between 1450 and 1460 as a mausoleum for Sigismondo Malatesta and his lover, built by wrapping a 13th century Gothic church with a new façade which could counterbalance and partially hide the ‘uncivilised’ language of the Gothic elevation. Appropriation, however, is not something only belonging to the past: in 1977 Frank Gehry transformed a 1920 detached house in Santa Monica by deforming its original configuration, and hybridising its image with a new disruptive lexicon. More recently, the 2004 Pavilion for Vodka Ceremonies designed by Alexander Brodsky consisted of 83 windows recuperated from a demolished factory. In their variety, all of these examples describe the ingenuous and sometimes desperate attempt made by humans over the centuries to deal with time: by celebrating it, denying it, dilating it or simply acknowledging it. Because facing the problem of time in architecture means, by extension, facing the problem of human caducity in its physical and symbolic expression. The refectory of New College, Oxford also serves as a pretext to investigate the relationship between time and architecture today, in the general context of the current capitalist development. What does durable mean for architecture? What are the social and environmental costs associated to its durée? How does time affect the design of space? Terms such as sustainability, circularity, reuse, upcycle have become commonplace: they not only influence the architectural discourse, but also suggest a wider paradigm shift in the role of the architect and their ethos. Such a shift manifests itself at various levels, from governmental initiatives – see the plan of the Dutch Cabinet to develop a circular economy in the Netherlands by 2050 and to achieve a 50% reduction in the use of primary raw materials (minerals, fossil, and metals) by 2030 – to the proliferation of architectural and curatorial projects on those topics – see Open for Maintenance , an exhibition/installation at the German Pavilion of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. In this project, curated by ARCH+, SUMMACUMFEMMER, and Büro Juliane Greb, the German Pavilion is displayed as a series of maintenance works which include not only Germany’s contribution to the Biennale Arte from last year, but also leftover materials from over 40 national pavilions showcased at the same Biennale’s edition.
1 See Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, ‘Sustainability and Duration’, Casabella 939, 2022.
6
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
wikimedia
Theatre of Marcellus, Rome, 13 BC
Despite the always present risk of reducing complex phenomena to fashionable trends, the German Pavilion and other similar projects pose urgent questions about the impact of architecture on the built environment. They do that by investigating the temporality of architecture as a material, conceptual and ideological practice, and by addressing the question of durée from a different perspective, one which refuses a vision of architecture as a mass-consumption, disposable, a-critical spectacle. In other words, opposed to so-called throwaway architecture which oft-times replaces buildings with devices, aesthetics with experience or the public with individualism, a variegated set of design positions have progressively emerged. If in the 1960s, Archigram responded to the ‘irreversible escalation in the day-to-day demands of ordinary people for greater access to goods, services, and culture’, 2 by imagining ever-changing cities ( Plug-In Cit y, 1964), nomadic units ( The Cushicle , 1966), or inflatable structures ( Blow-out Village , 1966), today the idea of a durée for architecture is articulated as a political vector to address societal and ecological issues. This approach produces architectures that are different in scope, scale and premises, but that all share some common points: a critical awareness of the need to optimise existing resources and reduce waste, a total disinterest in dramatic gestures or formal acrobatics, and an emphasis on public instances. Most importantly, these architectures, and the body of ideas connected to them, all engage with time directly.
Tempio Malatestiano, Leon Battista Alberti, Rome, 1450-1460 wikimedia
https://hicarquitectura.com/2022/12/frank-gehry-house-gehry/
Frank Gehry, Residence Model . Santa Monica, California, 1977
Yury Palmin, Divisare October 27 2016
Alexander Brodsky, Vodka Pavilion .. Pirogovo, Russian Federation, 2003
https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2023/germany
2 Simon Sadler, Archigram. Architecture without Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. p7
fARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / Büro Juliane GrebRO JULIANE GREB, Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet . La Biennale di Venezia 2023
7
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
Radical in its intentions – to offer an alternative to the current processes of urban development triggered by the so-called Bilbao effect – and provocative in its formal outcome – a synthesis of artistic performance and typological innovation – is the work of the Berlin-based office Brandlhuber+, founded by Arno Brandlhuber. Over the years, Brandlhuber+ has developed a unique trajectory in which the peculiarity of the decisions informing their projects – lack of thermal insulation, exteriorisation of interior circulation, formal indifference – matches with the interest in the work of artists such as Rachel Whiteread or Gordon Matta-Clark. This combination of heterogeneous references and positions finds full expression in Brandlhuber+’s architecture, which explores the intrinsic potential of existing buildings to resist over time and generate new unexpected meanings. Coherently, Brandlhuber+’s message involves not only the design of space but also its representation. The visual body of drawings produced by the office, for example, depict a clear understanding of the role played by time in their work, especially when it comes to the dialogue between old and new elements in both 2D and 3D visualisations. Among the several projects developed recently, two are emblematic of Brandlhuber+’s inquiries: Antivilla (2010-15), and San Gimignano Licthenberg (2012).
Antivilla is located at the Krampnitz Lake, southwest of Berlin, and is the transformation of a former warehouse, built in the 1980s, which used to store lingerie produced by a nearby East German factory. The challenge of this project was to prove that empty buildings in risk of demolition can be made usable again. So, rather than demolishing it and replacing it with a single-family home, Brandlhuber+ decided to keep the existing load-bearing structure, and to remove only a few interior partitions. More specifically, the design process was informed by a series of different steps: first, the existing asbestos-contaminated globe roof was dismantled and replaced with a flat concrete roof, whose presence was emphasized by a sculptural waterspout. Second, inside the empty shell of the building, a functional load-bearing core containing kitchen, bathroom, fireplace, and sauna was inserted. Then, the existing façade was perforated by irregular holes which allowed the house to have a view of the lake. Through a sequence of simple but bold moves, Brandlhuber+ presents us with an artificial ruin, a vacant building which has been given a new meaning and transformed into a domestic shelter. The ruin is at the same time romantic but blunt, intriguing but repelling, comfortable but extreme.
Brandlhuber+ https://bplus.xyz
© Erica Overmeer https://bplus.xyz/projects/0131-antivilla
Brandlhuber+, Antivilla . Krampnitz, 2010-15
8
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
Similarly, the San Gimignano project in Lichtenberg, Berlin, gravitates around the transformation of two existing towers – a silo and a circulation tower used in the past as central production sites for a large graphite factory. The only remnants of a larger industrial complex, these towers remained abandoned due to high demolition costs. Brandlhuber+ takes advantage of the existing situation to preserve their industrial character: one of the two towers serves as a workshop for different industries such as 1:1 prototyping of architectural units; the other tower works as a warehouse – an unheated storage space up 22m high. The silo tower only contains two floors: the ground floor and the first floor at 31.63m. By focusing attention only on those floors, the need for extensive technical equipment (ventilation and exit doors) shrinks and additional costs are avoided. Brandlhuber+ restored all original apertures of the tower and left them open, turning the interior into a semi- outdoor space. Overall, Brandlhuber+ reduced their intervention to the minimum: an additional floor in one of the towers as well as an external staircase to provide access. In using the framework of existing buildings and regulations as point of departure, Brandlhuber+ investigate new forms of interaction between public and private in contemporary cities; their projects explore radical forms of living and working via site-specific, acupunctural interventions in the urban fabric.
© Erica Overmeer https://bplus.xyz/projects/0154-san-gimignano-lichtenberg
Brandlhuber+, San Gimignano Lichtenberg. 2012-ongoing
Different in formal expression but equally compelling, is the dialogue with the existing built environment which characterises the work of several architecture firms based in Barcelona. One of those is HArquitectes. The Centre Cívic Lleialtat Santsenca 1214, designed in 2017, is in fact based on the transformation of a 1928 working class cooperative building. The project develops across the definition of an interior urban void – an atrium that allows for the encounter between the old decayed structures and the new intervention. The role of this urban void is to celebrate the heterogeneity of the separate parts constituting the building and, at the same time, to ideally bridge past and future. The atrium is the moment where differences juxtapose and interact: the patina of the existing walls and the new polycarbonate roofs coexist in the same environment. In the progression of the spaces designed as well as in the overall process of mending, an overlap of textures, patterns, and colors take place. One may say therefore that the whole project is an example of assemblage as it is compact and finite in its multiplicity; all its different layers morph into a visual and functional unity.
Adrià Goula, http://www.harquitectes.com
HARQUITECTES, Centre Cívic Lleialtat Santsenca 1214 . Barcelona, 2017
9
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
https://floresprats.com/archive/sala-beckett-project/
Flores & Prats, Sala Becket t. Barcelona, 2011-2017
A few years earlier in 2014, also in Barcelona, Catalan architects Flores & Prats worked on an analogous project of adaptive reuse: Sala Beckett . In rehabilitating a former social club used in the past for family celebrations, memory is the red thread connecting old and new, on the verge between nostalgia and experimentalism. The building is transformed into a theatre and a dramaturgy school. Instead of accommodating the new program in one specific and well-defined area, the architects fragment the program and diffuse it over every corner of the building. The building itself becomes the theatre: materials, decorations, object trouvé and interior vistas shape the main theatrical activity. The intervention in the old building reveals itself as a process of anastylosis where existing and new fragments are re-composed in a novel fashion. Notions of legibility and atmosphere regulate the relation between old and new, and connect the interiors to the history of the surrounding neighbourhood. Sala Beckett as well as the Lleialtat Santsenca Civic Centre are not questioning ideas of image and function. They constitute a composite artifact: a combination of old and new patterns, entropic relations, interior and urban components.
10
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
Einar Aslaksen. https://atelieroslo.no/project/pressens-hus#298
Atelier Oslo + KIMA Arkitektur. Pressens hus , Oslo, 2021
The 2021 Pressens hus , by Atelier Oslo + KIMA Arkitektur, Oslo, follows a similar design strategy as the one employed in the Lleialtat Santsenca Civic Centre by H Arquitectes. The project consists in the transformation of two nineteenth century listed buildings located in the centre of Oslo. The new program – spaces for media and press activities, conference rooms, studios, café/restaurant – develops across two atriums. Around these two voids, the building reveals the passing of time and the dialogue between the existing vocabulary of steel beams and brick buildings and the new vertical order of posts and beams in laminated timber. The geometry of these two orders overlaps, revealing the continuity of past and future in the same building.
In going over these examples, it is clear that differences in formal vocabulary, materials and building techniques characterise their configuration. Nevertheless, when it comes to the overall relationship between time and architecture, all those projects address a similar concern: all of them question the socially and culturally acceptable durée for architecture, against and beyond market-driven interests. The way they do it is by being aware that architecture is not only about space, but is above all a matter of time – whether time is interpreted as a scar of the past (Flores & Prats), as a design material (H Architectes), or as a conceptual scaffold for future interventions (Brandlhuber+). Only by facing, embedding and interpreting time in all its manifestations, architecture can play a different and less invasive role in the built environment. Reusing rather demolishing, repairing rather than discarding, updating rather than replacing; this is what architecture can do to act as a catalyst for new collective and urban instances. g
STEFANO CORBO is an architect and educator at TU Delft – Chair of Public Building – where he also serves as MSc Coordinator. In 2012 Corbo founded SCSTUDIO, a multidisciplinary network practicing public architecture. www.scstudio.eu
11
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
The Afterlives of Temporary Architecture
brian holland
Temporary constructions are an increasingly common part of contemporary architectural production. They range from short-term pavilions, installations and exhibitions to building-performance mockups and urban placemaking events. They offer architects a much greater degree of design freedom than full-fledged permanent structures, in that they are often smaller, less expensive and inherently less burdened by regulation and the obligations of long-term durability. As such, architects routinely use temporary projects as laboratories for testing new materials and exploring alternative approaches to fabrication and assembly, or as trial balloons to shape or activate space in unconventional and creative ways. More recently, as the discipline’s commitment to ecological engagement has grown, the temporary structure in its various forms has also become a site for progressive experiments in architectural recycling and reuse. No longer content to turn a blind eye to the widespread but wasteful practice of demolition and disposal, the designers of temporary projects are widening their attention spans to account for what comes before and after a temporary project’s limited run. Some of these architects build their short-term structures out of scrap materials or other byproducts of construction activities such as construction shoring
and lumber off-cuts. In these cases, the reappropriation of waste often constitutes a clever response to limited budgets, as in the common refrain, ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’. Other designers work to ensure their temporary projects will have a second life—either as raw material for future constructions, or in their entirety as relocatable structures that live again in service to other communities—thus, widening the project’s circle of beneficiaries. Either way, efforts to account for the past, present and afterlives of temporary constructions hold valuable lessons for architecture more broadly. Despite being implemented at a limited scale and in the short-term, these efforts constitute valuable rehearsals in radical architectural resourcefulness, and they point the way toward more sustainable and impactful life cycles of use and reuse. Through case studies, I offer three ways of thinking about the role of life-cycle design in temporary architectural projects: recovery of waste, preemption of waste, and extension of scope. Each of these approaches is illustrative of an entrepreneurial strategy I call piggybacking —where one project’s resources are opportunistically leveraged to the benefit of some greater, often public, good; where architects tease out hidden value from within the gaps of a market economy notoriously characterised by exploitation, inequality and waste.
figure 1: Building facade mockups.
figure 2 (facing page): Testbeds by New Affiliates, with Samuel Stewart-Halevy. Façade mockup repurposed as community garden greenhouse.
Both drawings by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho
12
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
reuse: recovering waste First, temporary projects that build from waste, or that redirect their own waste streams or byproducts toward subsequent projects. In Germany, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser took this approach to extremes in a range of temporary public structures they designed and built from salvaged materials during the early 2000s. Their projects were often visually striking; they made a conspicuous display of their salvaged components. Construction pallets, wood sheathing and discarded doors used as ad hoc cladding-framed legible public narratives around waste and reuse. Working with whatever unused materials they were able to scavenge from construction sites and city streets required that they develop a somewhat improvisational design process—one that allowed them to modify their designs in real-time during construction. This way of working brought challenges as well as pleasures: as their projects became more public and more permanent, the artists found that municipal authorities were often not amenable to changes made on the fly. Ultimately, their open and improvisational approach proved to be fundamentally incompatible with a public review process that demanded predetermination and certainty. As a result, Köbberling and Kaltwasser shifted their attention away from architectural installations and back toward the relative freedom of art practice. Working with the irregularities of miscellaneous scrap materials is one of the key challenges in waste-recovery design projects. Jessica Colangelo and Charles Sharpless, of the architectural practice Somewhere Studio, tackled this challenge with a temporary pavilion as part of the Biomaterial Building Exposition at the University of Virginia in 2022. Their pavilion, called Mix and Match , was developed in response to the large quantities of waste lumber – offcuts, overages and
temporary shoring—generated by conventional housing construction in the United States. Somewhere Studio’s approach foregrounded the inherent inconsistencies of salvaged wood as features of the pavilion’s design: pieces were stacked in a vertical gradient from tallest to shortest, and half-lap joints constituted a visually expressive connection detail that accommodated dimensional irregularities. In developing Mix and Match in this way, Somewhere Studio leveraged design to highlight both the opportunities and challenges presented by salvaged materials in architecture. Meanwhile, in a different corner of the building industry, large-scale commercial developments produce waste from short-term constructions in the form of construction mock-ups. For example, full-scale façade mock-ups up to one-story tall have increasingly become de rigueur among New York City’s newest high-rise projects. They allow design and construction teams to research, test and control for technical performance and design quality, and are typically discarded upon a building’s final completion (figure 1) . Testbeds , a project by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates, in collaboration with Samuel Stewart- Halevy and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, captures and redirects this waste stream for public reuse. Their project— they describe it as akin to a rescue operation 1 —is to reconfigure these discarded assemblages as the basis for any number of local community garden structures: sheds, shade structures, casitas, greenhouses or raised beds (figure 2) . Much more than a simple reuse of raw materials, they aim to bring the ‘image of the growing city down to the ground’, recontextualizing the mock-ups while ‘humanizing the scale of the skyline’. 2 New Affiliates completed a Testbeds pilot project in 2022 for the Garden by the Bay in Edgemere, Queens, currently featured in MoMA’s New York New Publics exhibition.
1. Akiva Blander. ‘From Playful Products to Clever Urban Interventions, New Affiliates Distills Design to Its Essence’. Metropolis , June 5, 2019. https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/new- affiliates-firm-profile/pic/56480/ . Accessed Oct 13, 2019. 2. Testbeds , New Affiliates, https://new-affiliates.us/Testbeds. Accessed June 22, 2023.
13
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
borrowing: preempting waste The next two projects exhibit a similarly resourceful disposition, but they also go one step further—demonstrating how, through borrowing, temporary projects might eliminate waste before it is created. Peter Zumthor’s iconic design for the Swiss Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, exemplifies this approach, both conceptually and practically. Designed to resemble stacks of wood temporarily set out to air dry, Zumthor’s pavilion was made of nearly one hundred vertical stacks of dimensional pine lumber arranged in something of a maze-like configuration (figure 3) . To facilitate eventual disassembly, these stacks of lumber were held together without screws, nails, glue or conventional fasteners; instead, small wooden spacers were placed between each wood member and a custom-designed assembly of steel plates, rods and springs held each wall together in tension. Each pile of wood was inherently dynamic; as the wood shrank over time, the tension rods were adjusted accordingly. The pavilion, formally called the Swiss Sound Box , but which Zumthor referred to informally as the wood yard , effectively held these materials in trust for the duration of the exposition. Having spent several months air drying (and increasing in market value), the entire pavilion was carefully disassembled—almost as if it was never there—and the dimensional lumber was sold-off for use in subsequent construction projects. Foregrounding a similarly logistical approach, Shelf Life , LeCavalier R+D’s proposal for the 2018 MoMA P.S.1 Young Architects Program, also borrows the bulk of its material resources to temporarily construct a series of labyrinthine spaces for public enjoyment. According to Jesse LeCavalier, the project’s designer, Shelf Life ‘intervenes in the material systems of logistics to recontextualize a major but invisible part of many people’s daily lives: the industrial pallet rack.’ 3 In a nod to the spaces
and furnishings of warehouses and big-box stores, standardised pallet racks were arrayed throughout the P.S.1 courtyard in tall stacks outfitted with seating, shading, misters and conveyance systems to serve the needs of MoMA’s summer-event programming. Instead of buying raw materials and reselling them on the open market, as was the case with Zumthor’s Swiss pavilion, Shelf Life involved a literal borrowing; the design team secured an agreement from an industrial shelving supplier to lend the 140 pallet racks needed for the installation. After the summer, the racks were set to be disassembled, returned to the supplier and re-dedicated to their customary service in warehousing and retail operations. Cleverly, borrowing these components instead of buying them allowed the designers to stretch MoMA’s notoriously small project budget in support of a larger and more immersive installation than would have otherwise been possible. By borrowing construction components to preempt waste, these two resourceful projects demonstrate another way by which architectural materials might be given multiple lives: they deploy shrewd logistical manoeuvres to piggyback on – and briefly insert themselves into – existing supply chains. There are lessons here that can be applied to the design of less temporary buildings as well. Proponents of such an approach seek to address the much longer lifespans of permanent architecture — they research design for disassembly in which materials and components only temporarily coalesce into architectural form. In design for disassembly, after a building’s useful life is exhausted, it is to be carefully taken apart, returning all, or most all, materials and components to their original state, available for future uses. This is a simple idea in theory, but unsurprisingly, design for disassembly remains a wickedly complex problem in practice. We can therefore expect further experiments with small-scale, temporary pavilions and installations to play a role in the advancement of this work for some time to come.
figure 3: Peter Zumthor, Swiss Sound Box . A temporary pavilion from borrowed timber. Drawing by Brian Holland and Jared Davenport.
3. ‘MoMA PS1: Shelf Life’, LeCavalier R+D. http://jesse-lecavalier.com/#/new-gallery-4/ Accessed June 22, 2023
14
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
doing double duty 1 Recycling and disassembly processes that break products down into raw materials or constituent parts pose a particular challenge to designers in that they typically obscure linkages between waste and reuse, making it very difficult for consumers to see and understand lifecycles of production, consumption, waste and reuse — think of those tote bags announcing in bold typeface that they ‘used to be a plastic bag’. Each of the projects discussed so far engage this challenge in different ways through design. In contrast, the waste-stream piggybackings we now turn to intervene in advance of disassembly to capture not only the raw materials but also the embodied energy and social histories of designed artifacts. These next projects call our attention to instances of architectural reuse by creating legible narratives around these efforts and by challenging architects to anticipate and design for a project’s afterlife at the very outset of design—effectively doing double duty as two projects in succession.
Holding Pattern , Interboro’s 2011 project for the MoMA P.S.1 Young Architects Program, is notable for the way it enlarged the ambitions and possibilities of an ephemeral urban construction. More than merely fulfilling MoMA’s project brief of providing a dynamic stage for a summer festival, Interboro designed their installation with the project’s afterlife in mind. The needs of MoMA patrons were overlapped with the needs of a diverse array of neighbourhood organisations by designing for both groups simultaneously (figure 4) . At the end of the installation’s time at P.S.1, the seventy-nine objects that Interboro designed and the eighty-four trees they planted were all given new homes among fifty local community organisations for long-term use and enjoyment. Through a process of extensive community outreach and inventive design work, Interboro leveraged the commission to realise not one but two projects: the first for P.S.1, and the second for the local community. Every element of the installation was uniquely charged and enriched by the designers’ ambition to leverage the project budget to serve not just a single institutional client for one summer, but a whole community of clients over the longer term.
figure 4: Interboro, Holding Pattern . Event installation with an afterlife of community service. Drawing by Brian Holland and Brenden Wohltjen.
15
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
doing double duty 2 The Jarahieh School for Refugees is the result of another resourceful effort to make two projects from one temporary-pavilion commission. Crossing continents and cultures, it captured the architectural by-products from an international exposition and put them to use serving refugee children in Lebanon. The project began its life in Italy: the Milan Expo of 2015 consisted of seventy temporary pavilions that amounted to an expenditure of 13-billion euros. Intent on putting this massive, short-term investment to longer term use, Save the Children Italy, working with the design practice AOUMM, made a commitment to the architectural reuse of its own expo pavilion in support of its larger philanthropic mission (figure 5) . During the design process the organisation connected with London-based CatalyticAction to plan for and implement the pavilion’s afterlife as a semipermanent school for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. CatalyticAction adapted the pavilion’s modular design, reconfiguring its six independent frame structures to support the needs of both the school and the larger community of the settlement (figure 6) . After being disassembled and shipped from Italy to Lebanon, the structure was reassembled, insulated and clad by residents of the Jarahieh settlement working alongside the design team from CatalyticAction, who tapped into local skill sets and material knowledge as the basis of an inherently participatory process. The result is a multi-purpose school and community centre that leverages underused international resources with local skills and materials to improve the quality of life in the Jarahieh settlement – benefits made possible by piggybacking one project upon another.
figure 5: AOUMM, EXPO 2015 Save the Children Pavilion . Drawing by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho. figure 6 (facing page): CatalyticAction, Jarahieh School for Syrian Refugees . Save the Children Pavilion reconfigured as school. Drawing by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho.
16
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
radical resourcefulness In these examples of recovering waste, temporary architectures extend the impact of discarded resources and provide those materials with a second life—piggybacking on the waste of prior constructions. Each of these temporary projects illuminates a promising form of social and ecological entrepreneurialism in contemporary architecture. Conceptually and practically, they point toward a more robust form of sustainability than is often considered in practice. They close loops to eliminate material waste, yes, but they also go further than that: by reusing waste, borrowing resources or doing double duty, they leverage one project’s resources in the service of another. In radically resourceful ways, their designers extend the tangible investments of their various stakeholders – clients, builders, designers and communities – across a project’s past, present and afterlife to serve multiple and often underserved constituencies. They demonstrate how, through practices of piggybacking, environmental sustainability might be made to dovetail with social sustainability. What is certain is that any attempt to carry forward the lessons learned from these small, temporary architectures will face significant practical challenges when measured against the demands of larger, longer-lasting buildings. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of present environmental and social crises, we must continue to try. Design experiments like those reviewed here are tremendously promising as ‘generative demonstrations’ 4 providing legible examples of life-cycle design that could help transform industry practices of waste recovery and preemption, and suggest a hopeful future where buildings are made of recycled materials, designed to be disassembled, and planned for extended lives of environmental and social impact. g
4. Dana Cuff. Architectures of Spatial Justice . Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2023. pp 159-187
BRIAN HOLLAND is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Arkansas, and the creator and organizer of the Piggybacking Practices research project, which launched online in 2021. https://piggybackingpractices.com/
17
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
Flowers in the Snow – Architecture,Entropy and Temporariness
tim ingleby
beginnings
The Swiss engineer Heinz Isler was a pioneer in the field of thin shell structures. He developed a series of form-finding methods that have informed the design of hundreds of reinforced concrete shells. Isler prototyped the most influential of these by taking advantage of his homeland’s frigid alpine winters: hanging sheets of saturated fabric overnight and returning to frozen forms that inverted became freestanding free-form shells. A little-known footnote to this story is that Isler also pioneered several other structural types using fabric and ice. Perhaps the most enigmatic of these ‘playful experiments’ as Chilton called them, is the flower form. I have looked at this structural type, the flower form, in a series of self-built experimental structures of fabric and ice. Knowingly ephemeral, the only certainty is their demise which occurs not to a planned timescale but to the caprices of the weather. Such structural entropy makes further study and understanding inherently difficult but it can start to formulate ways of embracing and addressing temporariness in architectural construction. That could stay, not forever, because we believe that nothing exists that is forever, not even the dinosaurs, but if well maintained, it could remain for four to five thousand years. And that is definitely not forever. — attributed to Christo In Christo’s terms, all architecture is temporary. In anticipating their demise, works of temporary architecture are unusually candid. Rarely is this strength exploited. By using principally fabric and ice, the story of my constructions is one of a death foretold. Although highly specific and undoubtedly quixotic by nature, to extend their lifespans offers three lessons that may benefit other architectures that also acknowledge their temporariness.
Orko, ice and burlap cloth structure. Val-des-Monts, Quebec
18
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
lesson 1: agility Architecture is rarely temporary by choice. Planning laws, land-ownership models and rising real estate values — bureaucratic and/ or economic imperatives, impinge upon the durée of buildings far more frequently than a building’s physical capacity to remain. Over the last century, art rather than architecture has found ways to exist within, embrace, or subvert, the rules and regulation of such systems. The subway drawings of Keith Haring, Banksy’s murals, the (pseudo) anarcho- libertarianism of Atelier Van Lieshout, Yona Friedman’s quest to free and empower non- specialists – all offer insights into agile guerrilla tactics. These modus operandi question, resist or exploit such state-imposed strictures. * Built on a frozen lake in Val-des-Monts in Québec, Orko is a modest act of subversion. It shares some formal similarities to lávvu – temporary tented shelters used by nomadic Sami people following their reindeer herds, stable enough to withstand the winds of treeless plains in the higher arctic regions. However, Orko has no structural frame. Fabric is propped or suspended to create a thin skin which is then saturated using water pumped from beneath the ice. The fabric freezes, fixing the form; props and ties are removed, leaving a self-supporting structure. Such an agile architecture designed to exist only for a short time, might exploit a grey area where planning permits and building codes are side-stepped, and land-ownership claims are difficult to enforce. Such acts of resistance, although anarchistic, need not necessarily result in anarchy. Nor need they preclude an architecture from ‘gathering the properties of the place’ as Norberg-Schulz wanted, with built forms retaining the capacity to respond to or reflect cultural, historical or material qualities of place.
Orko, lake water extraction as part of construction process.
Orko, the formation of ice crystals brings detail and delight
19
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
lesson 2: adhocism Some burlap cloth, a macramé ring, a reel of cotton, an ice auger, a kayak bilge pump, a telescopic swimming pool pole, some nylon cord, a snow shovel, and a backpack crop- sprayer. This inauspicious collection of everyday items could be an inventory of objects dragged from the dark recesses of a garage blinking into the light of a yard sale. It is, in fact, an exhaustive list of items used in the construction of Orko; a testament to adhocism where ‘everything can always be something else’. Improvising with what is at hand rather than things devised for a particular purpose is to construct as a bricoleur rather than as architect or engineer. Levi-Strauss observes that ‘the ‘bricoleur’ also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he ‘speaks’ not only with things … but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities. The ‘bricoleur’ may not ever complete his purpose’. In this spirit Orko is a beginning rather than an end. As temperatures rose above freezing, the structure failed as it melted. Doubling down, the construction principles, structural strategy and materials were reclaimed and re-deployed to create a new structure, assuming its own distinct form in a new location. Oculus, a small shelter for two people, is a bricolage of bricolage. To the bricoleur, temporary architecture is not an immutable object but a materials bank. Through architectural and structural strategies with multiple potential outcomes, and assuring the integrity of materials and components are preserved, shapeshifting reinvention is possible. Looseness and imprecision can extend an architecture’s life, albeit in a form that little resembles the original and may not have been fully designed at the outset.
Orko/Oculus, ice/fabric surface structure construction materials
Orko, salvaged materials following structure’s demise
Oculus, ice and burlap cloth structure. Val-des-Monts, Quebec
20
on site review 43: architecture and t ime
Page 1 Page 2 Page 3 Page 4 Page 5 Page 6 Page 7 Page 8 Page 9 Page 10 Page 11 Page 12 Page 13 Page 14 Page 15 Page 16 Page 17 Page 18 Page 19 Page 20 Page 21 Page 22 Page 23 Page 24 Page 25 Page 26 Page 27 Page 28 Page 29 Page 30 Page 31 Page 32 Page 33 Page 34 Page 35 Page 36 Page 37 Page 38 Page 39 Page 40 Page 41 Page 42 Page 43 Page 44 Page 45 Page 46 Page 47 Page 48 Page 49 Page 50 Page 51 Page 52 Page 53 Page 54 Page 55 Page 56 Page 57 Page 58 Page 59 Page 60Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker