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
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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