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
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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