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
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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