towards a ‘fast architecture’?
“I think it’s more important to make .., a lot of different things and keep coming up with new images and things that were never made before, than to do one thing and do it, do it well. They come out fast, but, I mean, it’s a fast world.” — Keith Haring, 1982, CBS Sunday Morning The world is still fast, but the term increasingly has negative connotations. From food to fashion, ‘fast’ is all but synonymous now with convenience, cheapness and disposability. Fast might be accused of creating or displacing as many problems as it proffers to solve. Temporary architecture is not immune to such charges. These are serious issues, but fast remains an indelible reality of our time. The structures described here are also fast. Even with little or no construction skill they can be made in a matter of minutes, conditions permitting. The artist and social innovator Theaster Gates has spoken of his belief that “most things have a second life, that there is a value in the discarded, and that objects and buildings can be reactivated and redeployed to serve a purpose beyond what they were originally intended for”. A melted ice/fabric structure’s second life – if not already the product of something else – may assume either its original form or a new one, never made before. Work continues on finding ways these playful experiments might also directly offer utility. Preliminary measurements taken from Oculus 2.0 offer encouragement that the snow blanket may not only make such structures more resilient in unstable frigid climates, but may also help create stable internal environments potentially suitable for temporary occupation, akin to an igloo yet a distinct structural morphology. For now, situated between the philosophies of Haring and Gates, these modest constructions perhaps offer some clues as to how temporary architecture can accentuate the positives of ‘fast’, while ameliorating some of the issues of disposability and waste associated with it.
Oculus 2.0, snow blanket consolidated, compacted and sculpted, enhancing resistance to structural entropy
bibliography Billington, David. The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy . Princeton, 2003 CBS Sunday Morning. ‘From the Archives: Keith Haring Was Here’. YouTube, 28 Mar. 2014 www.youtube.com/watch?v=W04j0Je01wQ. accessed 19 January 2023 Chilton, John. Heinz Isler (Engineer’s Contribution to Architecture) Thomas Telford Ltd., 2000 Garlock, Maria Moreyra, and David Billington. Félix Candela: Engineer, Builder, Structural Artist. Yale UP, 2008. Glaeser, Ludwig. T he Work of Frei Otto , Museum of Modern Art, Greenwich, 1972 Jencks, Charles, and Nathan Silver. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation . Expanded,updated ed., MIT Press, 2013. Levi-Strauss, Claude. Savage Mind . University of Chicago Press, 1968. Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture . Rizzoli, 1979. Tsui, Denise, et al. “Theaster Gates on Driving Community Transformation With Art.” COBO Social. 18 Apr. 2020. www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/theaster-gates- community-transformation accessed 19 January 2023
Though derived from an esoteric form of construction and structural type, the lessons of agility, adhocism and additive redundancy, are generalisable, applied alone or in combination with other architectures, but especially those with limited lifespans, such that like certain forms of art practice, they might question, resist, or exploit circumstances that would otherwise curtail their permanence. The lessons invite us to find ways of building more freely but still responsively and responsibly. They invite us to contemplate reframing the task of designing temporary architecture as an act of designing systems with multiple possible outcomes and lives, as opposed to a singular defined presence. In so doing, constructional grammar(s) may emerge that enable temporary structures to acknowledge and celebrate their transience, thereby architecturally distinguishing them from those which are to remain uncertainly. g
TIM INGLEBY is an architect and an assistant professor of architecture. His teaching and research interests lie in contemporary architectural design, allied with novel form- finding methods, innovative structural systems, and the principles of construction.
acknowledgements All constructions and photography by Team HILL (Hockett/Ingleby/Lawes/Leeson)
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on site review 43: architecture and t ime
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