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
Made with FlippingBook Online newsletter maker