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A bit off-topic from the themes this blog normally deals with, but hey, I’m still an architect, so let’s talk buildings for one time.
It’s the end of the year so it’s (clearly I didn’t make it) list-making-time, and because it’s also the end of the first decade of the 21st century we have an interesting time-frame to look at, especially when dealing with architecture. It takes some time to build, to reflect, to see trends turn into fads and to digest what you actually appreciate in buildings. I take notice of most of architecture’s production through the media (like the most of us), which makes it hard to render a constructive criticism of building production in general. But what does communicate are the idea’s that have driven a buildings’ design. This list of ten buildings and their designers summarize what to me personally is inspirational. These buildings have an attitude I appreciate, they deal with reality in a pragmatic, poetic and smart way, and they address a context, its limitations and potential in a explicitly architectural way. The list is chronological, and it is first and foremost about ideas and not about the particular building per se.
The French office Lacaton & Vassal works from a few simple but convincing ideas that carry through all their work but is perhaps most simply illustrated by the above house in Coutras and the one in Floirac.
Ready Mades 1
Architects are often not the ones driving innovation in the building industry, but on the other hand they are the first ones to jump on new design-tools and materials exploiting the potential. In a radical way not in terms of formal innovation but in using the potential of industrial mass-production this is what Lacaton & Vassal is doing by incorporating the greenhouse into their repertoire (Bucky would like it: cheap, mass-produced and light). It’s cheap in terms of material and labor, and thus enables lots of usable space for little money. Besides it being a pragmatic solution in terms of budget, the greenhouse is also a very pleasant space to be. Very light, open-able roof and sides, free view to the outside, and when adjacent to other spaces, these spaces can easily spill out into the greenhouse when more space is needed for a particular use. The greenhouse provides a habitable climate about 80% of the year, and it can be incorporated smartly in the climatic scheme of a project. The greenhouse space has a different quality in its finishing, temperature, etc. which makes it a space that allows different kinds of use, like; fixing your motorcycle, playing in a sandbox, party, gardening, i.e. messy stuff.
The Luxury of Space
“Luxury is not gilded materials – luxury is pleasure, happiness, comfort, and a good rapport with the outside world.” as Philippe Vassal tells us. The office’s mantra is that luxury is to have more space, to build more m² for less. This is not a good thing in itself, but in a world where the architect has to negotiate with project developers and housing corporations this is a strategy worth while, and one which the office is successful at. It is especially an approach that has been productive in the social housing projects they have done, where budgets are limited anyway and the trade off between a medium quality of materials and an industrial aesthetic that creates more space is easily made. For an example, take a look at their Social Housing project in Mulhouse. Here also the greenhouse is a perfect tool to realize this additional space, in Coutras as well as in Florias the greenhouse doubles the living space!
The American office Diller Scofidio (now + Renfro) designed one of the most important buildings of the past decade: The Blur Building. A building made entirely of an artificial mist generated by an array of nozzles that vaporize the water from the Lake Neuchatel above which it hovers. It’s not there anymore because it was a temporary pavilion for the Swiss Expo 2002 in Yverdon-les-Bains.
The Stuff We Live In
This building puts forward a radically different definition of what space is, of what it means to define a space not by walls, openings or demarcations on the floor but by what the nature of space itself is. Space is not a void, not a vacuum, not just the leftover when you carve a hole out of solid matter. Space is oxygen, water, a gas infested with particles, the vacuum in between atoms. What we think of as space is extremely anthropocentric. It is where we as human beings can move through and/or see through. I’ve always been fascinated by underwater photography where the ceiling of the underwater scene is the light fracturing water surface. It is merely where one material stops and another begins, but we can move through both. “Our space” – the places where mankind can be- is as much a material as concrete is. Space is the stuff we live in! Much of my favorite artist; Olafur Eliasson‘s also works with these theme’s in very interesting and persuasive ways.
In a collaborative and participatory process Elemental (an unusual partnership with COPEC (Chilean Oil Company) and the Pontifica Universidad Católica de Chile) produced a scheme, a system actually, for social housing (which is now being repeated across the country). The challenged was to re-house a community on the same location, maintaining the social fabric and their central location in the city. With the decision to stay on the location, which was three times more expensive than relocating to another plot, the project had to deal with extreme budgetary limits. But found the solution in building half of a good house, and leaving room and facilitating self-built expansion of the house by the inhabitants themselves. Here the architecture frames the infill.
More information on this project; Small Scale, Big Change at MoMA (has great video’s) and over at ArchDaily (has plans and sections)
Framing The Infill
The role of the architect in this case is to develop the framework, to design the architecture of the system that can host change, welcomes uncertainty, instead of designing a fixed image. Besides the budget constraints another argument Elemental uses is that in contrast with ‘normal’ housing, social housing decreases in value over, it’s more like a car, than it is real estate. To provide the space in the plan, literally ‘room for improvement’ each house acquires identity, inhabitants acquire pride in the upgrading of their house, and the public space doesn’t have the dreary monotony associated with social housing. The “framing the infill” approach is one that is not only useful in a social housing, or developing world context. Kunststad at the NDSM wharf, Amsterdam is an example. But balcony infills and literally frame infills are a common DIY practice in the Soviet social housing projects (Plattenbau, Microrayons) across the former Soviet union and eastern Europe. Although the frame/infill is really about an open system it is also used as an aesthetic, for instance this frame/infill pastiche by MVRDV in their Sildodam project in Amsterdam. While a certain system, produces a certain aesthetic, this doesn’t mean that behind that aesthetic the associated system is actually at work.
Recetas Urbanas, translates as Urban Recipes and this is exactly what a series of ‘Strategies for Subversive Urban Occupation‘ are. These projects, like the Skip project above, are scripts, how-to’s that exploit the loop-holes of the system. Recetas Urbanas seeks out the fringes, the legal limits of what the possibilities to make vacant space useful for playgrounds and temporal habitation. Architects as modern activists who don’t work against the grain of the system, but with the system as accomplice.
Love the System
Fuck the System, was the slogan of the Punk’s , Love the System, could perhaps be the slogan describing the hacker’s attitude. The hacker needs to passionately seek out the potential of a system, to exploit the possibilities that the authors unintentionally wrote into the system. A system serves specific agenda’s, it is equipped to deal with specific events, but ‘the system’ always lags. It lags behind the creativity and ingenuity of the hacker, of the entities that are unexpected, and were not incorporated as a possible variables. The system is the arena of the 21st century, with on one side the ones who write it, on the other side the ones who play it, whether this is the legal, technological, commercial or political system. The system will be the battlefield and the common ground for collaboration (also see Framing The Infill), we better learn to love it, one way or another. Especially when more and more gets systematized with the digitization of more and more sphere’s of society
When biking around the Amsterdam harbor searching for new office space Trude Hooykaas spotted an abandoned crane track and imagined it as the majestic pedestal for a long glass office hovering above it. Ten years later it was there. A long process, working together city authorities, a project developer and her office doing the design. The initiative was hers, and in that sense this project can classified as unsolicited. The Crane-track is simply the most beautiful re-use project i’ve ever seen.
Re-Use
Nothing shocking about this notion in architecture, although in building practice it’s still far from commonplace, as the recent Dutch contribution, Vacant NL, at the Venice Bienale makes clear. I would almost want to argue to write law that buildings need to be put to a use, when there is a shortage of housing, or another function for that matter. To forbid demolition to a certain extend, it’s basically the destruction of capital and history. Not that everything should be preserved, but in principle demolition should be the less attractive second option, not the first one.
Another project from Chile, this time by FAR. Not just Chile, but the entire Latin-American world is presenting the world with great work and bringing an activist and socially conscious edge to architecture. Other favorites of mine are Urban Think Tank (Venezuela) and Pasaj Emergentes (Columbia). What I think is smart about The Wall House project is the concept of decomposing the laminate of which a buildings wall’s and especially its facades are usually made up of. The result is a ‘baggy architecture’ (the term comes from Rory) that allows a generosity of space, which allows for various types of usage changing over the course of a day and with the seasons.
More on The Wall House (images and plans) over at ArchDaily, and a profile on FAR over at designboom
Baggy Layering 1
A Building’s exterior wall is typically a package of construction, insulation and door or windows openings. This packages also serves a variety of functions security, privacy, comfortable indoor climate, visual control of the surroundings etc. With bundling all these functions in one laminated layer in a sense makes all inside spaces more or less interchangeable (when it comes to climate and comfort). When de-laminating the various materials which make up the typical exterior wall, it results in a series of ‘inbetweens’ with distinct atmospheric and functional qualities. What I often lack in buildings is a place that allows you to make a mess, or to be nonchalant about. The sterile modern dwelling limits usage, it doesn’t allow dirt, stains, damage. Typically this is the garage or the garden, but these are always so separated from the rest of the living experience of a house, like people, smells and sounds don’t spill over into other spaces. A baggy layering also allows for is a more gradual way of living in terms of time and space. Just like the winter-garden provides a space that provides you an option between summer and winter. It’s not, either weather to be outside, or weather to be inside, there is an intermediate option. Baggy layering allows for a spatial ebb and flow in a building and invites a broader pallet use. Baggy layering can also be seen in the work of Lacaton & Vassal and Architecten De Vylder Vinck Taillieu.
In the category ‘buildings that make me smile’, this one is on the top of the list. Just he idea, but also the architecture, they’re so beautifully simple and executed gracefully. I remember first seeing it, I couldn’t stop smiling. The story behind the project has a similar feel good touch:
“The request from the kindergarten directors was extremely simple in content: “we want you to make a Roof House for five hundred kindergarten pupils.” We had been introduced by Kashiwa Sato, a creative director who loves the Roof House. The Roof House is a work we completed in 2001. Even now, the family eats together up on the roof. The Roof House has caused debate on its pros and cons. Has the roof been really used during hot summers and cold winters? The answer is YES. The husband and wife team that run the Fuji Kindergarten understood this roof without a single word of explanation. Nor was it necessary to explain the power of understanding of Kashiwa Sato, who had introduced us to the kindergarten directors. At the climax of the initial meeting, we conferred at the Roof House. Although it was originally just an inspection visit, having gone up onto the roof, somehow no one wanted to go home. Whether Mr. and Mrs. Takahashi (the owners of the Roof House) became involved, or whether the other couple involved them, unconsciously there was a deepening feeling of familial solidarity, however slight. We don’t think this is due to it being a gathering of people with similar hobbies and preferences. Discussion was unnecessary. The Roof House told us everything. “In summer the roof is hot, so we go out in the morning and evening. In winter the roof is cold, so the afternoon is good.” These comments from Mr. and Mrs. Takahashi, owners of the Roof House, penetrated to the essence of the architecture. This time, our team understood perfectly. The Roof House is the mother of the kindergarten.” – source: e-architect (for the entire story behind the realization and design of Fuji Kindergarten)
Here all the images and plans if the Fuji Kindergarten over at Architype Review
Rock the Roof
Probably one of the most under-utilized space of a building. No bigger story here other than a plea for that the roof should be used more, especially in urban settings.
I think in recent years my appreciation for Belgian architecture is surpassing my appreciation of Dutch architecture. In the work of the Belgians there is an appreciation of the ordinary, an aesthetic not aimed at the spectacular, but at dealing with common materials but using them in an architecturally interesting ways. Unlike the Dutch or ‘Droog’ Design trick of old stuff, or the ordinary in a new wrapper, or with a ‘twist’, something Roemer van Toorn calls ‘Fresh Conservatism‘. The Belgians are virtuoso’s within the ordinary without trying to remix or refresh it. (All of this is a grand generalization, and weakly supported position. Not more than a hunch really)
Although an annoying website, one should take the effort to see more of De Vylder Vinck Taillieu’s work
Baggy Layering 2
In the facade above another example of baggy layering resulting in a very different kind of image as in FAR’s Wall House. Behind the vertical glass plane, a stone wall that locally retracts from the glass to make room for the stairs. In front of the glass are the sunscreens. Here the bagginess happens in a smaller range, every layer is visibly stacked on top of the other. Here the layering really results in a distinct aesthetic, this baggy aesthetic isn’t so much visible in the Wall House, where it the bagginess is experienced throughout in the entire plan.
Ready Mades 2
Not in this project, but in other projects of De Vylder Vinck Taillieu has used a remarkable ready made; the pre-fab strut, as a budget solution for keeping the floors up. Apparently cheaper than your basic concrete or steel column, although a pity you can’t profit from the column’s adjustable height after construction.
Here are more pictures and plans of the project: ovo-1(4)
Former Metahaven partner Gon Zifroni designed this house in Brussels. Minimalist woodwork, without interior walls and what I like most, no ground floor! Such a simple, but radical architectural move especially in a street with row housing where such a move makes an impact. I haven’t invented a name for why this appeals to me so much, but it has something to do with a fundamentally architectural move. To make an opening, to close of or to frame a view. To make one straightforward un-nuanced purely architectural gesture that radically determines the experience and use of space. Kersten Geers and David van Severen often use these brutally simple but radical architectural choices as well, like ‘walling a space‘ is a strategy that often occurs.
Definitely in the category ‘buildings that make me smile’; John Körmeling’s Happy Street, Holland’s contribution for the 2010 Expo in Shanghai. What I love about the work of Kormeling is it’s humor, it just tells us “Why so serious?”, and especially “Why so serious about design?”, which is I think important to ask more often than we as designers do. Design won’t save the world, but a happy street will lift your spirits, and perhaps this is what Körmeling thought, as he explains in the video. When addressing the Expo’s theme ‘Better City, Better Life” he replies with, “a good city starts with a good street”, who wouldn’t agree.
One of the things that intrigues me is that the architecture on Happy Street quotes the past, icon’s from the Dutch modernist canon (at one third of the original size, work of Duiker, Dudok, Rietveld and others). It’s retro, it’s pomo in a sense and it doesn’t annoy me at all (it usually does). For instance in all of Körmeling’s buildings he uses the same detailing, like simply re-using the classic modernist window detail (glass fitted in steel T- and L-profiles sealed with putty), and why not?. These details are simple and beautiful, and this probably means that deep inside, when it comes to aesthetics, i’m a modernist (which I don’t see as an insult). But it also brings back a the discussion of the recent Volume (#26) launch, on the ethics of aesthetics (a piece by Rory Hyde in the issue), with as one example the social housing project in Islington by FAT which makes me cringe honestly, but then again I think the Inntel Hotel in Zaandam by WAM Architecten is funny, I can actually appreciate it. Clearly humor is serious business!
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| Posted by Edwin Gardner | | January 3rd, 2011 | | |
“All our thinking is performed upon signs of some kind or other, either imagined or actually perceived. The best thinking (. . . ) is done by experimenting in the imagination upon a diagram or other scheme, and it facilitates the thought to have it before one’s eyes”
-C.S. Peirce, (Hoffmann, 2005)
The dominant notion of the diagram is the diagram as a graphic of sorts, ranging from the highly articulate and systematized diagrams of mathematics, to scribbles and sketches which only have an intelligibility to the maker. The key is that the one who is engaged with the diagram, who is thinking with it, is reading or seeing it in a certain way. Through a perceptual lens, a conceptual framing. One reads it with the help of a system of representation. For example; to read English you need to read it with the help of English grammar, syntax and vocabulary, in other words the system of representation associated with an English word or sentence. But one could choose to read it in an entirely different way, one could choose to see a word or letter as the section or the plan of an architectural project, seeing them as pure form, devoid of meaning, not governed anymore by the rules of grammar. This is actually a common problem with dyslectics, they often also see letters as forms, and then the letters ‘d’ ‘p’ and ‘b’ are actually the one and the same form, only flipped or mirrored – which is a typical spatial way of thinking, not a lingual way of thinking.
C.S. Peirce calls this the interaction of internal representations (in the mind) and external representations (in the world) in what he calls ‘signs of some kind or other’. How this interaction works is described in Peirce’s concept of diagrammatic reasoning. Diagrammatic reasoning is based on the three step activity of “constructing representations, experimenting with them, and observing the results. The idea is that by representing a problem in a diagram, we can experiment with our own cognitive means, and thus develop them. ‘The diagram becomes the something (non-ego) that stands up against our consciousness,’ as Kathleen Hull puts it; ‘reasoning unfolds when we inhibit the active side of our consciousness and allow things to act on us” (Hoffmann, 2005; Hull, 1994)
I would like to make an argument to stretch up the definition of the diagram and the arena of diagrammatic reasoning beyond just graphics. When Peirce talks about a ‘sign’ he is not just referring to graphical entities. A sign is something that signifies something else, but the sign can primarily do so by power of the interpreter. Because the interpreter chooses (this can also be ‘involuntary’, i.e unconsciously) to see something as a sign of something else (as in the previous ‘English language’ example), in other words what the sign signifies. A diagram is a certain type of sign, the most important characteristic being that how one reads it, uses it and manipulates it, is governed by a certain system, a system that works through conventions, a certain rationality, navigated through inhibitions and intuitions. In other words, certain kind of rules are at work. As a fine example of a non-graphic diagram I present the foam-cutter!
Albena Yaneva’s little book on OMA I reviewed before, provides wonderful illustrations of how foam-cutting, book-making and diagrammatic reasoning (graphic and non-graphic) work together in the design process at OMA.
The foam-cutter, or more accurate, the constellation of: ‘foam, foam-cutter and the operator’, together form the triad of ‘matter, tool and mind’. Each of these objects, or actors in the activity of foam-cutting exert influence, ‘rules’ over the process of foam-cutting. The foam has certain material characteristics which dictate a range of possible manipulation (or one could also say ‘imaginations’!?), as does the foam-cutter as tool, as does the operator/designer with his/her knowledge and skill of operating the machine, and bringing to bear all his/her accumulate experience as designer and human being.
What is especially striking, is how the OMA architects themselves talk about working with the foam and the foam-cutter. They say that they surrender themselves to the process, the mechanics of the machine, the rationality of the tool. The intelligence of the designer seems to reside in a form of reasoning that unfolds when they inhibit the active side of their consciousness and allow things to act on them, as pointed out earlier by Kathleen Hull.
Clearly the designer entrust a lot of confidence in this tool, the design process is really a joint effort, where tools, matter and mind are operating on a leveled playing field. It’s actually not so hard to see that the second generation of OMA buildings (since the Seattle Library more or less) have a geometry that clearly has its roots in the foam-cutter. The huge impact of tools and materials used in the design studio on the final buildings is not limited to foam; OMA architects explain to Yaneva: “How the foam-cutter is an invention as important as Perspex, an invention capable of changing the face of architecture. Once the transparent and easy to manipulate Perspex began to be used for models, this changed the face of the final buildings, claim OMA architects. The Perspex models ‘show at one glance the outside and the inside’. It also anticipated buildings with such properties.” (Albena Yaneva, 2009 p.76)
image via: archinect
The process of cutting-foam, a rationality you almost undergo, is in sharp contrast with the arguments that are put forward to justify the building in public discourse, and when ‘sold’ to the client. Seattle Library is the perfect example, a seemingly super-logical and clear building in its argumentation (which I previously dissected). Olga explains: “So, that’s why you always have to go back and forth, checking repeatedly. Is it still the same diagram? Do the program and the shape still fit together, or are they readable as separate entities? At the end you have to sell it again. And if people see that it doesn’t work, they are not convinced. That was the strength of the Seattle project, because now we can explain it in three sentences, and you can argue about its aesthetics but its logic is so strong that people buy it even if they don’t like the form.” (Albena Yaneva, 2009 p.36) There is an active search to make the argument (the ‘diagram’) fit with the design, but the design actually happened quite differently, as Alain remembers “I am thinking of Seattle Library. I didn’t do it, but my friend did it. They made a model of something and it was misinterpreted as the whole building and (…) Do you know the library? It’s a really beautiful building. And then it became a solution.” (Albena Yaneva, 2009 p.93)
Although Alain and Olga have seemingly conflicting accounts; this doesn’t mean that one of them is lying. There are lots of degrees of rationality, of reasoning at work in the design process. There is an active search for ‘a fit’ to the ‘problem’ at hand, rationality evolves over time, and that the final argument is a strong rhetorical argument that is the instrument in justifying a specific design doesn’t disqualify the intuitive and messy practices that produced the argument as well as the design. Or as Yaneva puts it:”You can still appreciate a building, like or dislike it, praise or dismiss it, without knowing anything about the design experience that made it happen; but you cannot understand a building without taking these design experiences into account.”
All quotes from: Albena Yaneva – Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design, (Rotterdam: 010 Publishers; 2009)
| Filed under Design thinking Diagrams JVE | | No Comments | |
| Posted by Edwin Gardner | | December 19th, 2010 | | |
Another newsflash, one I intend to do more often. A short list of the books and other things that are on my reading list, that I just bought, or even read (which always seems to be the biggest problem).
This just came in at Archis:
Design Anthropology: Object Culture in the 21st Century. Edited by Alison J. Clarke
Here’s the blurb: What makes objects, like the iPhone, iconic? Why do design innovators spend more time observing consumers than styling new products? Is the shift from analog to digital culture really de-materializing our world? Design Anthropology explores design’s radical turn to users, their social lives and rituals, and questions who is really in control of our material lives.
Take a look at the table of contents, which features the departments: ‘Designers go Native’, ‘People, Objects and Entanglements’, ‘Mutating Forms, Shifting Materialities’ and ‘Future Trajectories: Future Users’
Just flipped through it, it it looks intriguing. I’m excited in a similar way by this book, as I was excited about Albena Yaneva’s Ethnography of O.M.A. That these field are becoming interested architecture and design products and practices is a great development. It gives new grounds for explaining what design knowledge and culture is, how the design process generates this knowledge, and how the ‘design way’ of seeing and dealing with the world is distinct from other ways, and a valuable addition to the cultures of science and the humanities.
The past few months I’ve been intrigued by some new developments in philosophy that fare under the banners of Speculative Realism and Object Oriented Ontology. What these emerging movements have in come is a passion for realism, not in dull limiting way, but in a way that opens up limitless possibilities. It moves away from a perspective where the dominant human-world dyad, towards a network of things, objects where the human is not the center but equal to the universe, oranges, sound-waves, a circus act and a cup of tea. This article in Frieze by k-punk/Mark Fisher is a good place to start as well as the Wikipedia article on Speculative Realism. Or this intro lecture by Graham Harman, one of the main protagonists (and my favorite so far) on the recently held ‘Hello Everything’ Conference at UCLA. [ The Harman talk (+ intro) start around the 21:00 mark ]
Two books by Graham Harman just came in.
Prince of Networks: Bruno Latour and Metaphysics
Here’s the blurb: “Prince of Networks is the first treatment of Bruno Latour specifically as a philosopher. It has been eagerly awaited by readers of both Latour and Harman since their public discussion at the London School of Economics in February 2008.
Part One covers four key works that display Latour’s underrated contributions to metaphysics: Irreductions, Science in Action, We Have Never Been Modern, and Pandora’s Hope. Harman contends that Latour is one of the central figures of contemporary philosophy, with a highly original ontology centered in four key concepts: actants, irreduction, translation, and alliance.
In Part Two, Harman summarizes Latour’s most important philosophical insights, including his status as the first “secular occasionalist.” The problem of translation between entities is no longer solved by the fiat of God (Malebranche) or habit (Hume), but by local mediators. Working from his own “object-oriented” perspective, Harman also criticizes the Latourian focus on the relational character of actors at the expense of their cryptic autonomous reality.
This book forms a remarkable interface between Latour’s Actor-Network Theory and the Speculative Realism of Harman and his confederates. It will be of interest to anyone concerned with the emergence of new trends in the humanities following the long postmodernist interval.”