CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus Documents 02:

CONTEXT 2010/2011 CONTENTS: 3 Editor’s preface • 4 Introduction by Rector Torben Nielsen • 6 Tom Nielsen: Local atmospheres and

global exchange: Urban space as context for music • 8 Boris Brorman Jensen: When context is an event - on temporary and performative architecture • 10 Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen: “Everything keeps moving, nothing stays the same” - on becoming with context in the work of SANAA • 12 Karl Christiansen: From “ugly duckling” to “black swan”: Poetics of tectonics • 14 Ole Egholm Pedersen: Material evidence in a digital context: Exploring the tectonic potential of concrete • 16 Niels Martin Larsen & Claus Peder Pedersen: From context to condition: Questions of context in generative architectural design • 18 Inge Vestergaard & Lars Henriksen: Respect for context: Approaching sustainable architecture • 20 Anne-Grete Andersen & Lars Bock: The significance of place • 22 Jan Fugl: Design in context • 24 Pia Bille & Christina Kvisthøj: Morphogenesis in the urban landscape context of Ho Chi Minh City • 28 Leif Høgfeldt Hansen: Sign, space and architecture: Fundamental constructions in Chinese characters and architecture • 30 Erik Werner Petersen: Zhang Yimou and event space • 32 Niels Nygaard, Gerard Reinmuth & Mads Tholstrup: Contested concepts in context • 34 Mads Tholstrup: The cave and the container • 36 Tine Nørgaard & Claudia Carbone: Contexere - construction of (a) project site • 38 Karen Olesen: Displacement: On dialogical contextualism • Back page Frederik Petersen: “Realising Representation”.

Arkitektskolens Forlag Aarhus School of Architecture

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Arkitektskolens Forlag

Aarhus Documents 02:

CONTEXT 2010/2011 Editor: Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen Translation: Thomas Falkenberg Svendsen and Tjeksproget.dk Layout: Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen and Pi Fabrin Karstensen Illustrations: Unless otherwise stated photographs and illustrations are by the author(s) of the article. Rights concerning other illustrations have been stated as far as possible. In case of not obtained rights, please contact Arkitektskolens Forlag.

Print: Narayana Press, Odder, 2012 ISBN: 978-87-909-7933-1 Š 2012, Arkitektskolens Forlag / Aarhus School of Architecture, the authors and photographers

Arkitektskolens Forlag Aarhus School of Architecture Nørreport 20 8000 Aarhus C, Denmark www.aarch.dk

Aarhus School of Architecture

CONTEXT 2010/2011

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Context 2010/2011

From “Aarhus V hip hop” to “architecture on architecture” In the beginning of 2011, a number of researchers and teachers at the Aarhus School of Architecture were invited to contribute to the second publication in the annual “Aarhus Documents”; a publication covering 2010/2011 which reflects on their work during the academic year. The invitation introduced “context” as the overall editorial idea for this year’s publication in order to make it a collection of background material and articles intended to bring forward the architectural interests that lie behind research results or which have informed the delimitation and formulation of study programmes and projects. The intention was to engage each contributor in the production of a collective view into the wide variety of approaches to architecture, design, landscape and urbanism that the Aarhus School of Architecture stands for. This collective view into backgrounds is but one aspect of context that this publication represents. The contributions, furthermore, reflect individually upon context as a subject-matter approached from the standpoints of the authors of the individual articles as these are unfoldings of a concept that has today become perhaps too commonplace in architectural discourse and is, consequently, in need of contemporary reflection within architectural research and teaching practice as well as within architectural thinking. Our publication does in no way attempt to offer the reader a definite answer to what context is; on the contrary, it opens up a multiplicity of perspectives on how contemporary architecture, as it is researched and taught at the Aarhus School of Architecture, touches on a wide variety of relations and methods in order to interact with its exterior, its conditions and its circumstances as a potential of significant importance.

Optics on context are multiple; topics and underlying questions present themselves in different perspectives throughout “Context 2010/2011”. This applies, for instance, to the conditions of newness and the understanding of the creation of new architecture in relation to context: spatially, culturally, geographically, historically, in social perspectives or as related to sustainability - as well as through methodically constructed contexts that apply to the development and creation of studio projects by architecture students. Questions about the understanding of context which concern process, performativity and change are equally delimited from different perspectives, such as when context is an event; architecture is temporality or even forces; architecture is becoming or morphogenesis; and when architecture is conditioned and conditions parametrically or as tectonics. Place and atmosphere are discussed as dynamic entities through urban perspectives on music culture, in relation to daylight as introduced by Rector Torben Nielsen and as spaces of action. The perspectives on context span from “Aarhus V hip hop” to “architecture on architecture”.

“Context 2010/2011” contains 16 background articles and essays as well as extensive graphic material, generously made available by students, teachers and researchers at the Aarhus School of Architecture. As editor I would like to thank all the authors and everyone who has contributed to this publication; Tom Nielsen and Boris Brorman Jensen have also participated in the process of reviewing the manuscripts. Rector Torben Nielsen has supported the work from start to finish - our intention was to provide an encounter with a broadspectred discussion of approaches to context and the contemporary relevance of context. Hopefully our publication has succeeded in raising questions and arguments that will provoke thoughts among its readers.

Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen Editor

Editor’s preface

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Introduction by Rector Torben Nielsen

Aarhus School of Architecture

CONTEXT 2010/2011

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Context Dear reader This publication focuses on a common concept in the world of architecture: CONTEXT. Context is often used as a starting point or pivotal point for architectural proposals – in schools of architecture as well as in practices. The concept is, however, culturally dependent and is, consequently, understood and used in very different ways and with varying importance and meaning. It is, in other words, not an exact and clearly defined concept which implies an answer. Fortunately. The application of the concept of context has changed and will continue to change over time as the cultural development of man and society progresses.

The concept is often used with this meaning: a system of relations within which something occurs. Or simply to mean place. The total expression or atmosphere of a place together with our impression, interpretation and understanding of it are quite decisive for how we humans feel in the present in a given place or space. It influences what is stored in our memory. What we bring with us into another relation – or context.

The concept of context has always been, and always will be, a precondition which is absolutely critical to the production of architecture by architects. This is so because, whether we want it or not, we always influence the surroundings we are planning for, regardless whether it is a matter of landscape treatment, an urban square or a building. We always interfere – by changing the premises and the experience.

Context understood as place is one of the most significant premises of architecture. This context consists of a combination of many things. Many aspects and part elements enter into this arena which we engage with when we decide to build or decide to change the premises for the appearance of a place.

Daylight is one aspect, and it is just one among many equally important examples of how the complex composition of context plays a decisive role in relation to the place or space where we are in or which we are drawing up proposals for. In the cave, in the field, in the streets of the city, in the waiting room at the hospital, up between the skies or ... All these places possess different spatial and contextual implications and meanings: spatialities which are reinforced, weakened or differentiated by the ever changing daylight. For the character, colour, strength and direction of daylight changes in the course of a day or a year. And this means that the concrete context - as concrete as it can be when we take into consideration all our individual views and perceptions – continually changes over time along with daylight.

One example: On a quiet morning with local light fog, the humidity of the air and the diffuse character of light together soften the demarcation of space. Distances are lost and the horizon disappears. We are in a place without demarcations; the dissolved nature of space moves at the same pace as we walk. We are in a hazy space defined by the meeting of mild and cool air; in a space where the appearance of light is forceful yet hard to define. Here there are no shadows that describe details and depths. Colours are soft. This place has a particular atmosphere which is gradually lost as the day gathers strength and the difference between heat and cold disappears. The space of infinity is dissolved and daylight takes over and once again emphasises distances and the horizon, as if it had never absent. Space, place and context have changed into something else. The composition of present elements has changed and the scope of what is possible is changing; not least our conception of what precisely this place has to offer, has changed.

Another example: Here it is also quiet. The sun is almost vertical in the sky, shadows are sharply defined, space is large and distances are nearly infinite. No spatial hierarchy exists here. The interplay between the direct and sharp-edged character of light and the evasive nature of sand turns into a feeling different from spatial dissolution, it is rather a longing for the horizon and a feeling of emptiness.The level line of the horizon is blurred and the heat haze erases all sharp outlines and is only differentiated by vertical structural beings indicating that far away a completely different life exists; an entirely different spatiality is present. A context so different from the place we are in that the interaction of daylight with the specific place defies comparison. In this place, far away, people seek the shade and the inside of buildings to protect themselves against the dryness of the desert and the direct rays of the sun.

In this manner, daylight may change the context in different ways and create the foundation architecture is built on and which is given such great importance by architects.

In this publication we present 16 insightful and thought-provoking answers to the meaning of context – and what context means for architecture and for the education of architects.

It is my hope that “Context 2010/2011” will provide inspiration and create a basis for further discussion.

Happy reading!

Torben Nielsen Rector

Introduction by Rector Torben Nielsen

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Tom Nielsen

Local atmospheres and global exhange:

Urban space as context for music

BY TOM NIELSEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, PhD, ARCHITECT

Globalization and context The understanding of context by architects has been broadened significantly as a result of the increased global exchange which was brought about during the last couple of decades by the development of communications technologies and the proliferation of their use. This means that integration with localities of production, exchange and consumption around the world has become as important an aspect of cities as their actual territory. In relation to architecture, it is a fact that stylistic ideas, building technologies as well as the programmatic content of buildings have, to a very high degree, become globalised and disconnected from any specific connection to a locally based culture. This has resulted in the idea that architecture and cities are now global, generic and “detached” from locations.

Today, cities are limitless multi-centred systems. Whereas cities (city-states, market towns and industrial metropolises) were previously defined by barriers and geographical distances, today, the integration within physical and virtual networks is very important to the definition of cities and their role in the world. Consequently, planning and architecture have also been given a new role. They have become strategic tools for defining the unique roles of cities in global and regional competition and division of labour. The ways in which we can contribute to defining cities has become an interesting issue to architects as well as politicians, and this has also resulted in a theoretical interest in describing the special qualities of cities. One of the most interesting examples of this is the work of Martina Löw on the intrinsic logic of cities.1

It is the sudden experience of one atmosphere, or of one dominant atmosphere in a world with a neverending diversity of sensual impressions, associations and emotions, which makes it interesting to use the concept of atmosphere. It is precisely this unitary aspect which causes it to distinguish itself from the purely subjective “experience” and suddenly become more relevant as a collective entity.

This work represents a break with the focus which, for the past approximately 15 years, has been on describing the general conditions for urban development after globalisation. One example of this type of generalising approach is the theses of Richard Florida concerning “creative cities”.2 Florida points out that the context is absolutely critical to how corporations, the driving force behind world economy, locate. This is a result of the fact that “The Creative Class” of employees which these companies base their existence on is quite particular with regard

to the physical surroundings of their lives. Florida provides general formula for the circumstances which create attractive urban areas. When information, goods and people move more easily, the question of context suddenly becomes important. Yet, whereas the context was previously very often connected with aesthetical and moral questions about what was appropriate to do in relation to the surroundings, the question has now rather become an aestheticaleconomical question about what would be attractive and profitable.

The concept of atmosphere The concept of atmosphere becomes interesting in relation to a description of specific urban qualities, and thus also to a contemporary understanding of the concept of context. It is part of our everyday cognition that places and urban areas may have specific atmospheres, and we settle in and visit specific cities or quarters because of their specific “atmosphere”.3 In architectural research, this term offers a new way of understanding, describing and working with spaces that define aesthetic qualities as atmospheres which are created in the space between the materiality of the architecture, the user, and the beholder; and which transcend a focus on the purely visual, on “the architectural object”, a focus which is characteristic of much architectural research.4 Atmospheres are created by the actions of humans as well as by the physical surroundings understood in very broad terms.

A central aspect of the concept of atmosphere is that the way atmospheres are experienced comes across as something unitary or singular.5 It is the sudden experience of one atmosphere, or of one dominant atmosphere in a world with a neverending diversity of sensual impressions, associations and emotions, which makes it interesting to use the concept of atmosphere. It is precisely this unitary aspect which causes it to distinguish itself from the purely subjective “experience” and suddenly become more relevant as a collective entity.

Music scenes and context Music scenes are of particular interest to the discussion of a topical contextual concept. Richard Florida uses the presence of a local music scenes as an indicator for whether a location is attractive, and, from his perspective, music scenes are seen as a precondition for and not as a result of the desire of a city to be creative. He, consequently, approaches the interesting question about what conditions create a fertile soil for the creation of creative milieus. As an architect, it is interesting in relation to this, to examine what physical, structural and possibly architectural qualities stimulate, for instance, music scenes. In this connection, the concept of atmosphere is of interest because we often find references in music and music literature to the atmospheres of a particular city or part of town.6 What is being described, either explicitly or implicitly, is often a particular atmosphere which is so dominant that several artists or groups respond to it in parallel. When this atmosphere can be experienced collectively and, can, as a consequence of this, be discussed and reinterpreted as music which is composed by groups and represented through music videos, it can be used as a common frame of understanding and identification within a “milieu” or a “scene”.

It is important to understand that the relation and influence between music and urban

environment is a two way process; the city is able to influence music and the music is able to influence the city. The example of Manchester is useful for describing this phenomena: towards the end of the 70s, the advent of post-punk created a music scene in the city which consisted of a number of groups, record companies and venues which defined a new departure in the context of global popular culture.7 This scene was, in part, defined by the way the music reflected the - seen in relation to the criteria of Richard Florida - very unappealing atmosphere of the city.8 The atmosphere was dominated by a worn down, fragmented and partly abandoned urban landscape which was a result of the blitz bombardments of the Second World War, deindustrialisation and brutal urban renewal based on modernist principles, a lack of opportunities for personal development and a general feeling of belonging to the periphery, and, finally, the climate. When post-punk mutated during the 1980s and began to dominate a new urban youth culture centred around dance music, clubbing and ecstasy consumption9 it, in return, affected the city. Manchester, suddenly, became interesting and attractive as a city of culture, and it began to attract students as well as tourists. This formed a basis for a regeneration and redefinition of the city as a “creative metropolis”, which has dominated the self-image and brand of the city from the 1990s and onwards.10

When discussing the example of Manchester, it is interesting that the context of the music is, at the same time, extremely local and extremely global. It would be too far-reaching to describe these relationships in detail, but the development of the “Manchester sound” which took place in the 1980s drew heavily on different aspects of “black” music, produced in the large industrial metropolises in the northern part of the USA. In this way globalisation is, to a great degree, reflected within music scenes.

It is one of the areas wherein the exchange across geographical and cultural boundaries has been going on for along time, and it is, possibly, also the area in which a global culture first came into being during the 20th century. As early as the 1950s, Elvis was a global cultural phenomenon.

Mediated, initially, through record releases and radio and, later, by means of television and the internet, music is globally accessible. Today, it is, consequently, not possible to define new music as local in the sense of it being autonomous and created without inspiration from or relations to the outside.

The same applies to architecture, even if the rate of turnover is significantly lower than for popular music.

Despite globalization, the particular atmospheres of urban areas, in some cases, influence music and turns it into something which stands apart. The same can be said about what Löw calls the intrinsic logic of cities. In the case of Manchester, the intrinsic logic relates to the circumstance that the city, as one of the first industrial metropolises, has a centuries long tradition for being open to incomers, but also to the importation of music along with the ships which brought goods to the city.11 In Chicago, a particular type of urban blues came into being.

One of the reasons for this development was that many of the farm workers who moved to the city from the Mississippi Delta Area, brought with them a particular version of the country-blues tradition, which was, later, reinterpreted in this new context.

In Chicago, it was influenced by the industrial metropolis due to the locations it was performed

CONTEXT 2010/2011

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Tom Nielsen

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A common aspect of the Chicago blues, the Manchester punk and the hip hop of Aarhus V is that these scenes and musical expressions are a part of a global musical culture in which inspiration flows across history and genres, but also that they are all dependent on and have contributed to a particular urban atmosphere. The urban atmosphere thus describes a possible frame for understanding the concept of context on an urban level. The idea that it relates both the the humans acting in the space as well as the space itself, along with the relation to subjective experience makes the concept of atmosphere useful as a way of both broadening both also specifying the concept of context on an urban scale.

These images are taken from MARWAN’s video ’Min blok’ (My Block). The identification between artist, music and urban environment is evident. The video contains a series of typical elements of the hip hop genre which, when placed in the Aarhus V context, give new meaning to the understanding of this location. © TabuRecords

in, which were quite different, (often bars with a permanent piano-player who had to be included and who extended the orchestration) due to new technological possibilities for making recordings, and due to a musical environment which was compressed in black ghettoes resulting in the different musicians and bands blending, helping and inspiring each other. 12

Another example is the hip hop environment in Aarhus V, the western part of Aarhus, which is very much inspired directly by the templates of the global hip hop,13 and more specifically the West-coast and Dirty South rap from the US, but which also has a local expression determined by the physical context in Aarhus V. At first glance there is, e.g. for a minority Palestinian in the Danish welfare state, a possibility of identification with American role models in relation to lifestyle and the basic self-perception as belonging to a minority. The general conditions of living in Aarhus V are, however, rather different from those of an African American living in a large city in Texas.

The specific context provides other possibilities and challenges:14musicians are being offered good free studio facilities in a “rap academy” sponsored by the municipality, and “there are even elevators in the ghetto”.15 Other circumstances take on more importance, and the global musical templates, the textual universe and the visual part of the music (in music videos) are characterised by some degree of adaptation to local conditions: “nigga” becomes the Danish derogatory term “perker” and the worn-down trailer park becomes large modernistic housing blocks undergoing constant renewal and surveillance, meeting places “in the darkness on the edge of town” become illuminated and newly swept parking spaces at the shopping centre, et cetera.

Atmosphere and context A common aspect of the Chicago blues, the Manchester punk and the hip hop of Aarhus V is that these scenes and musical expressions are a part of a global musical culture in which inspiration flows across history and genres, but also that they are all dependent on and have contributed to a particular urban atmosphere. The urban atmosphere thus describes a possible frame for understanding the concept of context on an urban level. The idea that it relates both the the humans acting in the space as well as the space itself, along with the relation to subjective

On the one hand, it is a question of something which is very specifically connected to the local, to the specifically experienced, to climate, to geology, and some elements of it might be said to be related to a phenomenological and essentialist concept of location or context as developed by Christian Norberg Schultz and his “genus loci” concept.

On the other hand, it is dynamic and connected to the situation or the present, it is immaterial and fragile because it is dependent on the relations between specific people and, moreover, cannot be demarcated geographically because there is continual inspiration and sensory perception based on cultural templates or borrowed from entirely different contexts [...].

experience makes the concept of atmosphere useful as a way of both broadening both also specifying the concept of context on an urban scale.

In an architectural-theoretical context, the concept of atmosphere is interesting because it is located between essentialism and relationism.

On the one hand, it is a question of something which is very specifically connected to the local, to the specifically experienced, to climate, to geology, and some elements of it might be said to be related to a phenomenological and essentialist concept of location or context as developed by Christian Norberg Schultz and his “genus loci” concept. On the other hand, it is dynamic and connected to the situation or the present, it is immaterial and fragile because it is dependent on the relations between specific people and, moreover, cannot be demarcated geographically because there is continual inspiration and sensory perception based on cultural templates or borrowed from entirely different contexts (e.g. the hip hop template from the USA in Aarhus V, the country blues of Mississippi Delta farm workers in Chicago). Identical ideas and musical typologies can be moved and reproduced all over the world, and parallels can be drawn to the concept of context discussed by Rem Koolhaas in “The Generic City”16, where all things local have to be understood in a mediated and global context, and what is most global may leave an impression as being the most local.

What we can learn from looking at the relation between musical environments and their physical environments is that a contemporary concept of context should be defined very broadly, and that it should be possible to base it on a phenomenological sensitivity without being blind to the fact that this sensitivity will always be mediated and inscribed in a wealth of local and global relations which, very quickly, level, exchange and hybridise every aspect hereof.

Notes: 1 Löw, Martina: The Intrinsic Logic of Cities, University of Darmstadt, http://www.stadtforschung.tu-darmstadt. de/media/loewe_eigenlogik_der_staedte/dokumente_ download/artikel/martinaloew_intrinsiclogicofcities.pdf Darmstadt.

2 Florida, Richard: The Rise of the Creative Class. And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure and Everyday Life. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

3 Böhme, Gernot: “Atmosphere as an Aesthetic Concept”

Daidalos no. 68, 1998, pp 112-115.

4 Albertsen, Niels: “Urbane atmosfærer”, Sosiologi i dag, no.

4, 1999, pp. 5-29.

5 Anderson, Ben: “Affective atmospheres”, Emotion, Space and Society 2, 2009, pp. 77–81.

6 There are many examples of relations between a physical context, a musical “scene” and a musical expression. Some of the most commonly referred to are: Vienna and the classical music during the late 16th century, Chicago and the blues in the 1940s and the 1950s, Detroit and, at first, Motown (50s/80s), later garage rock (1970s and again in the 2000s) and techno/house music (1980s&1990s), Liverpool and the beat music of the 1960s, NYC/Bronx and hip hop around 1980.

7 Bands such as Joy Division/New Order, A Certain Ratio, Section 25 and to some extent The Smiths. See, for instance, Robb, John: “The North will Rise Again”, Manchester Music City 1976-1996. London: Aurum Press, 2009.

8 One example is the relationship between the music of Joy Division and Manchester: “I see it as a direct environmental relationship, where you are informed by your environment and you relate back to that. It’s a sort of a two-way relationship. I think Joy Division is a ‘local’ band, […] they were of a particular time and place. Once you take them out of that, their meaning changes. […] collectively they relate to the aura of Manchester. They are what Manchester was like.” Liz Naylor in the documentary JOY DIVISION, dir.

Grant Lee, 2007.

9 I am referring to such movements as Madchester and acid-house with bands such as the Stone Roses, Happy Mondays, Inspiral Carpets, and not least the DJs at The Hacienda. Op.Cit, Robb, 2009.

10 Brown, A.; O’Connor, J. and Cohen, S.: “Local music policies within a global music industry: Cultural Quarters in Manchester and Sheffield”., Geoforum 31, 2000, pp. 437-451.

11 Haslam, Dave: Manchester, England. The Story of the Pop Cult City, London: Fourth Estate, 2000, p. 85.

12 Rowe, Mike: Chicago Blues. The City and the Music.

Cambridge: Da Capo Press, 1975.

13 Krogh, M.; Pedersen, B. :“Hiphop i Skandinavien” i Krogh, M.; Pedersen, B. eds,. Hiphop i Skandinavien. Aarhus: Århus Universitetsforlag, 2008, pp. 9-23.

14 “Many young people compare themselves to black people in the US, but I do not know if this comparison is valid” . We are a thousand times better off in Denmark than in Texas, but of course we have also done some bad shit.”

In ”Det nytter ikke at ligne en grønthandler”, Information 08/06/2007 http://www.information.dk/182434 15 Ibid.

16 Koolhaas, Rem: “The Generic City” in Koolhaas, R. (et.al) S, M, L, XL, Rotterdam: 010 Pub., 1995, pp. 1238-1264.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Boris Brorman Jensen

CONTEXT 2010/2011

When context is an event - on temporary and performative architecture

BY BORIS BRORMAN JENSEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, PhD, ARCHITECT

The increasing importance of the experience economy for the other sectors of the economy has brought about a marked growth in the number of new cultural buildings. More than 1,200 museums, concert halls, art galleries and other cultural centres have been built in Western Europe during the past two decades.1 A very large number of the new cultural institutions are extremely exclusive buildings into the bargain, and they represent some of the most outstanding contemporary architecture.

Simply think of the Tate Modern in London by Herzog & De Meuron, Luzern Culture and Congress Centre by Jean Nouvel or Kunsthaus Graz by Peter Cook and Colin Fournier. Good examples from the Danish scene would include Zaha Hadid’s extension of Ordrupgaard Museum, CUBO’s transformation of Nordkraft in Aalborg and the Natural Science Centre in Bjerringbro by NORD Architects. Personally, I have great expectations for the coming Elbphilharmonie in Hamburg, but the most classic example of the experience economy’s potentially successful interplay with architecture is probably the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. Frank Gehry’s signature project in the Basque country has actually been elevated to the status of a model for economic revitalisation and best practices in relation to the re-contextualisation of the city as a cultural and entertainment zone. Even the oil-wealthy clan regime in Abu Dhabi has gone along with the trend and has just bought one Gehry/ Guggenheim – and, so as not to fall behind any

Some types of cultural event deliberately try to think out of the box and actively experiment to influence and challenge established urban environments, for example by initiating and stimulating types of behaviour that are not normally at home in the places where they are actually played out. other state, also one Nouvel/Louvre, one Norman Foster, one Zaha Hadid and one Tadao Ando. The sheik’s power-shopping for cultural icons on Saadiyat Island2 involves much more than a transition to the experience economy; it tells us something about how cities in the post-industrial economy are being manoeuvred into position as spectacular producers of entertainment, education and events. In popular terms, culture is an expanding business area that provides the architect order with many excellent jobs because architecture in general (and not just ‘starchitecture’) has become a significant catalyst for development.3 Investments are huge, and all the new cultural institutions are naturally not only symbols of a flourishing civil society, they are also big business for both state and private players. The spectacular icon in Bilbao is being copied diligently as a business model in countless different contexts, but as a rule, the purpose is the same: to re-align economies with a long-term, permanent transformation of cities and the public sphere as a consequence. Architects have been designing cultural buildings for centuries.

Naturally, the challenge is to continually rethink the institutional framework to create new, hybrid forms,

try out new technologies and develop the cultural space. And in this connection, the profession has a long-standing, proud tradition to build on. The new, and in this connection, interesting aspect of the development is that the expanding cultural industry is to a great extent event-oriented. Many of the experience economy’s programmes are events that do not necessarily need a static or permanent architecture as a frame for their manifestations.

There are hundreds of exciting cultural offers outside the Guggenheim and the Louvre, and far from all art exhibitions and concerts are housed in traditional buildings with permanent addresses.

A large number of cultural arrangements, both great and small, establish their own context and temporary spaces. Some types of cultural event deliberately try to think out of the box and actively experiment to influence and challenge established urban environments, for example by initiating and stimulating types of behaviour that are not normally at home in the places where they are actually played out.4 Some cultural events travel around with their own scenographic architecture, and others take the form of events that primarily take place over time.

The point is that all of these new, ephemeral cultural institutions have gained relatively great importance for the economy of the knowledge and experience societies and thereby nourished the flowering of an exciting academic field that could be called the architecture of the temporary.

Temporary architecture as an ‘experimentarium’ A great deal of temporary architecture has been built down through history, and architecture has broadly speaking always worked with the scenographic aspects of everything from cities and landscapes to intimate spaces. Temporary architecture and event scenography are nothing new in this sense, and there are many good examples of temporary constructions that constitute significant architecture-historical references. The world exhibitions or Expos, as they are known today, are probably the most prominent exponents of this tradition and, at the same time, good examples of how temporary constructions have functioned as the objects of important architectonic experiments and as showcases for technological advances. Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace from 1851, Mies van der Rohe’s Barcelona Pavilion from 1929, which has been rebuilt and ensured a permanent existence into the bargain. Moshe Safdie’s Habitat 67 housing complex from the Montreal Expo 67, Buckminster Fuller’s megastructure from the same year, or MVRDV’s stacked landscapes from the Hannover Expo 2000 which sharply formulated some of the themes the drawing office later worked to realise in several different contexts. Still other, less temporary cultural events have also distinguished themselves as significant arenas for architectonic experiments. The Serpentine Gallery in Kensington

Gardens has been inviting prominent architects to design temporary pavilions on the lawn in front of the permanent exhibition building since 2000. In Berlin, the architect network, Raumlabor, has had temporary architecture as a special field since 1999. Raumlabor works in a place-specific manner and with mobile installations that are transported to various cultural events. They take part in cultural life as designers, but at the same time, their work has a clear activist character. Their constructions are often instruments with a political point that aim to do more than simply confuse the creative class or other target groups of culture consumers. Their installations function as critical scenographies that challenge the concrete urban space and point to new forms of application.

They could be called “disquieting ducklings”5 which, with relatively simple means, completely distort the given context through deliberate mood changes.

An example of this is their “kitchen monument” where a gloomy, dirty room under a motorway was briefly transformed into a cheerful local street kitchen. It is necessary to be in the right place at the right time to experience Raumlabor in action. The physical construction disappears rapidly, and the long-term effect of their projects is first and foremost established through memory. The physical context remains untouched, but the memories of and the narratives about the place have changed. All projects are connected with a certain event and are designed to disappear as soon as the occasion for them is no longer present. The members of the group therefore very deliberately strive to document their work, and they have developed a communication strategy that, in a certain sense, turns their work into a physical dimension of the new social media. A kind of Twitter architecture that transmits a vital physical message here and now – which is immediately afterwards filed in blogs and other publications. And in this connection, the event can become a virtual catalogue of interpretations which, for “initiated” internet surfers, will change the experience of the place for ever.

Temporary architecture often has an activist and social dimension, which is expressed in the works of the Japanese architect, Shigeru Ban, in particular. He has designed a large number of temporary constructions for refugees and victims of natural catastrophes in Italy, Turkey, Haiti and, most recently, Japan. Raumlabor’s activism criticises places and events and comments on them. Shigeru Ban’s temporary architecture rather has the character of direct humanitarian aid, and he often uses students as active helpers. At the other end of the spectrum, in the experimental interface between architecture, art and land art, there is the artist duo of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, for example. Their work often attempts to bring out a “different” beauty in buildings and landscapes – somewhat in the same vein as Olafur Eliasson. These are people who enrich the profession of architecture by not being just architects.

Panorama view of Vintergatan at Roskilde Festival 2011 Vintergatan’s many different spaces allow it to function as a lounge area and a meeting place. The design is very open and accessible; in this way Vintergatan facilitates shorter and longer stays equally well.

Photo: Henrik Ejnar Rasmussen.

Text: Frederikke Sophie Baastrup & Sigrid Marie Poulsen.-

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Aarhus School of Architecture

The heritage of events It lies in the definition of temporary architecture that it is built up, used and taken down, after which it falls into the category of combustible material at the waste disposal station or is stored and later built up again. But there are also good examples of temporary architecture that go further as their own aftermath or for which plans have been made as to how a given design can be transformed and enter into a new or changed context. As a material that can be recycled in a resource-related sense, as a reusable modular system in a constructive sense, as something functional that can be used for another purpose, and with regard to form as an object that undergoes a metamorphosis. Temporary architecture with a long-term, strategic starting point is an exciting development area that is highly relevant for many types of cultural event, one of the biggest of which is indisputably the Olympic Games. The temporary functions of the Olympic Games give impetus to comprehensive building activities, and candidate nations spend mindboggling sums of money on vying to host them.

Former Minister for Culture, Brian Mikkelsen, who was also the Minister for Sport, did not believe that Denmark could afford or had the stature to submit a bid for the Games, and this international event is clearly becoming a project for the great nations.

The Chinese authorities’ handling of the Games in 2008 is an excellent bad example of how cultural events and temporary architecture can interact.

The Olympic Games in Beijing lasted from 8 to 24 August, and the authorities razed several historically valuable residential areas to the ground for the purpose of building a new urban quarter, which today is a monumental ghost town. Mega-events such as the Olympic Games can naturally be utilised strategically and this is already in full swing in London. In this case, the event, which will take place next year, has led to the high-speed transformation of the run-down Lower Lea Valley industrial area.

This publication deals with context and understanding context, and it is naturally interesting in this connection that an event such as Roskilde Festival can bring about a completely new urban development. That event can so to speak create cities, and that context is not just something we inherit and carefully build on, but is also to a great degree a result of the narratives and the events we create here and now.

The Olympic Games in London will in all probability set a new standard for the exploitation of the event as something other and more than a PR stunt on a gigantic scale. There is often talk of the “legacy” after the Olympic Games, and the transformation of the temporary architecture of the Games will take years, but the ambition is that the event will benefit local people and give the entire quarter a decided lift.

Musicon and its virtual sister city Each year at the end of June, the show ground at Roskilde is transformed into the fifth biggest city in Denmark, complete with residential quarters, market places and service institutions. Roskilde Festival has architects to plan and design the event which attracts more than 100,000 people and involves about 25,000 volunteer helpers. The festival is naturally a musical event, but the arrangers want to do more than simply entertain people, and they have experimented with

the development of temporary installations for many years. Work is carried out purposefully at the festival to create new social spaces and opportunities for selfexpression with the help of various types of temporary architecture. The well-defined physical space and the limited time horizon of the festival define a very special framework within which everyday, collective social conventions can be exceeded, something the temporary architecture helps to support and stimulate. In this sense, Roskilde Festival is a kind of laboratory for trying out new public arenas. The festivities and the music programme last for eight days, but the effect of the social pressure-cooker is lasting and potentially rich in perspectives.

Sociologists and urban researchers are in full swing studying the event’s dynamic and its implications for the world outside the fence.6 Festival arrangers have collaborated with various educational and research environments for many years, and even Roskilde Municipality has finally discovered the opportunities that lie in a more committed partnership with the temporary city. A secretariat has been set up, and the establishment of a sister city on the other side of Holbæk motorway, which is intended to build on the festival’s synergy effect, is well in hand.

“Roskilde Municipality will create a neighbourhood which will strengthen the city’s opportunities in the field of experience economy.”7 The new “creative neighbourhood” is called Musicon, and the intention is that it will “be a motor for the transformation of Roskilde into a city with even sharper focus on culture, cultural business, education, events and housing.”8

This publication deals with context and understanding context, and it is naturally interesting in this connection that an event such as Roskilde Festival can bring about a completely new urban development. That event can so to speak create cities, and that context is not just something we inherit and carefully build on, but is also to a great degree a result of the narratives and the events we create here and now. This perception may appear banal, but in a Scandinavian context, there has been a longreigning, highly static view of context as an almost holy character alliance between place, climate, history and the building tradition which has often made it necessary to confront the past or to begin from scratch if new thinking was required. In this sense, performative and temporary architecture open up a new middle path based on active participation and ensure new types of ownership and inclusion in urban development.

Notes: 1 Cf. Carsten Thau “Arkitekturen i kulturens strømme betragtninger i anledning af nutidig byudvikling”, in Jensen, J.B. (ed.): Kulturplaner - fra velfærdsplanlægning til kulturel byudvikling. Copenhagen: Bogværket, 2008.

2 See: http://www.saadiyat.ae/en/masterplan/saadiyatcultural-district.html.

3 See Marling, Gitte; Kiib, Hans & Jensen, Ole B.: Experience City.dk. Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2009. .4 At the more political end of the scale, the Love Parade in Moscow can be mentioned. The arrangers attempt to confront the extensive homophobia in the Russian state apparatus by turning up in front of official buildings and other ‘hetero-monuments’ in tight underpants.

5 The Disquieting Duckling is the title of an Asger Jorn painting from 1959. “The disquieting duckling took its point of departure in the fear caused by the atomic bomb’s mushroom cloud, but the motif with the outsize duckling in the little pond has been the subject of many interpretations. In our day, it could be an illustration of the fear created by genetic engineering.” (http://www.dmol.dk/ billede_info.asp?genst_id=16380) 6 Most recently, Marling, Gitte & Kiib, Hans: INSTANT CITY @ ROSKILDE FESTIVAL, Aalborg: Aalborg Universitetsforlag, 2011.

7 http://www.musicon.dk/webtop/site.aspx?p=3398.

8 Op. cit.

Staff, Roskilde Festival project, the bachelor’s degree programme 2010/2011: assistant professors Stefan Rask Nors, Rasmus Grønbæk Hansen, Helle Christensen, Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen, Christian Dahl, Thomas Clemmensen, Stefan Darlan Boris, Christian Carlsen and associate professors Lena Kondrup Sørensen & Boris Brorman Jensen.

Boris Brorman Jensen

Daylight rendering, - captures how the installation fills out the empty site and makes it an inspiring place to be. Rendering: the students. Text: Frederikke Sophie Baastrup & Sigrid Marie Poulsen.

Architecture students designed and built an installation at Roskilde Festival 2011

By Sigrid Marie Poulsen & Martin Lynnerup, bachelor students

At this year’s Roskilde Festival, it was possible to experience a new, interesting habitat designed by bachelor students from Aarhus School of Architecture. The installation integrated space, light and materials in a novel way, and the initiative-takers from the festival were extremely enthusiastic about it when they revealed the winning proposal during an event at the school.

Vintergatan The installation was called Vintergatan, which means the Milky Way in Swedish. The title refers to the principal motif of the installation: a ribbon of light that framed the space in front of the Pavilion Stage. During the day, the installation was a natural resting place and somewhere to hang out between concerts. During the night, it created a ribbon of light that was a preferred gathering place for the many visitors to the festival. The installation comprised various triangular modules that could be combined to create a multitude of distinctive, exciting spaces. It “grabbed” the flow of people and provided a setting for life in the area. In addition to establishing a place to sit in and relax, Vintergatan was a prominent landmark in the area. The Vintergatan project was designed with the focus on the use of reusable materials – and within the framework of a very limited budget. It was a challenge to get such a great effect from cheap, simple materials: “Most people can come up with good ideas, but the challenge is realising them – especially on a tight budget, and we were obliged to be creative in a completely new way”, related architecture student Anja Nørgaard.

New collaboration The project was the result of a collaboration between Roskilde Festival and Aarhus School of Architecture in which 125 bachelor students worked for two months to develop it for the festival’s Pavilion area. The basic need for seating and shelter was the point of departure for the development of the installation. Roskilde Festival also wanted the students to develop the installation to create an extraordinary spatial experience for festival visitors. The Pavilion area, where the installation was built, is the festival stage for up-and-coming musicians and a base for the creative “growth layer”. And that was precisely the reason why the aspiring architects’ installation was located there. “The result of the collaboration with Aarhus School of Architecture far exceeded the expectations we had before we began the project”, said Signe Brink Pedersen, project manager for Roskilde Festival’s cultural partnerships.

Realisation The students from the school were responsible for building the entire project. They had to travel to the area a week before the festival began, wield drills and get their hands dirty.

And it was a new challenge for all of the year’s 125 students to work together as a team.

The collaboration gave them a unique opportunity to follow a project all the way from the drawing board to reality. “It was great to have the opportunity to realise a project at such an early stage of our studies”, was the verdict of architecture student Jorge Gonzalez.

In addition to Vintergatan, two smaller projects were also built and designed by architecture students: “Nature Box” and “Northern Lights”.

The new bachelor’s degree programme Cooperating on projects is part of the academic and educational development of the school’s bachelor’s degree programme, explains Associate Professor Boris Brorman Jensen, Aarhus School of Architecture: “One of the intentions of the Roskilde collaboration was to bridge the gap between theory and practice by allowing teaching to take its point of departure in down-to-earth problems and provide students with concrete experience in realising their projects”.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen

CONTEXT 2010/2011

"Everything keeps moving, nothing stays the same."

- on becoming with context in the work of SANAA

BY ANNETTE SVANEKLINK JAKOBSEN, PhD, ARCHITECT

Becoming with context Context is not background for architecture, it is part of it. As in other art forms: film, literature and relational art, the correlations between a specific work and the work’s exterior is, also in the field of architecture, something that folds into the practice as a discussion of content, form and methods.

Tendencies within contemporary architecture go towards acknowledging living reality and changes that occur over time as a form potential, and adapting it as an experiential quality. This is seen in transformation projects and rethinkings of, for instance, industry buildings and entire industrial areas. In such cases, temporality and change are factors that in a very direct manner relate former use and life to present use and life. An appreciation of the process behind something becoming something else is central to such projects. Also in terms of new building, there are ways of letting time and change play a significant role; for instance when contextual factors have a direct impact on the appearance and expression of a building or directly animate parts of a building. One of the earliest examples is Toyo Ito’s “Tower of Winds”, which interactively dissolves from solid form during the day to light and rhythms at night. Recently, this tendency has found expressions spanning from interactive projections in public space, as, for instance, in Rafael Lozano-Hemmer’s “Relational Architecture”, to the slowly growing and changing facades of Jean Nouvel’s “Musée du quai Branly”. SANAA, presently, carries such interest in time, change and relationality further in an architecture that relates to its exterior and to its users and subjects, not only visually and perceptually, but by expressively living the same reality and explicitly letting the experience of living-with, of being part of the same reality, be central to the work. This article suggests that SANAAs work makes explicit an architectural becoming with context.

A way to approach “becoming” is found in Gilles Deleuze’s and Felix Guattari’s ontological thinking of it as a continuous creation in-between milieus.1 In this view, nothing is ever static as in being one, or static as definable parts which are connected; but instead a continuous ontological process of becoming. The role that temporality plays in becoming is, according to Deleuze, that it eludes the present; that there is no distinction between before and after, between past and future in terms of a definable present.2 This can be related to Henri Bergsons understanding of continuous becoming, which is simply: “the living reality”.3 In regard to our perception of reality, the past and future is not separated from the present – we constantly draw on the past as continuously actualised, not as represented, but as lived with the present and as the present lived with the past.

Such thoughts on processuality relate to architecture’s coexistence with context: the conditions of architecture, in the broadest sense, undergo changes; architecture has to be prepared for the unknown and uncontrollable, political and financial crises affect us globally. Changes and alterations are necessary, for instance in design processes where architects are familiar with techniques for provoking change and for incorporating change in request to programmatic flexibility, i.e. to establish

“The New Museum becomes with context in several ways. Besides adapting the artistic legacy of the neighbourhood as part of its own identity, the museum building relates formally to the surroundings through the performativity of material, light and visual changes.”

possibilities for alternate use - and in the simple fact that architecture is in a dynamic relationship with its surroundings and circumstances, its past and future; in the broadest sense, with context. If we regard context as such movement and vivacity, how can we make it work as a potential within architecture? The “with” and “within” are important in order to think architecture with context and conditions of becoming as a process. Consequently, a conceptual distinction between architecture, context and conditions is exactly that, conceptual; in living reality architecture and its context and conditions are not just related, but are correlative. So how will it all emerge if architecture, context and conditions become with each other?

To get a sense of the creative implications of such correlation it is worth noting the difference between potential and possibility in relation to the emergence of something. In Brian Massumi’s work, relating to Bergson and Deleuze/Guattari, “potential” is connected with emergence as becoming with conditions, and is thus different from simple possibility, which prescribes operations and possible interactions: “The distinction between potential and possibility is a distinction between conditions of emergence and re-conditionings of the emerged.”4 Take SANAAs design process as an example of becoming with conditions: during the design process, SANAA will, continuously, create conditions for their design, in order to continue repotentializing the direction of their architecture. Regulations such as conditions of form which are developed and which the architects decide to keep in the further process grow more and more stable as the process develops, until the point where they become standard. As the design process develops and decisions are made,

new conditions emerge as relevant. This process of As if they want emerging, gradually, converges into the design of a to resist possible building suggestion. Eventually it becomes a work presumptuous of built architecture. This means, that conditions are continuously developed in accordance with the and static identitydesign, and vice versa.5 In SANAAs view, creation definitions of what does not stop once the architects have done their their architecture job and the building has been built and handed over to owners and users – using, filling and living in a is, they create building is also a matter of creation; using space is architecture that a creative behaviour.6 Becoming continues as those clearly “does” conditions change. with context. The The New Museum, New York emphasis that the SANAA tends to create buildings that are open, ‘thin’ architects place in terms of material and construction dimensions, on such vivacity is and with a degree of transparency. As if they want to resist possible presumptuous and static identityclearly foregrounded definitions of what their architecture is, they in Kazujo Sejima’s create architecture that clearly ‘“does” with context. characterisation of The emphasis that the architects place on such vivacity is clearly foregrounded in Kazujo Sejima’s The New Museums characterisation of The New Museums Bowery Bowery site on Lower site on Lower Manhattan: “It’s the one thing that’s Manhattan: "It’s the truly characteristic of that street. Everything keeps moving, nothing stays the same.” 7 This might seem a one thing that’s truly rather non-characteristic characterisation of a street; characteristic of that one that would fit many other project sites, streets street. Everything and neighbourhoods around the globe. However, keeps moving, nothing when considered in relation to the level of openness that often characterises SANAAs architecture, the stays the same."7 quote is more likely a key to understanding their take on abstraction-reality. What, in the first place, seems to be a general and non-site-specific quality is the exact opposite: a refined potentialization through abstraction of the most specific character. The

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Aarhus School of Architecture

potential of movement of the Bowery reaches beyond the most obvious types of movement: infrastructural and other movement patterns connected with the body displacing itself from one place to another.

It is, instead, a non-relating movement of change potential.

The New Museum is built with the past of the Bowery in mind and is experienced with it.

In American film director Lionel Rogosin’s 1956 documentary/fiction film “On the Bowery”8, on the life of the 1950s on New Yorks Skid Row, the Bowery, the street and the neighbourhood are shown as partly covered by an elevated railway which literally creates a street in shadows and darkness. The darkness of the street accentuates the subject matter of the film: the life of the Bowery men, “the Bowery bums”; “There is no man here today that started out to end up at the Bowery”, as the Bowery Mission minister puts it. The storyline stylistically emerges through life on the street, with a cast primarily consisting of non-professional actors and local people; the director has wanted to show life as realistically as possible, narrated from within. Today the Bowery has become home to the New Museum, new in terms of its content (contemporary art) and its new ideas towards exhibiting art: its original intention was to be an “anti-museum”, which is why the museum has existed about thirty years in smaller offices and galleries before applying the institutional identity that is related to having an actual museum-building.

“It lacked the identity that a body can give […]”.9 The New Museum relates to the artistic contextuality

The continous renewing of the Serpentine Pavillon’s appearance where reflections change and orientation seems blurred, is not a newness in terms of providing an ideal answer to being in the world, but an experience of relations changing. of the Bowery; in the years that have followed after Rogosin’s portrait of the Bowery as New York’s Skid Row it has housed many acknowledged artists and writers of whom Mark Rothko and William Burroughs are but a few. The Bowery’s rich artistic life in the 20th century is now mapped and exhibited online by the New Museum, describing the cultural legacies which provide a background for the art life of today as part of the museum’s own becoming with it. 10

The Serpentine Pavillon 2009.

Annette Svaneklink Jakobsen

“…we want to build relationships.” 11 The New Museum becomes with context in several ways. Besides adapting the artistic legacy of the neighbourhood as part of its own identity, the museum building relates formally to the surroundings through the performativity of material, light and visual changes. SANAA has pre-conditioned the vivacity of the building and the relationship with the surroundings by perforating the skin of the ‘boxes’ and slightly blurring the façade. The façade is doubled with a layer of expanded aluminium mesh and a layer of glass which gives the building a visually receptive surface that will subtly follow changes in the daylight and adapt to the colours that surround it, while still maintaining its formal definition. The blurring transparency renders visible the potential of architecture/context-transition for creating contextual passages. Stan Allen, in his essay on “SANAA’s Dirty Realism”, makes the very important point that the use of a rough, industrial façade material as a mesh should not be mistaken for representing the roughness of the Bowery neighborhood: “The expanded metal absorbs light, softening the profile from a distance in ways that glass could never do, and it changes color and character with the variable light of the city. […] for SANAA, materials are not chosen for their semiotic references, but for their optical and social performance.”12

In the essay Allen discusses his own attempt, some years earlier, to relate the simplicity of forms, which characterises SANAAs architecture, to minimalism. But “the architects are not satisfied to produce an architecture that begins and ends in refined details and sophisticated material choices.”13 Allen’s experiences on site with works of the architects convince him of the opposite; “evidence of daily life spills out everywhere”.14 The term dirty realism which originally described a movement in American writing, refers back to rough milieus like the Bowery and to a directness in terms of showing life as it is.

This characterisation fits SANAAs Bowery project (if one wishes to apply an ‘ism to the work of the architects), but even with this ‘ism Allen, possibly, narrows down their projects’ general architectural potential too much; dirty realism seems to connote a certain delimitation of content.

SANAA has created architecture where becoming performs more explicitly as expression; an expression of in-between becoming with materiality, subject and context. This is the case in their temporary London Serpentine Gallery Pavillon, 2009, where reflecting aluminium literally charge the pavilion with relation-creating potential.

Rather than being dirty realism the reality of this specific work more likely results from a continuous process of creating relations. Thresholds between pavilion, context and visitors are intentionally blurred through a continuously emerging visibility and interaction that gives the visitor an experience of being part of a process of architectural becoming.

The continous renewing of the Serpentine Pavillon’s appearance where reflections change and orientation seems blurred, is not a newness in terms of providing an ideal answer to being in the world, but an experience of relations changing – and furthermore, the experience is doubled by the architects’ idea of making it the formal expression of the architecture of the pavillion. It is a process in-between temporalities and in-between milieus.

The roughness of the Bowery has now been upgraded in close coexistence with its development so far - and provides an indication of the direction of the future.

The New Museum as institution and the Bowery site now together face the challenge of balancing being an art institution in this place with maintaining the museum’s and the Bowery’s potential to “keep moving”. The formal tendencies of changeability, which are seen in the Serpentine Pavillon, seem almost emblematic to SANAAs acknowledgement of movement and change as a potential in architecture.

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As such, the way these examples of architecture discuss architecture’s becoming with context give a clear indication of how this can be approached as life, function, form and subjectivity. This issue points to a broader architectural discussion of how qualities can be maintained while new are created, and it underlines the responsibility of architects and builders to continue to develop techniques on a level of abstraction-reality which ensures continuous creation.

Notes: 1 Deleuze, Gilles and Guattari, Felix: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Scizophrenia. Trans. Brian Massumi, New York and London: Continuum, 2004.

2 In the “First Series of Paradoxes of Pure Becoming”, Deleuze writes on Alice and “Through the Looking-Glass”: “She is larger now; she was smaller before. But it is at the same moment that one becomes larger than one was and smaller than one becomes. This is the simultaneity of becoming whose characteristic is to elude the present.” In Deleuze, Gilles: Logic of Sense. Trans. Mark Lester, Charles Stivale, London: The Athlone Press, 1990, p.1.

3 Bergson, Henri: Matter and Memory. Trans. N.M. Paul and W.S. Palmer, New York: Zone Books, 1991, p.34.

4 Massumi, Brian: Parables for the Virtual. Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2002, p.9.

5 See the conversation between Agustin Pérez Rubio and Kazuyo Sejima & Ryue Nishizawa “Feeling at home with SANAA” in Chermayeff, Sam and Pérez Rubio, Agustin and Sakamoto, Tomoko, eds.: Houses. Barcelona: ACTAR and MUSAC, 2007, pp. 9 – 19.

6 GA Architect: Kazuyo Sejima, Ryue Nishizawa 2006 – 2011.

Tokyo: A.D.A. EDITA, 2011, pp. 11-12.

7 Grima, Joseph and Wong, Karen, eds.: Shift: SANAA and The New Museum. New York and Baden: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Lars Müller Publishers, 2008, p.37.

8 Rogosin, Lionel: On the Bowery. DVD, Carlotta Films, 2010.

9 Op.cit., Grima and Wong, p.5.

10 http://mediaspace.newmuseum.org/boweryartisttribute/ 11 Grima and Wong, op.cit., p.8.

12 Idenburg, Florian: The SANAA Studios 2006-2008. Baden: Lars Müller Publishers and Princeton University, School of Architecture, 2008. p.60.

13 Ibid p.58.

14 Ibid p.59.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Karl Christiansen

From ‘ugly duckling’ to ‘black swan’

POETICS of TECTONICS

BY KARL CHRISTIANSEN, PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

trivialisation of the new which has been created – its wings need clipping!

ESSAY

The Sydney Opera House

In connection with the research project TOWARDS A TECTONIC SUSTAINABLE BUILDING CULTURE, the international cooperative project CONCRETE TECHTONICS (University of Technology, Sydney), and the local academic platform DIGITAL TECTONICS this essay examines the relation of tectonics to and the background it provides for concrete architectural form.

The new New architecture is generally looked askance at. This is an unavoidable condition.

This condition applies to art in general; at least if it really is art, and it is only art if it is able to contribute with something which is absolutely new.

This is what it does, if it is art.

The new is strange. And the strange is frightening and, consequently, needs to be bullied. It, threateningly, presents our preconceptions in a new light, this brings with it the danger of having to reassess, and possibly rearrange, our lives and the way we control them, ”Better the devil you know” et cetera.

This is why new architecture is always opposed. This capsizing manoeuvre is, consequently, a reality, even though it is sometimes unsuccessful because powerful authorities are able to force through “harmful” new architecture. If this happens, a conventionalising project aiming at “rendering harmless the damage done” begins. This project lays claim to predictability, explainability, normalisation and

There are countless examples of this. One of the more obvious examples is the Sydney Opera House.

Wind-filled sails, the hulls of ships, spaceships, mussels, clouds, waves and turtles engaging in group sex, these are some of the metaphors which have been used. But the house is none of these things, the house is what you see, when you see, and it has never been seen in this way before. It is a form which is created as a rare and stubborn piece of archi-tectural work on the edge of and in tune with contemporary technology. It cannot be expressed in words - in other words - it needs to be seen.

This was precisely the problem of Jørn Utzon: he could not meet the demand for explaining in advance what he intended to do, he was unable to do so because what he did was not imagined before it was carried out - imagined through the material.

And because it had never been done before, it had not been imagined before, and you cannot say what has not yet been imagined.

In this particular instance, it was not a question of providing, bringing forth or producing something which was already known. It was something new – true creation.

Merry Christmas In direct translation, Καλά Χριστούγεννα means happy birth of Christ. The last five letters: genna (somewhat disrespectfully transcribed) centre around the emergence, appearance, procreation, creation

or birth of something. There is, however, with all respect, nothing decisively new in a birth from the womb of a mother. It is rather a repetition which is limited in its ability to surprise: either she or he - a bringing forth.

Creation is something altogether different. When “God created Man” must be a statement which is based on the creation of newness. Γένεση is a Greek term for this particular creation of newness; the creation of the world, the creation of life, to bring into existence something absolutely new. We call this Genesis.

What is important is the differentiation between re-petition and the absolutely new. The firstmentioned is, the latter needs to take an active part in, the creation of architecture.

Genesis Creation is a confrontation between the real and the imaginary. It is not pure repetition (the real), for, if so, there would be nothing truly new. Yet it is neither purely imaginary, because in order to understand anything at all, it will have to be understood by means of something we are familiar with. But in what way can we reach for the unknown and the new within the imaginary when we have nothing but the known within the real to reach with? That would be doing something — which it is not possible to do! Genesis is a way of reaching which belongs to creation.

We are the ones who initiate genesis, using real and known material, which is operated technically, based on real, known, clear rules and systems.

Subsequently, the generic process mutates in accordance with its point of departure, and nothing else.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

While we are, little by little, rejected and our means of control are taken away. The result is a specific autonomous and depersonalised form created by genesis and not by us, who, however, sacrificed ourselves and who initiated it.

You do something – you cannot do?

Tectonics Genesis is tectonic in nature. The created form has coalesced with its origin.

Analogous to genesis, it is Material, subjected to an operation, now a Technique, which generates a Form.

There needs to be a special closed relationship within the M/T/F constellation. Nothing must be allowed to enter and nothing must be allowed to escape. The constellation must close around itself when it participates in the creation of the archi-tectural form, where it acts as an axiom.

Geologically The upper crust of the globe consists of the material which constitutes the tectonic continental plates of the lithosphere. The operation consists in the movement of these plates in relation to each other: depressing, drawing or displacing, and the form which is created on the surface of the earth consists of mountains, crevices or faults. Or the like.

Rock is the material which is detached from mountains when they weather. The operation is that these fragments fall towards earth (gravity) and gather at the foot of the mountain, and the form is a talus cone.

In both examples the result is tectonic forms, tectonic because the form equals its origin, no more, no less, but precisely.

Thus, geology repeatedly generates a pure tectonic form, although the ancient Greeks were probably unaware of this when they named this phenomenon.

Etymologically ANCIENT GREEK (approx. 800 BC – approx. 600 AD) As it is often the case with Greek terminology, tectonics is a many-faceted term. We need to interpret it. In general it, however, refers to a material which is processed in order to achieve a form.

τέκτονες refers to anybody who processes a material. Τέκτων refers to woodworkers, carpenters, ship’s carpenters, master builders, any artist who makes something, horn workers, yes even blacksmiths and poets. The term is intertwined with τέχνη; the craft which includes poetry and vice versa.

Art, consequently, is a part of tectonics; flanked by: construction, making, framing, forming, creating, building, and skilled in the art of building.

An originator, someone who creates, a schemer. Τεκτοσύνη means architecture.

MODERN GREEK For τεκτονικός two interpretations are provided: the one related to geological tectonics (here we are at last) but also μασονία which means freemason… Μασονία is related to masonry. Whereas, in antiquity, tectonics is often related to wood the focus is now, suddenly, on stone. As a concept tectonics is, consequently, not tied to any specific material. Τέκτονας (ο) means freemason. Why is that?

A particularly systematic development of buildings which tested the boundaries and reached for the sky, mainly related to cathedrals, took place in Western Europe from 1200 to 1400. This development also resulted in and developed freemasonry!

The guilds of the time connected masons geographically. One group was able to ”liberate” itself and found its own guild, which meant they were free to work in different locations. This mobility continually resulted in new knowledge which freemasons collected, systematised and developed into new knowledge of architecture and the art of building.

Karl Christiansen

Freemasonry is a discipline which is related to the art of alchemy of antiquity. It was hardly possible to create gold from lead, as the legend has it.

Still, some kind of refinement did take place, also of the alchemist himself; base man was refined (gold) for civilization. This was also the theme of the guilds which freemasons formed; to work with the individual on an artistic, philosophical and psychological level in order to achieve a deeper insight in general, specifically founded on and for the development of the art of building. These two aspects: he who creates and what was created were aspects of the same issue and were inseparable. During the Middle Ages the term “freestone-mason” included stone cutters, master builders as well as the work of architects and was related to tectonics.

Archi-tectonics We discuss tectonics as refinement. The refinement of raw stone cut in a way that creates building elements for architecture. Yet, at the same time, he who cuts/ creates architecture is himself refined. For he who creates is a part of the origin of the created form.

Contrary to geo-tectonics, which is a part of nature, archi-tectonics includes technique, which is culture, and it, in turn, includes us.

The amorphous This is why the author is included in the closed MT-F constellation I mentioned.

Material, technique (including the author) and form are inseparable and are, consequently, undifferentiated elements of the archi-tectonic.

In a similar way as when we, during the process of creation, work at negating the causality between what we do, the way we do it, and what we do it with we have to risk ourselves and become undifferentiated to and a part of what we create. The undifferentiated is the amorphous.

EUCLID (365-300 BC) Euclid named the amorphous when he conceived its opposite. He described 23 different definitions as being the central aspect of plane geometry. To this he added 5 different spatial polyhedra - known as the five platonic solids. Based on these sheer differences it would be possible to describe the world in geometric terms, he said. And whatever defies this description is outside the schema; άσχημος, i.e. ugly, indecent, uneducated, irregular, formless - without form; άμορφος = amorphous.

And we truly have taken on the habit of living our lives schematically, exclusively as differences. One year separated administratively from the next. The first decade differentiated from the next.

The first, second and third age. Childhood, youth, adulthood, mid-life; and then old age is proclaimed.

You and me, black and white, up and down, outside and inside, before and after, light and dark, dry and wet, good and evil, sun and shadow, right and wrong, hard and soft, wise and stupid, high and low, poor and rich, thick and thin, true and false, form and content, fire and water and heaven and earth, and classical and baroque and Euclidian and amorphous.

Yet before life, all was one, undivided, undifferentiated - amorphous.

All the way back to the time before conception we must have been, to the degree we were anything at all, dissolved in the world, one with the world in one singular now outside time and space. It was this now which Uranos was unwilling to give up, in the time before time, through his eternal embrace of Gaia.

After life has ended we once more dissolve.

With time we become liquid, ashes and dust until we are once again one with the world in one singular eternal now. A return to undifferentiated time and space - the amorphous.

In all of this cosmic circle of eternity and infinity, our only means of taking action is while we live our lives, between birth and death. This is where the real is played out, here, in between and by means

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of these differences, is it possible to do something.

This includes making a difference with regard to differences.

Death Still, it is quite interesting that we continually attempt to do something we are unable to do, and this to a very high degree through architecture. Something which is eternal, infinite, impossible. Tangled paradoxes which confirm their names with explanation problems because they are so non-schematic that nothing in life, no matter how specific, is capable of embracing them, and which, for this very reason, avoiding tedious repetitions, bring something absolutely new to market - this is the kind of paradoxes we are looking for.

We continually attempt to reach for something which is outside life, outside what is real, inside the realm of the imaginary, to reach for what is before and what is after, which is, in the end, the very same undifferentiated amorphous.

However, absolute lack of difference from the world results in the ultimate dissolution within it, and this is death. And when death is present we are not. And if we are not present, no difference will be made with regard to differences.

How can we work and develop to such a great extent and dissolve ourselves in the world to just the right degree that we are able to enrich the real part of this, life, with something absolutely different and new while avoiding that we dissolve completely and disappear, but are able to rescue ourselves again?

Like Odysseus we will experience the song of the sirens, but not as a swan song - we want to survive.

The thesis is that tectonics offers itself as a possible solution. Using any possible specific parameters, it is precisely capable of initiating a generic process which takes over our entire creative venture and which, while bypassing us personally, in the last resort, completes the mortal operation which positions an otherwise impossible poetry in a concrete work - a work of architecture.

After all architecture is not the only thing that matters in our life – yet it is a question of feinting death!

References: - The Ugly Duckling. The fairytale of H.C. Andersen about a swan born in a duck-yard which had to be bullied because it was different.

- Black Swan theory. A theory from 2007 by the American philosopher Nassim Nicholas Taleb about unpredictable occurrences and how their factuality is subjected to the simplifying explanations of hind-sight.

- Black Swan. A movie from 2010 by Darren Aronofsky about a ballet dancer who seeks out death in order to achieve/experience perfection.

- Swan Lake. A classical ballet with an equally classic morale: in order to obtain what/who you desire the most but which/ who is unattainable/of another world you have to sacrifice your life.

14

Aarhus School of Architecture

Ole Egholm Pedersen

Material evidence in a digital context

- exploring the tectonic potentials of concrete

BY OLE EGHOLM PEDERSEN, PhD STUDENT, ARCHITECT

The aim of this article is to describe a method for exploring the tectonic potential of concrete in a digital context. The method is put forward on the basis of an experiment that has been developed through parametric design, while allowing material evidence to play a central role in the shaping of the experiment.

Background Concrete is the most widely used material in contemporary building practice. Its composition of readily available natural resources, its constructive strength and its durability make it a cheap and reliable building material. At the same time concrete – in the current way it is produced and used - poses environmental, formal and technological problems. The environmental problem is that the production of concrete is tied to a large use of resources and generates an enormous amount of waste products: concrete also has a bad name due to the way it presents itself in the built environment. In the early 1980´s, architectural theorist Kenneth Frampton criticised the 20th century buildings constructed from repeated and standardised concrete elements.1 The buildings that have been created within the last decade show evidence of the urge to respond to the surroundings in a different way. This can be seen in concrete buildings where the standardised concrete elements are placed in varied formations to mask the appearance of repetition.

My hypothesis is that by investigating material properties and fabrication technologies, a design strategy can be suggested that will allow for the design of fully mass-customised concrete elements, better suited to respond to contemporary architectural challenges. Computers and CAM will play an important role in this as computers have the ability to control complex geometry, and robotics allows for production that breaks with the industrial paradigm of standardization. These possibilities are, however, yet to find their way into the production of concrete building components. The framework for my ex-

perimentation with utilizing parametric design to produce fully mass-customised precast concrete elements involves theory concerning tectonics, technology, digital form, and resources.

The term tectonics is used to describe complex connections between a material, the technology applied to that material, and the resulting architectural form. This definition is derived from the German architect and theorist Gottfried Semper who describes tectonics as the description of a unity including idea, action, construction, and building technique. Or, generally speaking: the unification of means and end.2

The relation to technology is based on Martin Heidegger’s view on the relationship between humans and the world in a modern, industrialised society. Heidegger warns about a positivist approach to technology, where technology is used to achieve a maximum output from resources (nature). Seeing technology in this light, Heidegger argues, allows for only one mode of truth – called revealing - and suppresses many others. Heidegger proceeds to suggest an alternative way of using technology in symbiosis with material and resources, pointing towards a more nuanced causal relation between a form or an idea and its execution.3 If we accept Heidegger’s arguments, then what is needed to enrich our world is ways of using technology that allow for truths which are more than strictly scientific or formal. In this case: the creation of concrete constructions that allows for a richer interpretation than it is the case in most concrete buildings today.

The first step in my investigations has been to identify and describe relations between a digital form, a chosen technique, the material concrete – and a construction, in order to start exploring where different modes of revealing can occur. These connections have been investigated by means of exploring the technology of CNC routing and mapping the different findings. This leads to the relations diagram below. The relations – especially the ones involving the material, mould, and technology are of a technical character and may seem trivial, but these relations may be of importance in terms of Heidegger’s

A sketch showing possible tectonic relations in the process from form to construction CONCEPT -> FORM

A form that is given tectonic qualities by means of the technology. E.g neccitating an alteration to the form, or by adding an extra layer of meaning

A form that can be realised in concrete in a way that exploids concstuctive and aesthetic potentials of the material

tranferring the concept to a mould -as elements or in-situ

MATERIAL

suggestion of an answer to the depleting of meaning. Heidegger argues that an artist or a craftsman can achieve an intimate knowledge about their craft, generating objects that can be clearly seen as arising from the potential of a material and the technique applied to that material. This is a case in point of a different mode of revealing that suggests a symbiotic relationship between man and nature.

Resources The idea of regarding materials in a richer light than what a market economy driven aesthetics allows, can be seen in the design strategy cradle to cradle, (CTC) in which materials escape being reduced to mere means to an end. A material is never to be seen as waste, but always as a resource. This notion enables a broader view of materials than their economical impact and mechanical properties. CTC divides materials into two categories: natural/biological and artificial/technical nutrients. The natural nutrients are viewed as part of a cycle. They are never waste, but become a part of nature after use (thus cradle to cradle rather than cradle to grave). The popular idiom is “waste equals food”. The artificial materials are basically the materials that nature can not break down and utilize as nutrition. These materials should be used with care in a closed cycle of use and re-use, in a way that does not downgrade the material.4

Material observations The method for investigating physical and digital relations is the development of a concrete sculpture called “hello world”- a constellation of masscustomised columns and beams. In the experiment, PETG plastic as a mould material and laser cutting as a technology are combined into a technique of casting unique concrete elements in folded plastic sheets. Laser cutting is capable of cutting complex shapes in the plastic material with a high degree of precision. The shaping of plastic sheets using a laser cutter is done by cutting and bending. A bending test of various plastic types reveals that thin PETG plastic is bendable, while other plastics are brittle and snap. Thicker PETG can be bent using a heat gun, provided dashed fold lines have been cut. If a cut is made the material has to be either glued or bolted back together, which adds to the complexity of form generation. To minimize complexity a concept for an optimised beam has been made using only bending.

The beam is tall and slim in the middle to cope with vertical forces, wide and low in the ends to cope with lateral shear forces.

sustaining the original architectural intention

MOULD concrete that is capable of adapting the geometry of the mould

TECHNOLOGY a technology that is suitable in shaping the mould material

TECHNIQUE a mouldmaterial that can cope with - or even express- the hydrostatic pressure

the best mould material for that technology

ability to read the mould material in the finished construction

Physical exploration of geometry and casting principle.

attention to curing, release capabilities and surface finish.

CONSTRUCTION The construction as an expression of the aesthetic and constructive potentials of concrete, i.e its shapeability and ability to cope with compressive forces

A construction that reveals the technology used

A sketch showing possible tectonic relations in the process from form to construction.

PETG is a part of the PET plastic family, one of the most widely used. It is easily recycled by melting at 260 degrees celsius, evaporating only CO2 and water.

Importantly, it has a structure that allows for infinite use and re-use without damage to the molecules. In cradle to cradle terms, it is a technical nutrient and should remain in a closed recycling process with no degrading. From this material investigation, the development of “hello world” identifies five parameters to form the basis for a script to further explore geometric possibilities and generate templates for laser cutting.

CONTEXT 2010/2011

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Ole Egholm Pedersen

15

Parametrics and spaghetti

A template for casting a unique concrete element. It is generated by a manufacturing script, which rely on input from the overall concept and the geometry of each element.

The script enables the placement of columns. Growing in complexity, the script is organized in linear manner. In computer programming this is called procedural coding, also known as “spaghetti-code”.

It is hard to read and thus hard to alter and improve.

The parametric model, however, greatly qualifies the physical models – allowing for precise moulds and the investigation of a number of variations that would have been hard to make up in analogue models. This, in turn, allows for more complex form-generation, where the inherent possibilities for cutting and bending the material are utilised.

Analysis Two challenges arise from this experiment: it is challenging to work with parametric models in a way where the different parts of the script are understood while the script grows large and complex. It is also challenging to use parametric models in a way which encourages exploration and does not limit it. This is especially true in digital modeling where material and technological evidence rather than a computational logic is the starting point.

The problem arises when the focus is turned towards trying to get the parametric model to express a 100% true replica of a physical model, as this imposes serious limitations on the exploration of form. Also, with the code arranged in procedural manner, it is easy to see the code as a linear process moving from A towards the final goal B. With all efforts turned towards perfecting the final goal, it is hard to grasp all of the behaviours between A and B, which may be relevant points for exploration in many directions – of either the casting technique, the geometry, or the arrangement of elements in a series of architectural concepts.

When parametrics is initiated as a tool for generating manufacturing output, it is easy to miss its potential to function as an explorative tool. Development is focused on elements rather than systems, members rather than a construction. Instead, use of parametrics in the early stage of sketching should boost a generative approach to quick investigations of many possible developments and uses of a system. As such, it should have a simplicity that allows for quick alterations, the addition of new geometry or new relations between existing geometry – at all times keeping the material, technology, and casting technique in mind. In other words, what is needed is an abstract and general parametric model based on overall conclusions from the physical models which can function as a test bed for numerous concepts, which is what parametric models do well.

Objects and classes The method was tested on a concrete structure called “hello world”. It consists of three columns and four beams, shaped and arranged in a composition that has been defined in a parametric model.

Notes: 1 Frampton, Kenneth: “Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance”, in Foster, Hal (ed.): The Anti-Aesthetic: Essays on Postmodern Culture. Seattle: Bay Press, 1983.

2 Semper, Gottfried: The Four Elements of Architecture. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

3 Martin Heidegger: “Die Frage nach der Technik” in The Question Concerning Technology and Other Essays.

New York & London: GARLAND PUBLISHING, INC, 1977.

4 McDohnoug, William & Braungart, Michael: Cradle to Cradle. North Point Press, 2002.

5 In this experiment the Rhino® plug-in Grasshopper® was used.

6 Lafore, Robert: Object-oriented Programming in C++. Sams publishing, 2002.

The development of “hello world” points towards the productiveness of splitting the parametric model into classes and objects. A strategy more familiar to software developers than architects and designers.

This division is purely organisational, meaning it can be implemented as a certain way of arranging and connecting the elements in the digital design tools.5 In this approach, parametric modeling is seen as the sketching of several objects simultaneously and the grouping of objects with similarities or connections in a class. The idea originates from computer programming. Software code can grow too complex to grasp when written in a linear manner, but intuitive,

transparent, and flexible when structured as objects and classes.6

An experiment with dividing the script into three classes of concept, manufacturing, and geometry has proved practical. As opposed to starting with one of the three, and then moving on one step at a time, all are defined and developed simultaneously. The arrangement of the script in concept, manufacturing, and geometry allows for easy identification of opportunities for altering the script. In this experiment it helped the exploration of material, structural, and contextural influences on the form.

With regard to material, it helps develop principles for creating fold lines. With regard to structure, it helps identify the information needed to test material stress and deformation by creating an external ‘object’ in Solid Works®, linked to Grasshopper® with Excel® as the mediator. With regard to the concept it allows for making quick tests of multiple organisations for the placements of columns and beams in a sculpture, where the distance between members will define their shape. In other, more complex, projects these influences could involve considerations regarding function, logic of assembly, material optimisation etc.

Conclusion My experiment with developing “hello world” shows that parametric models can support the generation of concrete structures which can respond to complex material, conceptural, and contextural relations. Abstract parametric concept models that are informed by material properties or a specific casting technique can work as a powerful tool for exploring several concepts which are all part of a tectonic logic.

The parametric models are seen as a tool which enables a generative process, exploring boundaries rather than defining solutions. The parameters inform the design in a way that can have a direct influence on architectural control. As such, the proposed method for combining materiality and technology with parametrics involves the use of parametrics as an explorative tool. Material and technological investigations form the basis for the digital model which prevent the generation of arbitrary, digital representations which would translate into complicated and expensive manufacturing techniques. The method involves a structuring of the script in classes and objects in order to keep track of the possible points of interference and development.

16

Aarhus School of Architecture

Niels Martin Larsen & Claus Peder Pedersen

From context to condition

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Slime Mold, from photo by Anita Vårbo Berglund, Pelle Hviid Andersen & Mateusz Bartczak.

Questions of context in generative architectural design

BY NIELS MARTIN LARSEN, PhD STUDENT, ARCHITECT & CLAUS P. PEDERSEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, PhD, ARCHITECT

Morphogenetic Studio is an experimental investigation of form-generating processes through use of digital as well as analogue tools. It is an exploration of how relations between the generic and the specific can be challenged by digital techniques.

In particular two major subjects are investigated and intertwined through these studies. One focus is on computational design, particularly looking into generative techniques, another focus is on digital production techniques and how it can be linked to the design process. Morphogenetic Studio integrates teaching and research into the field of digital tectonics and algorithmic design.

Context as the exchange between general principles and specific spatial conditions In architecture, the term context is often associated with a typological, morphological, structural and textural understanding of a specific environment which allows architects to design new buildings that display some form of kinship to the existing environment. Morphogenetic Studio is based on a different take on context. It explores spatial organisation based on general but dynamic and adaptable principles which allow for a specific formal and spatial unfolding in a given context. This unfolding is made possible through scripting and use of parametric software which makes it possible to develop and code threedimensional digital models. Using these techniques the models are developed to display specific spatial

configurations that respond specifically to an external context or, perhaps more precisely, (and less architecturally biased) to specific spatially determined conditions.

Condition as the internal logic of a structural and tectonic organisation The concept of condition could be extended to the structural organisation of a project. The use of scripting and parametric software makes it possible to describe the relationship between elements in space through rule bound relations rather than as explicitly defined geometry, which is traditionally the case in architecture. This creates a different relationship between part and whole. Morphogenetic studio explores the possibility of a bottom-up process rather than a traditional architectural top-down approach where the building parts are defined as constituent parts of a coherent whole. The generative techniques establish a different approach to the design process: here the designer, initially, describes and programs a framework of relations creating a system. The system develops autonomously with limited or no influence by the architect during an unfolding process. Rather than shaping the system directly, as in a typical design process, the architect defines certain properties or rules for the elements which are included in the spatial system, he subsequently allows the system to self-organise, or grow, into a type of spatial pattern, often with some type of optimisation guiding the process. Some forms of similar analogue generative techniques can be recognised in Antoni Gaudis hanging chain models and many of Frei Otto’s exper-

iments with shell structures, membranes, wet wool etc. Many of these principles can be defined as mathematical rules, which makes it possible to explore them extensively through use of computation. The difference from these earlier examples of form finding techniques is that contemporary computational approaches allow a more complex and varied use of determining conditions. Gaudi’s explorations were, for instance, determined by the uniform condition of gravity pulling hanging chains into catenary arches.

It would be possible to script a digitally based model which would be able to incorporate locally defined forces

Condition as the correlation between design and realisation The term condition could be understood as addressing all the factors that affect the development and realisation of an architectural project. Traditionally, architecture is developed through a number of distinct phases: sketching, project proposals, working drawings and realisation. Digital tools challenge this production logic. You could say that new conditions or relations within the design process occur. The parametric or scripted model can provide an accurate geometric basis which can form the basis of a digitally controlled production process. The relation between sketch models and final building can be more intimate and direct. Meanwhile, other parts of the design process become more dissociated, and may perhaps even change character: parametric models are labour intensive, complex and require an overview of how they can be established and the design

Morphogenetic Studio is an experimental investigation of formgenerating processes through use of digital as well as analogue tools.

Slime Mold By students: Anita Vårbo Berglund, Pelle Hviid Andersen & Mateusz Bartczak.

Morphogenetic Studio, Autumn 2010, Department of Architecture.

The project was based on certain properties extracted from studies of slime mold, such as capability of expansion and contraction. A mesh was generated in contextual relation to the studio space. The structure consists of numerous similar components, all geometrically different. Restrictions related to the production were laid into the form generating process to ensure that each component would work together in the structure.

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

process changes and becomes less immediate challenging the traditional role of the sketch as the visualization of an idea, and, potentially, even traditional notions of representation.

The proliferation of digital production techniques Digital production techniques such as CNC-milling and laser cutting are becoming generally available.

This opens a huge field of possibilities for variation and expression in architecture. At the same time, it encourages or even demands that the architect becomes involved in the whole chain of information flow, from the architectural design to the actual production machines. What is perhaps most important, it allows a feedback loop which can feed material and mechanical properties and constraints into the form generating process. This could be compared to the way many architects in the past would approach a design task, where the starting point might be the properties of a brick. The proportions and structural capacities of the brick would exist as a fundamental ingredient in the design process, regulating all decisions about tectonics, dimensions, structure, and often also defining the facade pattern and texture.

At the same time, the architect would possess knowledge about the mason’s craft and allow its implications to influence the building design.

A design-to-production feedback loop Now, what the combination of digital form generating tools and digital production machines offers is perhaps a way to re-establish a more direct connection between the designer and the realisation of the building. When the architect wants to make optimal use of the possibilities offered by digital production techniques, it automatically becomes necessary to engage with detailed information about the production and assembly logistics at a very early stage in the design process. You could consider this to be more demanding for the architect, but, in fact, a much more precise control of the actual result of the design is obtained. At the same time, the designer has an opportunity to embed the technical information in the digital form generating process and thereby enter a large variety of possible outcomes and also perform

From rendering by Ragnar Zachariasen & Mateusz Bartczak.

Niels Martin Larsen & Claus Peder Pedersen

optimisation procedures before major design decisions are made. It is exactly the potential of addressing the precise geometry directly in the form generating process which is important and which separates the generative techniques from other digital modeling techniques in which geometries are sculpted freely without necessarily having any knowledge of the underlying logic, thus making it much more laborious to find the exact measures needed for realisation.

Establishing knowledge and tools In the morphogenetic studio we try to investigate potentials and implications of these new possibilities and tools. At the moment, the software platforms are diverse and interlinked in multiple ways, on the one hand this allows the establishment of advanced exchange of information, on the other hand this makes it difficult to define a singular strategy for setting up the most suitable system for a specific task. The approach has been to use the programming language “Processing” as an open platform with large potential for development and inclusion of specialised so called plug-ins which makes it possible to exchange data with a large range of software. “Processing” almost automatically supports a self-organising approach to the form-generating process, and, at the same time, requires all operations which take place to be well defined. This means that systems of complex interactions can be established. Perhaps the most intriguing potential which emerges as a result of using digital generative techniques in the design process, is that it becomes possible to establish negotiations between diverse parameters. It means that structural, tectonic, environmental, and economic and, to some extent, aesthetic parameters can be embedded into the form generating process simultaneously. This method enables the designer to raise the limit of technical and aesthetic complexity in the project.

Conditions in architectural design The use of generative techniques in the design process forces the designer to look at contextual qualities in broader terms than as a question of similarity or contrast to the man-made or natural surroundings.

By substituting the term context by the term condition we point to a more general understanding of

From photo by Stephen Olson.

17

By substituting the term context by the term condition we point to a more general understanding of relations. In this case conditions refer to an abstract field of forces that is activated and used to inform the design through the use of computational techniques. relations. In this case conditions refer to an abstract field of forces that is activated and used to inform the design through the use of computational techniques.

This might very well lead to designs which, from a traditional contextual understanding, would appear to have no relation whatsoever to the surroundings, but which are, nevertheless, able to adapt to specific contextual conditions, relating for instance the lighting or climatic conditions of a site. The adaption to these conditions might, in turn, lead to a specific spatial and tectonic organisation which would require the use of specific structural and material solutions.

The exchange between scripted spatial models and digitally controlled fabrication tools create new design feedback loops where the physical properties and production techniques inform the design at an early stage, short-circuiting the traditional gradual progression from concept to design to physical realisation. In this sense conditions not only relate to an understanding of how a building is able to respond to the conditions it is situated in through the use of digital techniques. It also relates to a raised awareness towards the conditions that determine the interplay between design, construction and the material realisation of the building, and ultimately even the conditions of what architectural practice should or could be, by, perhaps paradoxically, reintroducing the notion of the architect as a craftsman.

Staff, Morphogenetic Studio, 2010/2011: Niels Martin Larsen, PhD student, Sebastian Gmelin, PhD student & Claus Peder Pedersen, Associate Professor.

From rendering by Anne Camilla Auestad & Liv Grete Strømme Fremgard.

Acetone

flux_

Void MakeGrid

By students: Ragnar Zachariasen & Mateusz Bartczak.

Morphogenetic Studio, Spring 2011, Department of Architecture.

By students: Rasa Marozaite, Trine Fredsø Guldmann Rasmussen, Stephen Olson & Dalius Martinaitis Morphogenetic Studio, Spring 2011, Department of Architecture.

By students: Anne Camilla Auestad & Liv Grete Strømme Framgard Morphogenetic Studio, Spring 2011, Department of Architecture.

The rendering shows how a standardized algorithm allows a structure of points and lines to achieve volume and dimensions. Thickness and smoothness of the shape is defined by certain rules reflecting the design intent where the overall expression to some extent is given by the predefined algorithm.

At a short workshop at the IAAC in Barcelona, the students performed a series of investigations with CNC-milling with the Alucubond material. The generative process was based on folding techniques and the experiments worked as feedback in the design process, where information about the production process and material properties was attained and more precisely addressed.

The structure is generated through a combination of algorithms. A virtual 3-dimensional grid exists as background for a dynamic process, where connections are made between points, depending on how they are attracted or repulsed by contextual elements and each other. The result is a structure, representing a stabilized situation containing programmatic and structural properties. In this case the goal was to allow complexity and unforeseen formations to occur, rather than optimization as such.

18

Aarhus School of Architecture

Inge Vestergaard & Lars Henriksen

High Density Living, Kreuzberg, Berlin, Spring 2011. Student project by Bjarni Árnason.

Respect for context Approaching sustainable architecture

BY INGE VESTERGAARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT & LARS HENRIKSEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

”Sustainability means – meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. “ Brundtland, UN World Commission 1987

Where architecture is concerned, the sentence above from the Brundtland Report, “Our Common Future”, means that sustainable architectonic form generation must take into account that the values and resources (materials and energy) used in the creation and practice of architecture can either be recreated, like solar and wind energy, or renewable, like wood, or can be recycled, like steel, glass and stone. Or, in other words: the characteristics of sustainable architecture are that the sustainable is experienced as attractive and appropriate in its context (climatic, cultural, social and economic) and must serve its purpose to the optimum, that it must be easy to maintain and renew and can partly or wholly be converted for other purposes or reused and that it does not use more natural resources than can be regained from it when its days are done. It could be claimed that most of these sustainability parameters have been virtues that have been connected with quality in architecture since the time of Vitruvius, but we have neglected to live up to others in modern times in our arrogance and apparent abundance of resources.

If Vitruvius had written his De architectura1 today rather than a couple of thousand years ago, he would probably have made sustainability his central quality requirement which, coupled with usefulness, durability and beauty, constitutes the foundation for architecture.

While usefulness, durability and beauty might appear on the face of things to refer to properties of the work itself, i.e. properties that are independent of their surroundings, the addition of sustainability would emphasise that a precondition for architectonic quality is a broader overall perspective and more comprehensive and lasting responsibility.

Responsibility that should be equally obvious ethically as it is challenging with regard to form generation.

When Vitruvius wrote his book on architectural theory, it would appear that sustainability was a perfectly natural, and therefore not particularly noteworthy, condition. In popular terms, people at the time lived “from hand to mouth”. Even the most magnificent buildings, which contemporary architects were primarily occupied with, were created from and in harmony with the proximity context.

Firstly, both grand and more modest buildings were constructed with the help of local materials and sheer muscle power and were cooled or heated by wind, water, sun, wood or manure. That is, with the help of resources which could at all times be reused or recreated and which, after they had been used, broadly speaking left the planet just as rich in resources as it had been before. Any environmental consequences due to a lack of forethought in the use of natural resources, however serious they may have been, were limited to the local environment.

Secondly, only the most well-built constructions survived, just as in nature. For genera-

tions, local artisans and builders passed on and developed their experience of how form generation could be optimised in a geological, climatic, cultural and material context and in relation to the available opportunities for effective production and operation.

Wisdom lay in the continuous handing down of the latest experience of what had proved to be most sustainable in terms of usefulness, durability and beauty.

While pre-modern architecture can thus be characterised as architecture that was created in close interaction with the context out of sheer necessity, a view of architecture that ignored the importance of context grew out of the ideological showdown of the modern breakthrough with historical tradition and craftsmanship and the apparently limitless technical options. With an unshakeable belief in universal form, rational functionality and new technological possibilities as the answer to the great social and architectonic challenges of the time, the significance of creating a sustainable connection between vision and reality was overlooked. There appeared to be only one path forward throughout the world wars, reconstruction and the struggle for greater welfare in the 20th century: the growing consumption of irreplaceable natural resources, increased pollution and the subsequent environmental consequences.

Here, at the beginning of the 21st century, the consequences of these developments are so clear that the famous chaos theory analogy2 - that the beating of a butterfly’s wings in South America could cause a storm in North America – appears to have gained new topicality. It is now generally acknowledged that even apparently simple local form-generating decisions could lead to incalculable consequences for the global environment. Fortunately, technological research and development have reached a level at which we have a real opportunity to take a more sustainable stance in our dealings with the planet’s resources without losing our basic quality of life. But this is on the condition that we also think in global

CONTEXT 2010/2011

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Inge Vestergaard & Lars Henriksen

Sustainable Urban development, Carlsberg, Copenhagen, Spring 2010 – Student project by Sofia Kellari.

While usefulness, durability and beauty might appear on the face of things to refer to properties of the work itself, i.e. properties that are independent of their surroundings, the addition of sustainability would emphasise that a precondition for architectonic quality is a broader overall perspective and more comprehensive and lasting responsibility. Responsibility that should be equally obvious ethically as it is challenging with regard to form generation. terms when we act locally, and that we take our share of responsibility for the big picture individually, collectively and in everything we do.

The people who train architects must take responsibility for ensuring that the next generation of form generators are equipped with a solid foundation of knowledge, methods and skills so that they will be capable of making their contribution to sustainable development. Sustainable form generation is a complex entity, and it depends on interdisciplinary cooperation so that it can draw on the latest knowledge from many academic disciplines in an integrated form-generating process.

Project work Project work is the central element in training architects and reflects the profession’s investigative, creative and activity-oriented practice. Project work has the special property, with methodical training as its central aspect, of being capable of establishing the concurrent development of form-generating talent and interdisciplinary knowledge.

With professional, integrated form generation as a role model, project work in the study unit “approaching sustainable architecture” has been organised as a collaborative process in which groups of students and tutors, together with external consultants, establish the knowledge that constitutes the foundation for sketching. Form generation in an integrated manner means drawing on all central formgenerating parameters in parallel – the aesthetic and experiential, those relating to the environment and resources and the technical and production-related − right from the initial programming and conceptual sketching stages. In a situation where we are obliged to limit the complexity of studies, this means that form generation is performed on the basis of a selection of parameters that are of particular relevance to the character of the project assignment, its context and educational goals. Some parameters of sustain-

ability are so fundamental that they always form part of the investigatory framework that defines the individual study assignment – the potential of the locality, flexibility of use, the compactness of form, the quality of the daylight in a room, the energy efficiency of a climate screen and the optimisation of the construction. Focusing sharply on the selected design parameters, the basis of the project is developed and programmed with the help of a series of workshops, lectures, preliminary studies and sketch studies. The result is a catalogue of joint knowledge, analyses and strategic form-generation deliberations that create a basis for individual sketching.

Constantly switching the field of study and scale is decisive for the progress of sketching. Sketching is a dialectical process that takes up several angles in parallel and runs iteratively rather than linearly.

The principal idea is perception that is developed through the sketching process, not a conceptual choice that governs it. The general goal is to contribute to the development of artistic talent combined with sustainable knowledge.

Studio Approaching Sustainable Architecture, Department of Architecture, 2010/2011.

Notes: 1 Marcus Vitruvius, Roman architect and engineer c. 25 BC, was the author of De architectura Libri Decem (The Ten Books on Architecture). The manuscript, which deals with everything from the training of architects to the choice of building sites, building materials and technology as well as urban planning, was rediscovered in the 15th century and was of great importance for the rebirth of the architecture of antiquity during the Renaissance.

2 Chaos theoretician E.N. Lorentz developed a simple mathematical model in 1961 which shows how a tiny, random change in initial conditions can give rise to considerable change over time. He called the phenomenon the “butterfly effect”.

Daylight analyses.

Ecotect and Radiance Daylight course Autumn 2010 – Group 4 .

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Anne-Grete Andersen & Lars Nicolai Bock

CONTEXT 2010/2011

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF PLACE

Students study and analyse a current restoration/transformation of a historical house at Plomari, Lesbos.

Photo by Lars Nicolai Bock.

BY ANNE-GRETE ANDERSEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT & LARS NICOLAI BOCK, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

The issue of the significance of place has been an integral part of architecture for a very long time – both in the practice of architecture and in the ongoing theoretical discussion in the profession. There has been a close almost common-sense and craftsmanlike connection with the opportunities made possible by the place and the world one lives in with regard to regional architecture or building customs throughout the world. But there have also been examples of building and architecture that may rather have originated in spiritual or religious circumstances. A mixture of the practical and spiritual and, in recent centuries, perhaps the more theoretical, has influenced architecture. The theoretical approach which, from the outlook of the Renaissance, has developed not least from the 18th century up to today is still the subject of discussions, rethinking and criticism.

The way in which international functionalism spread what was for contemporary modernists an almost universal message, met with fierce criticism as early as the period immediately after the Second World War, and architects more interested in the regional developed “the modern” in relation to regional conditions – in many respects.

In the 1980s, the debate about architecture and the way in which projects were conceived were marked by the idea of “genius loci” – also at Aarhus School of Architecture. It was not least the Norwegian theoretician of architecture, Christian Norberg-Schultz, who gained international influence with his articles and books. His book, ”Genius Loci - Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture”, from 1980 is central to his theoretical production.

Under the heading of ”Stedets Tyranni” (“The tyranny of place”) in Arkitekten no. 2, 2010,

Mari Hvattum provides an account of her thinking about the development of the “genius loci” concept.

She relates how, from the 19th century, the interest in justifying an architectonic expression connected with the idea of genius loci, anchored in special national characteristics and material authenticity, arrived at an interest in place in contemporary architecture where regional kinship can be experienced as the basic motive for some of our day’s most distinguished works of architecture. Paradoxically, the global view has probably given the local view a new and even more important dimension.

In the last paragraph of her article, Mari Hvattum provides a perspective on the preoccupation with place. The paragraph is headed “Stedet som handling” (“Place as action”), and it says that an analysis of place seen as a ”dynamic action space, rather than as a static form, can be liberating and contribute to a new interpretation, rather than writing off the local”. It could be claimed in continuation of this that in working with architecture, it is not possible to write off the local view because projects will obviously always interact with the physical expression and materiality of their surroundings.

In line with Venturi, Mari Hvattum comes up with a warning about making the space concept an undisputed premise for architectonic form generation, and she rounds off with: ”We must be on our guard in connection with the nationalistic and essentialistic undercurrents of thinking in terms of place, at the same time as we must explore, interpret, describe and build the ‘place itself ’”.

In working with architectonic cultural heritage, the question and discussion of the importance of place is of special significance as the task will always include the concept of “the space of action”. The entire range of history and development that has manifested itself in architecture and over the years

Fieldwork is a central part of studies. Students measure up a warehouse in Flensburg. Photo by Lars Nicolai Bock.

In working with architectonic cultural heritage, the question and discussion of the importance of place is of special significance as the task will always include the concept of “the space of action”. The entire range of history and development that has manifested itself in architecture and over the years has left traces in use and wear via maintenance and changing preconditions – i.e. throughout all culture-historical influences – has become embedded in physical form.

has left traces in use and wear via maintenance and changing preconditions – i.e. throughout all culturehistorical influences – has become embedded in physical form.

The task must be to investigate, interpret, evaluate and take a stance in connection with the exploration and preparation of architectural projects that summarise all conscious choices. With regard to the demand that project assignments must show what should be preserved, what values the preserved represents, how theses values can be preserved and how “new architectonic cultural heritage” can be created the challenge is precisely to make architectonic values interact with culture-historical values in such a way that all values mutually enrich each other. This is not, in this connection, a question of the tyranny of place, but rather a question of taking an attitude towards and allowing oneself to be inspired by the values of place. In other words, it involves the potential of the place, its architecture, cultural history and narrative properties.

In connection with investigating “the place” – whether it is a city, a neighbourhood or an individual building – there is a need on all scales for specific and specially-developed investigative methods, partly in order to generate functional knowledge of the objects one is working with, and partly to be able to produce documentation for posterity. This means collecting knowledge of the world created by culture, knowledge that can be used and developed, also by others, in the future. Architectural processes can typically be divided into several phases in order to ensure that projects are supported by knowledge, and in order to qualify the arguments for the choices made during the working process, both when training architects and in practice.

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Anne-Grete Andersen & Lars Nicolai Bock

Brana River

Brana River

Diecine River Ombrone River

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Brana River

Diecine River

Ombrone River

Pistoia, city wall and surrounding rivers. A city “atlas” of the historical city was prepared during the stay in Pistoia.

The atlas set out the observed properties, preservation values and problem areas. Drawings showing Pistoia’s transformation by Johan Stoustrup Jensen and Gustav Nordgreen Kragh-Jacobsen.

The fieldwork in Flensburg resulted in a series of thoroughly worked-out building studies.

Drawing by Lise Knakkergaard Nielsen, Lærke Karstensen and Mia Thomsen.

The phases could include: 1. method development, 2. investigation/analysis, 3. documentation, 4. preservation value assessment, 5. programming and 6. architectonic intervention (form project).

To illustrate this, a selection of various projects that integrate studies of buildings and cities connected with specific “places” to which architectonic and culture-historical values and significance can be ascribed is shown above. These studies, and the accompanying method development, were carried out during fieldwork in Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein and in Pistoia, Tuscany, in the 2010-11 academic year.

A fundamental precondition for the ability to work in a qualified manner with place analysis in the subject area of architectonic cultural heritage is basic knowledge of the myriad, complex theoretical problems and discussions that have characterised restoration and transformation projects for centuries.

Knowledge of the history of these theories can be brought into play to advantage in such a way as to develop individual architectural projects. Such knowledge means that interventions and ideas will not exclusively be based on aesthetic judgements and arbitrariness, but also on an awareness that enables the individual player to position himself/herself and take a stance in relation to the many theories and theorists of preservation. A theoretical approach of this kind can also be brought out in the architect’s drawings which, as an analytical tool, can help to characterise a given place, its atmosphere and preservation values.

Project example: building transformation – Flensburg, Schleswig-Holstein Many of the main autumn assignments for third and

Design and form projects based on building investigations in Flensburg were performed in the historical buildings. Project by Jonas Hjortshøj Sørensen.

Pistoia. Students performed individual form-generating projects at city level on the basis of the atlas and preservation value assessments. Project by Rikke Romm Jensen.

fourth-year students were located in the mediaeval part of Flensburg. Excellent cooperation was established here with Amt für Denkmalpflege, whose staff did a great job of contacting owners and arranging for a large number of historical buildings to be opened for our students in a way that enabled them to stay and work in the buildings for several weeks.

Studies took the form of measuring up the houses and carrying out building archaeology investigations, as well as analysing the city’s structure and spaces.

The studies came to form the foundation for concrete preservation value assessments and the subsequent programming of individual projects. Transformation and form-generation projects were carried out in connection with the objects investigated with the participation of students from all years. Groups of master’s degree students performed in-depth investigations at city and building level throughout the term. These investigations came to form the background for longer-term form tasks in the spring.

Some ninth and tenth-term students also worked in other, self-elected contextual areas.

performed. The projects took up the various scales in the city, ranging from problems regarding infill and new buildings to major urban building projects and landscape-related data collation.

Project example: urban transformation – Pistoia, Tuscany Some of the main spring assignments, especially for bachelor students, had the Tuscan city of Pistoia as their study and project object. Pistoia bears traces of Etruscan times, Roman times, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance and offered many analytical and design-related challenges. A number of urban analyses were carried out and compiled in a city “atlas”. This was followed up by a singling out of properties and problem areas, and a number of preservation value assessments were conducted in working parties, which again formed the background for students’ programmes. In continuation of this, a number of individual transformation and design projects were

Seminars and symposia A series of ongoing external arrangements in which students also take part will be held in the subject area of architectural heritage in order to support teaching, research and practice.

In the autumn of 2010, a two-day symposium under the heading of “Building studies” was held. It was sponsored by Realdania and arranged by the Department of Architectural Heritage, the Aarhus School of Architecture, Aarhus University, the National Museum of Denmark and the Heritage Agency of Denmark.

A two-day academic and social arrangement was held with the help of the association FORUM, which comprises graduates from the Department of Architectural Heritage, Aarhus School of Architecture.

In January 2011, the annual restoration seminar was held at the Aarhus School of Architecture in collaboration with the Heritage Agency of Denmark and the School of Architecture at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Professionals and students from all over Denmark participated.

Department of Architectural Heritage 2010/2011.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Jan Fugl

Design in Context “How can we influence and improve the conditions for and behaviour of a given target group by designing concepts, strategies and physical constructions such as rooms, furniture and other objects? What is the role of architecture and design in relation to poverty and its manifestations in a given/urban context? Is it in any way possible to help prevent and combat poverty by working with the design and development of these objects?”

BY JAN FUGL, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

The text above is an excerpt from the autumn term study plan 2010 on Department of Design and – together with the general structure of the department’s study plans for the bachelor and graduate programmes – constitutes the overall framework for the contents of the plan. The headline for this common framework is ”Design in context”, and a common theme, a common context and a common target group will be attached to it each term. An attempt will be made in the choice of theme to take the point of departure in a topical, socially relevant problem.

Autumn term 2010 Common theme: Design in context Problem: poverty Context: a contemporary Danish urban context Target group: the homeless

Background The EU decided to designate 2010 as the “European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion” during which sharp focus would be directed towards poverty and conditions for the poor in Europe.

It is obvious, even in a European context, that Denmark is a privileged country where the basic intention is to ensure that everybody can have a dignified, secure and meaningful life. To a considerable extent, the unemployed are offered help to regain a foothold on the labour market and enter into healthy social relations.

It could also justifiably be claimed that Denmark is one of the most privileged countries in the world, with a high rate of prosperity and free, equal access to social benefits for everybody. The Danish welfare model provides everybody with an economic safety net, and the public authorities can lend a hand if the individual citizen needs help. And, in principle, everybody has the opportunity to complete a course of education on the basis of the individual’s abilities and wishes.1

Several analyses show that Denmark is one of the most egalitarian societies in the world. According to figures from the OECD, Denmark is the member country with the lowest income gap and the one with the fewest people with a relatively low income. However, the figures for the exposed groups are not auspicious. Since 2001, the number of impoverished children has risen by 80%, and there are now 65,000 children in Denmark who live in poverty. Child poverty is extremely unevenly distributed across the country, and the hardest hit areas are the outlying municipalities and the capital. The number of people living in longer-term poverty increased by about 15,000 from 2001 to 2006, which corresponds to an increase of almost 50%.2 Some social groups, however, are harder hit than others, with immigrants in particular being liable to experience longer-term poverty. While immigrants from non-Western countries comprise 3.4% of the population as a whole, they account for more than 20% of the group of

long-term poor.3 According to the Danish National Centre for Social Research (SFI), an estimated 550 Danes sleep on the streets every night, and an additional 5,250 have no roof over their heads and are obliged to spend their nights in shelters and similar temporary accommodation.4

Poverty in Denmark involves more than economy, which makes it important to look at poverty and social exclusion in a broader perspective that includes the economic, cultural and social dimensions.

Term assignment The autumn term 2010 took its point of departure in the concept of poverty. Lectures, field studies, study groups and concrete design work set the stage for a joint investigation of the concept of poverty in order to create an idea of the initiatives that, in a given context, could be central to the relief of poverty in relation to design and architecture. The academic content dealt with studies under the theme of poverty in a contemporary Danish urban context with focus on the target group: the homeless. The principal starting point in the concept of context was of decisive importance for the choice of study process. In the disposition and weighting of the various stages of the term assignment, additional focus was directed towards registration and methods for studying the physical and spatial context as well as towards the experience and views of users/the target group regarding the immaterial aspects, atmosphere, character, functional circumstances and potential of the context.

Interpretation of context The physical context was an urban one. In addition, the concept of context was revealed by working with what could be described as various types of cultural and social contexts, where the composition and concentration of specific income layers and ethnic groups resulted in human and social contexts with definable conflicts, attitudes, standards and sets of values.

“Urban Farmers”. By Kaare S.Golles.

The broad, open interpretation of the context and the concept of poverty provided opportunities for many different types of assignment. This resulted in solutions ranging from the clearly defined problem of homelessness to more complex and conceptual suggestions. These included shelters and drop-in centres for various categories of substance abusers, and related concepts for meal schemes and tackling the problem of hygiene, etc. In general, the projects were designed to improve and remedy adverse circumstances with the aim of creating a better basis for achieving a higher degree of health and an improved quality of life for the exposed and economically and socially weak groups. The projects incorporated varying degrees of digital content. Work was carried out on products and concepts whose aim was to make it easier for a single person or a family with limited finances to plan how to buy less expensive food. Furthermore, work was done on the concrete layout and form generation of rooms and furniture in schools with particularly marginalised pupils. Some projects were performed with the main emphasis on physical presentation, others focused in particular on conceptual solutions. Third year students, however, worked on the condition that their projects should result in a solution that included the generation of a “physical product”. Fourth year students designed specific, physical products and developed purely conceptual solutions and combinations of concept and product.

Examples of term projects The following texts were selected from students’ own project descriptions: “Hoodie”– a heater vending machine for the homeless. By Linus Carlson, third year student. “”Hoodie” is a heater vending machine for the homeless. The aim is for the design to encourage people to talk to each other and, in the long term, for the machine to advertise itself with the help of its trendy nickname. I derived my inspiration for the design from the hood of a coat. Just like the machine, it

CONTEXT 2010/2011

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

warms the person who needs warmth. The design also makes it possible for a wheelchair user to approach it. Its characteristic shape makes it easily recognisable, even for those who haven’t seen the machine, but have only heard of it.”

The “heater”, which can be obtained from the machine, can be activated and give off heat at a temperature of 70 degrees for up to 2½ hours. When it is empty, it can be returned to the same vending machine in exchange for the deposit. The “heater” can be wound around the hand or foot or held against the body. A magnetic lock is used to attach it to the hand (or to another heater if two are bought at the same time). The vending machine can be in operation 24 hours a day and would offer people who can’t or won’t ask others for help for some reason a feeling of security.

“Urban Farmers” – bringing the homeless into prominence/creating a debate about the homeless/activating the homeless. By Kaare Sebastian Golles, third year student.

The project takes its point of departure in a specific problem experienced by the homeless, i.e. a shortage of resources, and how new concepts could be thought out to help the Salvation Army with its commitment to the homeless that could generate money as well as increase the respect for and acceptance of their autonomous lifestyle. “In order for the homeless to be able to meet society’s wish to create utility value for the community, the Salvation Army could offer them an activation scheme that would harmonise with their “autonomous” lifestyle. Furthermore, this activation scheme could also function as a critical statement and/or a question in the public sphere about the degree to which we want to resocialise “deviants”, the degree to which they want to be resocialised themselves and the degree to which we can permit autonomy in relation to society’s dominant standards. The Urban Farmers project takes its point of departure in urban agriculture where vegetables are grown in cities in a vertical tier system. The vegetables would be grown in planter sacks with dimensions that fit into a shopping trolley. The homeless could then buy a trolley filled with vegetables for a given amount and walk around cities selling them.

Buyers would practically get their vegetables straight from the “field” as they would only be removed from the soil when sold. The “farm” would be run by members of the Salvation Army who had received the training necessary to manage wholesome urban agriculture. The homeless would be responsible for the resale of the vegetables.

This project would activate the homeless in a way that would harmonise with their “autonomous” lifestyle, make it possible for them to earn their own

“Hoodie”. By Linus Carlson.

Jan Fugl

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money and offer them something to get up for in the morning. Many of them would find selling vegetables a dignified alternative to begging or criminality because they would earn money legally by selling a product they could vouch for.”

it possible to use it as a children’s chair, is not intended as the “correct” form, but simply as one option among many. It is not a piece of furniture that has a final form so it is not possible to do anything wrong.

“Room for everybody” – urban furniture.

By Anne Kruse Rasmussen, seventh term student.

The project takes its point of departure in the problem and the fact that the government’s plan for the homeless does not apply to people without a Danish civil registration number. The problem is particularly acute for the many people who come to Denmark, especially from Eastern Europe, and are completely neglected. Public shelters are not permitted to offer them help, and there is a pressing need, not least during the winter, for a sheltered place to sleep. A place accessible to everybody that makes no demands on who you are or where you come from – or what you have brought with you. A place that is easy to get to and easy to leave. The aim was to create a framework that meets the needs of the homeless where they are – in the city!

The principal element was to create an urban design that would function day and night – for the homeless as well as for other users. The design recognises that the homeless must be allowed to frequent the urban space on an equal footing with everybody else.

The examples of term projects described and illustrated, which all take in the concept of context – irrespective of whether context is interpreted as something concretely spatial/physical or in a broader sense that includes a social, economic or cultural background/state – make it clear that the common framework functioned as a help for project work.

Just as a word or a sentence is meaningful in the right context, the work with design, which relates to a specific context at all levels, is meaningful as a result and a solution and in the design process itself.

And the fact that the concept of context had to relate to the theme of poverty, with particular focus on the homeless as a target group, added a number of special options to the project work. It helped to place the premises for the development of design and design concepts in a special perspective in which products and solutions arise on the basis of a subtle mapping of needs – aesthetic as well as functional. It qualified the design process and provided an opportunity to investigate whether design can improve the conditions of life for a group of users when commercial considerations alone are not decisive for product and result.

“Tumle” – a piece of furniture for children.

By Anne Ditlev Nielsen, guest student from Kolding School of Design , seventh term.

“Children from poor families often suffer from low self-respect. Some of them are limited with regard to physical activity, and they are often withdrawn in social situations. Studies show that when children from impoverished homes start school, they are often a year behind their peers from better-off homes linguistically and with regard to motor skills.

The element of motor skills is very important for children’s learning process, and a tendency can be detected in this process for activities connected with the body and the head, respectively, to become increasingly separated, with more focus on the head.

But research carried out in Ballerup Municipality shows that children’s development of motor skills is of great significance for the way they develop – socially, with regard to intelligence and physically. Children think with their bodies and develop through sense perception. Learning by playing is the best method of developing children’s abilities.

A piece of tumbling furniture for children aged between 3-6 years that makes it possible to play and build up motor skills at the same time as it focuses on multifunctionality. The form, which makes

“Room for everybody”. By Anne K. Rasmussen.

Department of Design, 2010/2011.

Notes: Résumé ���������������������������������������������������� of Denmark’s activity programme for the European Year for Combating Poverty and Social Exclusion 2010, http://www.euaar2010.dk.

2 The Economic Council of the Labour Movement, http:// ae.dk/, 12 March 2010, Senior Analyst Jonas Schytz Juul.

3 The Economic Council of the Labour Movement, http:// ae.dk/, 11 December 2009, Senior Analyst Jonas Schytz Juul.

4 Benjaminsen, L. and Christensen, I. : Hjemløshed i DK 2007.

SFI, 2007. http://www.sfi.dk.

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“Tumle”. By Anne Ditlev Nielsen.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Christina Kvisthøj & Pia Bille

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. Photo: Lise Brevik and Lise Kjersti Hagen, Department of Landscape and Urbanism, autumn 2010.

Morphogenesis in the urban landscape context of Ho Chi Minh City

BY PIA BILLE, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT & CHRISTINA KVISTHØJ, ARCHITECT

Can Danish students of architecture offer a serious contribution to the solution of the problems of a megacity in a developing country?

The following is a description of a working method developed in theory and practice and tried out in various urban and landscape contexts. It comprises three elements: a theoretical and conceptual understanding of central features of urban development, a tool, mapping, which pinpoints the problems in the concrete task, and a method that deals with discovering whether a design can be developed with the point of departure in mapping.

The most important thing to develop during a course of studies is knowledge of the theories, methods and tools of the profession, while a geographical context offers an opportunity to make the task at hand more specific. The geographical context study projects are performed in is unimportant as a point of departure, but on the other hand, any spatial or geographical context will have an influence on which problems it is meaningful to occupy oneself with and on the way in which problems are perceived and treated.

Context can be described as the surrounding environment and the basic terms on which a project is performed, and it determines how a project will be perceived and which solution space it will be entered in. The general methodical principle in the study projects discussed here is to formulate a rele-

vant way of presenting the problem, taking the point of departure in a reading and interpretation of the urban landscape context with the aim of transforming and developing form. The projects described in the article were performed in the autumn of 2010, and their geographical context is the megacity Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC). They have a conceptual context that is designated porosity and a methodical context that deals with how project and form can be developed with the starting point in a “mapping” of the urban landscape.

The demographic and urban landscape context HCMC is characterised by extreme population density and a high growth rate and, like the rest of Vietnam, major economic growth. Migration to the city and the desire of a growing middle class for better housing put pressure on space in the city, and its expansion and transformation is taking place at a rapid pace. This makes the planning process that the communist government is attempting to put into practice more difficult, or even impossible. The plans for HCMC are characterised by a planning and urban development paradigm that is familiar from the ideal master plans of European modernism, but they lack a strategic anchoring in relation to the rapid growth of the city.

The landscape-related conditions of the city are another important aspect that must be considered. HCMC is located around the Mekong River in the northern part of the huge Mekong Delta and is embedded in a network of river branches. The river

system was originally the main thoroughfare and the most important infrastructure in enabling the development of the city. The river has made it possible to transport goods to the city from areas further up the river system and allowed international trade to develop with the loading and unloading of goods being transported back and forth across the China Sea. The city’s structure and identity are thus historically bound up with waterways, but the newer and planned urban areas are to a greater degree oriented towards the interior and towards a road network that carries the dense traffic of heavy goods vehicles and scooters.

In spite of the historic significance of the river landscape for the city, it appears today as the run-down side of the city because the riverbanks are lined with illegal buildings occupied by the most impoverished squatters and because the river branches function as huge open sewers and rubbish dumps for the city. The sea and the river are thus no longer a part of the urban picture as positive structure and identity giving factors, and only the informal business community and illegal squatters have maintained their attachment to the river branches.

The city’s location in the river delta means that it lies just above sea level, which makes it vulnerable to rises in the water level. In the coming years, one consequence of the current climate change could be a rise in the groundwater level in the city that would allow salty seawater to penetrate further up the river system and increase the pressure on the city’s limited fresh water reserves. A higher groundwater level combined with increased precipitation in

The most important thing to develop during a course of studies is knowledge of the theories, methods and tools of the profession, while a geographical context offers an opportunity to make the task at hand more specific. The geographical context study projects are performed in is unimportant as a point of departure, but on the other hand, any spatial or geographical context will have an influence on which problems it is meaningful to occupy oneself with and on the way in which they are perceived and treated.

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and surface water seepage in a city that must already cope with heavy downpours during the rainy season.

The risk of flooding in extensive areas of the megacity is exacerbated by the current urban development where low-lying areas are being built on and former wetlands are being covered over by roads as well as by the impermeable surfaces of buildings, making it necessary to pump rainwater away from the new urban neighbourhoods.

Porosity and the open space – the conceptual context The urban and landscape-related themes of the projects are put into perspective by the porosity concept, inspired by the way the concept is elaborated

by Vigano/Secchi1. Porosity can be described as a view of the urban as inclusive, which means that an exchange between the many types of social and economic activity in the city is possible; at the same time as inclusive also applies to the view of the city’s spatial structures.

The city and the landscape are continually changing with varying activities and ambiences in relation to the city’s ongoing development and transformation, as well as to the cycle of the seasons and days. The porosity concept is useful in describing how urban landscapes are accessible and tend to absorb changes in various ways. Porosity describes the relationship between the urban mass as a whole and those parts that are open to penetration and transformation processes.

The porosity concept also deals with spatial openness in a dual sense. It can be understood in one sense as an openness towards characteristics that are landscape-related and urban at the same time as far as programmes, influences and interests are concerned, as well as in a specifically spatial and material sense. Space can also be understood in the sense that it is open to multifarious and only partly controllable forces and transformation processes.

The aim of introducing the porosity concept was to formulate a conceptual context for the work of form generation. In a concrete urban landscape context such as that constituted by Ho Chi Minh City, the porosity concept functions as an overall concept within which various problems can be formulated and developed in individually formulated projects.

Water is omnipresent in HCM City, partly in the form of the river branches which all central urban areas are close to, partly in relation to the colossal precipitation which must penetrate the surface and be drained from the city, and partly as a precondition for the city’s lushness, its green structures and nearby agricultural areas. The porosity concept quite literally draws attention to the problems related to water and spatial densities, the circulation systems and to the organic rationality connected with them.

The methodical context Mapping, as the concept is developed by Corner2, among others, is the general methodical starting point for the development of project assignments.

This methodical context stands beside the geographical location and themes of the assignments as a foundation for the form generation of project development. Mapping functions as a method of understanding and reflecting about projects in a broader regional, landscape-related and urban context, and individual projects have been developed in Ho Chi Minh City with various problem formulations and different emphases on strategic and form-generating conditions on the basis of preceding joint mapping.

Morphology exercises are another part of a general methodical starting point and are a continuation of mapping. Morphology exercises function as a free space for experimenting with form, as an abstraction “experimentarium” for the location studies, location transformations and form generation carried out during project work, and they provide a methodical foundation for the concrete work of formgiving during project development. Mapping and morphology exercises are two central components, a collective methodical concept, and are observed on

Christina Kvisthøj & Pia Bille

the basis of a joint conceptual point of departure.

In his mapping text, Corner develops the idea embraced by the paired concepts of construingconstructing. The investigation – construing, which has inevitably infiltrated and already points to a proposal – constructing. The paired concepts, construing-constructing, formulate a principle to the effect that the project’s vision and proposal cannot be said to be founded on an already given typological ideal model established a priori, as hinted at in the concept of genius loci. On the contrary, a foundation must be found for the project. Mapping can be understood as a practice for something other and more than description and argumentation; it is a practice with transformational potential for a joint cultural framework of understanding as well as for creative development work.

The mapping concept is linked to Corner’s view of the organic concept3. Organics represents a basic understanding of creativity that comes from working in the landscape, subject to the living, to life itself, in constant transformation from one state to another where everything is seen as relationships and effects, developing in time.

The morphology exercises that link Corner’s approach to mapping with the organic concept offer a special approach to project work. Morphology exercises take the form of brief workshops during the initial stages of the term and provide occasion for experimenting with and developing methods that students can build on when working on their term assignments, according to their temperament.

The brief, experimental exercises result in a concrete conversion of an abstract, metaphorical conceptual framework. During morphology exercises, the methodical mapping strategy is coupled with a landscape concept as a filter for landscape investigation which directs focus towards the landscape’s processes and the relations between the mechanisms that function in the landscape and give rise to the multifarious phenomena that delineate it. The found consists more explicitly of an understanding of a process of creation, a morphogenesis. The exercises test this special interpretation filter which to a great degree is assumed to support the capacity of mapping to transform itself and generate ideas and proposals for new urban landscape-related realities. Corner describes this as an evolutionary, eidetic and critical potential in the investigatory activity of mapping.

The sequence of the morphology exercise is 1) to select a specific “finding”, described as a phenomenon consisting of a mechanism and the derived phenomenal effect, and the processes and time that the phenomenon enters into. Then 2) to let the finding be the foundation for a new conception in which the mechanism described is used to provoke new spatial effects. By way of putting the finding into perspective, the student reflects 3) over the urban landscape-related themes to which the spatial concept developed can be seen as a corresponding possible answer.

The experimental, form-generating exercises are regarded as a free space for an artistic approach to the development of new conceptions of form and space; an eidetic approach governed by a conceptual urge rather than an analytical, problem-formulating approach. This free practice space describes the status that ornamental gardening can be said to have for the landscape architect. Morphology exercises should be seen as a kind of ornamental gardening project in the sense that they establish a space – almost context-free – for creative work with an artistic approach to the matter in hand. Experience and concepts can be drawn from this free space for creativity into a broader architectural practice space where the concrete geographical, thematic and programmatic contexts set the terms for conversion and further development in more complex project work.

Some of the term projects transfer and integrate perceptions from the “experimentarium” of the morphology exercises into project work proper. The projects illustrate and further develop the principle tools of the morphology ­workshops in more elabo-

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rate and complex project work in the geographical and thematic context of HCMC.

Understanding context Studying a megacity in a remote corner of the world for a month and subsequently coming up with proposals designed to solve serious problems might appear arrogant or simply naive. The description of the methodical concept applied during the course of the term in Ho Chi Minh City, however, should provide an illustration of the fact that the approach to a challenge of this magnitude was firmly anchored in theory, methods and tools developed for the purpose of studying contemporary urban development and formulating relevant ways of presenting the problems arising from the concrete spatial context. But the greatest challenge was to provide form-related proposals designed to change and improve local conditions on the basis of local prerequisites. The cases cited (pp 26-27, ed.) illustrate how three out of a total of 35 projects tackled this assignment.

Department of Landscape and Urbanism, autumn 2010.

Notes: Vigano, Paola: “The Metropolis of the XXI Century” in Oase no. 80. Rotterdam: NAI Publishers, 2009, and Vigano, P.: “On Porosity”, in: Rosemann, J., ed.: Permacity. International Forum on Urbanism. Delft: IFOU, 2007.

2 Corner, James: “The Agency of Mapping”, in: Cosgrove, D. (ed.): Mappings. London: Reaktion Books, 1999, pp. 213-252.

3 In Kvisthøj, Christina: ”Life Forms. Learning from Corner”, Nordisk Arkitekturforskning vol. 20, no. 2. Aarhus, 2008. pp.

37-50.

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Christina Kvisthøj & Pia Bille

Aarhus School of Architecture

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Morphogenesis in the urban landscape context of Ho Chi Minh City / cases Sedimentation

Left: “Sedimentation”. Part of a response to a morphology exercise. By Mathilde Kaysen Kier, Stine Borgstrøm and Jeppe Bonne Olsen, Department of Landscape and Urbanism, autumn 2010.

Left: “When nature creates. A strategic art project in HCMC district 4”. Selection of presentation material. By Mathilde Kaysen Kier, Department of Landscape and Urbanism, autumn 2010.

Left: “Solid – Porous”. Part of a response to a morphology exercise. By Line Stybe Vestergaard and Ingrid Roalsø, Department of Landscape and Urbanism, autumn 2010.

Left: “The porous landscape. Landscape transformation of district 12. Urbanisation – a sculptural exercise”. Selection of presentation material. By Line Stybe Vestergaard, Department of Landscape and Urbanism, autumn 2010.

“Sedimentation” is the title of one of the responses to the morphology exercise, by Stine Borgstrøm, Mathilde Kaysen Kier and Jeppe Bonne Olsen. The exercise takes its point of departure in Corner’s principle of “finding as founding” and in the life form metaphor as a filter in mapping. “Water” was a given theme in the exercise, and all proposals had to take their starting point in a reading of relations and processes connected with water.

The underlying idea of the exercise is that something found in the form of a process of creation or morphogenesis can constitute the foundation for developing a project concept and a proposal.

The critical potential of the proposal developed in relation to the current urban and landscape-related problems in HCMC, i.e. the conception of possible new futures, comes in advance of a proper problem formulation.

The finding in this proposal is the phenomenon of sedimentation in which geometrical mechanisms and currents in the river system over time create sedimentation which constantly changes. The project proposal is based on the finding of the principles of sedimentation and utilises insight into these mechanisms and processes as a basis for the proposal which describes how green oases can arise in the deposits in the river system. In a broader critical and innovative perspective, the proposal points out how new types of more incidental and temporary green spaces can arise in places that otherwise appear disadvantaged and can become attractive features in an extremely densely-populated city.

“When nature creates. A strategic art project in HCMC district 4”.

Mathilde Kaysen Kier took the point of departure in her morphology exercise in the development of the term project: “When nature creates. A strategic art project in HCMC district 4”. The proposal in the morphology exercise addresses some of the current problems in HCMC: the extreme shortage of space, the lack of green spaces and the pressure on the city caused by major, intractable change processes in the urban mass.

Mapping reveals how sedimentation manifests itself in various ways in different stretches of the river system, and four principles of sedimentation that might have a form-generating effect in the project emerged. In the same way, different areas suitable for urban transformation were mapped in one of HCMC’s most densely-populated areas, district 4. On the basis of this, five material categories that were available for the form-generating process were identified. In addition, three plant species native to HCMC that are also available as material for a form-generating process were identified and selected. All three plants have high growth rates and special aesthetic characteristics.

The project comprised three subsidiary projects, all in HCMC district 4. The subsidiary projects were viewed as strategic art projects. The goal was not to find a permanent solution strategy for the spatial and planning problems that mark this district, but, on the contrary, to create green wedges in the existing urban mass and highlight the demolition and transformation processes that currently characterise the district. In order to emphasise this, the project drew on references to other familiar landscape projects and categories which thereby outlined the premises for the way in which the project should be understood.

The first category was called “The illegitimate intrusion of the green” and involved finding room for small green oases in a city where there is no room available for larger, more formal green structures. The second category was called “Nature as a

Christina Kvisthøj & Pia Bille

form-generating force” and involved allowing form to arise as a consequence of the terms set by nature’s mechanisms and processes. The third category was called “Marking and rearranging material” and was an investigation of how material which is already present somewhere, but is not noticed and does not form part of our collective cultural consciousness, can establish completely new meanings in more consciously-formed constellations.

The projects were developed spatially and visually. But the full significance of the project and the way it should be understood can be found in the formation process, in understanding the project proposals in terms of morphogenesis; as form, the genesis of form and the underlying terms and forces influencing them. The project is illustrated by the intended spatial conditions and, together with the influencing mechanisms given for the location, by the applied sedimentation processes, the prerequisites related to the materials, geometrical formation, the emergence of sedimentation over time and the establishment and development of the plant material over time. In the same way as the project will arise over time as a result of the landscape’s innate mechanisms, the project itself will also develop over time.

Each subsidiary project will peak at a particular stage and either fall back on itself or take on a more permanent role in relation to a future urban transformation process.

It was not the ambition with the project to remedy the rapid and partly uncontrollable development currently taking place in the district. On the other hand, the project did identify possible openings in the development tendencies and sequences – a porosity that could be used to enable new spatial and recreational opportunities to come to the forefront.

The project was described as comprising small measures that would not block the existing development, but would offer “small, illuminated oases” in time and space in a chaotic and changeable urban picture. However, at the same time, these measures arose as opportunities on the basis of the ongoing transformation process and its material spin-offs.

The greater river system will in general not be influenced by the project’s interventions, which will become integrated and eliminated over time by the currents in the river system and the anticipated rise in the water level. These interventions find a humble, vulnerable and temporary pool of opportunities in the face of these awesome forces.

“The porous landscape. Landscape transformation of district 12.

Urbanisation – a sculptural exercise” The finding in the morphology exercise was the foundation for a conception and a proposal and was the starting point for the project “The porous landscape. Landscape transformation of district 12.

Urbanisation – a sculptural exercise” by Line Stybe Vestergaard.

The genesis found in the proposal “Solid – Porous” comprises the dynamic in the construction and ongoing maintenance of a dyke in an agricultural area in HCMC’s district 12. Dykes delimit and provide access to the waterlogged fields in which farmers cultivate a special type of root plant that grows in water. The dykes are built of poles with mud in between and must constantly be maintained by the local farmers who use them every day to gain access to their fields.

The finding of the dykes was the foundation for further thought about the conception of a transformation in connection with the gradual erosion of the dykes. If dykes were no longer used in connection with day-to-day agricultural production, it would be unnecessary to maintain the mud between the poles and there would be a gradual erosion of the well-defined edge. During some periods, there would be slow, uniform erosion, and during other periods with heavy downpours, for instance, the erosion would be more instantaneous and dramatic. A series of new, unpredictable types of edge

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would arise with new types of transition to the wet areas. The finding and the transformation of dykes in the waterlogged areas in the morphology exercise are part of a subsidiary proposal on the development of this area into a dynamic park that would be based on and illustrate the balance between the retention of a stringent agricultural structure and the destructive and constructive effect of natural forces in the area.

“The porous landscape” The project: “The porous landscape” involves a finding on the scale of the body that is developed in a “superphysical” context as a general, but differentiated and flexible development plan. The project maps a series of findings or phenomena in an area and develops them as tools in an overall development plan for an area marked by a characteristic agricultural landscape that is under pressure from the growing urban development. The series of findings is identified and given further thought in relation to how the conceptions developed can be incorporated as elements in an overall plan for the area.

The overall plan should not be understood as an overlapping, structural plan for the area, but as a collection of strategies and measures that could develop over time and could function and be implemented more or less independently of each other with different roles and emphases. The future of the area is brought about in a transformation with the point of departure in an openness towards existing qualities found in the area and towards various emphases and implementation strategies.

The project describes how the plan puts together individual elements to create a unified, but porous and sporadic structure, not a complete and final plan for the area. The proposal starts something, allows it to develop and, at the same time, enables it to absorb changes. The intention of allowing the plan to arise and manifest itself in this way is to create a balanced plan in which carefully planned elements and changeable situations play a part, and in which some elements are subject to fixed stipulations and others are allowed to develop more spontaneously.

The project outlines a flexible transformation proposal that is open to several alternative future developments.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Leif Høgfeldt Hansen

Sign, space and architecture

Fundamental constructions in Chinese characters and architecture Stages of Chinese characters

小 六 十 大 人 Developed by Ronald G. Knapp

江 字 Developed by Lawrence K. Lo

It is striking, especially where Chinese history is concerned, that a fundamental parallelism can be noted in the development and construction of the ways in which the character system and architecture express themselves to which there is no correspondence in Western culture.

BY LEIF HØGFELDT HANSEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

Chinese characters are a source of great fascination among creative people in the West. They spellbind with their elegant, dynamic lines, and speculations concerning their pictorial origin and appearance arise automatically. Chinese is unique in that it is the only ancient written language originating in meaning-bearing pictograms to have survived. The reason why it has survived is probably a continuous and logical adjustment of the characters in step with social changes and changes in writing techniques that have helped to make the language accessible to and usable for many people.

The Chinese system of writing possesses properties other than a sporadic visual recognisability between expression and content, however, as the characters contain a structure in their expressive construction which is to a great degree comparable with a kind of architectonic system thinking in which individual standard elements are combined with the help of various techniques into homogeneous unities with individual properties and variations. It is striking, especially where Chinese history is concerned, that a fundamental parallelism can be noted in the development and construction of the ways in which the character system and architecture express themselves to which there is no correspondence in Western culture. The aim of this brief article is to argue that there is a basic historical kinship between the formal construction of the Chinese character system and classical Chinese architecture. This is done on the basis of a consideration of four main elements that act as anchoring points for the ways in which both disciplines express themselves.

- Elementarism: they are basically constructed from few, simple elements that are either added, multiplied or scaled.

- Modularity: the same components can be combined in different constellations so that new meanings/spatialities arise.

- Framing and axiality: both disciplines begin with a frame which is worked on inwards and filled in, and/ or an axis around which a harmonic composition is formed.

- The general: the realisation of forms of expression conforms to the general and conventional principles of craftsmanship mastered by artisans and carpenters in a broad cultural context – which is not the case where the unique and elitist artist or architect is concerned.

Early history The cultural development of architecture and writing began in China more than 3,300 years ago. Initially, representative architecture was built in situ in the form of rectangular units of clay surrounded by columns that supported eaves. It was also at this time that the development of the Chinese character universe began. The use of characters did not arise as an expansion and retention of people’s phonetic communication, but was seen as communication between people and gods. A shaman heated a tortoise shell or an animal bone until it cracked, and the cracks were then interpreted as a message from the gods with a given content. Characters could then be scratched on the back of the cracked shell or bone, and two-way communication with the gods could thus be established. These characters were called oracle bone inscriptions, but they generally lacked any consistency of form and were replaced about 1,000 BC by bronze inscriptions with simplified lines and an attempted harmonisation of sizes. The bronze inscriptions were scratched on clay which was used in moulds to make musical bells and vessels for use in religious ceremonies.

With the transition from bronze to iron from 475-221 BC, there was a radical change in the shapes of the characters as the appearance of silk and the use of bamboo strips that were tied together made it possible to set down characters with Indian ink and a brush, which could be used for rapid, portable communications between people, armies and states.

称 我 五 亡

architecture

The new brush writing is known as “seal script”, and it became the standard when China was united under Emperor Qin in 221 BC. The pictograms in the “old script” were inscribed with uniform lines in bone or clay and each line, and character was a unique, complex depiction of its content. “Modern script” stylised the individual elements and established structural methods by means of which it was possible to create complex characters that combined several different pictograms in a new character with a new meaning, but at the same time kept within a fixed, imaginary square outer frame which helped to make the characters equal in size.

Elementarism The “modern script” was further rationalised to become what was called “clerical script” by the bureaucrats of the Han Dynasty, 221 BC – 220 AD, so the longest and most time-consuming brush strokes were replaced by faster-to-write, more dynamic lines in accordance with the physical logic of the brush strokes. “Clerical script” also did away with all unique features by introducing standardisation in the form of fixed matrices structured elementarily with eleven different standard brush strokes which comprised dots, lines and hooks that could be combined, multiplied or scaled inside an imaginary square frame. The original, unique pictograms were now broken down and adapted to the square matrix so they could be reproduced with the use of the technique involving the eleven brush strokes, making it possible to write rapidly and systematically with a brush, as it was only necessary to master variations of the eleven stroke techniques for each character. This became a kind of elementary expressive thinking, the conception of which was so powerful that it has existed basically unchanged in Chinese culture up to the present.

The introduction of the matrix meant that the pictograms and ideograms, which had previously had widely differing appearances, were changed into abstract standard strokes and sizes so that some of them were now visually very similar and it required

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expertise to differentiate them with regard to content.

For example, the character for “person”, which was originally a drawing of a person in profile with an outstretched hand, became 人, and the original character for “fire”, which was a pictorial reproduction of the flames in a bonfire, became 火. This would probably prompt someone without the necessary knowledge to erroneously perform a pictographic decoding of the two characters, so that the expression for “fire” came to contain the meaning “person”.

Chinese architecture went through an architectural development from the specially-adapted basic volumes of clay with the addition of some repeated rows of wooden columns to buildings with exposed wooden skeleton structures standing on earthen or tile plateaus with open spaces or clay or plank fillings between the sections. As no buildings from the time still exist, the evidence from archaeological digs and finds of countless miniature clay houses shows that the buildings of the time were constructed on the basis of wooden skeleton structures with standard elements that could be joined to create unified constructions in a pragmatic manner. This applied in particular to public buildings that had a representative or protective function for the state. The buildings’ elements comprised vertical poles or columns connected by horizontal beams and purlins. In some cases, groups of brackets might be added in the transition between column and beam to increase the rigidity of the joints and/or to transfer force from the horizontal plane to a vertical direction with the help of corbelling. The same system was repeated in the roof construction which involved a system of force transfer with the help of small columns that transferred the force from the roof to an underlying horizontal beam, which again transferred vertical force through small columns to an even thicker underlying horizontal beam, and so on. The system was braced by using brackets in the joints where necessary, in accordance with the size of the building and connected by horizontal purlins in the roof construction.

This elementary system, which in principle comprised three or four elements with different standard dimensions that were repeated again and again, laid the foundation that made it possible to design all Chinese architecture, from temple complexes with small, downscaled alters inside, to palaces and huge building units for the public administration.

Modularity

References: Jing-hua Yin, John: Fundamentals of Chinese characters. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.

Nielsen, Kresten Thor: “Kinesertegn” in Mål og Mæle vol. 25, no. 1. University of Copenhagen, 2002, pp. 18-30.

Kirkebæk, Mads: “At skrive kinesisk – mere end blot et penselsstrøg?” in Sprogforum no. 44. Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 2008.

Lo, Lawrence K: Ancient Chinese script scheme created by Lo, Lawrence K. http://www.ancientscripts.com/ Lindqvist, Cecilia: Tecknens Rike. Stockholm: Bonniers, 1989.

Knapp, Ronald G.: China’s Old Dwellings – University of Hawaii Press, 2000.

The elementary skeleton structures of Chinese architecture provided artisans with clear rules for organising their activities in relation to the construction of buildings. There was a corresponding simplicity in connection with the buildings’ geometrical plan layout. A system was devised in this connection that enabled the addition of plan modules framed of four pillars (Jian) on an often used scale of 2:3 (just over 3 x 4½ metres), which experience had shown were dimensions that ensured that the standard wooden constructional elements could stand up to the physical loads. As, thanks to its system of rigid joints, this construction was not appreciably dependent on stabilising partitions, it gave the freedom to install partition walls or other room separators of a temporary character that could be moved as the need arose. However, it was often the case that buildings were constructed for different functions or family units and connected with covered, open corridors

Leif Høgfeldt Hansen

around an inner courtyard. The modular plan system of these covered corridors was governed by aesthetic considerations and was often on a scale of 1:1 or 1:2 as the statics involved were not complicated.

As previously mentioned, the “modern script” in China, which began with “seal script” about 221 BC, had already built up a modular system of characters with the help of a structural method that enabled complex characters to be written by combining several different pictograms in a new character with a new meaning. During the first century AD, the first Chinese linguist, Xu Shen, published “An Analysis and Explanation of Characters”, in which he divided characters into six categories. The first category consisted of simple pictograms, the second category consisted of abstract ideograms for concepts, after which came three categories of complex characters.

It is beyond the scope of this article to review these categories at length, but the following examples illustrate how complex pictograms became new character combinations. The complex Chinese character for “good” is 好. The character comprises two other pictograms, respectively “woman” 女, which originated in the ancient Chinese drawing of a kneeling person, and “child” 子, which originated in a drawing of a baby with a big head and outstretched hands. When the two characters for “woman” and “child” were combined (女 + 子 = 好), a new meta-meaning or association arose (woman + child = good); another combination is (人 + 木 = 休) (person + tree = to rest). Furthermore, complex characters can be combined modularly to create new meanings (建 + 築 = 建築) ((long paces + a hand drawing) + (bamboo + try square + wood) = architecture).

Framing and axiality The “clerical style” gave Chinese characters a formal structure that was based on the logic of the brush stroke, but which also had a formal compositional logic in an interplay between the outer square frame and the vertical central axis. The outer frame is dominant in some characters while others have the central axis as the compositional basis. Calligraphers begin by drawing the outer frame, after which they work inwards and fill it in. Anybody who has practised drawing Chinese characters knows how to begin by folding the paper in the centre so that the balance of the characters around the important vertical axis can be clearly perceived.

Chinese architecture has also made use of the stringent frame in its compositions from its beginnings. This applies to everything from the open skeleton structure framing of building surfaces to beautiful framed landscapes. But it is probably the Chinese plan arrangement that has made the most lasting mark. Ever since the first urban plans were drawn up, there has been a system comprising outer city walls and inner, local enclosed systems which resemble the layout of the entire city in miniature, such as Xian with its walled and closed areas, or Beijing with its closed hutongs. Both systems also had a clearly marked central axis which was a symbol of power and reserved for the emperor or, in the smaller system, the local patriarch.

For the aristocracy, the buildings constituted a modular frame around a system of ornamental gardens that so to speak acted as a soft, much-needed complementary contrast to the more rigid, modular appearance of the architecture.

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The general The case where writing and architecture were concerned was that they were both made operational for the public at large at a very early stage and thereby helped to make the major expansion of the Chinese state possible. For the bureaucrat, the technique of writing could be learned through combinations of simple brush strokes, and for the carpenter, the building tradition was a complex of established standards designed to create unified structures.

Unique individuals could elevate writing into poetry, philosophy or art, and the building tradition could similarly be turned into good architecture. Although there is no proof, it is not unthinkable that the modular and elementary buildings that the bureaucrats of the Han Dynasty worked in inspired the rationalisation of the system of characters, just as calligraphy later gained a decisive influence as inspiration for the ornamental gardens that surrounded Chinese buildings.

Conclusion Traditional Chinese architecture is often compared to Roman architecture in the West because both building traditions made sophisticated use of elementary building systems and modular structures that could act as a guide for architecture from the level of the individual building to the urban planning level. This was a systematisation that to a great degree helped to focus the idea of expansive development in order to create great empires for both parties. But there is a parallel sequence in the development of Chinese architecture and the construction of the script system in which interchanges at a formal level of expression took place; something which is not found in Western writing methods and architecture. The similarity in the argument above applies less to the relation of Chinese characters to pictograms, and more to the formally expressed constructions of the disciplines themselves.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Erik Werner Petersen

ZHANG YIMOU AND EVENT SPACE

BY ERIK WERNER PETERSEN, PROFESSOR, LIC. ARCH., ARCHITECT

What we call “event space” is intimately linked to the rise of Modernity. Architects like Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi have taken this new reality as point of departure for the definition of a new concept of space. This new concept is a space of intensities.

The predecessor of this kind of space dates back to the 19th century: the Arcades of Paris and London, parks like Parc des Buttes Chaumont in Paris, in short, the environment of the flaneur. The transition from bourgeois culture to mass culture is marked by sites like the piers of Brighton and Coney Island. But to mature into today´s event space something else was needed: the emergence of the cinema.

Disney World Walt Disney is, without doubt, the first great inventor of event space. He started with the cartoon, later animated the cartoon and finally, inspired by the old amusement park Tivoli in Copenhagen, established the first Disney Land and, subsequently, Disney World. What was accomplished was a model with no links to any specific territory or physical context which could be established everywhere in the world.

The design of Disney World follows a set of well-defined procedures: an enclosure in the form of a mound of earth is built to isolate the world of fantasy from everyday life outside the wall. The next step is to split this world up from one theme to several worlds: Fantasy Land, Frontier Land, Adventure Land, Discovery land. Instead of just representing a theme, the theme itself is turned into an assemblage of several themes that blend in what we might call a rhizomatic pattern with no hierarchy between the themes and no single entry. The point is that the visitor, in a way, loses the orientation known from the outside world and drifts in and out between the different themes in a non orderly way. The only focal point constantly visible from any point of view in the park is the central dream castle which Disney called the “Wienie”. In the design process of this landscape Disney applied a series of techniques borrowed from cinema. In her essay on “Disney Space” Chuihua Judy Chung notes among the design principles: first, the cinematographically arranged series of events. Secondly, the scale of manipulation; that is: a five-eighths-scale train, a horseless carriage, a paddlewheel steamboat etc. Thirdly, the forced perspective optical illusion which makes things appear larger and taller than they actually are.1

The Disney concept of event space soon became a model for numerous theme parks all over the world as well as a model for shopping malls and even for gated communities. However, as many strategists have pointed out, this model also has its weaknesses. It is still a world of concrete, plaster and

plastic with added light and mechanical devices.

What is needed is a more flexible model. A model that mixes the virtual and the real in a totally new way which makes the difference between the two disappear completely.

To solve the problem we must once again return to the cinema and, following the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze, make a distinction between two types of cinema: the movement image and the time image.

In the movement image time is subordinated to movement. Disregarding the fact that the chronology might be cut up into flashbacks and be exposed as parallel sequences of time, the movement image is still only an indirect representation of time.

In the time image this connection is broken. Time is no longer chronology but a polyphony of intensities each possessing its own rhythm. Time stops, contracts, extends, and jumps forward and backward.

Each intensity is reflected in other intensities. That is why Deleuze also refers to this as the crystal image.

The crystal image reveals a direct time-image, and no longer an indirect image of time deriving from movement. As he puts it: “It does not abstract time, it does better: it reverses its subordination in relation to movement.”2

“It is time itself which arises in the crystal.

The real and the imaginary, the actual and the virtual, chase after each other, exchange their roles and become indiscernible.”3

Zhang Yimou So what was needed is the second great genius of the cinema. This time a Chinese. His name is Zhang Yimou.

In his early films, like “Red Sorghum, Zhang Yimou started using colour in a new way. He released the colours from their ties to representation to let them become expressive in their own right.

Instead of characters and landscape with colours he creates characters and landscapes of colours. Colour characters and colour landscapes. Colours become the spirit of a landscape.

In later films like “House of Flying Daggers” and “Hero”, we see how this procedure is developed.

Monochrome scenes where characters dressed in red or green are surrounded by a space created by hanging drapery in red or green, all embedded in a red or green light. The draperies are semitransparent and blowing in the wind. It is all about invisible forces becoming visible. In a scene from “Hero” a set of candle lights is placed in front of the emperor. The candle lights flicker in response to the words spoken by the emperor’s subjects. The flickering detects the truth of the emperor’s subjects. The invisible becomes visible.

All forms of art in China have their roots in calligraphy. Calligraphy is made by gestures in the form of brush strokes. Making forces become

visible. The same forces penetrate painting, martial art, music and landscape. The art of the latter is the art of geomancy or Feng Shui. It is the same forces that allow people to transform into gestures that let gestures transform into signs. In the western world people make gestures and signs, in the east they become signs.

This can be seen in the opening ceremony of The Beijing Olympics 2008 performed in the new stadium nicknamed “The Birds Nest”. The undifferentiated differentiates and become expressive.

The beat of drums. People become characters. Skaters become calligraphy. An interior sphere of people rises in the middle of the scene. One singular individual takes on a line of flight into the air. He skates on the rim of the stadium. The architecture of the stadium becomes part of a gesture. Finally this movement takes the whole stadium outside itself by means of the ignition of the torch. The gesture becomes the Olympic flame.

Zhang Yimou is an educator. He has taken upon himself the task of revealing to the West the core of Chinese culture and five thousand years of civilization. Yet, in doing so he has opened up our eyes to something of tremendous importance: the limits of the Western Civilization.

The limits of the Western Civilization In Western civilization everything is supposed to be subjugated to the control of the eye. No matter if it is the central perspective of the Renaissance or the panopticon of Bentham it is all about the control performed by the eye.

This even goes for the non-sensible world of ideas. The word “idea” comes from Greek and means visible form. For Plato this did not mean the sensible world but the abstract world which is only accessible to the mind’s eye. That is why the expressions “I see!” and “I understand!” are synonymous in western culture.

Not so in the East! Chinese philosophy is not about ideas and their representations, but about the unseen forces that make up the world. This can be taken as the most significant difference between the West and the East.

It is the invisible forces that the Feng Shui master or the Chinese landscape painter make visible.

In every aspect of Chinese art, the question is never to make the objects or the phenomena themselves visible. What is depicted is rather the inner forces or intensities embedded in objects.

Chinese calligraphy is the mother of all Chinese art. So landscape painting, which developed in the Sung dynasty, was seen as an extension of the art of brush, water and ink. The object was never to make a representation but to make the unseen forces of the landscape visible.

In the early morning the Chinese can be seen in the parks of the cities, making calligraphy

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in the dew on the pavement. This writing only lasts until the sun dries it up. Writing on the skin of the earth they make geography in the true sense of the word. The gestures are repeating the first form of human writing performed thousands of years before the characters were born. The ritual gestures of dance on the earth. Ritual means repeated again and again.

It is the cancelling of time itself. Eternity condensates into a few seconds. In this way the Chinese vision of eternity is bound to the ritual of writing the characters which carry their whole civilization. So different from the western civilization where ideas are represented as archetypes petrified in temples.

The “Impressions” The problem is clear. How can this be folded back into the landscape; the earth from where it came?

If movies are made by projecting light on a screen, then how do we make a new type of calligraphy by using the skin of the earth as a screen?

Before the projection in the movie theatre starts, the lights are turned down. In the same way that earth turns down light in the evening, Zhang Yimou in his “Impressions” ignites the forces that animate the landscape. His light joins with the unseen forces embedded in the site to make them visible.

And his light joins with the music. It is the earth itself that sings. The local people who are, in their daily life, deeply connected with this landscape join in as performers making themselves into a landscape of light and sounds.

In “Impressions of Hangzhou”, the darkness of the movie theatre is replaced with the nightfall over a landscape. The white screen is replaced with the landscape. Nightfall, in the true sense of the word, refers to that singular moment in which Heaven

Erik Werner Petersen

reunites with Earth. Distances and time become obscure. The power of the eyes can no longer control space. Space itself disintegrates. Flashes of light and sounds take over. If the landscape is the screen, it is certainly not a screen for projections. It is the insensitive spots of the landscape itself that light up like flashes of light in the darkness. The crystal image and the place unite. A sonorous landscape made by sounds and light.

If Walt Disney liberated event space from any specific physical context, he could only do so at the cost of reterritorializing the concept of themes.

The event space of Zhang Yimou, on the other hand, is neither physical nor conceptual. It is a context consisting of the forces embedded in the site, the forces embedded in the people related to the site and the forces embedded in the cinematographic machine. Joining these three components the forces become active and affirmative. An event is nothing else but this pure becoming.

Finally event space is no longer a space filled up with events. It is a space which consists of these events alone and nothing else. It is an affirmation of the creative forces, or better, of becoming itself.

Notes: In Chung, Chuihua Judy; Inaba, Jeffrey; Koolhaas, Rem and Leong, Sze Tsung (eds.): Project on the City 2. Harvard Design School Guide to Shopping. Taschen Verlag, 2002, p. 276.

2 Deleuze, Gilles: Cinema 2 The Time Image. London: The Athlone Press, 1989. p. 98.

3 Ibid. p.127.

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In “Impressions of Hangzhou”, the darkness of the movie theatre is replaced with the nightfall over a landscape. The white screen is replaced with the landscape. Nightfall, in the true sense of the word, refers to that singular moment in which Heaven reunites with Earth.

Distances and time become obscure. The power of the eyes can no longer control space. Space itself disintegrates. Flashes of light and sounds take over. If the landscape is the screen, it is certainly not a screen for projections. It is the insensitive spots of the landscape itself that light up like flashes of light in the darkness.

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Niels Park Nygaard, Mads Tholstrup, Gerard Reinmuth

Aarhus School of Architecture

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CONTESTED CONCEPTS in CONTEXT

BY NIELS PARK NYGAARD, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, PhD, ARCHITECT; MADS THOLSTRUP, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT & GERARD REINMUTH, VISITING PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

- Two Tropes of Architectural Discourse and Education The following is an elaboration of two investigative themes central to a series of courses run at the International Studio. However, this text focuses primarily on the deployment of these themes in one specific assignment addressing the re-use of the former state prison in Horsens. Being a massive building complex confined by a high wall, and situated high on a hill visible from afar, the former prison is known vernacularly as ‘the Castle’. Due to its scale and its typology - comprised of long runs of very small rooms - the Castle has, so far, resisted the imposition of alternate programs proposed for it. For this reason we proposed the replacement of these top-down projection strategies with a bottomup transformative approach, informed by Alison and Peter Smithson’s “picking up, turning over and putting with” of the As Found movement of post-war Britain1. This idea sparked a number of other themes and explorations, some of which are outlined in this article. These themes are stated as ‘tropes’, in the conventional meaning of ‘rhetorical figure of speech’, as well as ‘tropes’ in the sense of ‘turning over’ or ‘upside down’.

Approaching the Castle; drawing by Colm O’Brien, International Studio, 2010/2011.

1: WALL IS SPACE The notion of architecture as comprised of ‘space’, rather than of built elements like walls and columns, is a relatively modern one; it first emerged with any force at the end of the nineteenth century as a result of psychological and philosophical concerns in Germany. Later, ‘Space’ became a limit term for modernity, and, not only in architecture, a primary critical term for the definition of what was ‘modern’.

Space was a remedy for the impacted environments of the old city and became the modern carrier of the Enlightenment image of hygiene and liberty.

For the modernist architect, space was universal - it was to flood both public and private realms equally.

And, of course, ‘space’ in these terms was politically charged. After the Second World War, ‘space’ became ‘democratic space’, as opposed to a previous and undemocratic ‘fascist’ inattention to space.

While this modern notion of space has been a major anchor to architectural discourse, thinking and practice since the later part of the 19th century, it has, in the end, become a hackneyed signifier, too abstract yet too vague to be operational as a nodal point in architectural discourse today. Furthermore, the modern discursive emphasis on ‘space’ has tended to weaken the awareness of the tactile, tectonic and morphological potential of walls, floors, columns and openings, reducing materiality and morphology to mere diagrammatic outlines of spatial geometry.

Thus emphasising ‘the wall’, not as an abstract or generic notion but as concrete topography, form and materiality, opens several opportunities. As suggested above, it is a chance to gain or re-conquer a tectonic meaningfulness and an emphasis on the experiential and tangible aspects of architecture, rather than focussing on abstract spatial relations or architectural space as mere quantitative utility.

More particularly, when working with the former prison (the Castle), the wall as a theme seems almost inevitable, as walls as vertical obstacles are obviously a predominant feature, and the cells appear as niches

It is counter-intuitive or cavities in the wall, rather than spaces confined by walls. that buildings over As should be clear, we do not intend to determine human dismantle any notion of space, but we rather find behaviour - yet is clear it crucial to regard ‘space’ and ‘wall’ - or ‘surface’ in general - as intrinsic. Thus ‘the wall’ could, like a that there is some landscape, be regarded as a three-dimensional surface connection between with niches, crannies, modulations; a receptacle for a the form of a building wide range of programs, actions and meaning. and what goes on in 2: FUNCTION FOLLOWS FORM it. There could, after When Louis Sullivan’s famous phrase “form (ever) follows function” became a battle-cry of Modernist all, be no functional th failure if there was not architects in the first half of 20 century, ‘function’ had a limited currency as meaning the activities a strong relationship designated for a particular building or part of a between form and so- building.

With a more encompassing, but more ciality, behaviour and accurate, conceptual content ‘function’ describes the so on. But this result of the action of one quantity upon another. In relation is not causal relation to architecture the question is then: what is acting upon what? in any necessary,

In architectural practice this entanglement simple and linear is seen in different disguises in every project. The sense; it is hyper-com- buildings themselves can be described as acting upon people or social material, as affecting behaviour. plex and contingent Conversely, the forms of buildings can be described - and it may, in the as determined by the will and action of people and end, be that the term society. And when the task is to transform or work in ‘function’ itself tends and with already existing buildings, the entanglement to blind us to this fact. increases as the existing always yields some degree of facilitation, friction, or even utter rejection to the new functional demands which are imposed: As Bill Hillier puts it, it is “the most significant fact about the built environment: that it is not simply a background to social behaviour – it is itself a social behaviour.”2 Given these issues, the decision to focus on the intrinsic spatial quality of the wall of the Castle led to a reconsideration of the now standard Modernist notion of the relationship between function and

form. Instead of considering architecture as a matter of producing adequate design answers to predetermined functional demands and programs, the existing spaces of the Castle demand that we work in the opposite way: first we develop architectural and formal strategies (interferences) for making the Castle penetrable (literally and metaphorically) and accessible (practically and culturally), then we will consider the introduction of adequate programs and activities. This apparent reversal of the usual progression of architectural projects has its explanations in both specific and practical terms, as well as more encompassing ones.

Due to its former function, the prison’s three main wings are characterised by narrow rooms and hallways with windows placed very high above floor level. The buildings are difficult to vacate and – for obvious reasons - to escape from, not only in terms of incarceration but also in the case of emergencies such as a fire. These issues would appear to render much of the building complex impenetrable for other programs (e.g. hotel, offices, conference centre etc.), and, despite interest from various investors, the insistence of these spaces has thwarted potential buyers from going through with a development. A logical conclusion is, consequently, that the primary task is not to impose or project a program ‘top-down’ onto the building complex, but – for real and practical reasons – to investigate, ‘bottom-up’ as it were, what sort of architectural interferences will possibly make the complex accommodative for whatsoever use but incarceration.

Perspectives Besides establishing a conceptual and intellectual ‘tool kit’ for dealing efficiently with architectural projects that have ‘transformation’ or ‘palimpsest’ as a moment, the underlying educational agenda behind deploying these two tropes is, more generally, to identify, discuss and challenge a set of profound

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‘Re-materialising’ the notion of space and reinstalling ‘space’ in the realm of the tangible and experiential is a step towards seeing architectural education as a matter of unfolding and refining certain skills and sensibilities which already exist as part of our lifeworld; seeing architectural education as a matter of professionalising our innate spatial intelligence.

patterns and assumptions in modern architectural education, discourse and practise. Two of these should be tentatively outlined here as they reflect ‘work in progress’ in the studio as well as in the practices and research of the associated teachers.

One is the reluctance to accept and rejoice in the fundamental contingency of architecture - and the prevalence of the deterministic conception of architecture as correlate of a program; or, conversely, sociality and use as a function of architecture – or architectural function as a function of architecture, as the tautological consequence would be. It is counter-intuitive that buildings over-determine human behaviour – yet it is clear that there is some connection between the form of a building and what goes on in it. There could, after all, be no functional failure if there was not a strong relationship between form and sociality, behaviour and so on. But this relation is not causal in any necessary, simple and linear sense; it is hyper-complex and contingent – and it may, in the end, be that the term ‘function’ itself tends to blind us to this fact.

Another is the neglect of the physicality of architecture, the ‘material culture’ of architecture as it were, as form and materiality that (although contingently) does inflict the life of people – and the prevalence of, as Adrian Forty asserts it, “[the] compulsion to render everything of substance as an empty abstraction”.3 As mentioned, this tendency seems in part to be connected to the notion of architecture as being comprised of ‘space’ rather than materiality and form.

The general history and connotative ramification of ‘space’ aside, the contemporary notion of ‘space’ as it circulates in design studios and practices seems somehow to divide into a very everyday concept of ‘space’ as enclosure (as in ‘room’) and ‘Space’ as a highly abstract term at the same semantic or conceptual level as, say, ‘time’.

The first concept of space reduces architecture to mere container; a vessel that clearly defines an inside and an outside, and thus cannot semantically operate with any gradient, continuity or embeddedness. The second concept of space is highly complex as it is both a nodal point in a power wielding ‘expert’ discourse intentionally monopolised and claimed to be mastered ‘only by architects’, and a highly abstract term signifying something intangible, far removed from our experiential lifeworld. This second concept is thus split in, on one hand, a notion claimed to be objective hence powerful but in reality functioning within the connotational language use of politics and power play, and, on the other hand, an abstract term of philosophy and physics.

‘Re-materialising’ the notion of space and reinstalling ‘space’ in the realm of the tangible and experiential is a step towards seeing architectural education as a matter of unfolding and refining certain skills and sensibilities which already exist as part of our lifeworld; seeing architectural education as a matter of professionalising our innate spatial intelligence.

International Studio, Department of Architecture, 2010/2011.

References: Cf. Lichtenstein, Claude & Thomas Berger (ed.): As Found.

The Discovery of the Ordinary. Zürich: Lars Müller Publishers, 2001.

2 Quoted from Forty, Adrian: Words and Buildings. London: Thames & Hudson, 2000, p. 195.

3 Forty, op.cit. p. 23.

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Niels Park Nygaard, Mads Tholstrup, Gerard Reinmuth

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Approaching the Castle; drawing by Colm O’Brien, International Studio, 2010/2011.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Mads Tholstrup

THE CAVE AND THE CONTAINER

BY MADS THOLSTRUP, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

INTERFERENCE The common theme for the 2010/11 academic year at the now defunct Department 1 was interference. Is it possible, with limited means, to upset the reigning view of what building is all about today? A view that gives rise to an endless production of boxes that are apparently placed at random on surfaces along motorways and waterfronts; surfaces that are evidently seen as having no significance for what is placed on them. The result is dissatisfying buildings. The question is whether this dissatisfaction applies to anything other and more than their appearance.

Does box architecture fail to live up to our expectations of being entertained, or does it fail to live up to a demand made on architecture as such?

If the latter is the case, then architecture must be thought of as being under an obligation to show how, in the concrete instance, it lives up to demands concerning issues that go beyond the purely practical.

This means that architecture must be thought of as being under an obligation to express an attitude to the fact of being architecture.

Many people have felt that the way forward in this situation is to acquire a theoretical foundation for producing architecture. Instead of bowing to the dictates of economic and subjective considerations, the production of architecture must be made independent of such external circumstances by building, as a point of departure, exclusively on the basis of an insight into the possible options for creating an architecture of our time. The diagnosis regarding the disappointing box architecture here is that it is produced on the basis of invalid or outdated ideas, such as that architecture basically involves the tasteful packaging of a programme and the necessary construction, and the cure is therefore to make sure that a new, up-to-date theory is made available. The goal is to develop an alternative to the grey mass of box architecture, to develop an architecture that can demand our interest because it must be understood as an experiment that involves discovering how a new theory can be turned into strategies for creative activity.

The question is whether there is another path. For is it not the case that the path taken by architectural theory has implied a disempowerment of architecture? A disempowerment that consists in making knowledge related to architecture something that derives from a textbook-like knowledge which is the product of fields of study outside the realms of architecture. The path of architectural theory seems to make the knowledge that manifests itself in the making of architecture to appear as something derivative in relation to the kind of knowledge that we can have of a subject when this is considered without taking our practical interests into account.

Another path could take the direction of examining architectural practice in detail in order to discover whether it contains anything that is blurred by ‘theoretical’ assumptions about architecture that can be laid bare so that practice can be put back on

track. One difficulty in this connection might be that the language such an examination would necessarily make use of would be coloured by architectural theory, so that cracks in architectural practice would be systematically covered up.

In the teaching I have been involved in during the past terms, we have attempted to confront assumptions coloured by architectural theory regarding the relation of the buildings to the surroundings they are built in with an intuitive understanding of certain phenomena that take the form of certain linguistic expressions and phrases. An architectural absorption of this kind took place during the last academic year under the heading “the cave and the container”.

THE CAVE AND THE CONTAINER What happens when we use the box as a model with which we attempt to understand architecture? We see architecture as though it were a container to the extent that the decisive factor is establishing an ‘inside’ versus an ‘outside’ by virtue of a separating ‘wall’.

Nobody would deny that a division between inside and outside belongs to architecture. The question is whether understanding architecture as though it were a container implies a problematic understanding of what is meant by relating to architecture.

Our concept of what we build on, in, or in some other way on the basis of, what we call the ground or the earth, shows that we do not think of this ground or earth as a wall we are situated above (or outside) and where, on the other side of this wall or surface, there is something beneath (or inside).

Being located in the ground, like a basement floor is, does not mean being located inside something, but means being located in the ground, understood as a materiality it is possible to dig cavities in, if they are not already there. The spatial determination of something being in the ground as opposed to being inside the ground shows that we can relate to a subject in a way that differs from the way we relate to it in terms of the inside-outside relationship of a container. The ground or the earth is not seen as something dual, as comprising something beneath a surface plus the surface itself, where the latter is understood as a membrane between what is above and what is below it.

In order to understand what is involved in this view of spatial phenomena in terms of containers, we can look at our hands. We can regard the outside of a hand as something that contains what we do not see and therefore see the layer of skin on the hand as something that separates an inside, where the bones, etc., are located, from the hand’s surroundings that are outside. However, this involves relinquishing our view of the hand as an ‘organic’ whole where bones, etc., are not inside it, but in it, and the skin is not outside it, but on it. Looking at something as a container to which the paired prepositions inside-outside apply blurs the understanding of this something as an ‘organic’ whole that is more than its parts, so to speak, and to which it is rather the paired prepositions in-away from that are applicable. If, without thinking about it, we use the container as a model in the attempt to create clarity about a subject, there is a danger that we will lose sight of the inner, ‘organic’ relationship between the parts of a whole.

When it comes to the ground or the earth, the use of the container as a model is limited in the same way. If we attempt to understand an excavated or naturally-occurring space in a given mass such as the inside of a container, the space and the mass will be understood as separated by a wall, and it will consequently be impossible to understand that there is a ‘spatial’ difference between being located in the inner of a mass and being located in a cavity in the surface of the mass. Without this difference, however, it will not be possible for us to make sense of the difference between being located in a niche in connection with a larger space and being located inside a smaller space that is connected to a larger space.

The niche, which we are either in or away from and not inside or outside, designates precisely the kind of location we talk about in connection with the ground or the earth – and with other spatial phenomena that we think of as parts of a landscape, such as a forest, for instance, which we can be in, not inside, when we are not staying away from it in the open countryside around it.

When we think about architecture on the basis of the container model with its separation of inside and outside, we lose sight of the opportunity for a certain kind of integral whole where ‘the given’, the ground or the earth, and ‘the added’, that which is built, constitute the parts. It becomes clear why the use of the container model in the attempt to understand architecture appears obvious. This use belongs together with a certain image of the situation in which the involvement with architecture takes place.

We think of ourselves as placed at a distance watching an object that is understood as though it were a container and watching objects that is understood as though they are either inside it or outside it. On the basis of this, architecture will seem to be something that we have knowledge of by virtue of a distanced observation and not by virtue of being part of a relationship borne by awareness of integral wholes within which we conduct our lives in a way that is characterized by participation.

LEARNING TO SEE These considerations regarding the difference between seeing something as though it were respectively a cave or a container should be understood as an element in teaching architecture. The difference will not necessarily make sense if we approach spatial phenomena with a distanced, scientific attitude.

It is assumed in connection with this teaching that it is necessary to learn to see the difference as part of learning a certain way of thinking and envisioning architecture, a way inspired by Frank Lloyd Wright among others on which is based the particular approach to the making of architecture, which later in the 20th century distanced itself from the heroic modernism and which, in contrast to this, did not have the disconnected machine, but rather the sitespecific building project as an ideal.

As the point of departure is that the understanding and making of architecture does not have a scientific foundation, this teaching must obtain a basis in the knowledge on how architecture has been made over the years. Studies of exemplary architec-

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tural projects, however, suffer from the weakness that it is always possible to find and emphasise what it is about the projects we are studying that confirms our idea that they are exemplary. From a scientific point of view, it goes without saying that this is not good enough. But from another, non-theoretical point of view, the occupation with predecessors can be a legitimate part of a continually expanding understanding of how seeing something as respectively a cave and a container has proved to be productive in connection with making architecture.

Learning to see something attentively as a cave and a container is to learn to hear what we actually express through our language when it is not coloured by theory, namely that a space in a landscape where the surface of the landscape stretches unbroken from its surroundings through space, is not the same as a space constituted by walls that separate the space from its surroundings. If architecture comes into the world through the establishment of the vertical, such as a wall, then space seen as though it is a cave indicates that, unlike a machine, architecture can be an integral part of a whole in which nature – understood as ‘the other’ of architecture – is the other integral part.

We exist not only as objects do, we also relate to something. This is why things go wrong if we perceive our relationship with a space as a relationship in which we stand ‘spacelessly’ outside of it and decide how we will relate to it. We are always occupied with the world in a way where what we see is either understood as something that is at our disposal,

Mads Tholstrup

is seen as an object or a resource, or is acknowledged as something in its own right, as something like oneself.

Thus, it is not the case that a space can just as well be seen in one way as in the other. It is the person who sees who is present in a different way.

The person who sees can in a detached way turn the seen into a resource, make it something that is there for the person in question, or the person in question can become involved in the seen as something in itself, as something that meets us. In this case, what we meet will no longer simply be an object; it will have the same independence as another with which we can enter into a relationship.

Learning to think and envision architecture in terms of the cave and the container does not involve developing skills with regard to being able to interpret a spatial phenomenon based on theoretical knowledge about when something can best be identified as though it were a cave or as though it were a container. Learning to think and envision architecture with the cave and the container as models of thought involves seeing with them. It is being able to take part in a meeting borne by our power of imagination. What we meet here will not simply be observed, it will be something that is expressed together with the person who meets it. The reality of what we meet is not what remains when all of our subjective attitudes to it have been eliminated; it is that which exists solely by virtue of our openness or responsiveness to what we meet.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Tine Nørgaard & Claudia Carbone

contexere1 – construction of (a) project site

Nella Maria Konnerup Qvist: final bachelor project CUMULUS, site Rome with Nolli’s map as case, Spring 2011.

Detail of drawing: digital fragmentation of Nollis map and analogue interfering drawing structures.

BY TINE NØRGAARD, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT & CLAUDIA CARBONE, ASSISTANT PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

[on context(-s)] Produced in the 1970´s John Hejduk´s Masques, i.e. the construction of interdependent space(-s) and context(-s), was influential in laying the foundation for what K. Michael Hays in his foreword to Stan Allen’s Points + Lines. Diagrams and Projects for the City2 terms an architecture of performance. As K. Michael Hays explains, it is an architecture in which the between takes on a specific meaning “as a condition conducive to certain outcomes, certain possibilities of activity and habitation”3. In other words, it is an architecture in which form is conceived of as intervention in inhabited space. In the studio presented here, it is within this line of thought that the term context is understood as both four dimensional and plural in a design process deliberately construed as a dialogue between the generated (as by notation) and the fabricated.

By interweaving the generated and the fabricated any field of data in the studio is de-territorialised, subsequently re-territorialised through multiple relays. By the application of interchangeable synthetic and hermeneutic modes of operation a common field of data is constructed. The constructed data field fragmentarily densifies in what evolves, and is in the studio finally understood as project sites: the concept of project context is defined as project site-specific interweaving of data, some solid, others of a more elusive character, all of them generated in fluctuating relationships during the design process.

“You never know who´s teaching you.”

A phrase often quoted by John Hejduk, architect, educator, dean at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture N.Y.C. 1972-2000

Thought and action running parallel in the studio, the following text is an abridged encyclopedic recording of the actions framing a practice in which each student’s construction and inhabitation of a project site is unfolding in an advantageously promiscuous relationship to the production of other students. Thus the studio inquiries into the production of space constitute a collective ground for unrestrained exploration in forum, a practice that offers each student space to exfoliate unique positions in an environment in which difference and diversity expand their field of potential architectural insights.

[mode of operation] situation 1. a group of 5th-9th semester students of architecture, two tutors, a studio space. In forum presentations each Wednesday, ruled by a production-student-tutor trialogue. Exhibitions, excursions, study trips, home cooked Christmas luncheons. Erratic encounters with graduates and guests, much appreciated agents provocateurs. No shit.

2. the studio optic defines architecture as circumstantial, situated, i.e. persistently discussed in relation(-s).

Given the climate, culture, the body, movement, flux the outlining of potential socio-spatial situations generate the modification of space, of an architecture in which “forms between things constitute a site for actions, a staging of a vantage ground from which effects are launched”.4 3. targeted at jerking optics and routines into instantly altered positions, specific situations are implanted ad hoc in the project development process: trapped in screen-manoeuvres, pour concrete. Conceptual diarrhoea? Do detail. Do both. And then more.

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it.”

Yogi Berra (b. 1925) malapropism, quoted from: Allen, Stan: “Working” in: HUNCH - Rethinking representation, Berlage Institute Report no. 11, 2006/7, Rotterdam: The Berlage Institute, p. 120.

experiment Conceived as a laboratory the studio constitutes an open yet protected environment, a supporting structure for experimentation, contemplation, hesitation, doubt. Insisting on collectively pursuing and sharing insights, on being able to see, touch, dismantle, (re-)assemble, (re-)construct any object of discussion in the studio perfection, imperfection and failure are embraced as equally potent sources of enlightenment. As the materialisation of one spatial inquiry releases further inquiries in different media, materials, scales, details, investigations start formulating series of spatial inquiries with regulated changes. Through the project development process differences between the components of each inquiry inform the composition of an increasingly condensed spatial intervention in which selected parts have been subject to scrutiny while other parts are left vaguely outlined. ”His quest is total even where it looks partial. Just when he has reached proficiency in some area, he finds that he has reopened another one where everything he said before must be said again in a different way. The upshot is that what he has found he does not yet have. It remains to be sought out; the discovery itself calls forth still further quests.”

Maurice Merleau-Ponty analogously about the work of the painter. In Johnson, Galen A. (ed.): Philosophy and Painting. The Merleau-Ponty Aesthetics Reader, trans. Michael Bradley Smith. Evanstone, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 1993. p. 148.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

rules don´t think, just do it. Then think.

Certain rules guide the studio’s quest for the loss of control which preconditions true creativity. Trusting their hands to break them, our message to students is clear: if lost, bewildered or confused, follow the rules specified in each construction.

“Hands are clever.”

Sue Ferguson Gussow, professor emeritus at The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture at The Cooper Union, NYC, in conversation with Tine Noergaard (and others) on drawing, 31.03.2011

Tine Nørgaard & Claudia Carbone

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By the application of interchangeable synthetic and hermeneutic modes of operation a common field of data is constructed. The constructed data field fragmentarily densifies in what evolves, and is in the studio finally understood as project sites: the concept of project context is defined as project site-specific interweaving of data, some solid, others of a more elusive character, all of them generated in fluctuating relationships during the design process.

construction(-s) duration: 1-8 weeks The studio project development is structured as a number of constructions in each of which a particular collective focus for the students´ production is specified. Additionally, a mode of operation – i.e. a set of rules guiding the production – is specified relating to the particular subject of scrutiny, production format(-s) and method(-s). The constructions prescribe 2- and 3-dimensional analogue and digital production, and that synthetic and hermeneutic methods of production be applied interchangeably in an initially tight but increasingly loosened choreography of the studio’s collectively performed explorations into space.

Construed in dialogue with, i.e. adaptive to the studio production, the constructions reduce complexities in order to enforce in-depth multiplicity and diversity in the contribution of each student to the collective landscape of potential architectural insights: the flatness of the overview is substituted by the thickness of space; the illusion of control by a search for precision. “… construction, which means passing from disorder to order and using the arbitrary to attain the necessary,…”

Valéry, Paul: “The History of Amphion, To the Audience”, in The collected works of Paul Valéry. Bollingen Foundation 1960, New York, N.Y.: Clark & Way Inc., p. 213.

pause: duration: 1 day, following the conclusion of each construction. A space for reflection, restitution, re-vision. “the act of construction develops its own momentum.”

Williams, Rosalind: Notes on the Underground. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press 2008, p.20.

site construction 1. acknowledging that all site analysis is inevitably prefigured by design intentions5 prior to onsite explorations, an optic based on a condensation of fascination(-s) is extracted from a selected 2- or 3-dimensional object. Through manipulations – inversion, exposure, concealment, erasure - a 2-dimensional drawing is produced. Recognised as the fastidiously selective construction of a map of fascination(-s) the 2-dimensional drawing acts as a blueprint for the manufacturing of a machine for observation – a registration-notation choreography and/or tool - which is brought to site. Documentations of and from its on-site application brings forth a collection of data which constitutes the foundation of a constructed site for further project development.

2. explorations in arts, ecologies, physics, the practice of everyday lives or perhaps the colour of shadows in Zagreb in September construct a fluid framework – some solid(-ifying), some ephemeral - which, through series of distortions, condensations and deletions, concretises in series of explorations into potential materialisations of interventions interweaving the fabric of on-site recorded spaces, movements and light. The contours and character of the 1. + 2. constructed site solidify momentarily in the final project presentation, which is considered a pause for review and reflection following the initial steps of an intentionally characteristic journey into architecture.

“Maps sweat, they strain, they apply themselves. The ends achieved with so much effort? The ceaseless reproduction of the culture that brings them into being.” Wood, Denis: The Power of Maps. London/New York: The Guildford Press, 1992, p. 1.

Anne Katrine Arridt: final bachelor project paraSITE, site Rome with Nolli’s map as case, Spring 2011.

Models in different materials. Photo by Frederik Petersen.

asthetic programme The development of aesthetic programme(-s) challenges the development of form – and vice versa. Situated spaces are molded, folded, multiplied, relations studied, distorted, erased, restored. In this process an increasingly programmed between materialises in spatial relations explored in drawings; models; mock ups. With an attentive eye for the strange, the mixed, the curious, the downright mysterious misfits are explored in the dichotomic relationships figureground; mass-void; unit-sequence releasing inquiry into potential materialisations of aesthetically increasingly well-defined body-space relationships. In a continuous dialogue between configuration, materialisation, analysis and re-configuration an aesthetic programme evolves. The question responded to with increasing precision is in which specific way(-s) the spaces generated are qualifying the world. No more, no less. ”(...), form is conceptualized as a condition conducive to certain outcomes, certain possibilities of activity and habitation. Form is an instigator of performances and responses, a frame that suggests rather than fixes, that maps or diagrams possibilities that will be realized only partially at any one time.”

Hays, K. Michael: “Points of Influence and Lines of Development”, i Allen, Stan: Points + Lines. Diagrams and Projects for the City, N.Y.C.: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

Relative to the formulation of spatial materialisation(-s) inquiries are initiated into the potential performance of activity(-ies) qualified by the spaces generating. If formulated in multiplicities, the programme of activity(-ies) is left open-ended.

Reduction is not on the studio agenda.

“The value of uncompleted things is very strong.”

Louis Kahn, 1965 in Merrill, Michael, Louis Kahn – On the Thoughtful Making of Spaces. The Dominican Motherhouse and a Modern Culture of Space. Baden, CH: Lars Müller Publ. 2010, p. 7.

presentation in forum, each Wednesday Constituting a collective ground for the unrestrained exploration of space, the presentation and discussion in forum of each student’s production is performed in a variety of ad hoc-adaptive formats: from the traditional studio pin up to the regular mass flashingand-crashing total production exhibitions solely involving student-production-student interchanges, hence generously offering tutors the part of the voyeur. Irrespective of the format contemplations, straightforward information, doubts, advice, everything is shared in an intense atmosphere establishing an advantageously promiscuous relationship between the production of one student to that of other students.

Tine Nørgaard, & Claudia Carbone, Studio [D] architecture & experiment, Department of Architecture, 2010/2011.

Notes: [late ME < L context(us) a joining together, n. use of contextus (ptp. of contexere), equiv. to con- CON- + tex- (s. of texere to plait, interweave) + -tus ptp. ending] Context, etymologic origin in Webster´s Unabridged Dictionary of the English Language.

2 Hays, K. Michael: “Points of Influence and Lines of Development” in: Allen, Stan: Points + Lines. Diagrams and Projects for the City. N.Y. :Princeton Architectural Press, 1999, pp. 1-9.

3 Ibid., p. 5.

4 Ibid., p. 2.

5 see Kahn, Andrea, “From the Ground Up: Programming the Urban Site”, The Harvard Architecture Review 10, ‘Civitas / What is the City´. Princeton Architectural Press, 1998, pp.

54-71.

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Aarhus School of Architecture

Karen Olesen

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Displacement On dialogical contextualism

BY KAREN OLESEN, ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR, ARCHITECT

“A designer who can’t wait for a complete, carefully prepared program is like a tailor who doesn’t bother to measure a customer before cutting the cloth.”1

With this categorical judgment of the overly imaginative designer or architect the authors Peña and Parshall identify a norm for correct architectural practice. The quote can be found in their book ”Problem Seeking”, a “classic” of programming written for practicing architects, students of architecture as well as for developers. Peña and Parshall consider the architect as a kind of professional problem solver: first, the problem needs to be formulated in depth – and, subsequently, a valid solution can be found, i.e. a form. Le Corbusier proclaimed something similar: State the problem! he wrote in his manifesto-like call for his fellow architects to learn from the rational and unprejudiced way in which engineers handle a given task.2 And, in a speech to RIBA given in 1957, the architectural historian John Summerson claimed that the characteristic of modern architecture is that it takes as point of departure the programme rather than (as in classical architecture) an established world of form.3 But even though architecture is, in general, incited by a program - a more or less explicitly stated demand or problem - this does not mean that it is solely within the problem itself that we find the most useful information on how architecture can respond to a problem.

The analogy of Peña and Parshall to the tailoring trade is interesting because they apparently overlook the fact that the tailor, when measuring his customer, already knows the design he needs to implement. The process of measuring is a question of adapting an already existing form of a shirt, a vest or a pair of trousers - not of inventing the suit from scratch based on a thorough mapping of the human body.

On the contrary, the prior knowledge about the final product is necessary for the tailor in order for him to carry out the relevant registrations and discover where it might be necessary to perform special manoeuvres: The suit may have to be adapted to an extraordinarily voluminous waist or arms which are shorter than normally. Consequently, a formal foundation for the tailor’s project already exists - the problem (to clothe a human body in textiles), is partly formulated by means of an existing model for solving that problem.

Compared to the profession of architecture, the work of the tailor can be considered as a form of typological practice aiming at revising a series of thoroughly tested and well-known models, what we usually refer to as types. In architecture, the type is tied to a historical and cultural context: a typological design strategy is based on the type as a culturally charged phenomenon, manifesting programmatic or geographical meaning accumulated through its repeated use. By using the type as a model, the architect is at the same time borrowing from and confirming such conventional-contextual meanings.

Yet, this basically conservative practice is not the only way in which already existing forms can be reused productively in creative practice. If a formal model is to escape - at least partly - established and culturally based meaning, a displacement-strategy is necessary, that is, the effective detachment of a form from its original context. It may be an advantage if the model is more specific than the established architectural type, avoiding the generality that connects the type to well-known cultural conventions. The term prototype (from ancient Greek: proto – first + typos form) seems to be a more adequate name for a formal structure which is, on the one hand, architecturally identifiable and poignant - and, on the other hand, sufficiently flexible to adapt to new specific contextual conditions.

But why this detachment from wellknown meanings? And why should we, in the first place, attempt to identify such a prototype as a basis

A

for design? The idea that the architectural practice is a linear process through which one gathers and analyses contextual information in a rational and logical manner, and on the basis of which a valid solution is drawn up, disregards a significant human competence, namely the ability to mentally connect objects or phenomena in defiance of conventional temporal or spatial connections. This ability enables us to create original and new products, but, equally important, it enables us to identify latent possibilities in the existing – possibilities which would hardly reveal themselves through linear and logic deduction.

Theft and Redesign The displacement strategy thus aims at removing a concrete, extant form from its original context and confront it with a new context. Such a manoeuvre may involve radicality and shock as in the wellknown statement about the beauty of ”the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table”4 by Comte de Lautréamont and from the surrealist game of ”cadavre exquis”5.

Yet the displacement strategy may also be used in a less subversive manner. It can be considered as a means of uncovering a field of opportunity that is not immediately visible in a given situation.

In this type of process the context is not considered as something which is once and for all given, but, on the contrary, as something which is continually being constructed. And the architectural point of view, which a prototype allows us, will emphasise architecture as a media that actively creates context.

Yet if the prototype – the architectural preform – is not generated by a reading of the context and can neither be found in a generalised typological catalogue, where can it be found? This is where stealing becomes a productive modus operandi.

The history of architecture can be seen as a huge storehouse of realised as well as unrealised projects, and, as such, it constitutes an almost inexhaustible

The displacement strategy thus aims at removing a concrete, extant form from its original context and confront it with a new context. Such a manoeuvre may involve radicality and shock as in the wellknown statement about the beauty of "the chance encounter of a sewing machine and an umbrella on an operating table"4 by Comte de Lautréamont and from the surrealist game of "cadavre exquis"5. Yet the displacement strategy may also be used in a less subversive manner. It can be considered as a means of uncovering a field of opportunity that is not immediately visible in a given situation.

A1

A2

A3

At [Studio] Agile Architecture, Department of Architecture, Spring 2011, we stole our design material from Atelier Bowwow’s collection of ”Pet Architectures”.

A: Prototype based on samples from ”Pet Architecture Guidebook.

A1 - A3: Prototype variations based on different movement patterns.

Variation A1 + A3 confronted with the Jardin de Tuileries in Paris - accomodating diverse sport activities in the park.

CONTEXT 2010/2011

Aarhus School of Architecture

Karen Olesen

It is exactly the processing or re-design, which can be considered as the appropriation of the stolen goods. Based on a continual processing and re-representation of the swag it is transformed into the architect’s own material and, consequently, into a new product. This processing is, not least, caused by the confrontation with contextual conditions in a dialogic process which continually affects the perception of the given task as well as the given form.

source for shaping new projects - it provides us with a possibility to create architecture on architecture.

However, in order for the stealing to be productive, two manoeuvres are necessary: the first is to choose what goods are desirable; the second is the actual theft, which, in an architectural context, consists of appropriation through re-design.

The act of choosing stolen goods involves a certain element of chance. For this, personal intuition is brought into play - along with the preferences and interests of the individual architect. Nevertheless, not every choice is valid; it must involve a conscious assessment of the architectural qualities of the stolen goods. These can be formal, spatial, structural etc. qualities, which to the architect appear to be at once inspirational and challenging. Similarly, it may be qualities that can, on a more intuitive level, be related to the specific task with which the architect is faced.

If such personal choices to some observers - such as, for instance, Peña and Parshall – may seem to be an inferior starting point for providing a solution to a given task, it might be because it emphasises two conditions of the architectural practice, which are rarely recognized.

Firstly, personal preferences are always parameters in the design process; without these the artistic aspect is negated. It is precisely personal involvement and the personal artistic agenda, which makes it possible for us to create results that go beyond pragmatism and feasibility as their sole justification.

Secondly, it is an illusion to imagine the production of architecture as being devoid of random and, possibly, even irrational features.

A specific building site is, for instance, not necessarily objectively the most optimal in relation to programmatic parameters. Where a project is constructed depends, among other things, on what is available in a given geographical context and within given economic limits; these are conditions which are determined by many other circumstances besides the specific content of the task. So, precisely by being completely embedded in a context – be it social, economic, political or geographical – there is an absence in the architectural process of a completely logical agreement between the preconditions on which the task is based and the pre-conception of its solution which exists in the minds of builder, users and architects. This type of agreement - this type of context – is, on the contrary, something which has to be constructed through the work of the architect. It is here that the architectural form and the manipulation of this form becomes productive as a context-generating media. What form or prototype is used is, consequently, less important than how the prototype is processed.

It is exactly the processing or re-design, which can be considered as the appropriation of the stolen goods. Based on a continual processing and re-representation of the swag it is transformed into the architect’s own material and, consequently, into a new product. This processing is, not least, caused by the confrontation with contextual conditions in a dialogic process which continually affects the perception of the given task as well as the given form. In order for this process to succeed the architect’s ability to perceive synchronously rather than in a linear process is necessary: we may draw a parallel to the interpretational delirium within the paranoid critical method of Salvador Dali, which was introduced to architectural discourse by Rem

Koolhaas, and which celebrates the human ability of investing diverse objects with meaning, connecting them by cutting across common causal relations.6

The Autonomy of Architecture In conclusion, I would like to call attention to the fact that this approach to architectural development contains several points. First, it insists on the autonomy of architecture understood as the ability of the architect to identify formal, spatial potential in an existing architectural material independent from the historical, geographical or social context of this material. Secondly, it emphasises that this ability is not opposed to pragmatic, realistic and socially involved activities. On the contrary, the ability to construct physical and semantic context is closely connected to the spatial sensibility and insight, which is a particular characteristic of the architectural discipline.

Thirdly, the understanding that the specific architectural form is not indefinitely “locked” in an unbreakable relationship to a given physical or social problem, allows the architect to manoeuvre in a reality where given conditions of his work may be, at least partly, arbitrary – and may, at the same time, be changed along the way. It is not uncommon that quite radical changes are made during the design process. It is, for instance, quite common that the economic framework changes, but you may also find that the programme, the client and even the building site are changed during the project development.

By considering the architectural-formal idea as a material which is basically self-reliant but which is, during the design process, manipulable, the project will consequently be less vulnerable to such changes.

The work of the architect is not, first and foremost, a question of problem-solving - aiming to tie a perfect bow from the information available. It is, to a much greater extent, a question of being able to identify potential in an active and creative dialogue between architecture itself and its surroundings.

Notes: Peña and Parshall: Problem Seeking, an Architectural Programming Primer. New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2001, p. 21.

2 Le Corbusier: ”Airplanes” from Le Corbusier: Towards a New Architecture. London: The Architectural Press, 1963, pp. 100-119.

3 ”The source of unity in modern architecture is in the social sphere, in other words in the architect’s program. From the antique (a world of form) to the program (a local fragment of social pattern): this suggests a swing in the architect’s psychological orientation almost too violent to be credible.

Yet, in theory at last, it has come about […]”. Summerson, John: ”The Case for a Theory of Modern Architecture” in Oackman, Joan, ed., Architecture Culture 1943 - 1968 - a Documentary Anthology. New York: Rizzoli Int. Publications, 1993, p.232.

4 This sentence is taken from Les Chants de Maldoror from 1869 by Comte de Lautréamont (actually Isidore Ducasses 1846 - 1870). This poet was rediscovered and celebrated in the beginning of the 20th century- not least by the surrealist movement.

5 Cadavre exquis is a procedure through which a group collectively create a text or an image. Each participant contributes with a morsel without having an overall view of the whole. Different rules ensure a high degree of randomness or automatism in the process to ensure an unpredictable result.

6 Koolhaas, Rem: ”Europeans: Biuer! Dalí and Le Corbusier Conquer New York” in Koolhaas, Rem: Delirious New York: a Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan. New York: The Monacelli Press, 1994, pp. 235 - 282.

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Plan of variation A3, final project: facilities for kayaking on the Seine All illustrations are from the project created by Sarah Månsson, 8th semester student of Studio Agile Architecture, Department of Architecture and Aesthetics, Spring 2011.

Staff, Studio Agile Architecture, Department of Architecture, Spring 2011: Associate professors Karen Olesen and Andriette Ahrenkiel Jørgensen and assistant professor Christian Carlsen.

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FREDERIK PETERSEN PhD, ARCHITECT

Preparation for the exhibition Realising Representation by Frederik Petersen, Aarhus School of Architecture Exhibition Hall, 2011.

Study from the PhD Realising Representation by Frederik Petersen.

Arkitektskolens Forlag Aarhus School of Architecture, 2012