INSTITUT FÜR KUNST UND ARCHITEKTUR
ADP ANALOGUE DIGITAL PRODUCTION CMT CONSTRUCTION MATERIAL TECHNOLOGY
www.akbild.ac.at/ika
ESC ECOLOGY SUSTAINABILITY CULTURAL HERITAGE
INSTITUTE REVIEW FOR ART SUMMER AND 2021 ARCHITECTURE
A SPLIT HOPPER1 BARGE2 IS NOT A HOUSE FIRST YEAR Wolfgang Tschapeller Damjan Minovski Sophia Abendstein Arda Ardin Vladislava Bugaeva Rosa Dotzer Elliott Griffith Luke Handon Paula Hauschild Lucia Herber Justa Jasaityte Jule Jungblut Marie Lang Majed Naseri Emma Malea Noll Jakob Draz Planinsek Laurin Saied Florentin Schumann Moritz Tischendorf Xaver Wizany Reviewers and guests Matteo Cainer Valerie Messini Daniela Mitterberger Niklas Paegle Sille Pihlak Werner Skvara
Space-Beings 1 is a project consisting of the exploration, documentation and transformation of a 1000m3, self-propelled split hopper barge3 by means of first person views, line drawings in 2-, 3- and 4-dimensional geometries, 3D renderings and physical models. The project Space-Beings 1 is set up to study split hoppers and their components as one of the opposites of a house, and to document them and their interactions in detail, such as the geometry of propellers, the weight of anchors, the various speeds of water, the relation of dead loads to payload, the interference of a ship’s hull with the water, and turbulences in the water produced by a rotating propeller, as well as the potential for living on all of this. Barges are not houses. They are crafts, vessels or vehicles, sometimes equipped with more or less developed configurations of a house. For “less”, the bent posture of old skippers (together with Charles Darwin’s complaints about the low headroom on the Beagle) bears historical testimony to it, and for “more”, contemporary cruise ships can serve as examples. Hopper barges, for their part – “Klappschute” or “Baggerschute” in German – comprise an interesting complication. At the bottom, where a ship is usually most vulnerable and therefore absolutely watertight, a hopper barge has an opening through which its cargo – garbage, dredged material, gravel, soil, etc. – can be dumped. Split hopper barges are the most advanced development. Imagine a ship cut in half along its longitudinal axis, held together only by two hinges and two hydraulic cylinders, which open and close the entire ship on demand. Closing for loading and transport, opening for disposing of cargo as swiftly and economically as possible.
Split hopper barges are mainly seen in the vicinity of hydroelectric power stations, as if the two were in symbiosis. And in a way, they are. Concurrently with the production of electricity, power stations mas-sively segment the river’s natural flow of alluvial deposits and sediment. This is where the split hopper barges come in. As specialists for collecting and disposing of debris as swiftly as possible, they have the capacity to fully re-establish the alluvium’s (natural) flow, like medicine or an implanted prosthesis such as a coronary stent. So why look at split hoppers as an architect? They are not houses; they do not stand on stable ground. They are not necessarily about shelter. They are not about stability. They are not about statics. On the contrary, they are about a slow type of dynamic. They are not about isolation and closure. They are about interchange. They are about transport. They carry cargo. Heavy cargo jams against the edges of the barges to a few centimetres from the waterline. Sometimes the freight holds of split hoppers are empty. Then the barge rises to show body and volume. Downstream, it drifts with the river’s lazy movements. Then it goes full throttle against the river with the help of engines, propellers, anchors, rudders, sometimes sails. Its hull is shaped not to shelter humans, but to interact in an optimized and highly efficient way with the surrounding environment, not with the ground, not with soil, but with a liquid, fluid site. Earth, soil and gravel not as a landscape, but as compressed cargo, an artificial piece of land, or debris from upstream contained inside a barge. Can split hoppers be seen as inversions of the concept of a house? And can we learn from such an inversion? Can we imagine grafting the practice and programme of “living” not onto traditional structures made for it, but onto devices that actively support the functioning of environments? Can we imagine having “living” as a side option rather than a main purpose? Can we imagine living on devices (rather than in houses) and adjusting our way of life to the rules of such devices?4 Although not with the same productive intention, an example of such a graft or transferral is shown by Marie-Françoise Plissart5 in the 18-minute documentary video “Le fleuve”. The camera is mounted on a boat going downstream on the Congo River. The camera is fixed. It does not move. What moves is the boat, and what the observer sees is a bank of the Congo River, consisting of an endless sequence of carcasses of boats, steel ruins of machines, broken hulls and dispersed machine parts, armour and weapons, steel beams, remains of battles and wars, together forming a landscape unified by rust and a specific function: that of an endless house. “Living” as practice and programme is mounted on the ruins of war. For the making of the project, “visualization” is one of the key words. Visualizations of the barge and the body of flowing water under certain daylight conditions by means of a first person perspective are produced. As if they were snapshots through the eyes of somebody who has lost a small item on the barge or, for example, somebody approaching the barge by swimming with their head halfway under the waterline and seeing a blurred
image of the barge. Typically, first person perspectives often show a broad range of scales, for example, the immediate surroundings – things one touches, a glass of water, dishes, a dripping garden hose, a rope on the ground, a fly sitting on a hand, tools indicating construction, a mobile phone, a toilet, a sink, hands performing the hand cleaning ritual – but then also far distant conditions like a cloud configuration, landscape contours, etc. Often, first perspective visualizations include parts of the seeing entity, such as a hand, a machine part, a robotic arm, a part of a recording camera or the lids of an eye, as shown, for example, in Ernst Mach’s “View through the Left Eye”. Such visualizations can follow narratives, like the repair of a defect rudder, which requires a dive underneath the hull of the barge. Design Studio First Year
→ fig. 5–8 / p. 7 → fig. 50-51 / p. 18 → fig. 52 / p. 18 1 A “hopper”, as its first meaning, is a “person or animal that hops”, mid-13c., agent noun from hop (v.). From c. 1200 as a surname, and perhaps existing in Old English (which had hoppestre, “female dancer”). The second meaning of hopper is a “container with a narrow opening at the bottom”, late 13c., probably an agent noun from hop (v.1) via the notion of the grain juggling in a mill hopper or the mechanism itself, which was set to operate with a shaking motion. Railroad hopper-car is from 1862. See: www.etymonline.com 2 A hopper barge, then, is “a barge for disposing of garbage, dredged material, etc., having hoppers in the bottom through which such cargo can be dumped”. See: www.dictionary.com 3 As a model for the project, a Mudder 80 with a length of 65m, a width of 11.4m and a depth of 4.4m was used. The Mudder 80 has a cargo volume of 1000m3 and is a class GL +100 A 5 RSA(20) split hopper barge. 4 Students were asked to assume the role of an architect who is addressed by a group of six people who have acquired a split hopper barge as their future base for experimentation with alternative lifestyles and alternative forms of economy and labour. A detailed programme is given. 5 Marie-Françoise Plissart is a Belgian photographer, filmmaker, video artist and architecture photographer. In her video works on cities and rivers, Plissart goes beyond the format of documentaries. Works like “Le fleuve” are closer to architectural projects than they are to film. In the photo essay “Droit de regards” Plissart uses photography as a language of theory.
A BUILDING?? ESC Hannes Stiefel Andreas Zißler Olivia Ahn Charlotte Beaudon Römer Lucas Fischötter Maximilian Gallo Patricia Griffiths Alexander Groiss Paula Hattenkerl Felix Knoll Nurhan Kok Armin Maierhofer Jonathan Moser Diana Mudrak Anna-Elina Pieber Dana Radzhibaeva Paul Schurich Roxane Seckauer Sebastian Seib Martin Sturz Marie Teufel
Reviewers and guests Margit Brünner Claudia Cavallar Ernst Fuchs Michael Hirschbichler Judith Mussel Simon Oberhammer Karolin Schmidbaur
Over the past three years, 14 out of 44 master thesis projects at IKA focused, in one way or another, on the design of a (terrestrial) building, or buildings. In this period, the number of building designs gradually decreased from year to year. In 2020 twelve master thesis projects qualified for IKA’s internal nomination procedure for the prizes of the Academy. None of them were projects that investigated the potential functions of a building in contemporary societies and actual environments, or in nearby futures, in terms of design. The eligible projects didn’t include any plans for architectural structures or constructions that would have expressed, by all the available means of architectural conception and representation, their authors’ true desire to realize these plans in the actual physical world. Hence, the elaboration of building proposals presently does not seem to be of overwhelming interest to a majority of IKA students when facing their final project in architectural studies. This is remarkable. It needs to be acknowledged and considered. And yet, it would be worthwhile – for students and faculty – to thoroughly explore what it is that constitutes this phenomenon, and to draw conclusions from the resulting findings. In 2019 alone, 27,681 new buildings were erected in Austria.1 It’s evident that not all of these buildings can be considered works of architecture per se. And yet, all of them, as we know, have a tremendous impact on their manifold environments. While under the current regime of extreme climates, all of us in the field of architecture finally have the chance (or, to put it bluntly, are forced) to become aware of the relational nature of all objects, subjects and spaces, grown and constructed, questions of buildings obtain new significance. Such questions do not focus on buildings as functional objects, but rather on their complex function in interplay with their environments. The environmental function of architecture needs to be addressed, investigated, studied and reformulated by design – today more than ever. And what, if not an anticipated future building structure, operating in specifically complex, critical environments, is practically predestined to serve as a model for such research by design? In the fields of academic architectural studies, arts-based research in architecture and experimental architectural practice, the idea of a model is constantly pushed to its limits. A model (from the Latin modulus = measure) is by definition a measuring device, a plumbing tool, a mediating structure, a research instrument. And architecture, through building, is capable of testing, observing and further developing these models in full scale in particular physical realms and specific societal and
HTC HISTORY THEORY CRITICISM GLC GEOGRAPHY LANDSCAPES CITIES
environmental contexts. That’s why we so urgently need more buildings whose conceptions are rooted in the abovementioned fields of architecture. Consequently, experimental building practice must finally be recognized and fostered as environmental research practice – also and especially by and within the relevant academic institutions. IKA is the Institute for Art and Architecture. And the highest art of architecture is the art of building: building as applied art-based environmental research practice. It is worth striving for, further and continuously. Hannes Stiefel
PRECEDENT: HABITAT 67 / MOSHE SAFDIE / MONTREAL 1967 Expo 1967 – A point of pride for Canada Surrounded by the ubiquitous noises of a harbour, hosted for middle-class city dwellers, and located on an artificial peninsula with nothing but a street and a building of Moshe Safdie’s design. Looking at Habitat 67 in Montreal, what we find is a cell-like structure consisting of 354 blocks housing 158 homes. A faint echo of Japanese metabolism, where everything is designed to be replaced, arises. Imagine living in a world without static entities. Imagine a structure conveying fundamental necessities of life like metabolism in the simplest geometrical forms. Where rectangular boxes start to depict organic processes. But what is metabolism? We replace the majority of our cells every seven years, and the upper layer of our skin every two weeks even. If all the cells in our body did this, we would be immortal. But some of our cells, like the ones in our brains, don’t renew themselves. They age, and they age us. We cannot have eternity, but we can have the memory of a touch. Eventually, in a world without static entities, there is constant abeyance between oblivio and immortalitas, between oblivion and immortality. Metabolically, Habitat 67 represents a continuous quest to expand into the future without the fear of leaving the past behind. Time is our dogma. As an independent, non-spatial continuum, time shapes our environment into fourdimensional space and synchronously limits our existence to a certain lifespan. It is both life-giving and life-taking. Time both heals and kills our cells through metamorphosis, symbiosis and metabolism. They live, they die. We live, we die. Imagine we lived in a world without static entities. Suspending the traces of time. There are three ways of cell regeneration. Unique. Cyclic. Permanent. The regeneration of cells is based on their ability to divide. The more sophisticated and differentiated a cell is, the less capable it is of dividing in order to regenerate. A neuronal brain cell, for example, is too heavily loaded with information, while a skin cell is made for nothing but constant renewal.