The Stupid Wall An homage to vernacular architecture constructions Topic 4. “Possible innovations from the vernacular techniques to modern construction” Aalto University - History of Finnish Architecture 1 Lecturer: Prof. Panu Savolainen Written by Joachim Daetz 2021
I. Introduction
The title of this essay is an innuendo to the current trends of converting everything in our todays lives into intelligent objects. From our phones, light bulbs all the way to our walls. The ‘Internet of things’ connects all objects to our internet to constantly surveil parameters like our moisture levels or making it possible to control the heating systems from another continent. In this essay I would like to explore, based on Finnish/nordic traditional construction methods, the necessity of intelligent walls/constructions oppose to how buildings were constructed only a few hundred years ago. Is there really a need for all this technology? As Sven Matt phrased it in a talk once: In a few years' time, passive houses will be nothing more than hazardous waste. My personal believe is that we can learn a lot from the past – as without it we wouldn’t be where we are today. Furthermore, I believe that we, as a society, have developed maybe “too quickly” in the past decades and due to focusing on new developments, forgot about our traditional building techniques. We were/are too focused on the future and didn’t value handcraft masters enough – which led to scarcely educated craftsmen in today’s world.
*Sustainability is a word that, in my opinion, has lost its clear meaning. It is merely a concept and is interpreted in many ways. The meaning should always be
clarified in each context. It has been recently used for marketing purposes to trick people into believing what a company is doing is in fact “sustainable”. 1/8
II. Analysis
II.1 Passive-/PlusEnergy Houses The trend in architecture from the 1960’s to this point was to develop methods to minimize the energy consumption during the service life of a building. To further ensure that the energy we need is coming from own produced energy (favorably from renewable sources like solar) – so called ‘Passive Houses’ or even ‘PlusEnergy Houses’ that can produce more energy than the house itself needs to sustain itself. Even selling this over-produced energy to the city or to use it to charge one’s electric car. This phase in architecture was needed to appreciate the fact that energy is not an endless resource, and its use needs to be optimized in order to save fossil fuels. Yet, as ‘sustainable’ as people might think this is its not as good as it appears to be on a materialistic level. As there is hazardous waste hidden behind the intelligent façades. All the insulation materials, the sensors for monitoring and thin foils needed to make sure no moisture can harm the construction. With this, I feel, we go against nature – forcing a material to stay dry, while there are materials such as wood which naturally continues to breath and attracts or abandons moisture based on the surrounding conditions.
This trend leaves us with
problematic materials once the passive houses have served their purpose (as people like to call it), which nowadays is around 60 years after its construction. It will be and is difficult to disassemble these constructions, furthermore, to upcycle, recycle or reuse any of these materials. This calls for two things, either better solutions to reuse insulation and concrete waste in the future or to avoid using these materials in the first place. I believe we, as architects and engineers, have quite mastered the energy efficiency of the service life of a building over the past decades. Now it is time to look at the ‘grey energy’ which is the energy needed to extract the raw materials, to ship them to the site, to build the building (machinery) and the energy needed to dismantle the building. Viewing the building in its whole context. From the extraction of the raw material all the way to the dismantling phase.
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II.2 ‘Material Depot’ by Thomas Rau Viewing a building as a ‘Material Depot’ is an idea that Thomas Rau describes in his published book ‘Material Matters’ that focuses on the issue of this ‘grey energy’. His idea is to design architecture ready for disassembly. Which is in fact not at all a new concept, as natives from Finland in the stone ages (and later) already build shelters for disassembly as they were not planning to stay in one place for a long period of time, thus needing their buildings to be as mobile as possible. This idea of mobility is interesting as in Germany we call a ‘property’ an ‘Immobilie’ which already conveys the fact that it cannot be moved and was built to stay there forever. Rau wants to revisit the idea of buildings not having to be immobile. Yet not in a way as indigenous people around the world would have many years ago, but in a sense of viewing a building as a depot. Creating material passports for all the materials used in the building, creating databases to ensure the whereabouts of a material that someone owns. It has many upsides but primarily this could lead people to start viewing material as an investment, like shares, and not as a property that will lose its value at the end of its lifecycle. Houses will merely be storing the materials until they can be used again somewhere else after they are no longer needed in this particular place. The material might stay at its original value, lose a bit in value or gone up in value - depending on the worlds market trends. Just imagine being able to sell your grandparents house, that is simply too old or too far away for regular use, in a sense of raw materials. Dismantling it and gaining profits through materials and not through the location it is in, as it might today be in an unattractive spot due to demographic changes. In this concept it is vital that the building is designed in a way that it can be disassembled easily in the future. To my knowledge, the easiest construction to disassemble, is the traditional log house of Finland (or Canada and other countries). The tree trunks are joint together with connections like the ‘norjalainen nurkka’ (Norwegian knot) or dovetail joints. They are not glued together and can thus be easily taken apart, transported to another site, and reassembled (if the trunks were marked in a coherent way, this step will be smoothest). This is a technique that many indigenous cultures have been using for a long time and has maybe gotten lost along our quickly industrializing society. It is simply impossible to do with a modern, highly intelligent house as it was designed to be immobile. 3/8
II.3 Monitoring The advantages of wooden log houses and them not being air-tight, in a sense of vacuum ceiled walls, are that they do not need strict monitoring. They can be left unheated for many months without worrying about it leaving permanent damage to the structure. Which leaves houses in today’s world inhabited yet heated. As the team from the ‘Zero Arctic’ project put it: “Sami have thus become ‘slaves to their houses’…” (Huttunen et al., 2021) meaning that constructions before passive house standards have allowed them to leave their house to follow their reindeer stock for months at a time. Today they need either technology and internet to monitor their houses from many miles away or they need someone physically present to keep the house at a heated state. This idea could further be translated to a modern day’s businessperson, who must leave their home for multiple weeks a year for trips around the world. Leaving the heater on or regulating it from a far to ensure the moister levels are not damaging the structure of the house. It is a luxury that our western privileged society can afford – yet it is unnecessary, and the electricity waste could be avoided by building structure that can handle unmonitored phases, in other words a ‘stupid wall’. Of course, monitoring itself is not a bad thing, it can also help wooden constructions to sustain longer periods of times. Warning about unwanted levels of moisture contents and leaving the owner to react to the state the walls are in. This is indeed a positive technology and thermometers could be integrated into ‘stupid wall’ structures. Yet there are good rule of thumbs to go by to ensure for example wooden structure to last centuries without the necessity of technology. This use or not use of technology, probably depends on the initiative a house owner is willing to take themselves. How much are they willing to learn about what it means to have a ‘stupid wall’ oppose to a smart intelligent home that provides maximum comfort and allows the owner not needing to know a thing about the place they are living in, as AI will take care of it. Is it fair to ask: Education versus comfort?
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III. Opinions and Ideas
III.1 Air-conditioner as the fall of climate orientated building designs Comfort is something that we all enjoy, me included, and having to do things that a machine is able to do can be a hassle, depending on what it is. Yet not all inventions were a success (in terms of environmental friendlessness) even though they provide the ultimate comfort. In my opinion the invention of the air-conditioner was the fall of climate orientated designs. It gave architects the green light to ignore the course of the sun and build windows in any size and shape. Of course, a lot of modern buildings I admire were designed in this ‘air conditioner design era’ and it was great to see what architecture is capable of, if we were to forget about the climate (large windows etc). But if we pick a fight with nature – we as humans will always lose. Yet, I feel we should learn from this and go back to how for example Finnish locales have designed houses in preindustrial times. Meaning, studying the course of the sun (and many other factors) to make sure that we need as little cooling/heating as possible. Julia Watson created a great publishment – ‘Lo-tek’ - in which she studied indigenous cultures that still exist today while trying to understand what their design principles were. Of course, they cannot all easily be compared to a highly complex modern city structure but in my opinion, there is a lot that could/should be translated to cities. Books like Watsons are looking for example at dessert regions 2000 years ago, illustrating how it was possible for indigenous people to sit inside a building whilst a cool breath of air flew through the room simply with the aid of ‘windtowers’. Furthermore, these books study the incredible accuracy the building masters had like in tombs in Ireland (Newgrange) where the sunlight only enters the chamber at the dawn of winter solstice (the shortest day of the year). This accuracy meant years of studying the paths of the sun to create such a scenario. Note that this was created roughly 3,200BC. Today, 5000 years later I live in an apartment complex that does not even receive enough sunlight to read a book in autumn at daytime. Is it may be time for us to respect nature again and instead of seeing these conditions as problems we see them as design opportunities? The more we, as architects, study our
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surroundings, the more we can use these parameters to propose a building that needs no air-condition, air-tight insulation materials or is exposed to poorly sunlit living spaces. III.2 Form Follows Function Climate Sullivans idea of “Form follows function” could be translated to “Form follows Climate” in the 21st century. Climate Designers are in fact a reality in our modern architecture world. The University of Technology in Munich (TUM) under the supervision of Prof. Gerhard Hausladen and Prof. Thomas Auer have for example educated people in this field. This job is based on understanding the local climates of an intervention and their designs are based on sun, wind, rain, humidity (etc.). Something that was already intuitive to indigenous people while constructing a building. These factors shape a building in many ways such as the volume, the sizes of the windows and the angle of the roof. Of course, climate designers are dealing with modern energy concepts that our technology provides for us. But by studying the surroundings carefully, creating great simulations before the design process started, they can reduce the use of technology to its bare minimum. It is idealistic to think that modern houses can be built without proper technology these days and obviously this is one of the things where technology and tradition needs to find a balance. Were a ‘stupid wall’ meets an ‘intelligent wall’ and finds a compromise to become a ‘clever wall’?
IV. Project example of a ‘clever wall’. The successful combination of Lo- & High-Tech So, how can we learn from the past but still respect what is going on in today’s world? How can we create these ‘clever walls’? Combining materials that can be reused, dismantled or put back into the ground without harming the ecosystem? Luckily, there has been architecture offices of todays time which have, in my opinion succeeded in creating this balance. Buildings such as the ‘Alnatura Campus in Darmstadt, Germany (Architect: haas cook zemmrich STUDIO 2050 / Energy Concept: Transsolar)’. Transsolar is one of the leading companies in the field of climate orientated design. On a continuous outlook to find the solutions that need the least technology while using materials that bring the physical properties that allow the construction to strive best under the given circumstances. One of the main materials used in this example is ‘rammed earth’ it is essentially clay, found on site with no transportation energy needed to ship to the site. Clay 6/8
has, similar to wood, the ability to breath. Take moisture in when the surrounding has higher levels and extracting moisture when the surrounding air is dryer. Leaving the building in a constant state of moisture equilibrium. Yet, the choice of materiality is not the only climate orientated choice made in this project. The section reveals that the angles of the roofs allow the heated air to leave through natural physiological means out the top while allowing cooled air to come through the rammed earth walls. It would be wrong to say that this example is a good one for the idea of a ‘stupid wall’ as the walls literally do contain a fair amount of technology like wall heating etc. – yet it proves that technology can be minimized and optimized or let’s say balanced.
V. Conclusion As we live in the 21st century and have developed from indigenous cultures, that strived the lands in nomadic tribes, into a modern city society with new ideals, contexts and structures architecture calls for yet a new era of construction. We, with our modern technologies, cannot live in houses that were build in the stone age, yet I believe that we also do not need to live in houses that cause damage to the earth simply because our technology allows certain things which were not possible centuries ago. People these days are looking for balance – if that’s in their work-life situation, their color concepts, in their society or in their diet. So why not also look for a balance of high-tech and low-tech? Between a ‘stupid wall’ and an ‘intelligent wall’? We need balance in architecture. Taking modern elements that help us create architecture in a logical and circular manner whilst respecting the context with a choice of materiality that is not overly processed and can be re-used, upcycled and easily dismantled. A ’stupid wall’ might not be the solution to the problem but they sure help us putting our needs into context. Identifying the strict necessity from the luxury and thus probably harmfulness for the ecosystem. Of course, the best thing for our environment is to not build new buildings at all and just renovate the existing ones - in either case, next time you are confronted with a design task – I hope you take a moment to think about the good old traditions and ‘stupid walls’. 7/8
IV. Literature List
Books and monographs: Rau, Thomas; Oberhuber, Sabine. Material Matters. Econ, 2019 Schittich, Christian. Traditionelle Bauweisen – Ein Atlas zum Wohnen auf fünf Kontinenten. Birkhäuser, 2019 Watson, Julia. Lo-TEK Design by Radical Indigenism. Taschen, 2019 Articles: Huttunen, Marko; Mikkola, Juulia; Saraste, Frans; Savolainen, Panu. ”Zero Arctic”, ark Perinne ja uudistuminen, 2-2021 (2021), p. 36-39. Saatsi, Emilia&Pekka. ”Repairing is a Source of Sustainability”, ark - Perinne ja uudistuminen, 2-2021 (2021), p. 40-43. Talk: Matt, Sven. here + there. Lecture series by the Faculty of Architecture at FH München. 2019
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