on site 9 : surface

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On Site review issue 9 2003 publisher The Association for Non-Profit Architectural Fieldwork (Alberta) guest editors Tonkao Panin Juan Manuel Heredia editor Stephanie White assistant editor Tom Strickland contributors Jin Baek Philip Beesley Justin Cipriani Steve Const Alexander Eisenschmidt Lyndale George Hamilton Hadden Juan Manuel Heredia David Hernandez Quintela Ivan Hernandez Quintela Florian Jungen Açalya Kiyak Brian Lemond

Karl Loeffler Christine Maile Joylyn Marshall Tom Martin Federicao De Matteis Fernando Moreira Rafael Gomez-Moriana Sheila Nadimi Peter Osborn Tonkao Panin Kerry Ross Aniket Shanane Caren Yglesias

design & production Black Dog Running printer Makeda Press, Calgary

Transportable Environments call for papers In April 2004, Ryerson will host an international academic conference entitled Transportable Environments. This conference will be the third in a series of conferences on portable environments and is being organized and co-chaired by Filiz Klassen of Ryerson University and Dr. Robert Kronenburg from Liverpool University, School of Architecture, UK. Delegates from around the world will examine built and theoretical transportable environments where permanence is either not possible or desirable. The conference will focus on a variety of topics ranging from portability, adaptability, deployability and the sustainability of built environments to material and technological innovations. The purpose of this conference is to search for new interpretations of existing and developing technologies to fulfill requirements that can not be met by the use of existing construction methods and materials. Examples of such environments can vary from refugee camps to high-tech space architecture.

The main objective of the conference is to identify and define possible directions for a body of interdisciplinary work connecting design, theory and practice in the conception and making of transportable environments in architecture, interiors, industrial design, fashion, urban design, highly engineered structural design, and aerospace engineering.

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comments, ideas, proposals editor@onsitereview.ca GST Registration No 89648 5117 RT0001 Canada Post Agreement No 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright On Site Review and Field Notes Press ALL RIGHTS RESERVED The use of any part of this publication reproduced, trans-mitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise, or stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of copyright law, Chapter

C-30, R S C 1988.

A call for papers from local and international scholars, graduate students, designers and manufacturers and a two day program along with a presenters’ list will be developed during summer and fall 2003. Full information is available at www.ryerson.ca/portable 2003 June 15: Call for abstracts September 15: Abstract submissions October 1: Notification of acceptance 2004 February 1: Full paper submissions March 30: Conference proceedings April 29-30: Conference The first conference took place in 1997 at Liverpool University School of Architecture; the second conference in 2001 was at the National University of Singapore, School of Architecture and Built Environment. Further information on conferences and publications can be obtained from www.liv.ac.uk/abe/portablearchitecture

A Note on Two Pieces Brian Lemond

Surface here is rendered in three distinct ways: 1. the limit of construction. Wood modules act in concert and in accordance with a consistent logic to build a rhythm, an expectation of sequence, in each piece. The sides and faces of the modules offer their signatures to the composite structure.

2. applied treatment. The treatment of these constructions, in these cases the addition of enamel or the burning of the wood itself, supplies a variable to the static equation of the configuration. The grid of elements alternately vanishes beneath the applied surface or is fundamentally and aggressively altered by the heat.

3. binding elements. The combination of these ingredients, the structural and the superficial, yields the third surface, the perceptual. The cold, white enamel edge lends the grid of endgrain an apparent thinness that counters our expectation of both material and form, while the induced splits and shifts in the scorched grid emphasize the fibrous nature and true depth of the wooden components. 

b r i an l e mo nd

Brian Lemond is a sculptor working in Brooklyn NY, and is part of the Experimental Modern Arts Collective, www.xmac.org

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ivan hernandez quintela florian jungen

hamilton hadden

Contents

david hernandez quintela

6 7 8 10 12

katherine bourke alexander eisenschmidt

caren yglesias

Katherine Bourke: Parking Surface Inese Birstins: Road Kill Tonkao Panin: In the City — how are we surfaced?

Alexander Eisenstadt: Stadbilder — memory, place, wall.

Raphael Gomez-Moriana and Sheila Nadimi: Out of Sight.

Architecture as camouflage in everyday life.

brian lemond

aniket shahane philip beesley

joylyn marshal and peter osborne

rafael gomez-moriana sheila nadimi fernando dinez moreira

kerry ross

building surfaces

16 Kuth/Ranieri: The Body in Repose. An installation at for

Fabrications at SFMOMA. 20 Acalya Kiyak: Rock and Liberty: Gehry’s Experience

Music Project draped in Seattle.

22 Kerry Ross: Detail: snow/surface/water. The Bear Street

project in Banff.

26 Karl Loeffler: The Ice Hotel, Duchesnay Ecological

Reserve.

30 Fernando Dinez Moreira: A Surface for Breathing. Lucio

Costa and Parque Guinle, Brazil.

33 Federico de Matteis: The Post Office and the Telegraph

Band — an architecture parlante.

34 Juan Manuel Heredia: Transparence of an Opaque Surface.

Juan O’Gorman’s Central Library at

the University of Mexico.

35 Aniket Shahane: Letter from Barcelona. On the Surface.

40 Marie Rupert: Shiny Surfaces. An ICF wall on a zero-lot line.

42 Caren Yglesias: Vague Places with Fine Edges.

tom martin

city surfaces

room surfaces

28 Jin Baek: Infinity and a Wooden Cross. Two churches by

Tadao Ando.

41 Manoo: Deep Skin. PS Offices, Cuernavaca, Mexico.

43 Joylyn Marshall and Peter Osborne: Spectacular, Spectacular.

West Edmonton Mall changes its skin.

inese birstins

juan manuel heredia

earth surfaces

24 Phillip Beesley: Orgone Reef, an installation at the University

of Manitoba.

25 Hamilton Hadden: Elemental Surfaces, a water controlling

geosynthetic surface.

36 Christine Maile: Smooth Diagrams on a Complex Earth

christina maile tonkao panin elizabeth ranieri and byron kuth

half the design and construction team of Emile Gilbert + associates

material surfaces

4 Brian Lemond: Two Surfaces 44 Eduardo Aquino: Flatbox, an installation at Fort Whyte,

Manitoba.

47 Florian Jungen: The Mi’kmaq Wigwam.

48 Tom Martin: Wet’swet’en Bridges, British Columbia.

50 Lyndale George: Letter from Hagewelit stephanie white Surface

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k at he r i n e b o u r ke

Parking space Katherine Bourke All photos are of the past, yet in them an instant of the past is arrested so that, unlike a lived past, it can never lead to the present.

Between the moment photographed and the present there is an abyss.

John Berger, Another Way of Telling

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from the series PARKING SPACE 3X3’ colour photograph 2002

n awareness of oneself, or how one belongs to and interacts with the world, is primarily realized through one’s experience of in-between spaces — an experience that is contingent on the flux of time, place, and identity. The in-between space found through walking generates a lucid mind and a displaced body.

Urban landscape photographs — vacant of utility — are slices of space subverted from the familiar; ordinary landscapes are made extraordinary. Still photographs of intersections and commuter platforms paradoxically arrest and embrace vitality, movement, and passage.

Surface Issue 9 2003

The idea of path communicated through photographs of this urban landscape recalls a pedestrian, or non-car, culture. Conversely, the photos of these parking lots possess a silence and stillness — a space for reflection.

To realize space through an investigation into the everyday provides a vehicle by which to explore the human experience within and of landscape, while simultaneously exploring awareness of self through these meditative inbetween spaces.  Katherine Bourke is a semi-nomadic visual artist and writer with a BFA & MFA in photography whose next locale is London, England to pursue graduate work in photography and urban cultures. www.citywalker.ws

in e se bir st e n s

Road kill Inese Birstins

t

he gloves were photographed and collected over a period of one year.

They therefore encompass all the seasons, include male and female, child and adult, and reflect activity ranging from work to play.

These items of apparel have been lost, not discarded.

They retain the reference to the absent body and express the gesture.

They speak eloquently of loss, separation, abandonment, but also of energy, activity and life force.

The emotional tone evoked is mostly poignant, with shadings ranging from pain and distress to hilarity at the antic energy trapped within. Overall, there is a sense of deterioration, the ending of usefulness and the sadness inherent in the decline, though tempered often by a strong touch of humour. ď §ď źď Ł Inese Birstins was born in Latvia, grew up in Australia, became an artist in Canada, has exhibited in North America, Europe and Brazil.

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Architecture and Surface In the city.

How are we surfaced?

Tonkao Panin

I

n the city one is surrounded by multiple layers of architectural surfaces which both serve our interests and sustain them. Perhaps it is inevitable that we are captured by the arresting surfaces in the city, those of the immaculate, the polished, and the jolly. Our impression of the city is often shaped by its constructed face, the manifold, inviting aspects of frontal façades. Yet, along with the smart and healthy surfaces, we also notice the extra-ordinary images of the seemingly accidental, sick, dumb, morose, and uninviting surfaces, often tucked behind, beside, beneath or beyond the immaculate façades.

Though the city consists of aggregated bodies of architecture, it ialso includes the in-between where space is conditioned by what is unused, unoccupied and at times, unwanted.

While the areas enclosed by frontal facades easily become glorified public spaces — a kind of beautiful display, the in-between spaces of the dismal surfaces can be seen as a special kind of setting, a different kind of exterior room. Within these hidden passages and the unreachable spaces, one discovers spatial and surface patterns without which the city fabric would be crippled. While the beautiful and carefully designed façades sustain the interests of the city spectators, the hidden surfaces of the areas in-between serve the interest of those who dwell within the city. Both the glossy and the gloomy surfaces should always be seen as integrated Their continuity, differences, moments of transformation and disruption, all represent more than skin-deep details. They represent the way the city is being used and occupied. Without the differences between the carefully-maintained frontal façades and the beaten-up surfaces, the city itself becomes inarticulate.

It is the relationship between the ensembles of architectural surfaces that lend materiality to the city’s boundaries. 

Born: France Registered architect:Thailand Current research: Architecture in Vienna: the dialectic between the concepts of space and surface.

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to nk a o p a ni n

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Stadtbilder — memory, place, wall Alexander Eisenschmidt

w

e as architects are used to the glossy, beautiful images of buildings and houses that are supposedly representative of the discipline; and maybe it is true that architecture must define itself through these pictures that stand for something extraordinary, something that is particular and new.

But there is also the other side of architecture, the already there, the not looked at, the avoided. These images are still part of our cities, but not of the architectural discourse. One might ask: is it possible that architecture overlooks the potential of these places and propagates, or at least facilitates, the smoothing-out of the discontinuities in the architectural ‘façade’?

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Looking at places that have survived the acts of renovation and cleansing in our cities, one can detect moments that relate to a very different mood than the one which is usually presented to us. I am referring to scenes in which the building block spontaneously breaks off and reveals its interior, moments of rupture, and moments that give insight into the matter of the city.

Could it be that the place reveals itself through these voids in the cityfabric, the so-called blind spots, with their dark brick walls and faded murals? These morbid surfaces that stand in contrast to the finished and smooth pictures of the cityscape can then be understood in terms of their distinct value of having a direct textural relation to the memory of the place. Here the relationship between void and wall-surface moves from a merely spatial to a historical condition.. This open-ended character that conflicts with the, more or less, homogeneous cities invites the new through a dynamism that confronts stagnation.

alex an de r e ise n st adt

Former buildings, previous use and weathering have left their outlines and marks on walls that become fields of memory, which are both extremely rich and free from spatial elaboration. History is here read through the absence of the building, through traces on the surface that give anthropological references and hence make a very different visual approach possible. Here time and human action are seen in the depth of the wall through remnants of whatever was previously there.The ‘looking at’ becomes a ‘looking through’ — an act of seeing that no longer stops at the sur (the above) of the surface but that penetrates through it and so removes the superficiality of the common surface.

Reading these walls as a palimpsest and as documentation of the ‘not anymore’ allows at the same time an association with the moments to come.

Enriched with memory but spatially open, these incomplete moments in the city stand for continuation and oppose a final structuring of place.

Other media like film and photography already have discovered these territories and it is time for architecture to work not against these images, but to recognize them as potential fields of investigation and equal components of the city-fabric. These zones — the densely layered surfaces that are by character temporal and autonomous — are open for subjective and self-defined projects, which might assist a new way of looking at these areas and question our common definition of beauty.

But, to begin with, we have to try to see more in these images than their negative connotations; indeed, we might as well accept the potentials that lie in ‘negativity.’ 

Alexander Eisenschmidt began his architectural education at HTWK in Leipzig, Germany. Later, he obtained a Masters of Architecture at Pratt Institute in New York City and is currently a Ph.D. student at the University of Pennsylvania where his research investigates the relationship between architecture and ideology.

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i

n nature, the resemblance between many animal species’ surface patterns and their habitat helps them avoid detection by their predators.

This principle, camouflage, is similarly applied by humans in some situations, the most common of which is warfare. In the normal, everyday life of the city, however, an architectural form of camouflage also exists that, as in nature or warfare, can serve as a stratagem for the avoidance of detection — not of prey or enemy forces, but of certain activities and building functions; and not necessarily by predators, but by ordinary citizens. This architectural type of camouflage is not very common, but it is nevertheless illustrative, demonstrating that, in addition to playing an aesthetic role, architectural appearance can also play a performative and strategic role in the city. It reminds us, moreover, of the diplomatic complexity of urban-architectural relations, while betraying the extent to which a mythical image of the city must sometimes be made to prevail over reality.

The surface of a building always conceals from view the very thing it contains and shelters: its function or content. However, in order to navigate the complexity of the modern city, however, buildings need to be somewhat legible. Historically, urban legibility was achieved by means of ornament and typological form: an important public building would have a socle, a church a steeple, a store display windows. While interior

styles could vary eclectically to reflect private tastes, the façade usually was consistent with a building’s program and type. With the emergence of steel structural systems and glass cladding, content could be rendered significantly more visible, obviating the need for traditional forms of representation. There was still a moral obligation, on the part of architects, for a building to honestly express its function, whether through the symbolic transparency of ornament or the literal transparency of glass.

With the advent of postmodernism, a disjunction emerges between program and expression, with the dialectic between form and content giving way to a dichotomy. A common example is the heritage practice known as ‘façadism’ whereby entirely new building construction takes place behind historical façades that have been retained at great expense. This is itself a reversal of the 1960s practice of re-cladding ordinary turn-of-the-century buildings in North American downtowns with modern metal screens and signage, of which Manhattan’s Times Square provides an example. Here, the dichotomy results from horizontal historical layering. In contemporary façadism, however, a horizontal anti-historical layering takes place that is rendered significant, and highly questionable, by its very willfulness.

Out of Sight Architecture as Camouflage in Everyday Life Rafael Gómez-Moriana and Sheila Nadimi

rafa e l g o me z - mo r i a na + s h ei l a n ad i mi

Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder (Our Lord in the Attic) is a clandestine Catholic church in Amsterdam built by merchant Jan Hartman as part of his house in 1663. It has its own access stairs from a side alley and two gallery levels.The laws that made Amsterdam Protestant in 1578 forbade the public practice of Catholicism as well as any public display of Catholic symbols.

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A ventilation flue for the Paris metro built in 1982 behind the retained historical façade of a small hotel that formerly occupied the site.There are no floors behind the windows, only maintenance catwalks.The flue extends several stories into the ground, and contains large fans that pump fresh air into the underworld of Paris. A series of louvres prevents birds and falling objects from getting caught in the fans.

New buildings with disjunctive elevations are just as disingenuous. Since the dichotomy here is planned from the outset, there is a suspicion that a surface is being used to mislead. A disjunctive façade could simply be a designer’s conceit, while camouflage entails that something is being deliberately hidden. The context of content—what is inside and its relationship to what is outside — is therefore a crucial factor in the identification of cases of architectural camouflage.

The most common rationale for camouflage is the desire for privacy, particularly in the case of clandestine activity, in which case the architectural façade functions literally as its deceptive ‘front’. Two examples here are the seventeenth-century Catholic church of Our Lord in the Attic (left), which was built into a typical canal house in Amsterdam during the Calvinist rebellion against Catholicism, and a recently exposed marijuana-growing operation in suburban Montreal that was concealed in dozens of new tract houses which, investigators believe, may have been specifically built for this purpose. Conversely, camouflage could also be used to avert crime, where the architectural surface deceives to prevent the contents and occupants of a building from being targeted by criminals. An example here is the residence of Hollywood actor, artist and collector Dennis Hopper in Venice, California (see page 15), designed

by Brian A. Murphy, and which urban theorist Mike Davis has termed a ‘stealth home’ for its resemblance to a shed.

Another application of architectural camouflage appeases public sensitiity to unsightly programs: urban infrastructural facilities —electric substations for example— are usually situated at important locations within an urban network. The architectural surface then deceives to maintain a certain public image consistent with a prevailing notion of civic rectitude— to keep up appearances, as it were. A subway ventilation facility in Paris is essentially a very large chimney built behind a historic hotel façade (above), and a suburban Winnipeg bungalow (see back cover) contains a flood-pumping station: both examples of ‘unsightly’ infrastructure installations that are camouflaged in their unsuspecting surroundings.

Camouflage can be applied directly over existing buildings that have a problematic history to literally cover up that history. The new surface layer deceives to promote a new public image. A World War II military hospital in Brigham City, Utah (page 15), subsequently used as a residential school for Native Americans, has recently been renovated by a private developer into new-urbanist row housing, is an example of a transformative and paint-thin application of camouflage designed to sell a new public image.

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rafae l go m e z- m o r ian a + sh e i l a na di mi

The Hilton Hotel in Barcelona, completed in 1990, was designed by two different architects: the client’s architect designed the building, while the elevations were required to be designed by a select firm approved by the city to handle building façades in important, highly visible locations.The hotel is sited on the busiest thoroughfare in Barcelona.

In each of the above cases, the predominant strategy for deceiving viewers is that of ‘blending’ into the immediate environment: camouflage as architectural contextualism. These buildings have not been designed as attention-seeking objects of aesthetic contemplation but, on the contrary, are therefore intentionally banal.

In places where banality is undesirable, camouflage can provide a strategy for its concealment. In this case, an architectural surface-as-spectacle deceives by presenting a hollow monumentality. Such is a generic, commercial, open-plan office building in Richmond upon Thames, England,

by Quinlan Terry that, on the exterior, resembles a Renaissance palace.

Another example is a Barcelona Hilton hotel (above) where the municipality ruled that the façade had to be designed by a different, more vanguard architectural firm (Viaplana and Piñon) than the firm hired by the client to design the rest of the building (Mir, Coll, and Carmona).

Although marginal in terms of occurrence, architectural camouflage is nevertheless insightful. It appears to exist mainly in technologically advanced urban societies, and to date mostly from the latter half of the twentieth century. It parallels other post-modern phenomena such as de-industrialization and the societal shift from material production to services. More precisely, it is an architectural stratagem that responds to particularly urban concerns, both practical—such as crime and privacy—as well as ideological, such as heritage and collective memory. Behind camouflage lurk private interests such as tourism, real estate and lifestyle marketing, as well as public interests such as the maintenance of public order.

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Architectural camouflage reveals, in the end, the degree to which the city is a space of illusion; an illusion that is maintained, at times, by highly theatrical means. The fact that camouflage, which is by its very nature adversarial, exists in the artificial and purportedly civilized environment of the modern city says, perhaps, the most about the degree to which the city, as a concept, is shrouded in myth. 

Research was made possible by grants from the Graham Foundation, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Netherlands Foundation for Fine Arts, Design and Architecture, by the kind cooperation of the buildings’ owners, as well as by helpful tips received from colleagues and friends.

All photographs by Rafael Gómez-Moriana and Sheila Nadimi.

Rafael Gómez-Moriana is an independent researcher and instructor interested in masscultural aspects of architecture. He lives in Barcelona.

Sheila Nadimi is a visual artist with a background in environmental studies. She is currently a lecturer of 3-D design at Utah State University in Logan, Utah.

rafae l go m e z- m o r ian a + sh e ila n adim i

Eagle Village in Brigham City (Utah) is an affordable housing development incorporating the adaptive re-use of barracks originally built during WWII as a military hospital and subsequently converted into a residential school for Native Americans.

The faรงades of the barracks have been painted to correspond with their new internal organization and to present a new image to a blighted zone with a problematic history.

rafa el g o me z - mo r i a na + s h e il a n ad i mi

The Hopper residence in Venice, California, by Brian A. Murphy, which conspicuously lacks fenestration on its main faรงade, contains a notable contemporary art collection. At the time of its construction in 1986, Venice was considered an unsafe, gritty Los Angeles neighborhood.

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The Body in Repose An installation for ‘Fabrications’ at SFMOMA Kuth/Ranieri Architects San Francisco

r

ecent trends in architectural methods of production have shifted architectural discourse from form and typology to assembly and manufacturing. Fabrication in simplest terms is about building or constructing. Our parallel interest is the skillful construct of a specific story or reality.

The Body in Repose, an installation at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, revolved around themes of body, material, and fabrication. The methods grew out of our commitment and interest in synthetic systems and the integrated confluence of surface and structure. The wall skin revealed a running subtext of psychological associations of body made evident in how the singular and synthetic membrane is inscribed.

The whole idea of trying to present architecture in a museum begs the question of context, physically and textually. We began by looking at the nature of Mario Botta’s design for SFMOMA, a masonry veneered monolith, and challenged the pastiche of his architectural narratives.

Our first interest was to unveil the represented fiction of an authentically crafted masonry exterior wall construction. Second, was to critique the museum’s internal narrative of surface, the so-called ‘white wall’, and the myth of its neutrality.

We intervened with a new narrative, a surface that created alternative readings to what constituted specific moments of enclosure; rewriting the gallery wall, corner, window, and floor.

We stripped off the gallery’s trim, sheet rock, plywood and insulation revealing a three foot deep hollow cavity of steel, mechanical, and electrical systems. By excavating the wall we exposed the backside of the exterior brick veneered panels of concrete, showing its crane anchors and assembly.

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k ut h- ra ni e r i

the museum

repose Our response to the theme of repose was intimacy. If one considers clothing a degree of enclosure, then one could say that the garment is the most intimate, physical condition of architecture. The project took the form of a fashioned tectonic garment. It was made from 800 lbs. of half-inch synthetic felt and one thousand C-clamps. The work re-scripted the joints, seams, and contours of what it veiled; wrapping and replacing the skin at the south side of the gallery; muffling the light at the window; and unveiling laminations at the corner of the gallery wall.

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t

he choice of felt as a primary material for the installation opened up a variety of investigations. In recognizing the history of felt as a medium in the museum, we had interest in works that represented intrinsic characteristics of the material; in compression, in tension, and one might say in psychological and metamythic states.

Sculptural works of Robert Morris and Joseph Bueys exhibited ways that felt, as raw material, was at the service of portraying itself.

Our research resulted in some intrinsic contradictions: transforming the felt from what was a naturally a fluid and unstable medium, to a rigid and structural matrix.

The first step in fabrication was to provide the felt manufacturer with full-scale templates specifying pattern forms and dimensions for the garment. The factory responded with finished patterns from 2000 square feet of felt, trimmed, coded, shrink-wrapped, and truck delivered to the site. Students assembled the piece by fastening, folding, and clamping the individual panels.

k ut h- ra ni e r i

Programmatically, the installation responded to occupation.

Benches introduced at the gallery wall and window provided an intimate retreat from the public realm; one could view from it, and in turn be partially viewed. A more studied aspect of the work however was its interiority, enmeshing the occupant, wall cavity, and blanket. The result was a new thick surface, an armature for modulating shadow and light. Intertwining voids formed torqued vistas penetrating the full length of the wall, illuminated by open hoppers along the top edge.

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The intimate territory of operations on the material was similar to what one encounters with regard to the body; a new skin that was connected and restrained through: dimpling, piercing, suturing — all familiar intrusions and deformations of body. The work for us became a geography of the uncanny, predicated on the conflict of comfort and discipline: it was not the patient that was restrained, but the bench itself. Inherent paradoxes between tectonic/organic, rigid/ fluid, inviting/formidable were left unresolved, and up to the user to navigate. 

Kuth/Ranieri is a multi-disciplinary architecture studio, whose work is informed by the discourse of politics, psychology and pop culture, and tempered by the progressively standardized building industry. The work is inscribed with cultural and tectonic attitudes to anchor it to program, place and time.

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Speaking bluntly, there are not many differences between the construction of the Statue of Liberty and Frank Gehry’s recent buildings.

tailoring

m

liberty

The draped body was traditionally associated with luxury, wealth and nobility, yet the rendering of drapery in architecture is quite rare.

One exception is the 151 foot tall and 225 tons of green copper drapery on the colossal Statue of Liberty, designed in 1880s by the French neoclassical sculptor Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, in direct imitation of antiquity.

The Lady Liberty is habitable; unlike other statues, its skin encloses an interior space. Her loose copper drapery is hung over armatures placed on an iron skeleton designed by Gustave Eiffel. The inner surface of Liberty’s copper skin and the iron skeleton are not intended to be visually connected — this uncanny conjunction is part of the visitor’s experience.

Bartholdi conceived Liberty entirely in terms of its outer contours. After settling the final form in a clay model, it was enlarged to a full-scale set of plaster fragments in his Paris workshop. Following the contours of the plaster, massive wooden moulds were built and thin copper sheets (2.5mm thick) were hammered onto the moulds. The copper panels are fastened together, hung on the iron skeleton and present her rippling skin.

rock and roll

Experience Music Project (EMP) in Seattle, opened in June 2000, was the first large-scale Gehry building after Bilbao. EMP is a music museum dedicated to Seattle-born Jimi Hendrix, thanks to the globally wealthy cofounder of Microsoft Paul Allen’s love of rock music and his $240 million.

The museum’s webpages explain that EMP’s structure ‘symbolizes the energy and fluidity of music’, while an electric guitar is the source of inspiration. One can imagine Gehry, a classical music fan, going to a guitar store and buying several electric guitars. After taking them back to his office Gehry ends up being inspired only by their shiny finish. EMP shimmers in vivid red, purple, blue, gold and silver, dominating the Seattle convention area.

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s o urce unk nown

odern architects often compared clothing with architecture, and tailors, fashion designers and editors talk about the ‘construction’ of clothes, where flat patterns become three-dimensional through a series of operations — cutting, sewing, and stitching. Drapery, though, is a word rarely mentioned in architectural discourse.

What exactly is a drapery? It is the simplest method of dressing: a piece of cloth hung on the body without cutting or sewing. Drapery has no form by itself — it moves freely with the body and it behaves according to the thickness of the cloth.

Rock and Liberty

Experience Music Project by Frank Gehry Açalya Kiyak in the outside

In the complete monograph of Gehry only one section and a few plan drawings of EMP appear.

There is an obvious reason: try to imagine describing the building in conventional drawings — building EMP from orthogonal drawings would be nearly impossible. Robin Evans wrote that in Scharouns’s Philharmonie project, construction workers faced serious difficulties in setting out the foundations. Only after taking large-scale sections at very closely spaced intervals across the breadth of the building, could workers build it. To describe EMP one would need billions of thin slices. Instead of this burdensome task, Gehry’s office used a digital three-dimensional model as the single source of information for the entire project.

Working with a wire frame model of the exterior surface of the building, EMP was conceived from outside in, not unlike the Statue of Liberty.

Similar to Liberty, Gehry begins with a study model. Once he decides on the final form, the model is digitized and scaled to full-size in the computer environment. At this stage the building is constructed, virtually, in three-dimensions. The software allows the three-dimensional forms to be charted two-dimensionally.

In a method similar to tailoring, cutting machines produce each shape from flat sheets of metal.

Surface Issue 9 2003

William Zahner is the head of a steel company in Kansas City and, equally, a tailor. Working directly from the digital model provided by Gehry, Zahner’s firm produced the nearly 4,000 panels that form the exterior skin of EMP. Each panel holds about seven shingles that have a unique shape and size, tailored to fit exactly in a specific location and stitched to other panels in situ. The building’s surface looks like a patterned drapery. Consider the time, energy, and amount of money spent in draping these metal shingles over EMP’s structure. Given the materiality and weight of the building, the making of a drapery is not an easy task.

under the surface

One sees in EMPs drapery both the representation of technology and, beneath the glossy surface, the unlimited budget of the client.

It seems that drapery continues to suggest luxury and wealth as it did in art for centuries.

Depicting drapery in Renaissance paintings, linked to the rise of rich merchant families, had no purpose other than ‘to take delight in the way it looks’. Tellingly, such over-draped fabrics were derided by reformers in the nineteenth century for representing ‘a millionaire’s notion of the pretty and nothing more’.

Anne Hollander explains the concept of drapery as ‘something which, while it conceals, yet confers an extra ennobling or decorative dimension upon the essentially wretched and silly human form’. What is behind the drapery in EMP comes to mind. Drapery directs one’s attention to the presentation of the object underneath, but what happens if the drapery becomes the object itself? Unlike the Statue of Liberty, EMP is a museum — the structure is not its only material presence. The museum desperately tries to push the content forward: ‘If you think its wild on the outside, just wait until you get inside. There you will find interactive exhibits, rare artifacts and a one-of-a-kind ride!’ Having us pay $20 to get inside, rather than stopping at the exterior skin, is their aim.

The many connotations of drapery, luxury, excess, concealment and display seem unintentionally appropriate for EMP. The surface is almost a fetish. Although it appears as a loose drape laid over the structure, it is uniquely tailored, an expensive, shiny, boozy dress ready for a rock concert. Versace for buildings.  1 Marvin Trachtenberg, The Statue of Liberty, New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1976: 119-50.

2 Robin Evans, The Projective Cast: Architecture and Its Three Geometries.

Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1995: 120-1.

3 Anne Hollander, ‘The Fabric of Vision: The Role of Drapery in Art’ Georgia Review 29, 1975: 431.

5 Gen Doy, Drapery: Classicism and Barbarism in Visual Culture. London; New York: I.B. Tauris, 2002: 11.

6 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes. New York:Viking Press, 1978: 15.

Açalya Kiyak is a PhD student at the Univesity of Pennsylvania.

l in d a s me i ns

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In the upper roofs of the Courtyard on Bear Street building, like in many alpine precedents, the incline of the roofs balances the requirement to shed snow and rain with a need to provide as much useable space as possible beneath it. Its low slope allows snow to accumulate and provide an insulating blanket against the winter chill.

Detail: snow/surface/water Kerry Ross

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rban development in Canada is intrinsically associated with surviving and adapting to winter. Banff, Alberta sits at an elevation of 1,384m above sea level, latitude is 52°N, it is surrounded by mountains and is subject to unexpected winter warming ; all of which mean it is both dry and cold, with heavy snow that can melt quickly on short days in a long winter.

The Land-Use Bylaw of Banff and the Banff Design Guidelines dictate a material palette for roofing of cedar shakes, heavy asphalt shingles, concrete tiles or slate tiles. For the low slope roof on this project, our first choice of cementitious corrugated roof panels presented problems with jointing, torsion, drainage and ice-jamming due to the effect of freeze-thaw cycles on lapped material. We developed instead a composite system of cedar decking affixed to a layer of strapping above a full SBS roof membrane.

Snow

Sliding of snow occurs at the roof-snow interface. If snow stays on a roof, it either melts slowly because of building heat loss through the roof assembly, or rapidly because of high outside air temperatures, rain or sun. The cohesion and friction forces between snow and a roof surface also vary with the roughness of the roof itself. Normally, snow slides when heat loss through the roof causes the 0°C temperature line to move up into the insulating snow layer and melt the bottom surface of the snow, lubricating the roof surface and destroying cohesion and friction forces. An insulating layer of snow cover can allow significant melting at the roof surface, producing a layer of slush which allows the snow to slide.1

Ice

Melt water will freeze on roof eaves, forming icicles, ice on walkways below and ice dams where water from the melting snow freezes in the drains. 2

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The project here is a green, sustainable mixed use development in Banff, and the detail looked at here is a double roof skin, designed to deal with snow on roofs.

The roof system used on the Bear Street project allows melt water from snow accumulation to drain through gaps in a top surface of cedar decking. Like a cascading stream in a mountain crevasse, drain water is channeled by waterproof strapping to a roof valley and down to water basins where it is guided through piping inside wood columns to an underground cistern beneath the parking ramp. The snow remains dry above the cedar cladding, reducing the weight of the snow and preventing the formation of ice-jams. The low slope design combined with the ability to drain any melt water eliminates the need for snow fences.  References: Taylor, D.A. ‘Danger: Falling Snow’. Construction Practice. Ottawa: National Research Council of Canada, 1990.

Taylor, D.A. ‘Sliding Snow of Sloping Roofs’. Canadian Building Digest no. 228.

Ottawa: Division of Building Research, National Research Council of Canada, 1983.

Baker, M.C. ‘Ice on Roofs’. Canadian Building Digest no. 89. Ottawa: Division of Building Research, National Research Council of Canada,1967.

project: BEAR STREET PROJECT location: Banff Alberta client: Arctos & Bird Enterprises Ltd. date of completion: Oct. 2004 architects of record: Zeidler Carruthers & Associates Architects design architects: William McDonough + Partners specifications: Susan Morris Specifications structural engineers: Read Jones Christoffersen mechanical engineers: MechWave Engineering electrical engineers: Stebnicki Robertson & Associates landscape architects: Scatliff Miller Murray (roof)

VDMO Landscape Architects (courtyard) energy consultant: GF Shymko & Associates builders: PCL Maxam Construction Management

The shapes and rhythm of the building massing are borrowed from the folded jagged plates of the surrounding Rocky Mountains and the snowretaining roofs of traditional alpine architecture of Europe. A generous open courtyard at the centre of the project emulates the Bow Valley as a place of water collection and provides a public amenity for gatherings and performances.

Putting projects in place O|S: What is the relationship between Zeidler Carruthers and William McDonough? What does architect of record mean?

Kerry Ross: William McDonough’s team, led by partner Allison Ewing, have been the design lead as well as the environmental lead on issues of building materials and specs. Bill McDonough himself helped the client establish guiding principles for the client (the Arctos & Bird Principles), based on the Hannover Principles which WMP developed for the 2000 Hannover Expo. Using these principles as a reference, he and the project team helped develop benchmarks and targets for the building project.

From there, Allison, working directly with the client by phone, fax and in person, led us through the development of many schematic design solutions.

As architect’s of record, we (Zeidler Carruthers Architects) are the local designers and construction drawing technical team. We have provided most of the design/development solutions as well as the final detailing

Kerry Ross is an architectural graduate from the Université de Montréal who is passionate about travel and sustainable design and currently the project architect for Bear Street with Zeidler Carruthers in Calgary.

and coordinating of the construction documents. We executed the numerous DP prior-to-release conditions and have been the eyes and ears on the ground for the McDonough team to both communicate and negotiate variances with the Town of Banff.

There was a lot of interaction with the Town and their Municipal Planning Committee which had a significant impact of the development of the design and, over the course of a year and a half resulted in the approval of the design by the Town of Banff Planning department, the Municipal Planning Committee and the Development Appeal Board.

We worked from the start of the project with the complete team (and I mean everyone, including the contractor) at the kick-off meeting with Bill McDonough. It was felt that early participation by all consultants would be beneficial in developing this building.  Surface

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Orgone reef An installation by Philip Beesley at the Architecture 2 Gallery University of Manitoba January 20-February 13, 2003

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rgone Reef is an extremely lightweight expanded meshwork, a dense interlinking matrix made of thousands of pieces manufactured by a computer-controlled laser cutter. The project probes the possibilities of combining artificial and natural processes to form a hybrid ecology.

The structure has active qualities that hover and vibrate in response to air currents.Visually, it dissolves into an oscillating field. Like Pitcher Plants and Venus Fly Traps, the details of this structure are designed to catch and hold the things that they contact, collecting and digesting material and, in effect, building themselves, without our interference.

One can contextualize this work in the Romantic tradition of working with forces beyond human control. Nineteenth and twentieth-century poetic and religious writings often reveal uncanny mixtures of anxiety and hope that might come from intervening in nature. The project title Orgone Reef is derived from this tradition — orgone was coined by Wilhelm Reich, a psychologist working alongside Freud, to suggest a subtle life force encircling the world. Reich, whose work was tinged by mystic obsession, saw the world as an intelligent, evolving entity. From a historical perspective his visions offer a poignant alternative to the Modern version of progress. 

p h il i p b e e s l ey ar c hi te c ts

Orgone Reef is a technical exercise in construction and fabrication.

The project relates to geotextiles, a new class of materials used for reinforcing landscapes and buildings. A minimal amount of raw material is expanded to form a network forming a large, porous volume. This structure acts as an artificial reef that could support a turf-like surface of natural material. The elements of this construction have been fabricated using rapid-prototyping equipment. Current manufacturing associations are with Roylco, a plastic toy manufacturer in Waterloo assisting with engineering and production planning, and MIT’s Media Lab, the producer of ‘cricket’microprocessors for Lego. Individual elements can be produced at low cost and quick cycles of refinement, supporting

highly efficient industrial design. The small scale of production suggests the possibility of a cottage-industry based economy.

Philip Beesley is an artist and professor of architecture at the University of Waterloo.

His geotextile sculptures combine natural environments and artificial technologies.

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Elemental surfaces Hamilton Hadden

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reefall is an artificial surface designed to control runoff from strip mines. It is also a way to describe how rain descends to the earth’s surface from above it. It is the kinetic energy that a droplet possessed before it became a droplet; the potential existed in a different state.

Vaporous water prefers the tumbling air currents to gravity’s singular, downward attraction.

Any earthly surface, and in particular a roof, seeks to move the water that falls on it. Despite the static nature of many roof plans, the surface actively shapes the flow of water along, across and over it. In a rainstorm, the roof is not the only surface that manages these patterns; in its deluge water becomes another surface, covering the roof with a liquid coat. These surfaces together constitute the entire architectural surface.

As immoveable as an architectural surface may seem it is always in dynamic play with the elements pressed against it. Rain is perhaps the most antagonistic actor in this relationship, but it is by no means the only surface element. Sunlight, wind and earth all have a defining role to play with architectural surface; each of these becomes another surface and in this becoming each one defines the architectural surface with its coat. 

ha mi l to n h ad d e n

An analog to this relationship between roof surface and water surface is the mutually dependent relationship between our rib cage and our

lungs. The pleural wall is not a wall at all, it is rather the sheer, unbroken contact of two surfaces: the interior surface of our rib cage and the exterior surface of our lungs. Muscles expand our ribs and diaphragm outward from the body, and the vacuum that is the pleural wall draws air into the expanding lungs. The integrity of the wall’s sheerness delivers oxygen to our bloodstream. So when we allow for a break in contact between water surface and roof surface we should expect a vulnerability to emerge.

Hamilton Hadden studied in Vermont, worked in San Francisco and just finished a masters in architecture from the University of Pennsylvania.

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Icy surfaces: the Duchesnay Ice Hotel Karl Loeffler

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ce hotels present many challenges to their designers. First-time visitors, expecting to see a structure made of ice blocks, are surprised that the building is actually a series of cast-in-place snow vaults.

The construction process begins with manufacturing the snow. Artificial snow is used because of the demands of the construction schedule for a ready supply of pure white snow of consistent quality. Also artificial snow is less dry than natural snow, which helps it freeze into place more solidly.

The next step is the placing of the vault moulds. As many as eight moulds may be placed in line at a time. The moulds used in the first ice hotel done by Émile Gilbert + associates in 2001 were imported from Sweden, home of the original ice hotel. These roman arch-shaped moulds were manufactured in sections to facilitate shipping. As a consequence, vaults built using the original moulds were marred by horizontal lines where the sections join together. The roman arch, while structurally sound in theory, proved to be subject to severe deflection, requiring shoring up with ice block columns.

To eliminate these two problems, a second series of moulds was produced in Quebec for the 2002 hotel. The new moulds were made of two continuously curved stainless steel sheets that join at the apex of a gothic arch, eliminating horizontal joint lines and making a more stable vault.

The roman arches continued to be used, in this case, for the chapel. Had the chapel had been built with gothic arches, we suspect it would not have sagged as much, despite the warm weather.

Each mould is 8 feet deep and between 15 and 20 feet wide, depending on the model. An ice hotel, although it presents a monolithic appearance, is actually a modular building. Spaces listed in the design program are given in terms of number of moulds required, simplifying the initial diagrammatic phase of design, but complicating circulation during design development.

After the moulds have been placed for the first series of vaults, snow is sprayed onto the vaults with a snow cannon to a thickness of 4 feet at the sides and 2 feet at the apex of the vault. The process is very similar to the gunite process for spraying concrete. Once the wet snow has hardened into opaque ice (24-48 hours) the moulds are slid down the line to form the next series of vaults. Ice columns are placed inside the fresh vaults and ice block walls are built at the exposed ends. Southfacing vault ends are particularly vulnerable to the sun, and the ice walls help prevent them from drooping.

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e mi l e g i lb e r t an d as so c ia t es

The hotel is divided into two sections; circulation through the public section is through the main vaults themselves, which include the lobby, two galleries, and the bar. The use of courtyards resolves some circulation problems, and the addition of longitudinal corridors (formed with a new, third type of mould) for access to the 35 guestrooms and suites further alleviated the situation in 2002. In 2003, circulation was refined with the addition of transverse, hand-built corridors crossing the larger vaults between guestrooms.

The entire construction process is extremely sensitive to the vagaries of weather. For instance, the first roman vault finished in the 2003 hotel was built during the warm weeks of early December, and the ice bond between the snow crystals was weak as a result, causing the top of the vault to sag visibly. In order to keep the hotel in as good shape as possible, there is no heating of any kind. Even the fireplaces in the bar and the Hilton Suite are specially designed to radiate minimum heat, and although the interior lighting used throughout does add some heat to the space, the overall effect is not appreciable. Interior temperature hovers around -5°C, slightly warmer than the average outside temperature. Visitors keep their snowsuits and boots on at all times inside the hotel.

Taking your clothes off in the middle of a snowy courtyard can be a chilling experience, which is why heated changing rooms are provided for anyone who wants to take a dip in the hot tub. Changing rooms and bathrooms are in a prefabricated trailer, camouflaged by snow vaults that surround it on three sides.

Sleeping bags provided by the hotel are rated for -40°C — no pyjamas needed.

During the day, the main spaces are filled with diffuse natural light shining through the translucent ice walls and columns and reflected off the white snow walls. Windowless guestrooms are lit by fluorescent lamps hidden behind the ice block base of the bed platform, creating the illusion that the bed floats on a cushion of light.

At night, the main spaces are lit with snake lights inside and coloured floodlights shining on the outside walls. In the main lobby is a fibre optic chandelier with dozens of large ice crystals that cycle through a series of colours. A column in the bar with integrated fibre optics achieves a similar effect.

The hotel is located on a clearing by the shore of Lac St-Joseph in the Duchesnay Ecotourism Station, about 30 minutes from Quebec City.

It is surrounded by a forest of birch and evergreens. When construction is finished, in early January, the vault forms can be clearly seen.

Over the winter, as snow accumulates, the hotel becomes a giant mound of snow, difficult visually to separate from the site. This magnifies the effect on visitors as they walk into the lofty, cathedral-like space of the entry lobby for the first time.  Architects: Émile Gilbert + associés Designers: Stéphan Gilbert and Karl Loeffler Project manager: Karl Loeffler Client: Ice Hotel Canada For more information, visit emilegilbert.com Karl Loeffler obtained his B.Arch at Cal Poly in San Luis Obispo, California. He has lived in Quebec City, Canada, since 1996.

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Infinity and a Wooden Cross jin bae k

Two churches by Tadao Ando

Tadao Ando, Church of the Light (1989)

Jin Baek Concrete . . . serves to produce light, homogenous surfaces.The traces of regularly attached shuttering and separators are finished to produce smooth surfaces and sharp edges.

Tadao Ando

t

he presence of the regularly distributed points on the front wall in Tadao Ando’s Church of the Light is not clearly apparent, for a resplendent cross of light casts the surrounding surface into darkness (above); the front wall of his Church in Tarumi allows their strong presence (right).

In order for a canvas to begin to evoke a sense of infinity, it should liberate itself from becoming the simple background for the representational depictions of any finite entities.Yet, 26

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it should not be merely left blank, which would simply indicate the utter void of no-things. It accepts points precisely in order to transform its emptiness into yohaku, or the ‘constitutive emptiness’ which ‘upholds the pretended positivity’ of the points.

The front wall of the Church in Tarumi becomes a sheer surface of infinite expansiveness, not by rejecting the traces of its construction process, but by showing them. These points, in their geometrically regulated collectivity, transform the thick, reinforced concrete wall into a zero-depth pure surface. The light infiltrating through the slits around the front wall blurs the real material boundary of the surface and expands the points beyond the margin. This infinite surface could be said to be imaginary, rather than illusionary, because it is the points, not the real flat surface of the concrete wall, which create the presence of an infinitely expansive surface.

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In this fashion, the points on the wall first replace any representational figures in accordance with the Judaic prohibition of images and the Protestant ideal of the return to the Word. They further cancel a first level of subjective vision tamed to find the focal perspectival point and decentralize the subject into the perceptual horizon of the multi-centered infinity. Again, the subject is re-centered at the moment the central presence of the modest wooden cross is superimposed over the multicentered horizon of infinity.

The fundamental symbolic power of the otherwise mundane cross emerges in this dialectic between the multi-centered infinity of the background and the centrality of the cross as the universal Christian symbol. The perceptual horizon of infinity unfolding itself before the subject glorifies and perpetuates the one and only historical incident of the sacrificial love of Jesus on the lost wooden cross of Golgotha. 

Tadao Ando, Church in Tarumi (1993) Jin Baek studied architecture in Seoul, has a M.Arch from Yale and is working on a PhD. at Penn, researching religious christian architecture in the context of Asian culture.

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A surface for breathing — Lucio Costa and Parque Guinle, Brazil Fernando Diniz Moreira

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est known for Brasilia, Lucio Costa is certainly the most important figure of modern Brazilian architecture. He played a major role, commonly underestimated, in what made Brazilian architecture so remarkable during the mid 20th century, particularly the association of modern architecture and local traditions.

In his studies of colonial architecture, Costa was not looking for exceptional baroque churches and monuments, but for anonymous, simple and functional buildings, appropriate to their time and place. Costa claimed that the main principles of colonial architecture could be incorporated into modern architecture, and that the latter was able to recover the core of nationality formed during the colonial period.

This bridge between modernity and tradition is especially evident in his buildings from the late 1930s to the mid 1950s, particularly a series of houses built around Rio de Janeiro, such as Saavedra, Hungria Machado and Paes de Carvalho houses. Combining modern and traditional materials and devices and promoting an appropriate relationship between indoor-outdoor spaces with terraces and courtyards, Costa created great examples of this synthesis between tradition and modernity.

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A more complicated problem, however, was to adapt these principles to larger and more complex programs than houses. The opportunity to address these issues came when an aristocratic family commissioned Costa to design some rental aparment blocks in Rio de Janeiro in 1948. This initiative, called Parque Guinle, consisted of a group of apartments for the high middle class built on the family property. The site was an oval depression quite complicated upon which to build. Costa maintained this depression as a park, and created prismatic building blocks around it, in a circle, keeping the family mansion on the highest ground, as the focus of the composition. The blocks were united by a sinuous street. The great conflict was to reconcile the view of the park with a good solar orientation, solved by making the blocks face the park, while creating a system for solar protection. In a moment in which apartment buildings were starting to replace houses in Brazilian cities, this plan represented a sort of experiment, attempting to adapt the traditional house into a new form of living.

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Parque Guinle addressed all the points of modern architecture proclaimed by Le Corbusier: prismatic blocks located in greenery, a freestanding concrete skeleton, free plan, pilotis and the free façade. It even suggests a concretization in miniature of Le Corbusier’s 1929 dreams for Rio de Janeiro. The Parque Guinle’s façade also incorporated the innovations brought by modern methods of construction, which liberated the façade from expressing load-bearing and aesthetical requirements, reducing the size of piers and increasing the dimension of the windows. This evolution dematerialized the façade, transforming it in a cover or transparent membrane and blurring the difference between window and façade wall.

To diffuse the excessive sunlight, Costa created a membrane of elements for solar protection, a unique combination of brises-soleil, venetian blinds, and latticed screens of prefabricated ceramic elements, called combogo. The wood was painted white, while the ceramic lattices were left in their reddish natural tones. Most of these elements were drawn from Moorish architecture, revived by the Portuguese when they arrived in the tropics.

F e r nan d o Di ni z Mo r e i ra

Costa attached this incredible network of sun shading devices to pure and prismatic volumes, creating an envelope, which has value on its own by its weight, texture and composition.

Completely covered by panels of varied elements and different textures, the façade is extremely elegant and achieves significance by itself. The interplay of variously transparent, translucent, and opaque elements dematerialize the façade in a brilliantly unified composition, whose sheer variety defies monotony.

In the tropics, the spaces bordering the inside and outside organize most of the dwelling practices. If the window has as its most basic task the orchestration of human events, in the tropics this function is amplified to include the entire façade. Considering the façade as a great window, Costa proposed an innovative way of thinking of architectural surface. The façade performs the basic functions of a window: it frames views of the surrounding landscape, illuminates the interior, and allows the building to breathe; it mediates between exterior and interior, works like a loggia shading the façade, filtering light and letting the breeze flow. With these devices, Costa created an in-between spatiality in the façade itself, a space which belongs to the exterior and to the interior at the same time. He provided depth to the enclosure, but, seen from a distance this membrane seems to disappear. There is an effort to blur distinctions between solid and void, opacity and transparency.

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This façade is an attempt to avoid what Jose Luis Sert would call some years later of ‘facades of anonymity’, the monotonous and inflexible glass wall of the most Post-War skyscrapers. Costa addressed central questions that persist for architects today. In a time in which building practice is reduced to the assembling of pieces and parts, the act of covering, dressing or cladding a façade is deeply affected. How can architects use the most innovative materials, mass-produced elsewhere, while being able to respond to a particular environment? How to mediate between production (modernity and rationality) and representation (tradition and convention)? Being free and modern, but made of traditional materials, the Guinle’s façade is an attempt to solve this dilemma. The combogos and lattices are pre-made, industrialized, but are simple, non-mechanical and brought from local workshops. It is a balance between nontechnical and technical conditions, between a traditional and a contemporary building practice. Costa demonstrated that technology and inheritance, modern and traditional architecture could be reconciled. This surface successfully mediates between functional and economical requirements and aesthetic impulses, while responding to the local culture and climate. 

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F e r na nd o D in i z M o r e i ra

Costa was not interested in recollecting models and references from the past to make populist allusions. These shading elements do not intend to look traditional, but rather to express traditional relationships with light and climate. They reflect patterns of living, old and deep architectural experiences. In this sense, Costa demonstrated the main thesis of his manifesto Razıes da Nova Arquitetura published fifteen years before. In this text, Costa, claimed that instead of copying decorative elements of colonial architecture, we should understand its spirit, logic and simplicity, the clarity of its construction, and its appropriateness to its time and place. In sum, according to him, understanding the essence of colonial architecture is crucial to the formulation of a new architecture.

Lucio Costa. ‘Razıes da nova arquitetura’ in Revista da Diretoria de Engenharia do PDF, 3-9 Jan, Rio de Janeiro, 1936. Reprinted in Xavier, Alberto (editor).

Depoimento de uma Geração. São Paulo: PINI, 1987.

Sert, Jose Luis. ‘Windows and Walls: an approach to design’. In Architectural Record 131 no 5, p132-133 About this issue see David Leatherbarrow and Moshen Mostafahvi, Surface Architecture. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002. p9

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Fernando Diniz Moreira is assistant professor at the Department of Architecture of the Federal University of Pernambuco, Brazil.

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alvanized by Marconi’s ocean-bridging radio signals, Fascist Italy set out to assert its primacy in the field of telecommunications within the civilized world. The monumental post offices which shaped the urban panorama of Italian cities in the early 1930’s recount that history today.

One of these post offices, surprising for the peculiarity of its form, is in Piazza Bologna, built

by Mario Ridolfi and Mario Fagiolo, two young architects, in 1933-35. Its curved façade is an homage to baroque Rome— a borrominesque memory.

Yet beyond this historic parentage, a futuristic line can be discerned: the building is literally wrapped in what can be considered the ultimate symbol of Marconi’s ground-breaking inventions: the telegraph band.

The post office and the telegraph band: an architecture parlante Federico De Matteis

The skin of the post office mimics that particular kind of paper ribbon with a good degree of fidelity. The curved travertine slabs of the cladding are painstakingly dressed to create a continuous surface; the punctured windows relinquish any characterization in order to become mere rectangular holes — similar to the perforations in the telegraph band.

A curious effect is thus established. The ‘semiotic’ band of the telegraph, a thin ribbon-like surface, is multiplied in size to become building surface, and to represent ultimately itself. The interplay of scale, language, and representation give place to an architecture parlante, balanced between the representative intents of the regime, virtuosic craftsmanship, and baroque reminiscence. 

Federico De Matteis has studied architecture in Italy, Germany, and at the University of Pennsylvania.

He is currently concluding his doctoral studies at the University of Rome, La Sapienza.

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J ua n M a nue l H e re di a

Transparency of an opaque surface

Juan O’Gorman’s Central Library at the University of Mexico Juan Manuel Heredia

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he Central Library at the University of Mexico is 50 years old this year. Finished in 1953 as part of the new university campus, the building still serves its original purpose despite an increasingly cramped interior; Its once spacious reading room has been progressively reduced in area by stacks that were originally meant to remain in its (box-like) upper structure. In any event the interior space was never intended to be as important as the exterior: the mosaic covering the building has remained a powerful motif throughout the years. This autochthonouslydressed library was for a long time (and before the work of Luis Barragan was ‘discovered’ in the mid-seventies) the symbol of Mexican architectural modernism. Through it not only the campus acquired a central figure that consciously inverted the logic of the surrounding — mostly transparent — school buildings, but also the city and the country found a paradigmatic new centre that expressed its midcentury nationalism.

Fifty years later some may think of the building as an exercise on architectural vulgarity. The declared nationalism and modernism that prompted the project attest to a world gone by. Mexico and its architectural culture has become less chauvinistic in its claims; it has either turned to the more abstract and subtler regionalism of Barragan or to a search for high-tech and neo-avant-garde architecture. The building may have appeared dated even at the time of its construction as use of its figurative technique didn’t reflect the abstract teachings of the then pictorial avant-garde. Juan O’Gorman was indeed more of a realist painter than an architect. He belonged to the school of artists, muralists and communists led by Diego Rivera, whose nationalistic bias was very straightforward and often dogmatic. And yet, despite its 32

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evident rhetoric, the building’s surface still has the ability to speak on a civic level.

The four mosaic murals are devoted to the history of Mexico: the Pre-Columbian and European ‘worlds’ occupy the two large front areas while the sides depict the recent revolutionary past and a progressive ideal future. The murals consist of a matrix of one-meter square prefabricated panels made out of natural-colored stones brought from all regions of the country. Each panel was laid out horizontally and later transferred to its vertical position. The Library was transformed into a giant book, a codex that allowed for close and distant readings, announcing its programmatic function.

The opacity of the mosaic acts here as a transparent agent. The most prominent side, the northern one, depicting the history of European civilization as it emerged victorious over the native one, acquires. from a distance. an ambiguous message. As one looks from farther away the ‘story’ recedes to reveal a conscious abstraction of a masked Aztec figure.

Carrying such rhetorical devices the materiality of the surface, carefully built and impeccably kept, and the way the building is sited are its most secure and enduring aspects.  Juan Manuel Heredia is an architect from Mexico City who studied at the Universidad Iberoamericana. He teaches architectural design in Mexico’s National University and is now doing graduate studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

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ants is not the neighborhood that comes to mind when we think of Barcelona. It is not the home of modernista architecture as in the Eixample nor does it vibrate with public space as does the Barri Gotic. In fact, Sants is not considered to be one of the desirable neighborhoods in which to live or work.

As we turn onto Tenor Masini Street, this is immediately apparent in the first person we see on the street: in the clothes she wears, in the way she walks, in the places she meets neighbors. She slowly strolls into a café, orders a coffee and a slightly stale croissant.

At one time, Sants used to be one of several autonomous villages on the periphery of Barcelona. While other villages like Sarria were housing the upper crust of society in elaborate mansions, Sants was the humble home of many working class Catalans. When other towns like Gracia were harboring bohemian thinkers and artists, Sants was the place of local artisans and craftsmen producing everyday objects with wood, metal, and glass. Eventually all of these villages became incorporated into the modern metropolis of Barcelona. And what once was considered a village came to be regarded as a neighborhood. These neighborhoods merged to create a city with many social, economic, architectural and urbanistic surfaces. Some of these surfaces were carefully maintained; several were renovated and brought back to life; others were simply plastered over. Over time, Sants has received coats and coats of plaster.

People, buildings, cafes, houses, industries have been layered on top of whatever may have existed underneath, without much regard for past, present or future. There was no concern for the older surfaces that existed and even less for the new surfaces coming in.

letter from barcelona — On the surface

House #39 on Tenor Masini is a bit like the neighborhood of Sants itself. It has not been ignored nor has it really been acknowledged.

It has coats of plaster over layers of wallpaper.

The change in times, people, and environment has occurred in this building in the same manner as it has in the neighborhood: without cognizance. When a new owner moved in, a coat of plaster was applied, a ceiling hung, a kitchen installed. It’s hard to find traces of anything that has been removed. People who have occupied this flat seem to have either accepted the surfaces before them, and left them untouched, or plastered over them as a quick fix.

Now as we, a fresh wave of occupants, begin familiarizing ourselves with this house by opening doors, windows, ceilings, walls, and floors, we are discovering lives that have been buried under the musty smell for almost 150 years.

Beyond the false ceiling are large wooden beams that span the entire width of the building. Between the beams is a wallpaper from the 1930s. Behind the wallpaper is masonry vaulting that supports the floor above. Hidden in walls are two large masonry arches: one which serv|es as the front entrance, another as the rear exit. Beyond the back door and the darkness of the interior is a large, sunny courtyard overgrown with weeds, dandilions, hibiscus and lemon trees. The walls of the courtyard were originally built with brick, then extended with stone, later filled in with concrete and covered at some point with chain link. Through the jungle that is the courtyard is a small outbuilding with wooden beams that sag so low, they almost touch the empty chicken cages left over by the last owner.

then, will we respond with new ideologies.

New materials will be inserted in a manner such that old materials are reused. New surfaces will be introduced so that older surfaces will be recognized. New experiences will be inserted in order for older experiences to be understood. The next group of tenants who will live in this building will do so with an understanding of the surfaces that came before and those that will come after. And maybe with that understanding they will become empowered to bring some of these surfaces out onto the street and eventually into the neighborhood. For years Sants has been thought of as a neighborhood from the outside in. But now there exists a possibility to regard this neighborhood from the inside out. 

How can we work with elements that have been disregarded so long? How do we determine what is of value and worth recognizing?

How do we interject new ideas in a place that already conceals so many old ones? Perhaps the answer lies in the act of surfacing layers, both new and old, that exist in this project. Old planes will be removed until older planes are revealed. We will peel away history layer by layer until we find a reason to stop. We will learn about the faces that preceeded us and consider those that will follow. Then, and only

Aniket Shahane

Aniket Shahane is an architect in New Haven, Connecticut and has taught architectural design at the Wentworth Institute of Technology in Boston and the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence. He is currently pursuing a Master’s degree at Yale University.

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Taking the rough with the smooth Christina Maile

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he landscape that stretches before us is covered in a skin of meridians which float invisibly over land and ocean.

As if we resided at the height of constellations, it is this surface, this reflected sky, and its re-presentations — maps, charts, topos, geometric diagrams, and inevitably architectural drawings — that we gaze down upon when we seek full disclosure of the world. It is upon their smooth rational plains, and not the beating earth, that we navigate our plans.

So pervasive is this cosmological surface on our perception of the world, it has become an eternally present surface, lurking within the folds of all that exists, always ‘already there’.

It beckons us with its pristine metaphors of the cosmological condition. In the bumps and grinds and rough particularities of the earth’s surface, we tirelessly draw perfect ellipses, self34

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absorbed triangles, golden rectangles — our grand vision of the eternal surface. Re-inscribing them on the earth at ever larger scales afirms their power over us. Out of an intangible surface materializes a shining immaculate world. Our imagination can scarcely think otherwise.

Glass luminous with the very sky of mythic origin , illuminated at night like regimented stars, infinitely reflecting, mirroring, presenting and re-presenting the planes and angles of the eternal surface, as we, captive to awe, stand gazing at ourselves and our works in endless speculation.

Therein lies the orthodoxy. Lest we lose thefortuitous destiny of the eternal surface and its illusion of control, we must remain steadfast to its axioms. In faithful celebration of what we imagine to be the cool ethereal beauty of its chaste skin, we have created images in its image. Around us tower polished marble and sheets of burnished steel, sanded walls, and objects re-enskined in gloss, semi-gloss, semimatte, anything to cover the original sin of their grainy nakedness. But most of all, there is glass in all its somber purity and divine clarity.

How can the rotting hide of the earth’s surface compare? Its torn regions of crusts and wounds, its chaotic and quivering dimensions; the very breath of it breeds murkiness and weather, the twin enemies of the eternal surface.

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Yet it is so enticing, the sound of the earth.

The pounding rhythm of its peaks and hollows invite topographical intimacy, invite us to become lost in its layered pleasures, to be made deaf to everything but its siren call, to

ch r i st i n a m a i l e

risk never coming back. Unless. Unless we bind ourselves, like Odysseus, to the smooth mast of control. Only if our ears are shuttered against the delirious noise of the earth, can we move into its vesperal zones and steal beauty from its fevered surface. Does not the phyllotaxis of a leaf reveal at last the golden section?

Can you now see it, the wondrous catenary in the sway of the vine?

If we draw a careful line around this or that clattering region, can you not see that we have exorcised it of its self-possession, brought it into our metaphor of eternal surface?

The answer to this question may lie in the tectonic collisions of these two surfaces, the rough and the smooth. From their continuous scraping and explosive folding and unfolding all around us, there rises a morphology which may account for our anguished bicamerality towards the built world.

The key to this morphology lies in show surface shows and conceals. Its force resides in how surface appropriates light and shadow; its power, through the strength of that appropriation, is how it turns light and shadow into the substance of vision.

The morphological failure of the eternal surface is that it reduces light to a mere reflection of material, and removes shadow to an entirely separate region, to only a measurement of an entity’s relationship to the cosmological condition. Without shadow the eternal surface, whose perceptual narrative is embedded in the metaphor of the immaculate, becomes silent in its banality It is not just the visual rhythms of shadow and promise of light that imparts coherence to the earth’s surface for us. The rhythm in the very

operation of this surface, the act of opening and closing, moving towards and away, simultaneity and disjunctiveness; this mobile response to light and shade, this articulation of show and concealment communicates to us the powerful wholeness of the earth’s surface inherent in its fragmentation — a deeply sensuous memory.

What we recognize is not only the richly textured interaction of appearance and disappearance, but on a deeper level, the cycle of loss and return, and the thick embrace of our embodied senses in the duration between.

The actual incorporation of show and concealment into the pristine regimen of eternal metaphors then has resulted in a surface morphology of the built environment composed of three elements: depiction of shadow, ornamentation of shade and possession of the originating process.

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Depiction of shadow

Ornamentation of shade

Possession of the originating process

Shadow lines accentuate the placement of materials and elements such as windows and sills on building facades, lattice on garden walls, the eaves of a roof line, the overlapping shadows of steps, the rhythm of joints — especially the rhythm of false joints, capstones, molding, curb reveals and convex pavers. This refinement and re-imaging of the complex interplay of light and shade not only serves to make coherent the smooth planes of the eternal surface but maintains, even in this distilled format, the kinship we feel with the shadowed irregularities of the earth’s surface demanded by our sensuous memory. The crucial difference is that it exists only in the central movement of our gaze, in the moving orientation of our bodies in the sun and with the sun that imparts the rhythm of show and concealment.

The entity in the built environment is, in this instance, itself totally motionless. It is not operating at all.

It is not so much the subject matter — curling vines, floral centers, eggs, dentiles, rocks — pastiches of the divine metaphors in repeating ellipses or multiplication of rectangles. What is most significant is the actual shadows generated by the ornamentation that speak to us of natural canopies , dappled breaks in vision and all the other surficial topographies of show and concealment. Whether at the top of the stunted tree forms of columns, or plaster rosettes, or steel trellises overhead, mullioned patterns, polished material next to rough, it is the presence of carved shadow that invites tactilicity and speaks to us of a surface outside the surface of the built world. The crucial difference is that there is no growth, no senescence, no disappearance. The shadow remains precise and exact, the entity eternally present.

Permanent, unchanging, unmoving. This then is the perception we have about the earth’s surface based on our incorporation of show and concealment in the built environment. From there it is only a step to believing that by thinly cutting and pasting pieces of this surface onto various sites of the built environment we, in some short hand way, fulfill the needs of our deep sense memories for shadowed complexity. In the context of the eternal metaphors, we have perfect circles for trees , showing just enough of the squiggly line to portend show and concealment, yet not too much so as to dilute the metaphor or to bewilder the site plans’ adherence to cosmological patterns.

We have in elevation filigreed lines for shrubs and trees that by present convention provide the coherence for the burnished facades constructed behind them.

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ch r i st i n a m a i l e

The end result is that we are surprised when these aspects of the earth’s surface we have so blithely incorporated without regard to its actual operation outgrow the surfaces we have pasted them onto. We are disheartened at the environmental cost of maintaining these pieces in their place. But we are not disheartened enough because our cosmological metaphors of dominance insist on broad swathes of rigid lawn and stiff evergreens as the pathetic, sterile gardens at the sky-end of glass towers.

And so the transformative, generative powers of the earth’s surface are left outside our metaphors for the built environment, little understood, and unreconciled.

A French poet once asked of the earth’s surface, ‘Where is the snow of yesteryear?: We no longer know this answer: It has dissolved to leaves. It has melted to blood.’ 

Christina Maile is a landscape architect and artist living in New York City.

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Shiny Surfaces Marie Rupert

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his building, on the edge of a 1920s Calgary inner city neighbourhood, Ramsay, is also on the edge of the decaying industrial zone that once held Calgary’s stockyards, feed lots and assorted oil industry plants. Although flanked by very small bungalows, the lot is zoned commercial/mixed use and takes its cue from the 1910 Co-op Feeds, a block away, that now holds a number of artists’ studios.

As the lot is zoned commercial, zero lot line conditions apply as long as the walls are noncombustible. For these, Smith + Co used an insulated concrete form system— R50 below grade and between R35 above. The actual system used, the Advantage WallTM Insulated Concrete Form (ICF) System consists of castin-place concrete sandwiched between two layers of styrofoam.

The east wall is a sheer three storey sheet of steel siding, sheathing the ICF wall. It is a tough move, unapologetic about its height (34 feet) and very beautiful with it. It reflects light on what was quite a dreary industrial roadway and simultaneously protects the building and the edge of the neighbourhood.

The building is divided in a front/back way.

Three storeys of studio and office space project in a transparent bay at the front on the street, and at the back, on the lane, is a three storey house — a main living area with an exterior deck, an upper floor with bedrooms and laundry, and a third floor mechanical room and outside roof garden. It all sits over an undergound garage and storage area. The site is a standard 33’ x 120’ Calgary lot, and this project demonstrates precisely what Calgary has so far not been good at — inner city densification on a lot by lot basis. The allowable building envelope is filled completely. Steel joists, concrete slabs, ICF walls, the building is as harsh and as beautiful as an Alberta winter. 

The east wall combines all the elements of efficiency, strength, security and privacy, plus shade to the patio.

Smith + Co Studio, Calgary Alberta, consists of three Architectural Technologists, Chuck Smith (design), Cody Dunn (production) and Marie Rupert (construction manager) and one Interior Designer, Laura Fenniak.

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a

nalogies between the human body and architecture have often been thought of in polarized ways, separating clearly structure from skin, the rigid from the soft, wet from dry. This is not necessary. We can think of structure as flexible, skin as rigid. More than this, we can begin to think of the structure and skin as one, a surface capable of changing, at times rigid, at times flexible, becoming thick in certain areas, humid in others, and sensitive in others.

The skin can become more alive than ever, full of scars, sensitive hair, breathing, adjusting,, recomposing itself, capable of being not only an envelope, but the structure of the space itself. The skin has acquired depth, has become a deep surface capable of generating space between itself.

Deep skin ps offices Cuernavaca, Mexico manoo

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his project is about one of these skin interventions, a skin that separates itself into three layers in order to accommodate different conditions.

Layer 1: a solid surface

This concrete surface generates the floor, changing texture to distinguish the circulation area, a smooth area to permit sliding, from the waiting area, a rough area to restrict the movement of the chairs.

The surface has a series of small dents and bumps to permit the introduction and maintenance of electrical systems. The dents are covered with river stone capable of removal when needed.

Layer 2: a soft surface

This wooden surface generates the furniture, becoming smoother in the areas in direct contact with the inhabitant’s body.

The surface folds in itself to accommodate a meeting table, a working table and a storage space.

Layer 3: a permeable surface

This plycem surface generates some of the walls as well as the ceiling.

The surface is perforated to varying degrees in particular areas to permit strategic accesses, natural and artificial light, ventilation and views in and out of the space. 

David Hernàndez Quintela, Universidad Iberoamericana, 1989. Lecturer at Universidad Iberoamericana since 1991.

Ivàn Hernàndez Quintela, University of Texas, Austin, 1999. Lecturer at Universidad Iberoamericana since 2000.

Manoo We, David and Ivàn, formed manoo in 1999, to mantain contact with the city while stuck in the office, to avoid our work becoming an element of isolation. Thinking this way, we set up our offices as a caffè-gallery-laboratory open to the city, where people can freely enter and transmit opinions, ideas and actions to our work and possibly initiate a collaboration.

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This is an addition to a house, overlooking the Potomac River just outside Washington, DC, made for a family of five.

Of the little events that make up dwelling, I remember her husband as a man of tremendous energy, traveling great distances as part of his work, and longing to come home to a place as special as his other destinations. He spends time playing the piano in the room whose purpose we could never figure out except to think that it might be good to have a room both near and private at the same time. Her children have found their spaces, places to put their things, their nooks and corners. She said, ‘It worked out so perfectly . . . the spatial interaction, the right proportions. I feel very comfortable. I get a peaceful sense of well-being’.

Vague Places with Fine Edges

Seven years after completing this project, we spoke — architect and client. The very first thing she said was, ‘I love being in the house. Opening the front door’, she continued, ‘is like opening a package … I want to be in the house’.

Caren Yglesias

m

ost of the time clients want specific things. Sometimes they leap with you into places undefined and difficult to name. When this happens, harmonious dwelling becomes possible both between architecture and landscape, and between a person and their home.

I have often thought about walking through this house. It is not easy to understand about moving through spaces, along walls and towards objects leaving things behind. If you bend the wall does your step shift, does your eye? If you set the sides of the stair apart from the walls can you feel a sort of three-dimensional threshold between plan and section? Does the wedge of space between the original house and the new addition setting up a shift in orientation split one part from the other? Or does the adjusted aspect support sensations of placement within the landscape? Will the glass block emphasize this as a formal gesture, or even better, suggest drawing near the surfaces of diffused light? She said, ‘It gives me the feeling of having beauty around me.’

Why doesn’t every project end up this way? Is it that good ideas in their young state wither under scrutiny? Some architectural projections cannot be defended with words. Some inventions proposed with care cannot be argued because they do not come from places of rational and logical certainty. Architecture seems to come from listening to client memories about places that somehow are worth remembering.

Architecture seems to come from a desire to have what they do not have, those sensations that come from seeing material surfaces hold shadows and reflect light. Architecture seems to come from understanding that many things in architecture cannot be understood.

When this happens, however it happens, my pleasure comes from their dwelling well, and my thoughts continue to dwell in the realm of elegant intentions. 

Paul Y gl e s ia s

Architects wonder about how to know what clients are asking for. Many want to be part of every creative effort, but usually end up challenging every proposal you make. This time the client worked with the contractor to purchase everything needed for construction. Windows and doors, skylights and fixtures were found and brought to the site. She made tiles. Her work involved experimenting with patterns, colors and finishes. How could I do less with the drawings and models?

During construction, a smoothness of effort seemed to come without constantly reconsidering decisions about elements. A rare confidence earned through this consideration.

Caren is in her third decade of practicing architecture in Washington, DC with residential projects throughout the country.

She is an adjunct professor teaching studio at the WashingtonAlexandria Architecture Center of Virginia Tech.

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Spectacular, Spectacular

can one feel nostalgia for the old West Edmonton Mall?

Peter Osborne and Joylyn Marshall

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est Edmonton Mall, on the edge of the city, was bankrolled in 1984 by a wealthy Edmonton family, the Ghermezians. As first built, West Ed could have been seen as the family’s cabinet of curiosities. Treasures from peacocks to crown jewels were displayed in glass cabinets throughout the halls. Entire wings of the Mall were devoted to site-specific spectacles taken from Europe and New Orleans.

The textured surfaces of these areas created associations to real places.

While the objects might not have necessarily been collected from the family’s own travels, it was enough just to imagine that they might have been. In fact, the objects may have been plastic reproduction, but it did not matter as long as the consumer believed. Originally, one moved through the Mall reading each spectacle. There was no specific interconnectedness between the events but together they added up to an extravagant whole.

In 1999, renovations to the Mall’s surfaces began to link these events together. This thematic shift supresses the treasure-chest of individual spectacles, replacing different stories with a single dreamscape. The old surfaces, whether they were glass, concrete or wood, have been spraycreted with an industrial paper maché and painted bright pastel colours regardless of location or attraction. These new surfaces incorporate a singular colour scheme and style, changing the diverse and eccentric Ghermazian layout. The new style is based on fantasy characters, removing the ‘realism’ of the original surfaces.

The new surfaces are now unified and decidedly less powerful. No longer about the strong family and actual places, the renovated mall is a disassociated abstraction of generic fantasy worlds. The ‘original’ Pebble Beach miniature golf course has now become Professor Wem’s Adventure Golf. Other areas like Bourbon Street did not change in theme but changed in character. Where there once were statues of prostitutes being arrested by the police there is now an oversize head of a jester floating above multi-coloured concrete.

The consumption of play here has become as important as the consumption of goods — an Ikea store was replaced by Red’s, a 100,000 ft2 rec room. The change in surface has changed interpretation; oncerealist depictions of places are now filtered into a single branded image.

The consumer no longer has to understand individual associations but just a single commodity.

You used to be sold the possibility of going places, places you can’t go because you are in Edmonton. Now you know you cannot go there because they are not real. By changing the surface treatment, the character of West Edmonton Mall changed into something so generalised that it is not even imaginable. You can loose yourself in a specific myth but you always wake up from an unfocussed dream. 

Here, you can see a glass column half covered by the new surface treatment.

Joylyn and Peter are recent graduates from Dalhousie University and live, but not yet work, in Edmonton.

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How do you grow a prairie town?

The gopher was the model.

Stand up straight: telephone poles grain elevators church steeples Vanish, suddenly: the gopher was the model.

Robert Kroetsch Seed Catalogue

Flatbox Eduardo Aquino

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rriving in the Prairies from the West (the Rockies) or from the East (the Shield) the rapid erasure of iconographic elements inverts the process of image accumulation as if a painter finished a painting with a blank canvas. Movement in the Prairie landscape occurs as a progressive observation of objects. Sequence is less a product of time, as it is a condition of experience. What is left is an apparent rigid land with sparse marks, the horizon predominantly washing out orienting indications or references.

Flatbox is located at the Fort Whyte Centre in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The site is a mound between a prairie dog town and a bison field, giving the visitor a bipolar experience of the prairie landscape in a number of ways.

Fort Whyte is is located in an urban edge condition — spatially rural in that it lacks any density and buildings are more individual elements than they are a cohesive whole, and urban in that the park is the remnant of an industrial district used for the development of the urban core.

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Immensity The prairies originated in the ice age with the drying out of Lake Agassiz.

Thoreau wrote about a lake, ‘It is earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature’.

Henry David Thoreau. Walden, or, Life in the Woods. New York: Houghton Mifflin Co, 1893.

Immensity is not an attribute given to something observed but is a perception caused by an enormous sense of absenteeism which provokes us to internalize experience and to measure our own natures.

Flatbox identifies, accentuates and celebrates the wide blue sky with its vast horizon, instigating a new way to think about architecture on the Prairies. It is a device to experience the prairie landscape through the spatial and physical phenomena of place. It is a study on viewing, light and perspective; it is a receptacle for the sensorial body.

Horizon The prairie landscape and its absenteeism is dominated by the horizon.

Gravity prescribes to the body the conditions for the search for position: one stands and looks. A connector between the land and the skies, the horizon remains as a singular reference, intangible. The distance between the body and this impalpable line is relative; it is not a physical distance, nor is the horizon a concrete object. Like Thoreau’s lake, it is a perception of immensity.

e d u a rd o a qu in o

Flatbox’s horizontal slats build a direct dialogue with the land and, as with gravity, presses the structure to the ground. Not a solid surface, the slats work as a soft skin. The structure wraps the visitor, opening the view to the sky. Not a shelter, Flatbox introduces both the Prairies and the urban edge through cropped openings and seating configurations within the landscape.

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Sense of Time/Place Through contemplation one is always confronted by the incredible vastness of the Prairies and, indecently, ever aware of one’s relative proportion to it, of our own perceptual dimension. These vast dimensions compress the self by the meditating quality generated through the singular experience with the landscape. The impact of prairie size demands a new balance. In the open landscape the body asks for a frame as the negotiator. Architecture can be model and frame.

e d ua r d o aq ui no

The temporal transition and evolution of a culture is read through weathering, a continuous cycle in the Prairies as the main construction material is wood. Wood decays and returns to the land. The conditions for settling the Prairies obliged homesteaders to be resourceful in their use of energy and materials. Excessive waste could hamper the growth of a farm and materials were continually reused. Innovative strategies, design solutions born from pure necessity, using any available means, are common occurrences within the Prairie setting. Built exclusively out of recycled and surplus lumber, Flatbox is intended to wear rapidly, returning its own existence to the land. 

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Eduardo Aquino teaches at the University of Manitoba. This project was built with the students of the Faculty of Architecture.

The Mi’kmaq wigwam

f lo r ian ju n ge n

Florian Jungen

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he birch bark wigwam is a building type used by the Mi’kmaq people on the Atlantic coast of Canada. The frame of the domed wigwam is built with a series of two inch diameter birch saplings driven into the ground framing a circle about 14 feet wide. The ends of the saplings may be charred to protect them from moisture in the ground. Two opposing saplings are bent down and lashed together in the center with spruce root or with branches left on the ends of the trees. To avoid snapping the poles, they are anchored in the ground and slowly massaged over a person’s back to take the required bend. Thus the structure is immediately given human proportions. The rest of the saplings are bent over to form a series of perpendicular arches and a few horizontal poles strengthen the dome-shaped framework.

The framework is covered with large sheets of birch bark, reed mats or hides which are hung from the frame overlapping like shingles, so that they shed water. A few diagonal poles are laid over the structure to hold down the skin.

In the winter, the wigwam might be insulated with sphagnum moss filling the cavity between an exterior layer of bark and an interior layer of decorated cattail mats.

The wigwam was an ideal house type for a nomadic lifestyle. The valuable birch bark sheets could easily be rolled up and taken on seasonal migrations in pursuit of the most abundant resources. The frame was left standing, as material for a new one could be found almost anywhere. If well built, the frame might even be reused on the next visit to a camp the following year. By constantly moving their settlements, the Mi’kmaq ensured that the ecosystem would not be over-stressed, even though they might visit the same site over generations.

The wigwam uses the minimum of readily available resources, can be built in a few hours with a limited set of skills and is responsive to both climatic demands and the availability of materials. This technology has also proven to be adaptable today. With the availability of industrial mass produced materials, a tarpaulin from Canadian Tire might provide the most practical cladding material for the structure.

The skin of the wigwam represents the interface between human culture and the natural environment, not only separating the weather outside from a sheltered space inside, but joining together the natural properties of a raw sapling with the arch of the human back to give architectural form. 

Florian Jungen has just completed his M.Arch thesis at Dalhousie University in Halifax and is headed on to Montreal for a research residency at the Canadian Centre for Architecture to study a large archive of drawings by John Hejduk and his interpretation of vernacular New England construction details.

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Wet’suwet’en bridges Tom Martin

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here are several photographs in the National Archives taken of river crossings in the Cassiar district of BC, near Hazelton. I thought it might be of interest to look at the structures of these bridges from a modern design point of view. Working from the photographs, this study implies no first hand knowledge of the actual methods used or of the choice of tree species selected.

Three of the bridges are remarkably similar suggesting that they were quite common constructions. The first, described as ‘Indian Suspension Bridge over the Wotsonqua River’, photographed in winter by Charles Horetzky in 1872, is particularly dramatic having been built fairly high over the gorge (see page 50). The second, ‘Indian Suspension Bridge over the Alaw-Kish’, has been recorded in a set of three photographs from 1899 which provide clear details of the connections made between the different members used. The third is ‘Indian Suspension Bridge across Sestoot River’, 1899. These two bridges are so similar that, at first, they could easily be mistaken as the same one.

Indian Suspension bridge over the Alaw-Kish (Kuldo River), B.C. 1899.

National Archives PA-083029

STRUCTURES These are really not suspension bridges as we use the term today. They consist of cantilevered beams from each embankment, and the gaps between the ends have a joining piece hung from the tips of the two cantilevers to make up the distance required to be crossed.

In order to build such a structure the two cantilevered portions need to be anchored into the embankments so that they will not topple into the river. This could be done by having the beam length on the embankment longer and heavier than the length projecting from it. This, however, might be too limiting on the span and requires fairly long timbers. It appears from the photographs that the root system of the cantilevered trees are rooted in the embankments with some additional soil or rock overburden to ensure that stability is maintained. Perhaps, at first, the eroding of embankments created partial river crossings and were extended by trees on the opposite bank being lowered by the deliberate undermining of the roots.

Generally there seem to be four main cantilevered tree trunks from each embankment, two higher and two lower. One or two of these might have originally grown on the spot and the remainder subsequently hauled in from not too far away. Using the first to support the next, it would have been possible to create the finished cantilever section in phases. Once these were in place the parts of the tree trunks on the land could be topped with earth and rocks to form a durable and balanced abutment.

With two cantilevers constructed, the connecting section could similarly have been built from smaller logs tied to the tips of the cantilevers. The upper logs form a handrail while sharing the total loads through ropes or sinews connecting lower to upper. By loading the lower, the upper would be forced to deflect with it, thus sharing the load.

Some of the photographs indicate additional support and lateral bracing from shorter posts on one or the other river bank. These, of smaller size than the main timbers, may have been most useful during the construction stage before the counterweights had been completed.

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ANALYSIS I have carried out a simple analysis of a model bridge to determine whether these structures would have been durable and safe enough for a reasonable life. To do this some assumptions about dimensions had to be made: Useful length of trees — 23 m Diameter at base — 54 cm Diameter at top — 18 cm Length of centre connection — 10 m Overall span — 57 m Abutment length of trunk — 7.5 m Snow load — 30 kg per metre of each of the main members.

These properties were estimated from scaling one of the Sestoot bridge photographs after making some judgement about the size of the standing trees.

From some relatively simple calculations it is possible to estimate the deflections and stresses arising from these assumptions. a) The snow load would have been a more critical load case than the weight of people and goods being transported across the bridge.

Like today’s bridges, most of the strength is needed to support the structure rather than to carry the live loads. b) Deflections under its own weight would be about 200 mm at the centre, under snow about 300 mm and under traffic 40 mm assuming four people on the bridge at the same time.

Indian Suspension Bridge across Sestoot River, B.C. National Archives PA-083106

c) The maximum bending stress in the main cantilevers at the springing point would be about 7 MPa giving it a load factor of about 2 assuming a bending strength of approximately 13 MPa. This is comparable to that we would require for a modern structure.

COMMENT The fascination of these bridges lies in the wonderful proportions that result from using nature’s materials in the most simple and straightforward manner.

Many of the tallest trees at that time would have been capable of spanning the rivers by themselves, but the difficulty of handling them would have been considerable. Instead the builders used materials of a scale that they could handle with, probably, quite a small crew.

In return, nature required the users to cross the bridge not with automobile or even horse but using the most surefooted method. The abutment areas appear to have been chosen at locations where further scour was not likely to be a major concern. The bridges were site specific, with the counterweight stones carried but a short distance. The first tree could be load tested to determine its capacity and then be used as a guide for the rest of the structure. As long as the trees were strong enough, the counterweight of soil overburden could be placed by both trial and experience.

A simple, effective and delightful solution to an important function and in the tradition of the great feats of human engineering. 

Tom Martin, M.I.C.E is a structural engineer in Calgary, Alberta, with many bridges in his portfolio.

Indian Suspension bridge over the AlawKish (Kuldo River), B.C. Floor System and North abutment.1899 National Archives PA-083030

Indian Suspension Bridge at Moricetown, B.C. National Archives PA-082992

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On Site review

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letter from Hagwilget Lyndale George

t

he Wotsonqua bridge, was built by the people of Hagwilget village.

At that time they were mostly Wet’suwet’en but now they are a mixture of Gitksan and Wet’suwet’en people. The Gitksan name for the village is Hagwilget but the Wet’suwet’en name is Tse-kya.

Maureen Cassidy, in The Gathering Place. A History of the Wet’suwet’en Village of Tse-kya, says, This shot of the bridge at Tse-kya by Charles Horetzky captures the gracefulness and beauty of the construction. The photographer was in the area searching for a route for the proposed transcontinental Canadian Pacific Railway. He spent Christmas at Hazelton. Afterwards, on December 28th, he and some others took ‘a little tour up theWotsonqua, taking with us a camera.’

Horetzky described the bridge as being— built entirely of wood, fastened together by withes and branches; it’s height above the roaring waters beneath is fifty feet, and it sways about under the weight of a man.

This bridge and the several which have followed it are perhaps the thing most associated with Tse-kya by the general public. A spectacular construction in a spectacular location, the early bridge spanned the WaDzunKwuh employing engineering concepts usually associated by non-natives with recent Western technology.

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The bridge at Tse-kya was part of a network of bridges built along the native trails of the northwest where rivers proved to be unfordable. Other bridges were located at Kyah Wiget and the Suskwa River where it is joined by Skilokis Creek. Gitksan, Niska and Tahltan engineers also built bridges in this style.

The one at Tse-kya certainly became the most famous of the lot.

This is partially because it was on the main non-native east-west trail between the coast and the interior in the northern half of the province. Many early white travellers came to bless its sturdy usefulness.

Canada on the Pacific by Charles Horetsky Montreal: Dawson Brothers, 1874. p. 103

Now the bridge doesn’t look quite as spectacular, it is all metal, but still one lane. It is called the Hagwilget bridge and I know that it has changed a few times since. My husband’s cousin who is one of the oldest people in the community and he says he can remember when the new steel bridge came in. He was about 4 at the time and he is now in his seventies. There is no one left who had a part in building the old bridges, of which he says there were more than one and built in different locations.  Lyndale George is presently working with the Gitskan Government Commission. Although not from the area originally (she is Haida) her husband is, and they live in the community of Hagwilget where the above picture was taken.

Geography of Home. Writings on where we live.

Akiko Busch.

Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. paperback 2003. distributed in Canada by Raincoast Books.

Essays on the house and its various rooms. Intelligent, unsentimental, so astute about what is dramatic about everyday life. Akiko Busch’s writing through all the rooms graphs where America, and thus the western world, is drifting domestically. We are like underwater swimmers in this book, the sharks of time, work politics — inescapable contemporary values — nipping at our feet. We are trying to find not style in our houses, but order and comfort.

She has a wonderful turn of phrase —the garage, ‘the kitchen drawer of the house…remains a place that holds out the possibilities of flight’ (p 147). This and more eccentric insights from Metropolis architecture essayist in this great little book.

two books Hiding. Mark C Taylor. University of Chicago Press, 1997.

Still perplexed by the depth of modern life and its global consequences, where nothing is as it seems, where capital and its accumulation make our decisions? This brilliant discussion accepts the complexity, running often three different texts on a page, graphically intercutting each other.

Architecture is placed beside fashion, religion, the modern economy, medical history, painting, politics, Bernard Tschumi next to the Luxor Hotel in Las Vegas gives La Villette a context crystalline in its contrariness.

Architecture here is not buried in its own self-generated history but is shifted into the real, infinitely layered universe where Donna Haraway meets Vogue, Cindy Sherman meets prosthetic genetic engineering and architecture darts amongst it all. Big section on skin, surface abounds throughout. Impossible to paraphrase, just a startling book.

—sw

rafae l go m e z- m o r ian a + sh e ila n adim i

in this issue camouflage buenos aires mexico city new york streets ice industrial felt liberty and hendrix banff mine surfaces

the orgone reef tadao ando architecture parlante flatbox flatland hagwilget bridges sants gloves edmonton the hudson charcoal parking lots wigwams

The Clifton Street floodwater pumping station from 1960, discreetly situated amidst riverfront houses in suburban Winnipeg, is an important component of that city’s extensive flood-prevention infrastructure.The façade is clad in wood siding, the lawn is cut regularly, and the front window has permanently drawn curtains. see Camouflage, by Rafael Gomez Moriana and Sheila Nadimi on page12

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