on site10 : architecture + weight

architecture + weight

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On Site review issue 10 2003

Introduction:

publisher The Association for Non-Profit Architectural Fieldwork (Alberta)

Architecture + Weight

guest editors Michael Carroll Ana Rewakowicz

Michael Carroll and Ana Rewacowicz, guest editors cover images: Susan Dobson Martin Ruiz de Azua

editor Stephanie White contributors Battersby + Howat Architects Jacques Bilodeau Michael Carroll Ella Chmielewska Susan Dobson Aliki Economides Kevin de Forest Julian Haladyn Juan Manuel Heredia Paul Laurendeau Filiz Klassen Mark Guard Architects Marie-Paule Macdonald

Tom Martin Marcus Miller Myron Nebozuk Patkau Architects Ana Rewakowicz Rick Joy Architects Owen Rose Saucier + Perron architectes Hayub Song Terry Tremayne Lois Weinthal Stephanie White Peter Yeadon Carl Zimmerman

design & production Black Dog Running

Issue 10 of OnSite is devoted to the notion of weight and architecture. The array of articles attempts to balance both – the heavy and the light. Architecture can be expressed through permanent immobile buildings grounded to the earth, or ephemeral portable structures that rest lightly on its surface. This issue alternates between these opposite viewpoints. We feature side by side, the weighty sheet metal constructions of Jacques Bilodeau with Peter Yeadon’s speculation on architecture in the age of nanomatter; construction photographs of Rick Joy’s minimalist rammed earth houses stand in contrast with Marie-Paule Macdonald’s overview of transportable environments.

Our contemporary architectural neurosis is articulated by Paul Laurendeau in his article, ‘Architecture Psychoanalysed’. Whether heavy or light, Buckminster Fuller’s question still holds — ‘How much does your building weigh?’

printer Makeda Press, Calgary

advertising sales t: 403 266 5827

Lot 15. From the series Home Invasion, 1998/99 by Susan Dobson.

subscriptions per year (two issues): $15 (individual) $10 (students) $20 (institutions) $25 (two year individual) $5 for back issues make cheques payable to On Site 1326 11th Avenue SE Calgary Alberta Canada T2G 0Z5

comments, ideas, proposals editor@onsitereview.ca Canada Post Agreement No 40042630 ISSN 1481- 8280 copyright On Site Review and the Association for Non-Profit Architectural Fieldwork (Alberta) 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

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C-30, R S C 1988.

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call for articles On|Site issue 11 the circumpolar issue Where, for you, is the North? What do you know of architecture in the circumpolar region?

Issue 11 will be looking at the whole tope of the globe, not just Canada’s north, for examples of architecture, ways of building, environments, traditions and innovations.

Send ideas by January 1, 2004 to editor@onsitereview.ca. Articles due January 31, 2004.

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Sonar SURGE — Ingrid Backmann, Lorraine Oades, Ana Rewakowicz

Sonar, a multimedia project, was installed in JulyAugust 2001 by SURGE in the abandoned piscine St-Michel. Consisting of a grid of copper piping that sprayed a mist over an empty pool, the work essentially re-activated the building and provided refuge from the heat of summer.

Blurring Figural Notations Terry Tremayne

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retend for a moment that you have no stylus, no gauge and only the vaguest of reference points. Imagine you have almost no concrete position at all, no object to copy and no material ground upon which to draw or place it. All you perceive is the phenomenal quality that surrounds and envelops built form.You are not lost but might as well be.

First you hear a sound in isolation, you are alone, and then a dialogue, humidity, a dim light and moisture, polyphony. At just that instant distance and isolation give way to spatial definition. You look down and find yourself inside an impressionistic picture of weightlessness.

You reach out and locate yourself in an architecture of brief, albeit re-affirmative, encounters that added together direct you back towards the door.

Installed in the ageing and near-forgotten public pool, La Piscine StMichel, Sonar intervenes in the moments that separate building from experience; an empty pool tank from its phenomenal appearance. La Piscine St-Michel becomes the pictorial ground upon which an image of desire is redrawn — a desire to refigure this abandoned architectural shell and move beyond programmatic and material expectation into an interstitial image of informal atmospheric space. This blurring image marks the transition from being physically attuned to base needs — gravity, ground and air, to being suspended in an image of interiorized phenomenal space.

Sonar is not solely concerned with the grounding of material architecture, the ground of stereotomy and of its resistance, impenetrability and weight. It also reveals the spatialising effects of phenomenal weightless4

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ness on the resolute materials that build a frame, if not the ground, for architectural events. This is the effect of sound and of light, and in the case of Sonar, the effect of dissolving the substance of architecture into its corresponding image — the effect of establishing the interplay between the weight of architectural substance and its spatializing nonmaterial qualities.

The image that supports the weight of this pool is an image of space where sound in concert with light defines the bounds of form, its tempo, timbre, tone, intensity; another way of saying material, a parallel representation of space, temporary, immanent, a near formless image. To eventualise phenomena is to give some form to this oscillating process of dissociating expectation from recognition. We watch, we listen and reach out for some indication of a change in phase, some indication that we are still there within tangible space. In this place you might almost disappear but for the affirmative realization of touch and the stereophonic sound of your incessant breathing. Form is eventualized and recedes, dissociates itself temporarily from the empty tank that frames our experience. But these fleeting impressions will always move off, one step ahead of us as it were. We are resolute. We are not flecks of colour only, nor mute disembodied specks of light, or objects that creak in the dark. We are neither built of fragments of larger things nor fully imaginary visages. Our ground remains immutable. Unlike water vapour we can not disappear. We experience our weight as if everything depended on it.  Terry Tremayne is a critic currently living in London, England. This text is taken from a longer review of Sonar.

10 Contents

michael carroll

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great weight

Julian Haladyn and Miriam Jordan:Visiting the Hall of Ancient Masters of Shilluksa, South Korea.

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Carl Zimmerman: Industrial Landmarks of Britain.

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Jacques Bilodeau: 925 des Carrières, Montréal 11 Michael Carroll: The Weight of Architecture. Four case studies.

12 Patkau Architects: Bibliothèque nationale du Québec, Mon-

terry tremayne ana rewakowicz

tréal, Québec 14 Saucier + Perrot: Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics, Waterloo, Ontario 16 Battersby + Howat: Gulf Island Residence, Mayne Island, BC 18 Rick Joy: Adobe House, Tuscon, Arizona

paul laurendeau

20 Owen A Rose: Fire, Air, Water and EARTH.

julian haladyn and miriam jordan susan dobson

great plans

21 Kevin de Forest: The Architecture of Air: Yves Klein’s leap into the social void. marie-paule macdonald

22 Paul Laurendeau: Architecture Psychoanalysed 24 Peter Yeadon: Architecture in the Age of Nanomatter

kevin deforest

28 Ella Chmielewska and Aliki Economides: Weighing the Words, Reading the Architecture 30 Marcus Miller: Expo ‘67 and the Weight of Utopia.

34 Susan Dobson: Home Invasion lois weinthal

marcus miller filiz klassen

great perversity

36 Myron Nebozuk: La Maison Cigale, Edmonton 38 Lois Weinthal: Lightweight Architecture, Heavyweigh Interiors

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great lightness

Surge: Sonar, Montreal

40 Ana Rewakowicz: The Reality of an Inflatable Utopia 45 Marie-Paule Macdonald: Romantic Nomads 48 Filiz Klassen: The Malleability of Matter: design flexibility and the re-thinking of fashion, industrial design and architecture

hayub song juan manuel heredia

myron nebozuk

49 Mark Guard: Transformable Apartment, Soho, London

great bridges

50 Stephanie White and Tom Martin: Log Stringer Bridge,Youbou, BC.

tom martin 5

stephanie white

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great books

51 Juan Manuel Heredia and Hayub Song review David Leatherbarrow’s Uncommon Ground. Architecture,Technology and Topography.

Visiting the Hall of Ancient Masters of Shilluksa, South Korea Julian Haladyn

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n a very hot summer day in South Korea, Miriam Jordan and I took a bus from our village of Bubal to Shilluksa, a Buddhist temple site in the neighboring town of Yoju. We had visited this site once before in the winter, but wanted to see it again before returning to Canada. In the middle of Shilluksa is a smallscale temple called the Hall of Ancient Masters or Chosadang.

Built between 1468-69, during the Choson period, this little Buddhist hall is quite a simple looking structure, especially in comparison to the larger and more elaborate buildings within the same complex. It is painted in the same brightly coloured traditional pattern characteristic of Korean Buddhist temples.

Miriam Jordan and Julian Haladyn

The feature that makes this Hall unique is the fact that it has no main supporting beam; instead the weight of the structure is held up by a series of smaller interlaced beams that spread out the distribution of the weight evenly. This has the effect of making the physical structure of the Hall appear to disintegrate.

With no single point supporting the weight of the building, entering the architectural space of the Hall becomes a Buddhist experience of nothingness. In the open space of the Hall — which I enter only after removing my shoes — the interlaced ceiling dissipates any sense of weight that the structure may have, while simultaneously accenting the materiality of the architectural elements themselves. This can be seen in the use of heavy corner brackets.

This contradiction captures the Buddhist sense of nothingness within the architectonic language of Chosadang, in which the structure of the Hall appears weightless by drawing attention to its physicality.

I had to sit in the Hall for a while to figure this one out. 

Julian Haladyn is an artist, writer and curator in London, Ontario. In 1997 he studied traditional Korean painting under Lee Young-Hwan in Ichon, South Korea.

He shared the position of Visual Arts Coordinator at the Forest City Gallery with Miriam Jordan, June 2002 to February 2003. He is presently enrolled in Goddard College’s MFA in Interdisciplinary Arts program in Vermont.

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Carl Zimmerman’s Industrial Landmarks of Britain

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mall, very detailed models provide the material for these photograhs. Empty of mid-Victorian occupation that such industrial buildings would have had, we are faced with the powerful determinism of such industrial spaces and their absolute utility.

draws on a monumental classical heritage and dwells to an even greater extent on the ramifications of physical mass and scale.

Industrial Landmarks imagines a Victorian worker’s state at the apogee of British wealth and imperial ambition.

Lost Hamilton Landmarks, 1997, exploited both the authority of the gallery and the presumed authenticity of photography to present a fabricated and personal compilation of Hamilton’s public buildings. The current series, Industrial Landmarks of Britain,

The photographs themselves are very large — 40” x 72”: heroic proportions for imagined heroic buildings of an imagined statesponsored programme of monumental public architecture. We are presented with pure metaphor for an alternative history. 

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Buildings of modern construction were poorly suited to form that bridge of tradition to future generations... My theory was intended to deal with this dilemma. By using special materials (eg. stone and brick) and by applying certain principles of statics, we should be able to build structures which even in a state of decay, after hundreds or thousands of years would more or less resemble Roman models.

Albert Speer’s Theory of Ruin Value, from Inside the Third Reich, 1970

Although it wears a correct Beaux Arts dress... something about it seems to go straight back to pre-history; glimpsed at twilight or in the early morning it looks as if an unknown race of giants might have quarried it up in great chunks out of the living rock.

Brendon Gil, essay for exhibition catalogue, The U.S. Customs House on Bowling Green, 1976.

Carl Zimmerman is a photographer/ installation artist living in Orangedale, Cape Breton. He was recently artist in residence at the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin.

925 des Carrières by Jacques Bilodeau Michael Carroll

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acques Bilodeau’s work is substantial.

His furniture and interiors present his material of choice — sheet metal.

My first experience of Jacques Bilodeau’s work was his folded sheet metal furniture featured in the media lounge of the Biennale de Montréal 2000. Its minimal aesthetic matched with its comfort made it one of the most engaging pieces of the Biennale. One of his most recent projects, his studio/residence at 925 des Carrières in Montréal, continues to exhibit this distinctive architectonic sensibility.

925 des Carrières both inhabits and extends an existing industrial building sited near an incinerator just north of a swath of railway tracks in mid-town Montréal. The understated exterior, clad partially in sheet metal, announces Bilodeau’s occupation of this marginal, industrial landscape. On entering, it becomes clear that this is a place of quite repose and imaginative experimentation. Large sheets of metal hover above the concrete floor. This horizontal, blackened, sculptural assemblage is both a work of art and a surface to be occupied — a background for gastronomical delights served from Bilodeau’s fully equipped industrial kitchen.

jean longpré

To maintain the studio’s highly edited ambience, large sheet metal sliding doors and free standing partitions screen behind-the-scene gadgetry, including the studio storage area crammed with fragments of industrial machinery and hospital equipment. It is apparent that this designer is a modern day alchemist transforming found materials into evocative creations that defy easy categorisation. An object or surface might be a lighting fixture, a piece of furniture or a fragment of a building.

However, and more importantly, it all bears Bilodeau’s spirit of invention matching ‘high’ design with a witty sense of the everyday. Asked how he achieves the subtle lustre on the large horizontal and vertical expanses of sheet metal he replies nonchalantly. One can only imagine the ritualistic applications that give a distilled shine to his weighty creations.

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ilodeau’s work is concerned with the representation of emptiness.

At the same time, it discloses the relationship of conflict that we maintain with such a representation.

There is the unmentionable emptiness that dwells in us and desperately urges us to cram our interior environments with objects. 

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angelo barsetti

Jacques Bilodeau was born in 1951 in Garthby, Quebec. His current studio residence is located 925 des Carrières in Montreal. His work has been published in such magazines as World Space Design, Japan (1989) and Interior Magazine, USA (1988).

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Building Weight: Four Architectural Constructions

Michael Carroll

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s a culture we are obsessed with weight loss. Fashion dictates.

Thin, lean and muscular bodies saturate our media-savvy culture.

Industrial designers obsess with sleeker more aerodynamic profiles.

Everything from laptops, to cellphones, to computer chips are, with every passing season, more wafer thin.

The residues of this are also evident within architectural culture. Architecture has become increasingly transparent and ‘invisible’ finally disappearing into a misty vapour as realized by Diller+Scofidio in their Blur Pavilion, the critic’s choice of the 2002 Swiss Expo.

However, with this disappearing acting comes a realisation, that architecture in its most fundamental state is, and continues to be, weighted to and imbedded in the earth — immobile. It is weighted literally through becoming real. In the process of the word becoming flesh there is an inevitable weight gain. Even Ricardo Scofidio states, in reference to the design of the Cloud, ”It’s incredible, the structure that’s required to make this nothing.”1 Witha quick glance of the contemporary architecture scene it is clear it has been inundated with the weightlessness of the digital and the virtual worlds of the computer. However, with the fall of the Dot.com industry and the demise of blob architecture, there is a hint in the air for the return of the real, an architecture of resistance, rooted to the ground, an architecture centred around notions of materiality, physicality and actual experience — beyond the thin veil of the screen.

In the support of a weighty architecture that is earth bound, that doesn’t mind a couple of extra pounds, our eyes quickly shift to four architecture studios that revel in the notion of the real with an emphasis on tectonics, materiality and connection to the particularities of the places their projects inhabit — in both an immediate and an extended sense.

Michael Carroll is a founding partner of atelier BUILD and an adjunct professor at McGill University’s School of Architecture.

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beat widmer

Blur building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland. Diller+Scofidio, 2000.

‘An inhabitable cloud whirling about Lake Neuchatel —’

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On|Site offers you an anti-magazine stance. We feature not the composed image of the finished project but an inside look at the construction of four projects. We consider the unfinished building in the midst of the gritty construction site as a kind of reverse ruin that engages the imagination of both the professional architect and the average passer-by. Construction photographs, usually taken by the architects themselves, show the building’s foundation, its structural skeleton, and its interior/exterior wall assemblies to reveal a de-laminated architecture.

Architecture in this light is not understood as a hermetic product to be distilled and consumed but an open-ended process — an assemblage of spaces and surfaces to be inhabited.

This article highlights four projects currently under construction in North America. Two are institutional buildings: the Bibliothèque nationale du Québec that currently stands as an elegant concrete shell in the midst of Montreal and is designed by Patkau Architects of Vancouver, and the earth bound Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Waterloo, Ontario by Saucier + Perrotte Architects of Montreal. We also look at two houses, the first a Battersby+Howat house, carefully scribed into its site on Mayne Island, British Columbia and lastly, in the heat of the Arizona desert, a weighty rammed earth house by Rick Joy Architects of Tuscon. In parallel with the descriptions and photos are excerpts from David Leatherbarrow’s recent book, Uncommon Ground and Daniel Willis’ The Emerald City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination2.  Ned Cramer. ‘All Natural’ Architecture July 2002 p. 53 Leatherbarrow, David. Uncommon Ground, architecture, tecnology and topography.

MIT Press, 2002.

Willis, Daniel. The Emerald City and other Essays on the Architectural Imagination.

Princeton Architectural Press, 1999.

1 2

michael cunningham

Bibliothèque du Québec Montréal, Québec 2003 Patkau Architects

on the middle ground, neglected or appropriated by the layout of a building:

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five storey provincial library, la bibliothèque du Québec holds general collections, an historic Québec collection and a variety of public spaces including a lecture theatre, cafe, gallery, garden and bookstore.

The collections are housed within two large wooden rooms, each with different characters.

The Québec collection is in a grand room, inwardly focussed, with the stacks at the perimeter and reading areas within. The room for the general collection is a storage container for the various materials of the collection with reading areas outside its boundaries.

— paraphrased from www.patkau.ca

‘Could not this neglect of the middle ground also, and more largely, allow us to think again about what it means to “design” a buildng in a location? For this to be so, topics of design such as distance, measurement and finally “space” would have to be reconsidered, as would design itself. If one could rethink the field or horizon of architecture along these lines, it would be possible to discover and devlelop practices of project making that acknowledge the existence of latent settings without trying to make them into something they never should be, permanently on show. Were we to try to conceive such spatial structure, we would accept the challenge of imagining a terrain with gaps or unclaimed areas, a discontinuous field, an uncommon ground. . . a mosaic field built up situation by situation, not taken for granted, like space, as an extended receptacle wanting infill.’

David Leatherbarrow, ‘Architecture and Its Horizons’, Uncommon Ground, pp 18- 19

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on the grand abstraction as a premise of design: ‘An articulated field or horizon was never intended to be abstract, it was meant to be concrete or practically and topographically specific.’

David Leatherbarrow, ‘Building Levels’, Uncommon Ground, p 62 ‘Close proximity annuls aesthetic distance.

At the back a practical field replaces or temporarily subordinates visualised objects, or exhanges one kind of visuality for another. The loss of the object allows for a gain in the nearness of things, their immediacy and their ability to sustain practical affairs; and this in turn promotes non- or pre-aesthetic engagements.

Such a realisation … demonstrates participation in the whole, recognising it as a mosaic of opportunities.’

David Leatherbarrow, ‘Back to Front, or About Face’, Uncommon Ground, p 78

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Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics Waterloo, Ontario. 2003 Saucier + Perrotte architectes

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gilles saucier

he design is inspired by the nebulous spaces occupied by the subjects of theoretical physics, at once micro- and macro-cosmic, rich in information and of indeterminate form and substance. Between city and park, the Perimeter Institute expands and inhabits the improbable space of the line tht separates the two. The building defines the secure zones of the institute’s facilities within a series of parallel walls, embedded in an erupting ground plane that reveals a large relecting pool. The north façade, facing the park across this pool, reveals the institute as an organism, a microcosm of discrete elements. The south façade, facing the city across train tracks and the city’s main arterial road, presents the institute as a unified entity, but of enigmatic scale and content. Entry to the institute is possible from both the north, along the reflecting pool, and south, under the new ground.

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Initial conceptual sketch (west view) showing the Institute expanding and inhabiting the space of the line that separates city (right) and the park (left).

‘Years ago one of my teachers told me that the understanding and interpretation of the site is more than half the solution. The Greek architect Aris Konstantinidis wrote that architectural concepts must be conceived in situ; architecture, he said, germinates from its site. ‘ David Leatherbarrow. ‘Back to Front, or About Face’, Uncommon Ground, p. 91

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Staehling Residence Mayne Island, BC. 2003 Battersby + Howat

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his retreat simply leaves fashion aside and concerns itself with nothing but the marks left by time in the soil, with the wind, the sun, the view and of course, the budget and program to respect.

Each of the constraints encountered, each of the materials use, induces its own expression which modulates the plan, the volumes and the architectural vocabulary.

Maio Saia, in Canadian Architect, December 2001. p5 To minimise impact on the site, new construction is limited to previously altered land and existing infrastructure —septic field, well, roads and paths.

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. . . the act of building is not the work of restoring regional identity or unity, by recreating and coordinating its familiar signs: instead, construction is described as an agency of topography’s perpetual becoming, a process unimpeded by the absence of an ‘origin’ or ‘natural condition’…

David Leatherbarrow. ‘Preface’, Uncommon Ground. p. ix

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Adobe Canyon House Patagonia Region, Arizona, 2003 Rick Joy Architects

‘I can offer a tentative answer to my question regarding the weight of architecture: architecture, at the present time, would do itself a great service by becoming both more real (heavy) and more imaginative (light).’

Daniel Willis. The Emerald City. p 58

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his project used engineered soil and water from a well on the site in a very dry mixture (about 10% moisture content). Foundation and floor slab are concrete; inside the formwork, 10” of earth are compacted down to 5”, and the steel firebox and steel plate window jamb embeds are cast into the walls. Once the wall footings were in place the rammed earthwork, including the setting of forms, took approximately 3 to 4 weeks. The process is relatively simple, and a contractor can direct a group of day labourers how to do the work, and then they build it.

The house is perched on the edge of a rippled ridge where water has eroded the land over time. It is approximately 1200 sq. ft. and is only 18

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used for part of the year. Large gates on the porches allow the building to close upon itself when the owners are gone, to complete the box.

The larger porch also acts as the carport when the clients are gone.

In the main open spaces are the living, dining and bedrooms. The living room looks out toward a beautiful view of the ridge beyond the valley.

The kitchen, bathroom and meditation/yoga space, and laundry/storage make up the smaller mole-like corners. 

michael Kothke 19

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Balancing the Humours

further references:

Owen A. Rose

Easton, David. The Rammed Earth House. Chelsea Green Publishing Co, White River Junction,VT, 1996.

King, Bruce. Buildings of Earth and Straw. Ecological Design Press: Sausalito, CA, 1996.

ire drives our industrialised world to the detriment of the air, water, and earth; however, its weight needs to shift. Concern about our air and water is giving new importance to the old technology of rammed earth construction. Stratified rammed earth walls have a primal beauty that speak of time and place. They are solid, acoustically sound, tactile, healthy and very locally sourced.

‘Earth Work’ Architecture. December 1998. BPI Communications, New York.

‘Sheppard’s Pie’ Architectural Review. April 1998. Emap Construct, London.

‘Earthly fortresses’ Architectural Review. February 1996,Vol CXCIX No 1188.

Emap Construct, London.

‘B.C. firm builds niche out of dirt’ Globe and Mail. August 24, 1999. Toronto.

‘Feet on the Ground’ Natural Home Magazine. May/June 2003. Natural Home, Loveland, CO.

Not only the Great Wall of China. The Hakka people of the Southern Chinese province of Fjian have been building communal rammed earth dwellings for centuries. About fifteen percent of homes in France are made of earth. Australia is heavy with rammed earth. And in North America, some architects and builders in Arizona and British Columbia are casting it as a normal construction material.

http://www.rammedearthworks.com/ http://www.hahaha.com.au/rammed.earth/links.htm http://www.sirewall.com/ http://www.rickjoy.com/ http://www.terra-ram.com/ http://www.rammedearth.com/ http://www.earthhomes.com/ http://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/contents.html http://www.ramseal.com/ http://www.bedrosians.com/glznseal.htm http://www.cement.ca/cement.nsf

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According to the Cement Association of Canada, typical concrete contains 7 to 15% of cement and 16% water. Stabilised rammed earth walls have a cement content that ranges from 3 to 10% and an approximate water content of 8%. Nonetheless, reinforced rammed earth walls can be more than two-times thicker than their concrete counterparts, ranging from 300 to 600 mm (12’ - 24’). Time has shown that the world’s oldest earth walls are roughly composed of 70% sand and 30% clay (Easton, p. 91). Structurally, rammed earth walls can be considered to share the same characteristics as unreinforced masonry. Today, reinforced rammed earth walls can be engineered to be earthquake resistant, multiple storeys and durable for centuries.

Rammed earth walls also share the same thermal characteristics as concrete and brick. In Northern climates such as Canada, these thick walls still have to be insulated. A British Columbia company, Terra Firma Builders Ltd, has developed an insulated wall system where 100 mm (4’) of rigid insulation is built into the centre of the wall. Fully insulated, the walls then offer an interior thermal mass that can maximise passive solar gains and better regulate household temperatures.

Similar to straw bale construction, rammed earth walls are built upon reinforced concrete foundations; they are capped with a steel, concrete, or timber ledger; and also have wide roof overhangs to help protect them from driven rain and snow. Clear, non-toxic water-based sealants can be applied to interior or exterior walls to keep them dry. Another aspect of this natural building is the probability of shrinkage cracks, honeycombing, voids and efflorescence. These imperfections are part of the expected finish of earth walls and their appearance varies with local soil conditions. Unlike air-entrained concrete, wet rammed earth will spall when subjected to freeze-thaw cycles.

planted roof concrete ledger capping wall

reinforced rammed earth cavity wall

ecosourced 100 mm (4’’) rigid insulation

wood framed casement window

hidden steel lintel triple-glazed thermal glass

Constructed in forms similar to concrete formwork, these walls are literally rammed. Earth lifts of 150 to 200 mm (6”- 8”) are placed in the forms and then either physically or mechanically rammed solid. The repeated application of these lifts is what gives the walls their stratified effect, similar to sedimentary rock. The strata can be further enhanced with coloured sands, oxides, etc. Electrical conduits, niches, windows and door frames are also incorporated into the formwork. The process is labour intensive and although human labour is an environmentally neutral activity, this can add to construction costs. And no, the walls wonít crumble if you kick them.

The natural inherent appearance of the rammed earth requires little finishing. Contrary to the cold look of concrete, rammed earth walls provide a warm healthy environment that replaces the manufactured and chemical components of typical framed buildings. Naturally fire resistant, rammed earth technology is as old as human dwelling and as relevant as our next breath. 

reinforced concrete foundation wall

Schematic Rammed Earth Wall Section

Owen Rose can be found at www.ecosensual.net 20

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Kevin deForest, Drawing after Yves Klein’s Architecture of Air, photoshop, 2003.

The Architecture of Air Yves Klein’s leap into the social void Kevin deForest

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he legacy of Yves Klein is often identified through the filter of a strategically self-generated media sensationalism which overshadows his nuanced utopian exploration of the immaterial as a reflection of social freedom. The contemporary relevance of Klein’s all too short career is manifold, both in his wily social engagement in the presentation of his work, as well as with his level of enigmatic material innovation.

Klein’s medium of choice for the Architecture of the Air projects (1958-1962) was the elements. He proposed a series of large scale outdoor projects with walls of fire and water and a roof of air made by pressurized air streams that arch over a vast ground plane. The air emanated from blowers and was then gathered with collecting pipes.

This enclosed micro-climate became the epitome of Klein’s use of the immaterial void as a reflection of social space. The air roof is antiarchitecture, the dematerialization of the Miesian glass wall taken one step further in a playful and positive destruction of the Modernist grid.

Innovatively using the atmosphere as a construction material, it precedes Diller and Scofidio’s Blur Building in Yverdon-les-Bains, Switzerland, by nearly a half century.

The elemental purity of these projects was tied to a complex social engagement. As a hybrid strategy located on the boundary between pure and impure, Klein very consciously presented much of his materi-

ally elemental work through the populist vehicle of bad taste. His notoriety was established in the public eye by a sensation-hungry news media through which he strategically garnered publicity around many of his exhibits and performances.

As social critique, the Architecture of Air project proposes a model of radical societal restructuring. In his New Eden, the open plan organisation of the ground surface delineates unwalled zones of residential, leisure and work areas. All mechanical components of the design are placed underground, metaphorically burying the technological aspects of civilisation, concealed from view. Thus the open ground surface of these environments reflects a sense of boundless freedom. The absurd playfulness of this freed society without walls advocated a radically impersonal state of being, abolishing both personal and familial privacy.

The majority of this work was never realised due to financial restraints and Klein’s death in 1962 at the age of 34. The medium throughout his diverse body of work is the immaterial, the void as a potential space of societal freedom. His work survives as the traces or remnants of this hybrid notion, merging high with low, metaphysics with public relations, and the everyday with the fantastic. 

Kevin Ei-ichi deForest has been a participant at the Rijksakademie van Beeldende Kunsten in Amsterdam, Holland (1989-1991) and a resident artist at Seika University, Kyoto, Japan (1997-1998). Recent exhibits include Summer Jam at Satellite, New York City (curated

by Franklin Sirmans) and Americas Remixed at La Fabricca del Vapore in Milan, Italy. He currently lives in Montreal.

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According to architects, architecture has reached a limit. For a psychoanalyst, the architect has forgotten his art.

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isillusion with virtual materials and blob forms can only be temporarily rescued by a new imaginary vision condemned to future destitution. Likewise, concepts of heaviness, lightness, transparency, gravity and weightlessness will be impotent if they are used a priori. Art is not a recipe.

This essay outlines the uneasy and problematic gap between ideas (the symbolic dimension — language) and the real (the experience of the work itself, or what cannot but not happen). This division arises when built buildings are not as exciting as they were intended to be; when the theory that supports them gets overthrown by experience. Architects do not have the discursive tools to analyse how language paralyses and short-circuits their action. To re-establish continuity between language and experience is no easy task in the current architectural context where design and construction are most often deprived of a discursive relationship caused in part by the inherent problem of transmission.

Universities structure their teaching of art along the divisive avenue of science. In science, to approach reality with a hypothesis produces predictable results that are useful at best. In art, reality cannot be reduced to objectivity and testing. Art is not about verifying a conscious idea.

A thesis, in a school of architecture, is the selection of a topic in absentia, a premise developed into an architectural project expected to reflect this premise as proof of learning. This process is nonsense if architecture is to be poetic, expressive of a meaning that can only be interpreted but never imposed. In love, people that build a theory to find the ideal lover will only be met by anguish. People engage and make their own those things that trigger their desire. They build their narrative from experience, from the residues, the signifying fragments of perception.

Why then do we construct theory to drive the making of architecture?

To sublimate sexuality and not have to admit it —to not articulate the truth without repressing the sexual, the ex-centric position where we unconsciously either are or have, and from where we assume that another will stand where we are not, or for what we do not have, to make operative this illusion of unity.

Establishing a question before making the artwork is a fallacy that often leads to baffling intellectualization. Architects use theory as an insurance policy. They should not attempt to catch meaning before making it.

To assume that the world is a mirror of thought and to then modify the world to equate it with thought is pure psychosis. A psychotic takes seriously what he thinks and entertains a non-dialectical (a frozen) relation with his ideas. Political regimes that work in this way proclaim laws for the masses as an extension of a dictator’s intentions and

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Architecture psychoanalysed Paul Laurendeau

world vision, creating the illusion of mastering perception. The individual, in this position, is greatly destabilised when reality presents a hole in knowledge that cannot be logically stitched. In history, architecture has at times been structured as such, creating spaces where a sense of orientation is impossible to maintain without a set of instructions.

University pavilions, built in the 1960s and 70s as applied theory, are perfect examples: walls get covered with signage to compensate for a lack of spatial meaning. Words at the rescue of buildings!

Centuries ago, scientists positioned god as the cause of their experiments when presenting their work to the sovereign, until they realised that reality worked on its own. In art, no one yet can say that an absence of hypothesis leads to production that cannot be interpreted.

Interpretation, the architect has no control over.

Create a building as if it means nothing.

Transfer the burden of interpretation to the other.

See what sense people make out of it. * * *

semblance

true

reality

Three realms unite consciousness: the real, the symbolic and the imaginary. They are not equivalent; they overlap and are held in a Borromean fashion. The Borromean knot is made of three pieces of string tied together without passing through one another. If one is removed or cut, the two others become free.

The real, the symbolic and the imaginary cannot work without one another. They are separate but dependant entities. Ideas (imaginary) never quite correspond to experience (real). Reality (symbolic) lies somewhere between the real and the imaginary. It is perception connoted by an image. A neurosis is when the symbolic and the imaginary would like to operate on their own, disregarding the real which inevitably resurfaces as an imperative that overthrows a dream — a real(ity) check.

The use of geometry is a way to write the law in the real (i.e. without using words).

Working unilaterally from symbolic to real subordinates perception to thought and leads to a denial of experience in order to preserve a theory unbroken. Any great psychotic, one day, sees the world slip under his feet. To prevent buildings from becoming uneasy intrusions in an otherwise perfect idea, architects should proceed as follows, from real to symbolic: Create a space without thinking and develop the aspects that are prone to symbolization. Start again, and again with what holds your desire, until matter appears united by the laws of the signifier, i.e. poetry. *CAUTION* A model or a drawing is a metonymical object — in other words, a partial representation of another object. The distance between the substitute (the partial object) and the actual building (the representative of the part) is bridged by a mental image. To be as effective as their model, realised buildings must themselves be the model, the metonymy of another object. What this is will not be written.

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aurendeau sees architecture as a geometrical poem made of space. His work can be described as an integration of broad and grand volumes that create a strong impact. He believes definable forms are essential for a building to be imaginable.

Architecture is a spatial testimony of each society’s social structure, a cultural necessity that always finds expression. It is because man talks that he builds for reasons other than his survival. Buildings create places, places he gives names to. In speech, words become reality.What the architect receives as his mission is symbolized by a program, a singular representation of this social structure.

As a member of a school of psychoanalysis, Paul Laurendeau knows that words build partial truth while sustain misunderstanding. When he listens to a client, he never takes things at face value. For him, architecture does not start with words but with forms. It is another language, an imaginary one. Avoiding the initial thought process, he creates volumes, models and drawings until he witnesses the appearance of an object he desires. He does not impose conscious knowledge (an idea) to create form, as according to him, the effects of consciousness are only temporary.

To do without thinking does not exclude the production of knowledge, as knowledge is unconscious. His work is about repetition: making representations and reworking elements that are prone to symbolization, perfecting the form to make it metaphorical of a lost object. Architecture starts to exist with the emergence of the signifier of its function, when socially it is reintegrated in the discourse that caused it.

The following operations order space and make it readable (to the unconscious) after the model:

alignment geometry opening repetition scale specularity

A possible room for a psychoanalyst with two chairs not quite facing one another (for preliminary interviews that can last for years in some cases) or the divan facing away from the analyst’s chair (when transference installs itself).This room is divided in two by a black color and illustrates one kind of geometrical proportion.

proportion symmetry

The occurrence of these properties in nature is highly noticeable and, if organised, becomes unnatural. Structured, these features appear as a sign — a sign of culture. They are the ones architects would use to construct their self-image. Architecture, like human sexuality, is anything but natural, it is purely cultural. Culture is the real ordered by the law of the signifier, i.e. language. Artistically created, human expressions become metaphorical, reminiscent of something beyond their materiality. Architecture is the art of making geometry (a sublimated word) habitable, the metonymy of a lost object, impossible to recover.

For an architect, the making of a building holds more meaning and is closer to truth than any theory he formulates. This is why, since he cannot say the truth, he makes a space out of it.  Paul Laurendeau is an architect, member of the Order of architects of Quebec and member of the Lacan School of Montreal.

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The Transgenic Zoo, by Peter Yeadon, illustrates this article.

The Zoo would be situated in downtown Toronto. It would cover an extensive stretch of land that would be available after an expressway and rail lines are buried.The work considers architectural possibilities for new nanotech and recombinant biogenetic materials.

They are, in a sense, neither bulk nor molecule and open a window into the fuzzy size region where bulk solid state properties rise out of the molecular noise.

Dr. Moungi G. Bawendi, Keck Professor of Chemistry Department of Chemistry and Center for Material Science

and Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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t is a challenge for architects to think small. We have been through the glorious Machine Age, the Space Age, the Digital Age and the Information Age. But none of it has prepared us for what has been emerging from the nanotech sector during the past decade. Nanotechnology is technology that is developed at the scale of nanometers, or billionths of a metre. These are technologies of a molecular scale and, as in those previous epochs, architecture will likely follow and embrace these atomic feats after they have become commonplace.

Who among us could resist working with a programmable substance that would appear to assume any shape, colour, and density? String could become wood. Glass could transmogrify into concrete, and then be instructed to return to glass. Paint could become leaves. The opening in that wall could follow you around the room. What is it, if it can become

Architecture in the Age of Nanomatter Peter Yeadon

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Dwellings in the Zoo use carbon nanotubes to create bedroom scopes for viewing the stars at night.

The scope is situated above the pillow and extends above the clouds and pollution. As the room is made of programmable matter, which is discussed in this essay, it can be any substance.This lack of material identity is used to register a memory of place by having the programmable matter configure around the movement of the body in space.The void, which is the space, is the result of all previous movements that one has performed within the room.

anything? This is one of the significant problems that nanotechnology has now introduced to architecture through the emergence of utility devices that self-assemble and programmable matter, a nanotechnology that can alter matter at the atomic level.

It has been more than a decade since Dr. J. Storrs Hall of Rutgers University proposed the possibility of a utility fog which can change from this to that. The fog would consist of foglets, silicon micromachines that are the size of dust. Each foglet would have twelve arms that would be capable of joining hands in various configurations to form substances of any shape and density, and the foglets could be programmed to change.

Some scientists believe this might be achieved in ten years if atomic friction forces can be overcome. We can already make micro-electromechanical systems (MEMS) from silicon, such as microscopic gears,

left: The Transgenic Zoo includes a number of mixed develop-ments wherein humans live and work alongside animals in their habitats.This image shows a collection of nanomembrane windsocks that filter pollutants out of the air by allowing only certain molecules to pass through.

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pumps, and motors. Zyvex Corporation in the United States specialises in the research and development of MEMS. But let’s think smaller than MEMS, a thousand times smaller. In addition to building tiny, mechanistic machines, Nanoscientists are now working on designing atoms that change the very substance of matter. Each known atom has a unique number of electrons, protons, and neutrons (including zero). Platinum has one less electron than Gold, and Gold has one less electron than Mercury. Nanoscientists are now able to trap electrons, confining their movements in three dimensions within a structure that is known as a quantum dot. Dr. Paul L. McEuen has been working with forming quantum dots at the Laboratory of Atomic and Solid State Physics at Cornell University.

The park maintains, and is defined by, the city zoo.The existing Toronto Zoo would be relocated from its current suburban location to the site downtown, and it would be enhanced with bioengineered plants and animals.

When the electrons are trapped in the quantum dot, they behave as though they were swirling about the nucleus of an atom even though no protons and neutrons are present. The number of electrons that are trapped determines the kind of atom they will emulate. So nanophiles are speculating about the possibility of making one atom become another by altering the number of electrons, as electrons can be added or removed from the quantum dot. For example, a Mercury atom would become a Gold atom if one electron were to be removed.

Interestingly, electrons trapped in adjacent dots will also form chemical bonds, just as their natural atomic counterparts do to form molecules.

By programming the addition and removal of electrons, we might change the very essence of a molecular substance. But we are not so limited.

Because we can introduce any number of electrons into these artificial atoms we can produce new atomic structures that are not yet known.

The bioengineered beings are a stock of genetically modified creatures that are already available to us today, and will be tomorrow.Through recombinant DNA practices, we already make beings that heretofore never existed.We have spliced phosphorescence genes from fireflies and jellyfish into plants and animals to make glow in the dark trees and trotters.We have tomatoes that resist freezing by hosting antifreeze genes from fish.We can easily change the color of peppers, even the taste.We have made cloned goats, transgenically modified with spider genes, to secrete spider silk for military and industrial applications.These are the ‘designer’ plants and animals of the biotech sector.

With nanotechnology, we would not be bound to the stable atomic elements that are presently available to us. We would be designing atoms.

Now think big. An architecture of meshed electric nanofibres, that act as quantum dots, could produce replicants of any desirable atoms by trapping and moving any number of electrons.Your Gold walls could be your Salt walls too, or any other substance at the turn of a switch.

One extraordinary and unique characteristic of this nanotechnology is related to weight. The substance would appear to be Gold, or Salt, or any other substance, but would not have the same mass as those natural substances. As the electrons emulate atomic structures, but are without a nucleus, they don’t have the same mass as the natural and synthetic atoms that are listed in the Periodic Table of the Elements.Your Gold would, instead, have the mass of the electro-trellis that supports it.

Of particular concern is the associations between the Zoo lands and the places of human activity, work, and dwelling. Here, recombinant materials and analogies present provocative associations between natural and artificial compositions.

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A polymer scaffold is installed to grow nails in a hair and nail salon at the Zoo.The polymer scaffold was developed by Advanced Tissue Sciences and the University of Washington for growing human organs such as a liver or heart.The polymer biodegrades over time, leaving the organ intact.

This is not a building material; it is all building materials. It is all matter.

As Christine Peterson, President of the Foresight Institute, stated at a U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science meeting in April 2003: Humanity’s drive to improve our control of the physical world is intrinsic to our species and has been in progress for millennia. A vast international economic and military momentum pushes us toward the ultimate goal of nanotechnology: complete control of the physical structure of matter, all the way down to the atomic level.

If the Committee is considering this technology with respect to accidents, economic disruption, access, and terrorism, what might it become in the hands of architects? 

Peter Yeadon is an architect who is registered in New York and teaches at the Rhode Island School of Design. His works can be viewed at www.yeadon.net

The use of the polymer scaffold is unique to certain conditions. In the nail and hair salon, above, it is used to decoratively cultivate and harvest growing parts of the human body. Here, it is used as cladding to support a snake-like skin that exfoliates and continually renews the facade.

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Weighing the Words, Reading Architecture Ella Chmielewska and Aliki Economides

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anguage is a constant of human culture; it is our first carrier of collective meaning. It is also dynamic, resonating differently in different cultural-linguistic contexts.1 In English, in addition to denoting quantity, weight implies a burden and the actions of carrying, lifting, holding up.

There are connotations of comparing, measuring, and assessing, which imply deliberation and assigning value. Thus in the spatial characteristics of the word, we find a verticality, both in terms of gravitational force and as a vertical axis serving as the basis for comparison and measure.

In Polish, weight and importance are conjoined in the word waga, which means a balance, a scale, as well as being the root of several noble terms such as bravery (odwaga) and solemnity (powaga). In this context, the word weight contains two directional attributes: verticality (connoting gravity and anchoring) and horizontality (the lateral, communicative quality expressing value and relation).

The words importance and weight, then, differ in their communicative dimensions in different languages, and indeed in their implicit spatiality.

In relation to architectural meaning, no matter what the language, to consider weight as only vertical (i.e., as simply the opposite of lightness) limits the richness of possible readings.

We take weight, here, as both importance and gravity. We look at two important civic buildings, the Toronto City Hall and the Warsaw Justice Building, both created during an optimistic epoch in the development of each city: the post-war building boom and metropolitanisation of the city of Toronto, and the post-communist institutional re-building of Warsaw.

Considering weight as architectural significance we ask: How does architecture convey its weight in a particular context? We consider two important sites in cities that we know intimately.

But before attempting to read the buildings, we propose to weigh the words and see how their particular meanings may inform our contextual reading.

In both cases designs were chosen through a competition process. An open, international competition in 1958 for the new Toronto City Hall generated over 500 submissions from architects in 42 countries.2 The closed competition for the Justice Building in Warsaw was organised by the Association for Polish Architects (SARP) in 1991 with only a few local architects invited to participate.3 In both competitions, the symbolic dimensions of the buildings and their expression of democratic ideals were of paramount important.

The new Toronto City Hall with its public square was complete by 1965 and heralded as the city’s most important landmark; one that ‘transformed the image of the city’ and offered itself as both ‘a symbolic object and a highly successful civic square.’ The design of Finnish architect Viljo Revell was praised for its ability to communicate twentieth century notions of progress, as well as for forming a strong identity with neighbouring civic buildings. The winning scheme was not only ‘bold’ and ‘fresh’, but its image and form obediently espoused ‘a modern vocabulary.’4 The City Hall has a strong vertical presence and is a focal point of the city. The connection with the community, however, is through its connection to the Civic Square, which metaphorically receives the lateral spread of the building’s weight. As a well-used public space, the square manifests the literal meaning of the city’s aboriginal name: toronto, place of meeting.

michelle matthews

City Hall, Toronto.

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below: the Justice Building,Warsaw.

At the point of meeting the Warsaw Insurgents’ Monument (left), the columns are crowned with the symbol of the scale of justice (waga), repeated relentlessly until the colonnade embraces the Warsaw Insurgents’ Monument, and the ornament changes into the symbol of the national resistance (the joined letters PW). The same means used for inscriptions of different weight flatten their significance: names that recall individual and national tragedy and heroism are written in the same hand as the distant Roman law.

The Justice Building in Warsaw, designed by Marek Budzynski and Zbigniew Badowski and completed in 1999 is arguably the most important civic building erected after the political change of 1989. It is also one of the city’s most controversial projects, dividing the architectural community and the public at large.5 The building frames the Krasinskich Square on two sides, paradoxically creating a thoroughfare rather than a plaza.

In front of a curtain-walled mass its long colonnade of pre-aged copperclad columns reads as a continuous surface. The building announces its program and suggests its civic ‘weight’ through the words that are appliquéd in copper lettering on the columns’ corrugated surfaces (right). These are literal representations of jurisprudence — quotations from Roman law rendered in Latin and Polish. The inscriptions, however, can be only read as a visual pattern; for the pedestrian they are not legible.

adrian buitenhuis

The expansive rhythm of the colonnade overpowers the former seat of Justice (the elegantly modest 17th century Krasinski Palace) and extends to surround the heavy-handed Warsaw Insurgents’ Monument. While nodding to historical referents it claims to ‘stand at attention in tribute to the culture of past times.’6 The building seems preoccupied with its surface(s). Its architecture seeks explicitly to communicate importance and notions associated with justice. Although it proclaims lateral connections, communication and transparency, the building’s potentially meaningful message(s) are stripped of potency when translated into textual patterns and reflective surfaces.

It is the connection that architecture is able to make with its public that creates its weight, its importance, its waga. When architecture aspires to be read as a text, when it becomes a surface for inscription or a site for mere message display, it looses its gravity. To quote Daniel Willis, ‘Architecture is not so much like a language as it is like the poetic use of a language.’7 It is its arrested gesture, or emotion (not in any literal proclamations or semantic games) that architectural meaning takes place.  The gravity of language, its sounds, symbols and textures change from one place to the next. According to a Hindi proverb, ‘language changes every eighteen or twenty miles.’ Robert McCrum,William Cran, Robert MacNail, The Story of English. New York: Viking,1989. p 21.

2 The Bureau of Architecture and Urbanism. Toronto Modern: Architecture 1945-1965. Toronto: The Coach House Press, 1987. p 78; William Dendy and William Kilbourn, Toronto Observed: its architecture, patrons, and history.

Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1986. p 268.

3 Magdalena Wojtuch, ‘Werdykty i uklady ñ jak dzialaja sady konkursowe?’ In Architektura—Murator, 1/2000, 56-59.

4 This was asked of the architects in the competition statement. Nick and Helma Mika, Portrait of Toronto City Hall. Belleville, ON: Mika Silk Screening Limited, 1967. 11.

5 ‘Sad Najwyzszy’, Architectura Murator, 1/2000 (64) 12-33.

6 And the reference to the Doric order is meant to signify ‘the solemnity of things final.’ Witold Jerzy Molicki, ‘Przejrzysta sprawiedliwosc i przejrzyste sumienie.’ 30-34. Architektura & Biznes, July 2000 no. 2 (91) 33.

7 Daniel Willis. The Emerald City and Other Essays on the Architectural Imagination. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. p 57.

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Ella Chmielewska was born and raised in Warsaw, Poland. Originally trained as an engineer, she later directed her attention to design and visual culture. She holds a Masters in Urban Planning and a Ph.D. in Communication Studies from McGill University. She is currently a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow and Research Associate at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Aliki Economides was born and raised in Toronto, Canada. She holds a professional Bachelor degree in architecture from the University of Toronto, and a Masters in the History and Theory of Architecture from McGill University. She is currently the Coordinator of the Study Centre at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal.

Expo’67 was a Modern utopia, and both Fuller’s and Safdie’s buildings serve as exemplary representatives.

Expo’67 and the weight of utopia Marcus Miller Bob de Moor, “Balthazar,” in Tintin #24, 1967, p. 43

photo in Robert Fullford, Remember Expo, (photographs by John de Visser, Harold Whyte, Peter Varley), McClelland and Stewart Limited, Toronto, 1968, pgs. 6-7.

f 2

Colonel Edward Churchill, Director of Installations for Expo used computer projections and an iron hand to meet deadlines. Builder of airfields for General Montgomery during WWII, his threats to push pavilions into the river if their construction fell behind schedule earned him a daunting reputation with engineers, architects and contractors.

Luckily, two of the most radically utopian buildings produced for Expo are extant: the geodesic dome of the American Pavilion designed by Buckminster Fuller and Moshe Safdie’s Habitat’674.

While the two projects are glaringly dissimilar in terms of form, material, structure, profile, height, weight and program; both buildings in fact proposed radical solutions to the challenges of mass culture. Interestingly, both took on iconic value as architectural emblems of Expo’67 and more generally, of the entire era5.

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Remarkably, almost all the buildings, mass transportation infrastructure and services were demolished, precluding any possibility of making a practical contribution to the urban infrastructure of Montréal.

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The American Pavilion was donated to the City of Montréal, and after an inauspicious dormancy lasting nearly 20 years (a fire in 1976 burned the acrylic skin leaving both the steel geodesic structure and the interior platforms in tact) the interior structure was refurbished in 1995 to house a new environmental museum dubbed the Biosphere.

Habitat’67 on the other hand enjoyed a slow but steady improvement of circumstances following the closing of the fair. Today it operates as condominiums and is the centre-piece of a growing residential zone.

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It would appear that to date, the most popular application of the geodesic dome is as an architectural logo, representing Disney theme parks around the world.

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Pawley, design heroes, p. 168

1 Twenty five million tons of landfill excavated for the construction of the city’s new subway system was used to create Ile Notre Dame and expand Ile Ste Hélene. A running joke referred to the ludicrous mistake made in hiring a Dutch engineer, practiced in the arts of land reclamation for a part of the world so obviously endowed with wide-open space.

ollowing the classic utopian model, the 1967 World’s Fair in Montreal was literally ‘no-place’, and in an important sense was outside time. Many locations in the city were considered for the future fair as local municipalities lobbied for consideration. In the end the scheme proposed by the expansive Mayor Jean Drapeau prevailed and the site for Expo’67 emerged in the middle of the St Lawrence River on synthetic islands1. An extremely ambitious period of construction and preparation ensued and Expo opened to great fanfare in the spring of 19672. Commentators around the world praised the organisers for their stunning achievement, but no one seemed to notice when six months after the turnstiles had registered their last visitor, and the euphoria of Canada’s centennial summer exhausted itself, Expo’67 was almost completely demolished3.

marcus miller

Pawley, design heroes, p. 133

Novelist Gabriel Roy summed up both the popular and the intellectual spirit of the era when she was asked to comment on the proceedings at the Montebello Conference in 19636 — ‘Firstly, one firm basis of accord was established: faith in progress’7. It was as if the entire potential of the modernist enterprise; corrupted by the most sobering and horrific events in history, was given one final chance to express itself in a frenzy of fantastic architectural propositions, showcases of social and technological collaboration, and interactive multimedia exhibits. Expo was a cosmopolitan celebration of smoothed differences and global interdependence filtered through the triumphant terms of post-WWII American benevolence. It may be that Ile Nôtre Dame in 1967 was the last time and place it was possible to believe in the capacity of humankind to intentionally direct its own future.

Roy’s faith, unshaken even after recent cataclysms, encapsulates the most telling difference between her generation of artists and intellectuals and the next. Expo might be characterized as the final gasp of Camelot before protest, alterity and subculture took over8. The seemingly naive assumption that architecture could be called on to offer real solutions to social, environmental, even ethical problems is striking. Not only were people looking to architects for visionary leadership, but also architects themselves typically accepted the mantle and self-consciously generated profundities. This was as much a function of Camelot’s optimistic zeitgeist as it was its reverence for authority. Nevertheless, the dome and Habitat both testify to a faith in man’s ability to design his way out of a mess and reassert mastery over himself and his world.

Contrary to prevalent depictions of Modernism as reductive, homogenising, monolithic, even fascistic, Expo was a study in complexity and contradiction. Counterposed with extensive efforts to unify the look of the fair with integrated graphic design and street furniture9, the urban plan was deliberately provocative. Consider the sites chosen for national pavilions. Ontario was located across from Quebec, Britain from France, U.S.A. from the Soviet Union etc. Even the pavilions themselves were full of ellipses and inversions:

The pavilions of the two richest Canadian provinces stood side by side, separated by only a few yards of water. Individually they were interesting, but together they made a fascinating study: Ontario robust and creative and perhaps a little awkward; Quebec, by contrast cool and restrained and sophisticated. It was as if the two provinces had for some reason decided to exchange identities10.

Designers and architects clearly coddled differences and encouraged ambiguity.

The theme of Terre des Hommes was taken from the title of a book by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (author of The Little Prince), and emerged in 1962 at a meeting attended by Associate Defence Minister Pierre Sevigny, who claims it was his and Mayor Drapeau’s brainchild. The following year a special conference of artists, scientists, and educators was held in Montebello, Québec to elaborate distinct aspects of the theme that would later be developed as the various thematic pavilions. These included: Man and Life, Man and The Oceans, Man the Explorer and Man the Producer among others.

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Robert Fulford, Remember Expo, McClelland and Stewart, 1968, p. 12.

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While it was known that John F. Kennedy enjoyed Camelot (the Broadway musical starring Richard Burton and Julie Andrews that opened shortly after he was elected President in 1960), it wasn’t until the media-savvy Jackie Kennedy quoted a line from the play in Life Magazine’s eulogy (Theodore H. White, ‘For President Kennedy: An Epilogue’, Life Magazine, Dec. 6, 1963) that the mythic association was made between the idealized court of King Arthur and the Kennedy Administration. ‘Don’t let it be forgot, that once there was a spot, for one brief shining moment that was known as Camelot’.

Paul Arthur (former designer of Canadian Art, who actually coined the term ‘signage’) developed the universal pictographs for Expo’67, and Luis Villa designed the urban accessories including phone booths, park benches, waste cans and streetlights.

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Robert Fulford, ibid. pp. 105-6.

If Expo’67 represented the world as an idealised microcosm, then its two most celebrated buildings may be considered as the highest expressions of those ideals. As propositions, they both pose questions about late Modern capitalist society from their own angles and articulate its challenges differently.

In the years following Expo’67, the human and environmental costs of the progress Roy so confidently placed her faith in exploded onto the popular agenda. The efficient use of materials and energy suddenly took on a moral dimension.

photo in Martin Pawley, design heroes: BUCKMINSTER FULLER, Harper Collins Publishers, London, 1992, p. 117 (all the illustrations in this book are copyright to the Buckminster Fuller Institute, 1743 South La Cienega Blvd., Los Angeles, California 90035, (213) 837-7710).

When I invented and developed my first clear-span, all-weather geodesic dome, the two largest domes in the world were both in Rome and were each about 50 metres in diameter. They are St Peter’s, built around A.D. 1500, and the Pantheon, built around A.D. 1. Each weighs approximately 15,000 tonnes. In contrast, my first 50 metre geodesic all-weather dome installed in Hawaii weighs only 15 tonnes — onethousandth the weight of its masonry counterpart.11 Not only were Fuller’s domes stronger, cheaper and lighter — they were far more versatile. In spite of the fact that applications for spherical structures hadn’t actually expanded that much in the past 20 centuries, Fuller’s visionary ingenuity shone when it came to figuring out what to do with them (see note #5). As part of the cold war fixation with emergency systems, he developed domes in the fifties as portable shelters that could be packed into small containers. The super-light, super-strong structure suggested other possibilities though. In 1962 Fuller published the now famous proposal to cover a section of Manhattan spanning 50 square blocks. He calculated that a fleet of helicopters could assemble the 3.2-kilometre structure in about 6 months. An even more grandiose scheme called Cloud Structures proposed full spheres built to enormous scale. The geodesic structure had such a low weight to strength ratio that at 16 kilometres in diameter, the sun would heat the air inside to the point where the whole ensemble, along with thousands of people, would simply rise into the air of its own accord.

The cloud structures would be perpetually aloft, riding air streams around the world, or be anchored to mountaintops.

Application was always an issue with the domes, and what exactly to put inside was never really resolved. They were after all, hollow shells.

From a formal perspective they were already complete, and any actual function that might be applied seemed to merely sully their perfection.

The interior structure of the American pavilion at Expo’67 for example does its job of providing functional platforms at various levels, but there is no necessary or organic relationship between the interior structure and the geodesic structure. The two aren’t even physically connected — they are in fact two separate, independent buildings.

11

Buckminster Fuller (Inventions, 1983) quoted in Martin Pawley, Design Heroes: Buckminster Fuller, HarperCollins Publishers, 1992, p. 115.

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marcus miller

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nter Habitat’67 with its extremely earth-bound program. An alternative to both the claustrophobia and monotony of the high-rise apartment blocks and low-density, single-dwelling sprawl, Habitat deployed new industrial techniques to produce high-density, humane housing for ‘the masses’. A closed system of heavy, standardised, load-bearing units were prefabricated from concrete and assembled on site like building blocks. The result is an airy conglomeration of cubic clusters that could be infinitely expanded. Each unit has its own garden and in spite of the density, enjoys a high degree of privacy.

Where the geodesic dome’s open-system of small, off-the-shelf modular components would make it relatively easy to fabricate in a wide variety of circumstances, Safdie’s closed-system modules required large-scale and highly specialized facilities. This did not allow for the production of smaller projects since the cost per unit would carry too high a proportion of the tooling costs, and be prohibitive12.

Ironically, Safdie’s heavy, closed-system modules allowed for a more open, mutable and anarchistic structure, while Fuller’s open-system of geodesic components produced forms that were far more limited, and not nearly as amenable to modification.

The audacity of Modernists like Fuller and Safdie to trash the past and start fresh seems almost immoral today. On the other hand, Expo’67, the American Pavilion, and Habitat’67 are striking emblems of a license to speculate that ever since seems to have withered and become increasingly irrelevant. Here is a speculation — what if the two architects had pooled their resources and collaborated?

Even as is, Habitat already makes more sense as an interior structure to the geodesic dome than the original structure, because it is modular.

Consider the possibilities for Habitat if it were built in a super-strong, climate-controlled environment. In the best-case scenario, Safdie might have been encouraged to adopt an open-system of construction and a structure more integrated with that of the dome. His heavy, loadbearing units might have given way to suspended components, and helped to articulate a more dynamic relationship to the exterior dome.

On the other hand, Safdie’s attention to the challenges and details of everyday life might have given Fuller the practical social (and formal) content his project lacked. 

llustrations in Moshe Safdie, Beyond Habitat, (photos appearing in this book: Jerry Spearman of Media Extensions, N.Y.C., The Montreal Star – Canada Wide, Keith Oliver, Kero, Official Expo Photographers, Moshe Safdie), The M.I.T. Press, Cambridge Massachusetts, 1973, p. 23.

After several public-financing schemes fell through, the Expo Corporation itself took on the production costs of Habitat, and was forced to reduce the scheme to about 10% of its original 1300 units (the minimum size, according to Safdie, for a viable, self-contained community). The result was that the cost-per-unit was so high that future, potential developers stayed away in droves. In a sense, Expo’67 killed Habitat.

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marcus miller

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After traveling more than 3600 km to visit the world’s fair in 1967, Marcus Miller missed both the American Pavilion and Habitat ’67.

Future Neighbourhood Park. From the series Home Invasion, 1998/99

Home Invasion Susan Dobson

I was driving past a new neighbourhood under construction when I noticed a fox picking its way through discarded building debris. Our eyes locked for several seconds before the fox turned away. As I watched it disappear down the road, I felt surprised by how well the fox appeared to have adapted to its new habitat.

t

he ongoing body of work titled Home Invasion is a series of photographs that documents the flattening of land and the construction of assembly line houses in southern Ontario. As the houses appear in the landscape, they are large, hollow, inert structures, devoid of spirit, stamped from identical molds with only minor ornamental variations.

Each community is surrounded by a standard issue fence, for protection against physical or spiritual invasions.

Issue of identity and individuality are recurring leitmotifs in my art practice. In Home Invasion, the subdivision vernacular and its social implications is explored photographically. There is no depiction of a violent act as the title may suggest. Rather, the title refers to the subliminal violence inherent in the societal quest for, and concurrent struggle against, sameness and assimilation.  Susan Dobson’s photographic work has been exhibited in galleries across Canada and in the United States, and published extensively in newspapers and periodicals. She has received numerous awards for her images of urban and natural landscapes. Dobson is currently represented

by Tatar/Alexander gallery in Toronto.

Dobson is an assistant professor in the School of Fine Art and Music at the University of Guelph and serves on the Board of Directors at Visual Arts Ontario. Her work can be viewed at www.susandobson.com, or at www.tataralexander.com.

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Lot 95. From the series Home Invasion, 1998/99

Lots 2-7 From the series Home Invasion, 1998-99

Lots series Home Invasion, 1998/99 35 1-15 From On Sitethe review Weight Issue 10

2003

Influencing this project’s narrative is an unusual bug found in the south of France called the cigale. This bug spends the first two years of its life buried in the ground.

It then emerges to live the last two weeks of its life in trees, absorbing heat and light before expiring. Curiously, the people of Provence have adopted this large insect as their symbol.

from Grandview Drive, looking southward onto the site

Maison Cigale, a work in progress Myron Nebozuk

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ruth be told, this project began life well before the theme of this issue was announced. For years I’ve been obsessed with Lebbeus Woods’ comment, ‘Imagine that we find a cure for gravity; what then?’ Also shaping my proposal for a theoretical house project was this excerpt from this issue’s call for submissions: ‘an architecture centred around notions of materiality, physicality and actual experience—the nature of the ground—our bodies demand a richer lived experience.’

Accommodating both Woods and the provocative excerpt above, I suggest a middle ground;

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an architecture devoted to the senses yet treading lightly on the earth.

This house is dedicated to an imaginary couple who desire a home with night time spaces that are oriented towards the night sky and the aurora borealis. Daytime / waking hour spaces are oriented to the sun, tracking the sun’s trajectory.

For the most part, program is set within an emerging steel superstructure that lifts the entire house from its site. Kinks in the plan allow program elements to better track the sun.

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In place of a prosaic garage, the idea of a berm to protect vehicles from the elements has begun to take hold.

My obsessive-compulsive couple has requested an illuminated, glass-enclosed linen tower.

‘What’s the use of ironing a table linen and then throwing it into a closet?’ It is placed alongside the stair to separate night time and daytime zones.

The house is located on an undeveloped lot in a fortyyear-old neighbourhood, close to where I live. No one I’ve talked to seems to know why this lot is undeveloped or who the owners are. Do they live elsewhere? Do they even care about this property? Have they left this lot dormant for some unknown reason?

Good fences make good neighbours.

The front façade is a bas-relief composite of adjacent neighbours’ street-facing façades.This conciliatory gesture acknowledges immediate neighbours while giving my imaginary clients sufficient privacy to pursue their obsessions.

A local railcard building was slowly deconstructed late last year; it’s an inspiration for the superstructure.

postscript The owner of the mystery lot is mysterious no more. He’s an older doctor who bought the lot when the neighbourhood was being developed. Apparently, he was promised an unobstructed view of the city at the time of purchase; this promise was broken as houses went up between his lot and the river valley beyond. In a fit of pique extending forty years, he has refused to build on this property, letting the site literally go to seed. A future chapter may be added; I’m tempted to approach him with my design and get his response. It may very well appeal to him. As I was photographing the model on the site one morning, a number of neighbours jogged by and commented that they wouldn’t let their dogs piss on this building.  Myron Nebozuk is a partner with Manasc Isaac Architects in Edmonton, Alberta. He continues to favour martinis with lime twists.

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These two projects bring the interior to the foreground by investigating objects found within it. The conventions of architecture as heavy and interior objects light and mobile, are challenged here through the interchange of drawing conventions that produce architecture, furniture and clothing.

Lightweight Architecture / Heavyweight Interiors LoisWeinthal

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he relationship between architecture and interiors can be seen as the container of the contained. The architecture comes first, and the interior follows. Architecture provides a structural grounding that establishes itself as a heavyweight container, whereby the contained objects on the interior are mobile, lighter in weight and structurally ungrounded. These temporary objects might include clothing, furniture, carpets and photographs. Two such items — a coat and chair, are chosen here for an investigation where one object gravitates towards the heavyweight and the other towards the lightweight. These two projects challenge the weight of architecture, allowing the concept of container to be re-defined in terms of the interior and allow the interior take priority over architecture.

By choosing patterns and drawings as a starting point, the projects begin with ways of making, leaving the objects free to gravitate towards heavy or lightweight constructions, changing as they acclimate to their new weights. Here, clothing takes on characteristics of architecture while architecture approaches clothing.

Clothing and Architecture Construction

The French word pochĂŠ, meaning pocket, can be found in both architecture and clothing construction. The pocket in clothing is an element, carefully tailored, which interrupts the surface of the garment, making an interior space. In architecture pochĂŠ designates the thickness of walls, floors and ceilings that one cannot occupy, while simultaneously showing grounding to a site. Drawings for both architecture and clothing follow parallel rules, with each discipline having established notations and conventions. With each, volume is constructed by piecing or keying together the the materials delineated by the drawings. But before the materials come together, they are unfolded, but not yet a volume. It is at this critical point that the drawing systems for architecture and clothing patterns reveal parallels between the disciplines, showing a potential to develop a dialogue between one another.

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House Coat

In an interior, the body is surrounded by layers such as clothing, textiles, furniture and wallpaper. The walls, ceiling and floor are the larger containers of these layers. The meeting of these two realms defines both the temporary and the permanent nature of architecture and interior objects. One of the most temporary objects — the clothing one wears, is the first layer to house the body. House Coat uses the notations of architectural drafting to alter the domestic act of sewing.

The instructions of how to construct a coat from a pattern are rewritten in the language of architecture and typed onto the surface of the coat. The fabric of the coat is the architectural paper used for drafting — tracing paper (left). The shift from fabric to paper offers the potential for a lightweight wearable interior, one that is made through sewing.

When backlit, the poché is highlighted, as if looking at an x-ray to see the unoccupied space of the wearer (fig. 2). The phenomenal aspect of light and transparency often found in architecture is now brought to the interior.

Wing Chair

Traditionally furniture is secondary to architecture. The architecture is built first and then occupied by things. Wing Chair challenges this order and allows the furniture to organize architecture through its construction, taking cues from clothing patterns. Specifically, the sewing technique of a dart allows material to become more fitted to the figure. Clothing patterns show how to fold the material in order to go move from a flat to a developed surface (above right). Here, the construction of the dart finds its way into the construction of a chair indicating where it can fold and unfold, thereby taking on characteristics of clothing construction (bottom right). The unfolded chair resembles an architectural drawing in a plan view, but upon folding the dart, the chair organizes the connected floor of architecture. The traditionally temporary way that a chair is placed in a room is transformed. It now has a primary role; the architecture responds in a secondary way. The heavy weight of architecture, taking new direction from sewing, allows it to break away from permanence becoming more lightweight, more responsive, while the chair becomes the heavyweight.  39

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Lois Weinthal is an Assistant Professor in the School of Architecture at the University of Texas at Austin.

She teaches architecture and interiors and continues to explore the space of interiors through peripheral disciplines.

The Reality of an Inflatable Utopia Ana Rewacowicz

f

loating, ephemeral spaces of human imagination, flexible in form, beyond socially regulated boundaries, zones of transience and impermanency – what is the future of inflatable technologies? Will they allow us to live up to the radical idea of bettering the world and provide us with practical solutions for the social concerns of globalized culture, or will they bring us to yet another commodified moment of material distraction?

A vision of stability and permanence is what created the greatness of all ancient civilisations we admire. It is the remains of their buildings and monuments we study and not the cultures of nomadic tribes. Entering the twenty-first century, are we ready to reconsider our attitudes in light of our need for mobility in a global community of airspace travels or are we still concerned with what is going to stay behind? Is the development of new materials and technologies making pneumatic structures more easily accessible or will they remain in the hands of a few scientists, academics, artists and paper architects? Are we ready for a society in which the form and function of constructed environments will unite, allowing us to live without affecting what’s around us? Are we ready for Buckminster Fuller’s ‘Comprehensive Anticipatory Design Science,’ or is this just another utopia and a dream of science fiction?

The desire for a more democratic future has fueled the imaginations of many minds throughout the history of Western civilization and many have looked at technological advancements as a way of liberation. In his book Citizens: A Chronicle of the French Revolution, Simon Schama comments on the ascent of Montgolfier Etienne’s globe airostatique at Versailles in 1783: Instead of being an object of privileged vision — the specialty of Versailles — the balloon was necessarily the visual property of everyone in the crowd. On the ground it was still, to some extent, an aristocratic spectacle; in the air it became democratic.1 In Russia after 1917, there was a great aspiration to abandon aristocratic restrictive and selective forms and invent new ways of alternative living.

Movements such as Russian Constructivism, Futurism and Suprematism were driven by this enthusiasm for change and Tatlin’s concept of Art into Life had significant influence on later generations. Marc Dessauce in The Inflatable Moment, Pneumatics and Protest in ’68 draws an interesting parallel between inflatable technologies, liberation and revolution and student protests that stirred Europe and the United States in 19682.

Without a doubt, the nineteen sixties was a time of concurrent cultural infatuation with pneumatic technology. After WW2, there was an urgent need to provide shelters for people whose houses had been bombed.

Intensified by rapid population growth, the need to build affordable housing resulted in ugly gray high-rises that obliterated the landscape

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of cities all over Europe. These concrete tower blocks were often poorly constructed and unpleasant to live in. As a reaction to the monotony and ugliness of urban planning, architecture groups such as Archigram (UK), Utopie (France) and Hans-Rucker-Co and Coop Himmelblau (Vienna) emerged. Inspired by military technologies3 and earlier pneumatic innovations4, they turned their imaginations towards science fiction and utopian visions to make a better world, introducing the concepts of inflatable structures, furniture and environments5. Especially with the Utopie group, the wish to engage in architecture as social practice was particularly strong and was considered an ‘anti-monumental and therefore anti-establishment answer to the desire for emancipation through technology’6.

Yet, four decades later, when you ask the average person what they associate with inflatables, most likely the answer is lifesaving devices, gigantic parade floats or sex toys. Disposable objects of ultimate consumerism have flooded the markets of Western countries and have had little to do with the concerns of improving social conditions. Jade Chang, in her recent review of Los Angeles artist Jessica Irish’s website project Inflat-o-scape (www.inflatoscape.com), says that ‘giant inflatable penguins and dinosaurs—advertising gimmicks grown almost to the size of their owners’ desire for dollars—are shown next to inflatable warehouses designed for the New Economy. (Should you ever need to close shop, just deflate your warehouse and relocate).’7 The irony is that the inflatable fascination of the sixties, intended as a critique of consumer society, ended up in the landscape of McDonald’s Playland and overblown dotcoms.

As an antidote, imagine yourself stripped to the bare minimum, where all you need is a room that you can carry with you wherever you go.

Utopian science fiction? Not for Barcelona-based artist and designer Martin Ruiz de Azua, who produced his Basic House project in 1998, an inflatable cube that can be carried like a handkerchief in a pocket and, when needed, can be inflated by a gust of wind, solar or the body heat.

The notions of living with less and the possibility of ‘having it all without having a thing’8 stand behind de Azua’s house made from a reversible metalized polyester film that was developed by the Paï Thio Company, but never commercially produced.

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Basic House, Martin Ruiz de Azua, 1998.

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i

n 1980 Buckminster Fuller made the following comment: For the first time in history it is now possible to take care of everybody at a higher standard of living than any have ever known. Only ten years ago the ‘more with less’ technology reached the point where this could be done. All humanity now has the option to become enduringly successful.9

Although on a global scale we can question the success of Fuller’s scheme, the following projects contribute and support alternative propositions for living. They link inflatables to freedom and mobility and stimulate our thinking about less tangible things: our relationships to each other and our individuality in modern day culture and society.

Canadian experience A paradigm of combining new materials with old technologies and applying inflatable prototypes to everyday life and environment is the Wood Powered Inflated Building by Steve Topping, a Montreal-based artist.

Canada is known for its wide and wild nature and Topping believes that winter camping is a quintessential Canadian experience10. The Wood Powered Inflated Building is a lightweight and portable shelter that inflates when heated. Inspired by the Huron First Nation’s way of drawing outside air to the fire inside a shelter, Topping is in the process of designing a wood-stove with a double wall flue that will allow the heated air to create a draft and to inflate a clear plastic dome. This warm inflatable encampment will be movable and comfortably livable while using the natural resources of the surroundings.

Steve Topping. Wood Powered Inflated Building, 2002 drawing.

All I want is to look in your eyes11 Another example of a transportable environment is a project by Swiss artist Christina Hagmann — The RelationShip. In her project, realized during a six-month residency in Montreal, she built an inflatable ‘coverdome’ that fits over a canoe and creates protective space for people to interact inside. The fast pace of urban life has alienated us from one another; the anonymity of the individual is a growing tendency fed by the disfranchised effect of popular media. Hagmann raises questions about different ways in which we interrelate and describes The RelationShip as ‘a wearable bodyboat and 3D paradigm for self-determined identities in flux’11. We all carry an invisible, personal space around us. Through it, we control our distance, allowing some to come close and avoiding others.

In The RelationShip one can sail away from urban life into an inflatable moment of true self-experience.

Christina Hagmann. The RelationShip

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You never know WEAR The Dressware project that I have been developing follows the legacy of Michael Webb’s 1966-7 Suitaloon and Cushicle12. The main goal of this work is to create multipurpose inflatable dresses that, through inflation and incorporation of wearable technology, will change and adapt to different situations and environments. In this project I draw attention to the uncertainty in globalised culture where individuals have less and less control over their lives and are increasingly controlled by big institutions, corporations and governments. Dressware brings our individual needs to the basic, everyday experience of survival. Considering how our lives have become multi-dimensional and multi-demanding, this work attempts to find practical solutions to ‘you never know WEAR?’ situations of local and global emergencies.

While there is always room for individual inventions and approaches, many questions remain: how will these developments help a society controlled by profit and the interests of a few rather than the many?

How can we increase an awareness of humanity when, on the one hand, individualized images of society circulate widely, yet, on the other hand, individual souls dissolve in the miasma of the general individual? Will technological advancements bring us to a new inflatable moment, and if so, where will we end up? And although the questions and answers continue to be open, it is important to nourish the belief in a better future and support all efforts that go along with it. 

Simon Schama, Citizen of the French Revolution. New York:Alfred A. Knopf, 1989. p. 125.

1

Marc Dessauce, The Inflatable Moment, Pneumatics and Protest in ’68.

New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999. p. 13.

“Pneumatics and revolution agree well. Both are fueled by wind and the myth of transcendence; as the balloon enraptures the child, they animate and transport us on the promise of an imminent passage into a perfected future.“ 2

Sean Topham, Blowup. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 2000. p. 38.

“Inflatable dummy apparatus later proved its worth in Fortitude South, one of the largest deception campaigns in the history of the war. The aim of Fortitude South was to dupe Hitler’s armed forces into believing that any plans the Allies had to invade occupied France would be focused on Calais, rather than Normandy where the D-Day invasion would actually take place.”

3

Ana Rewakawicz. Sleeping Bag Dress Prototype 2002

Courtenay Smith and Sean Topham, Xtreme Houses. Munich: Prestel-Verlag, 2002. p. 152.

8

The innovations in inflatable technologies pioneered by F.W.Lanchester airsupported dome 1917), Walter Bird (Radome 1947, swimming pool cover in Buffalo in NY 1957, Peace pavilion for the US Atomic Energy Commission 1962), Frei Otto (pavilion at Rotterdam expo in 1958).

4

Dyodon by Jean-Paul Jungmann, Traveling exhibition hall for everyday objects

by Antoine Stinco, Traveling theatre for 5000 spectators by Jean Aubert, Cushicle by Michael Webb, Balloon fur Zwei by Haus-Rucker-Co.

http://www.bfi.org/introduction_to_bmf.htm# Quote from the artist.

11 Quote from the artist 9

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Joan Ockman, ‘Pneumotopian Visions’, Metropolis Magazine (New York: June 1998. Online: http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0698/ ju98neu.htm)

In 1966 and 1967 Michael Webb, a member of Archigram group (London UK), developed the concept of ‘clothing for living in’ — single space and portable units.

12

6

Jade Chang, ‘Monitoring the historical ups and downs of inflatable architecture’, The Metropolis Observed (New York: October 2001. Online: http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_1001/ob/ob05.html) 7

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Ana Rewakowicz is an interdisciplinary artist living and working in Montreal, Canada. She received a BFA at Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto and MFA at Concordia University in Montreal. She works with inflatables and explores relations between temporal, portable architecture, the body and the environment. Her artwork has been exhibited in Canada and abroad. Currently she teaches at Queen’s University in Kingston and Concordia University in Montreal.

Romantic nomads Marie-Paule Macdonald

North America was originally inhabited by nomads who made efficient use of local materials in situ. The romantic notion to a natural nomadic state of existence is a recurring theme in western culture. From Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Robert Frank’s photographs to the road film directed to mass culture; from Frank’s Candy Mountain to Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho, the land and the road are the sites of North American dwelling.

Heironymus Bosch, [1450-1516] Garden of Earthly Delights, detail

a

poet from the Russian revolutionary period,Velimir Khlebnikov, described a vision of transparent portable dwellings — The idea is this: a container of molded glass, a mobile dwelling-module supplied with a door, with attachment couplings, mounted on wheels, with its inhabitant inside it. It is set on a train, or on a steamship, and inside, without ever leaving it, its inhabitant would travel to his destination.

Just as a tree in winter lives in anticipation of leaves or needles, so these frame-work-buildings, these grillworks full of empty spaces, spread their arms like steel junipers and awaited their glass occupants. Every city in the land, wherever a proprietor may decide to move in his glass cubicle, was required to offer a location in one of these framework-buildings for the mobile dwelling-module ( the glass hut). (1920-21)1

Khlebikov proposed dwelling units ‘identical throughout the entire country’ 2. He saw bridge-buildings, underwater-palaces, steamship-buildings, filament-buildings, single rooms connected in a single strand fieldbuildings. The ‘poplar-tree building’ was ‘a narrow tower sheathed from top to bottom by rings of glass cubicles. There was an elevator in the tower, and each sun-space had its own private access to the interior shaft, which resembled an enormous bell tower 700-1400 feet high. The top of the building served as a landing platform.3 Khlebniknov lived a nomadic life during the housing crisis of the revolution, roaming from emergency shelters to cots in shared quarters arranged by friends.

Projects from the 1960’s proposed mobile dwellings as escape. During the ‘anti-architecture’ wave, designers mixed technological gadgetry with revolution. Superstudio, Coop Himmelblau, Archigram and Hans Hollein proposed environments pared down to a minimal capsule. Hollein proposed the Enviro-Pill, a pill that would alter one’s environment. Michael Webb’s Cushicle and Suitaloon, seminal ‘personal enclosures’ are prototypes for this contradictory condition of the individual in capitalist society divested of all but a minimum survival kit of commodities.

The Cushicle was an intimately scaled translucent capsule, a free form chamber, a pre-engineered, customised micro-environment. Its sensuous

Velimir Khlebnikov, ‘Ourselves and Our Buildings, II, Remedies from the yet-to-be-city of the Futurians’, Letters and Theoretical Writings. transl. Paul Schmidt, ed.

Charlotte Douglas, Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1987, p 350-1 2 ibid., p 351 3 ibid., p 353 4 William Gibson interviewed in Eye magazine, Toronto weekly, Sept. 9, 1993, p. 11 1

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title synthesised the pleasurable connotations of popsicle, bicycle and cushion. A primal living space, it was portable and inflatable, accommodating one or perhaps two intimately associated individuals housed within a membrane whose central element consisted of a high-tech chaise longue, like the banana-style dentists’ chair, equipped with the requisite appliances.

These radical projects critiqued consumerism. A film by Jacques Doillon, L’An 0, proposed a vision of society ‘after the revolution’ whose inauguration was celebrated by a shower or rain of keys — the key being a quintessential symbol of property which must be continuously administered, inventoried and guarded. In Doillon’s film the citizens spontaneously throw their keys out the window and roam through western civilisation’s cityscapes. Futuristic, sci-fi scenarios proposed by visionaries of the 1960s — the plastic bubbles and high-tech gear — are familiar to the popular consciousness, having been completely absorbed into a recycled-pop visual vocabulary. William Gibson has remarked, “Well, Technology ‘R’ Us, at this point. What I find alarming when I’m doing interviews is people who say, ‘Technology, Bill. Good or bad?’ as though we could put it back in the box! We’re such fabulously artificial creatures that we live four or five times longer than we do in the wild. I’m always amazed that anyone could say [noting that it’s the most technological of people who ask most often]... ‘Can we not go back to nature?’ Well I guess you can, but you won’t like it.” 4 The fascination for instant architecture was provoked by a desire for immediate gratification. The cartoon-like images are still powerful. Did these gadgets work? What were the fastenings and connections, were they zippers? super adhesive? Velcro, which was already in garments in 1961? Since these projects were drawn up, advances in technologies in polymers and the plastics industry have been so numerous that little of the technological literature on plastics from 1965 is relevant today.

The issue of disposability has metamorphosed into recyclability. The fordist model of continuous accumulation that prevailed in mid-century faces the problem of finding a place to throw away to. Ecological issues have returned with great force, as the consequences destroying the finite resources of the planet have become more obvious.

Reassessing Plastic Plastic is both familiar and an index of the new. In the last twenty years plastic — polymers and composites — have dominated new materials. The Plastic Era began in 1979 when more plastic than steel was produced in the world. Petroleum-derived, plastics come from a finite resource without necessarily being natural or ecological materials.

We have filled up the landscape and landfills with plastic products, detritus that is often unbiodegradable. Flotsam and jetsam washes onto our shores that will remain litter forever. In South Africa, the plastic grocery bag is jokingly called the national flower. The growing plastics industry has made this material supremely ubiquitous. Sylvia Katz

describes the complexity of a bottle molded in PET (polyethylene terephthalate), a kind of packaging that appeared in the late 1960’s and is now everywhere in western society — “a bottle made of several layers of different types of plastic, each with its own different function...[and] blow-molded forms a sandwich of polypropylene ethylenevinyl (PP/EVOH/PP) [which] has many of the properties of the PET bottle ...but is squeezable as well. Five layers of this multi-layer extrusion - a kind of polymer lasagna - (PP/EVOH/PP/EVOH/PP) produces a highbarrier plastic [...] ‘shelf stable’ at room temperature, and later put in a microwave oven.” 7 The ultimate test of plastics as a material for dwelling environments may be determined by problems related to off-gassing and users who have developed human allergies and sensitivities. These problems have mushroomed in recent years, particularly in reaction to harsh adhesives and to carpet materials. Greenpeace has prepared a critique of polyvinylchloride based on the industrial production of the substance 8, and recommending alternative materials, synthetic as well as natural.

Reassessing Homes Can a dwelling with a life-cycle and a depreciation time be a home?

Cedric Price has asserted that, “The ages of a building are five: use, re-use, mis-use, dis-use, and ref-use”, and asked, like Buckminster Fuller, how much the building weighs9. Miniaturized commodities - the notepad, fax, walkman, cellular phone, miniature generators and photovoltaic cells, ushered in a fluid attitude towards territory. Information is condensed into tiny packages; a lifetime of medical record fits on a credit card. With access to transmission through centre-less web systems like the Internet, the daydreams of a perpetually ramblin’ individual, seem realistic and convenient. Webb’s Cushicle seems a logical extension of the relentless commodification invading everyday life, including dwelling10.

above: Marie-Paule Macdonald, movable inhabitable cell, Khyber Art Centre right: Wearable Environments. Marie-Paule Macdonald, Mobile Inhabitable Cell, model, 1995. Transparent mobile inhabitable cell with magnifying lenses.The top of the cell is shaded by a reflectormirror equipped with photovoltaics as energy source. Inspired by the ‘messy space station’ of Lem and Tarkovsky’s Solaris, the bottom and some sides of the cell are fitted with magnifying lenses set in the wall membrane.The lenses distort visual perception to allow privacy to the inhabitant. From the inside, the occupant can see flora and fauna such as insects, flowers, bees and hummingbirds hovering outside, magnified to marvelous new scales that reveal rich detail. the cell is meant to be suspended by a simple pulley and cable system so as to rest lightly in a natural environment such as a forest, or in a field, from light structural frame. It could also be hung off existing infrastructure in leftover or underused urban and suburban spaces.

Ideally because it does not touch the ground, it would not be classed as ‘real estate’ and no ground rent need be paid.The cell would be energy autonomous and would come equipped with innovative rain water-collection and waste reduction apparatus. Its materials are translucid and transparent synthetics built up in multiple layers. acknowledgements: canada council assistant: magda wojtyra

Sylvia Katz, Plastics in the ‘80s, in The Plastics Age. London: Victoria & Albert Museum, 1990, p 145 7 Katz, p 146-7 8 Greenpeace. PVC: Toxic Waste in Disguise.

1992 9 Cedric Price, ‘Homes and Houses’, AA Files 19.

1987, p 30 10 Peter Cook, et. al., Archigram. London: Studio Vista 1972 Boston: Birkhauser Verlag 1991.

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Lo-fi In the wake of Khlebnikov’s futurian city, the Mobile Cell project modelled three-dimensional scaled prototypes, realizing a series of portable environments to be suspended on found surfaces or custom frames. The form that the capsules take were inspired by the ‘soft’ shapes of antiarchitecture and by the plastic forms created by post-minimalist sculptor Eva Hesse: a squashed irregular spherical capsule. The pod contained a core and a central structure, like an apple. Another version split into segments, with membranes like an orange. The capsule consisted of a translucid material making up thick composite walls, built up in layers of synthetic sheet, film or textile. Translucent membranes contained magnifying lenses, to allow for more careful observation of small creatures, insects or birds. The pod could be a suspended in soft transparent plastic with doubled or multiple walls, filled with transparent insulating gel, and membranes along which a range of tubes for services and structural blades were threaded for quick assembly or dis-assembly.

Other models used cast, extruded, sewn or injection molded plastic to build prototypes. These wearable environments envisioned life on a landscape in a minimal capsule-like portable environment combining the ideas of a living pod, a library capsule, and a pharmaceutical module, all incorporating views, lenses, or ‘concentrate’ so that the natural environment would not be disturbed by the individual who inhabits it. The various-sized capsule or module would include ultra-light wearables with interchangeable elements that provide visual or other information about miniaturised perceptible environments.

Steve Topping ‘Traversing Shack’ Camp construction, Cartier, Ontario, Canada 1996-7

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Over the winter of 1996-7, visual artist Steve Topping built an encampment near Cartier in northern Ontario. He travelled by riding the rails: finding a freight train headed in the right direction and climbing on as it left. While hopping freight trains requires extremely light luggage, Topping packed enough material to assemble a winter shelter, adequate for -30 degree weather of northern Ontario, in his backpack and carry-on luggage. In addition to food supplies, he brought in the cladding material and tools to build his hut structure when he arrived in Cartier. The forest and a previous encampment provided the branches and a metal flue.

The skin of the hut is a sheet of plastic from Western Tarpaulin Company, three layers, a clear woven glass-fibre layer sandwiched between two transparent layers.

Topping carried the plastic tarpaulin and aluminum-coated paper, bundled and tied around a bow saw, twine, additional building and camping supplies in a backpack, and made a series of voyages into the forest to build his portable encampment. The structures used traditional bent branches bent into arcs and tied, with the plastic on top. The camp was build over a found cylindrical flue which Topping made into a fire container. By placing the heat source at one end of the paraboloid structure and lining the convex ends with reflective metallic-coated kraft paper, the shape focuses heat on each end of the interior. The camp was not only built of materials that could be carried by one person, but once assembled, can be moved in one piece — by two people — to a new site. Topping used the encampment to observe the Hale-Bopp Comet.  Marie-Paule Macdonald teaches architecture in Montreal and at University of Waterloo. Her book, ‘rockspaces’ was published by Art Metropole in 2000.

Where transformation becomes a form-generator, physical transformation requires ease of movement facilitated by lightness of material.

Otherwise, what is designed to be flexible or adjustable is more often left in one fixed position as the physical task of transformation is too cumbersome. Transformable architecture collapses the distance between architecture and industrial design, as highly transformable spaces, building components, furniture and wearable items invite innovation and experimentation with lightweight materials and their assembly.

Clothing achieves ultimate transformability. We constantly put on, take off and move about in our clothing. Using either one or any combination of a belt, string, elastic band, zipper, velcro, button, or pleat allows the garment to not only fit on to our body but also to flex as we move about. CP Company, Italian outerwear designers, take the idea of transformable clothing even further where jackets, coats, hats can change into inflatable chairs, hammocks, tents or sleeping bags.

filiz klassen

Awnings are flexible elements that complement the fixed exterior surfaces of buildings. Cotton awnings, or toldos, still cover the spaces between buildings throughout Spain. In Shigeru Ban’s Curtain-Wall House of 1997, a large outdoor room can be entirely enclosed by enormous, lightweight, billowing curtains, reinventing the common curtain as a wall.

The malleability of matter and the fascination with felt. Study model, Filiz Klassen, 2003.

The malleability of matter Filiz Klassen

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esign flexibility is widespread in fashion, industrial design and architecture. Transformation, in design, embodies malleability of matter and form and suggests stretching, expanding and contracting space. We naturally adapt built spaces, building components and furniture to everchanging needs and desires, either momentarily, daily or seasonally, using our own physical abilities. We move, pull, push, open, close, stretch, fold, unfold, rearrange, assemble, adjust and continually transform the space that is around us.

As an integral form generator of built spaces, transformability suggests the molding of furniture, built-ins and interior partitions into an indivisible entity. In Mark Guard’s Soho apartment of 1998 (right), Lazzarini Pickering’s Milan apartments of 1994-97 and Steven Holl’s 1989 Hinged Spaces in Japan one cannot distinguish a partition from a cabinet, a wall from a door or a room from a piece of furniture. ‘Moving panel’ replaces conventional terminology for walls and partitions. These apartments demonstrate that a building can sustain its spatial integrity through the flexible spatial articulation of varied uses.

Environmental concerns, increasingly, have an impact on the design of our built environments and on construction practices and products.

Questions about the life span of built spaces, the appropriate use of resources, as well as their adaptability and interchangeability to different functions over time lead, hopefully, to environmentally sensitive architecture and design. For designers, the appearance of objects and spaces can no longer ignore the eventual disappearance or transformation of the same object or space. In architecture and design, size, weight and longevity matter. ‘Lightweight and changeable’ increases the life span of built spaces and objects. This change in attitude for both designers and consumers emphasizes lightweight and transformable design not as a one-off design solution but as an integral part of the design and production phases. Rather than weight and fixity, it is lightness that is compatible with stability and longevity. 

lee valley catalogue

references and further reading: Bell, E, editor. Shigeru Ban. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2001. pp49-54.

Bell, J, & Godwin, S. editors.The Transformable House.

Architectural Design, 70(4), 2000. pp50-57, 62-71.

Holborn, M. Issey Miyake. Germany:Taschen,1995. pp1-16.

c p company

Lupton, E, editor. Skin, Surface, Substance and Design.

New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002. p186.

Tuta, 3218F008, 2000, from Trasformabili, by CP Clothing Company, Milan. White sweatsuit in ‘Crystal Wind’, windproof and rainproof light rubberised runproof nylon mesh. Through zippers the sweatsuit can be transformed into a long trenchcoat.

Not in production, Trasformabili are archival designs and prototypes developed each year and frequently exhibited.

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This kind of design relies heavily on the innovative use of materials and mechanical connectors. Various components of the interior environment made out of wood, drywall or plastics are made less rigid and heavy with the help of a wide variety of precise and mechanically coordinated connectors and conveyors.

Attachments, countersunk hinges made of brass and nylon, rotating connectors — easily found mechanical devices facilitate changeable building components. These examples are from the Lee Valley catalogue.

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Schanz, S, editor. Frei Otto, Bodo Rasch, Finding Form: Towards an Architecture of the Minimal. Germany: Deutscher Workbund Bayern, 1995. pp179-185.

Schwartz-Clauss, M and Von Vegesack, A. editors. Living in Motion: Design and Architecture for Flexible Dwelling. Weil am Rhein:Vitra Design Museum, 1995.

Filiz Klassen is the co-organizer of the upcoming international academic conference,Transportable Environments (www.ryerson.ca/portable) April 2004 at Ryerson University,Toronto.

mark guard architects

above: kitchen open. below: kitchen closed. left: free standing shower shell.

Transformable apartment, Soho, London Mark Guard Architects

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etween 1961 and 1991 the percentage of one person households in the UK has risen from 12% to 26%. In the same period the percentage of households comprising of only one person or comprising of couples without children has risen from 33% to 62%. In the London borough of Westminster 69% of households consist of either people living on their own or living in partnership with one other adult. The conventional two or three bedroom flat does not seem appropriate given these demographic changes. Modern technology allows us to re-think the planning of residential accommodation.

With space in the inner city at a premium, large living spaces are not economically feasible for the average person. This project explores the maximisation of available space through flexibility of use; a flat that can be transformed from one bedroom to two bedrooms or to no bedrooms at all to provide a large space for living or working. ď §ď źď Ł

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Log Stringer Bridge, Youbou, BC Stephanie White and Tom Martin

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og stringer bridges were once very common in the logging roads in BC. This one consists of six 80’ long, 3’-6 diameter logs, most likely old growth spruce and fir, whose market value today can be as high as $40,000 per log. Steel and precast concrete bridges are now used to replace log spans when they do finally deteriorate.

This bridge spans Cottonwood Creek, west of Youbou on Vancouver Island, and is one of hundreds of bridges on the maze of gravel logging roads between Lake Cowichan and the West Coast. Driving, lost, on this web of roads, one could be forgiven for thinking that BC has a lot of trees. The road is dark and wet with puddles even in the heat of September, as the forest never dries out. Then you burst into the dazzling sunshine of a clear cut — no mystery, no majesty, no shade and very hot.

For this kind of bridge, the river bank is stabilised by heavy timber cribs.

On these rest four stringers which support the road bed. The top of the bridge is contained by two more stringers on each side, lashed with cables to two crosswise needle beams beneath the four bottom stringers. The six logs thus share the load equally.

Off-highway logging trucks have 5 axles with an overall spacing of 48 feet. The total weight of these vehicles, for which there are 4 classes, is 667 kN to 1,468 kN. (The classes designated L-75, L-100, L-150 and L-165 actually denote the Imperial tons of each vehicle. 75 tons = 667 kN. This bridge would have been designed for L-75 loading.) It is likely near the limiting span for its section. Because logging trucks may not be symmetrically loaded the bridges are designed for an unsymmetrical loading.

The decks, generally, are 14 feet wide (the trucks 8’-10” wide). Two layers of timber planking lie over 10 x 12 18”o/c beams. The bottom layer is 4 x 12 random length rough sawn treated planks (Coast Douglas Fir #2 or better), with the top row a wearing surface of 3 x 10 random length untreated planks. More recent bridges do not have an earth or gravel covering as this one does.

stephanie white

Untreated timber bridges have to be inspected regularly and occasionally load tested. Allowance is made for deterioration of the outer timber layer by excluding the outer 2” for size. Some bridges survive in use for twenty or even thirty years. 

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Stephanie White photographed and measured a number of lumber installations, including this bridge, for Large Things in Wood, a Field Notes small book.

Tom Martin is a structural engineer in Calgary. We discussed these bridges with Colin Nicol-Smith of Gower Yeung Engineers in Vancouver, a firm long involved in logging bridges.

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Uncommon Ground. Architecture,Technology and Topography David Leatherbarrow.

MIT Press, 2000.

— reviewed by Juan Manuel Heredia and Hayub Song

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ncommon Ground allows a diversity of readings, most obviously, typological, historiographical and contextual. The book develops a theory of elements —platforms, furnishings, partitions— that challenge typical design priorities (space/plan/façade making). It is also an alternative ‘history’ of modernism that reconsiders examples from Loos, Neutra, Raymond and Konstantinidis in terms of their commitment to site. While it criticizes radicalizing ideas of both the emancipatory modernists (Le Corbusier’s aerial perspective, Howe’s space-flow, Breuer’s structural gymnastics) and conservative modernists (Sert’s monumentality and Wright’s topogenesis), it does so to highlight theoretical limitations as opposed to the topographical reality their work often engaged.

Warning about oscillations between technological freedom and cultural necessity Leatherbarrow finds in their tension the real framework for design.

as platforms and their natural and correlates, are not meant to be taken literally. Fundamentally levels are horizons of inhabitation, layers for and of dwelling identifiable by traces of occupation rather than by over-explicit definition.

The book talks at a deep theoretical and disciplinary level. It acknowledges the reality of perspectivism in architects’ attitudes, suggesting ways of overcoming perspectivism’s en-framing potential. Selective and sectional understanding are proposed as complementary surveying techniques. The disclosure of relevant and latent aspects of a surrounding terrain allows for the productive distinction between geometries of position and those of situation. Architectural levels, although explainable

As the tri-partite subtitle of his book suggests, Leatherbarrow’s theory recovers a well- known but hardly rehearsed tradition. The analogical playfulness of his writing permits him move away from excessive categorization producing imaginative and provocative interpretations. The book requires the initial effort of attentive reading, once accomplished, the flow of its language engages the reader in its emergent and profound meanings. 

one great book

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Topography, likewise, is not just the continuity of land and plan, but registrations that measure the interrupted field or ‘uncommon ground’ of architectural reality. Façades (fronts) are discussed in terms of orientation: approaching them is less a matter of focused perception than of site awareness. Questioning the pre-eminence of iconography, Leatherbarrow re-situates the problem of representation within the spectrum of building performance: ‘what it does’ instead of ‘what it means’. This is not just function in the traditional sense but the historically-renewed technical and spatial responses to culture and region that allow for its own rehabilitation when inadequate and insufficient.

the magazine you have to read in this issue sheet metal rammed earth concrete air psychoanalysis nanomatter words utopia land insects fabric inflatables collapsibles logs books hinges

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top: CP Company’s transformable taincoat see p. 48. bottom: Martin Ruiz de Azua’s Basic House. see page 42.