on site 35: the material culture of architecture

ON SITE r e v i e w

35: 2019

architecture infrastructure urbanism construction design culture

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35: number 35 spring 2019 www.onsitereview.ca

the material cultur e of architecture

Clive Crowder, Nigel Henderson’s Streets: Photographs of London’s East End 1949-53.

London: Harry N. Abrams, 2017 ISBN - 10:1849764999 ISBN - 13:9781849764995

David Leatherbarrow and Mohsen Mostafavi, Surface Architecture.

Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 2005 ISBN: 9780262621946

Jane Rendell, Jonathan Hill, Murray Fraser, Mark Dorrian, editors. Critical Architecture.

London: Routledge, 2007 ISBN 978-0-415-41538-5

Robin Wilson. Image, Text, Architecture.The Utopics of the Architectural Media.

London: Routledge, 2015 ISBN paperback 9781138573260 ISBN 9781472414434 ebook ISBN 9781315587820

Guy Nordenson and Terence Riley, editors. Seven Structural Engineers: The Felix Candela Lectures. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 2008 ISBN-10: 0870707035 ISBN-13: 978-0870707032

Isabelle Hayeur, Raymond Beaudry.

Dépayser / Strangeland Montreal: Isabelle Hayeur, 2019 ISBN : 978-2-9808422-1-4

John MacArthur. The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. London: Taylor & Francis, 2008 ISBN10 1844721418 ISBN13 9781844721412

Alexander Eisenschmidt, The Good Metropolis: From Urban Formlesness to Metropolitan Architecture. Birkhauser 2019 ISBN-10: 3035616329 ISBN-13: 978-3035616323

Robin Wilson and Nigel Green, Brutalist Paris Map. London: Blue Crow Media, 2017

Complete Set of Architecture and Design Maps. bluecrowmedia.com

Eileen Gray & Jean Badovici, E1027Maison en bord de mer Marseille: Editions Imbernon, 2015 ISBN: 9782919230099

Stanford Anderson, Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art. Princeton Architectural Press, 2004 ISBN-10: 1568983719 ISBN-13: 978-1568983714

Koen Van Balen and Els Verstrynge, editors. Structural Analysis of Historical Constructions: Anamnesis, Diagnosis, Therapy, Controls.

Leuven: CRC Press, 2016 ISBN-10: 1138029513 ISBN-13: 978-1138029514

Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Oren Sagiv, Tania Coen-Uzzielli, editors.

Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018

These books are either by past contributors to On Site review, or are particularly important to the contributors in this issue and are mentioned within their articles.

ON SITE r e v i e w Spring 2019

35: t he mater ia l c ult u re of archite c tu r e In the realm of architectural publishing we see a lot of successes: the professional journals publish the best, the most technologically advanced, the most culturally significant of the new. Critique happens in the letters.

Theoretical journals also reveal a kind of success, usually academic successes, the kinds of discussions that are presented at symposia, or, before that stage, as theses and dissertations: original thought, often, carefully crafted to advance an academic career that can change the education of architects and in consequence, the profession. In theory.

On Site review has always carved a middle ground, taking professional success with a grain of salt — it is never the brainchild of just one architect but massive teams of designers, engineers, bankers, construction companies, politicians, shareholders, planning offfices.

Even the building of a house involves an interdependent team.

At the other extreme, the abstract and theoretical discussions that are advanced academically, often fly above daily experience of architecture. There is a connection, but life is short – sometimes, usually, that connection is difficult, abstruse, personal, complex – not many people have the facility or the theoretical underpinnings, or the academic incentives to figure it out.

conte nt s The material culture of architecture: Grenfell Tower Brick: the material of Eladio Dieste Developing form within the materials of architecture The culture of wood construction Yucca indigo willow The culture of materials Leaves willow lichen Material gestures The materials of the model On concrete Forensics of nuclear landscape The hard and the brutal: a journey through Parisian Brutalism The uninscribed surface The power of the material object Epilogue: boundaries and the materiality of architecture Postscript: Olinger Architects, T-Wall housing, Iraq call for articles: On Site review 36: our material future who the contributors are

On Site review has taken a three-year hiatus from its 20 years of publication and with this issue, 35: the material culture of architecture, proposes a discussion of architecture that starts with the material of architecture.

On S i t e r e v i ew 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

contribu to rs 2 3 6 7 12 13 14 16 17 24 26 32 40 46 50 54 55 56

Stephanie White

Ted Cavanagh Nicole Dextras

Stephanie White Richard Collins Stephanie White Andrey Chernykh Robin Wilson Yuxin Qui Jonathan Ventura Johathan Ventura and Sharon Danzig

I would like to acknowledge that this issue was created on the traditional and unceded territory of the Coast Salish Peoples, the traditional territories of the Squamish, Musqueam and Selilwitulh First Nations.

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t h e m ate r i al cu lt u r e of a rc h i te ct u r e stephanie white

the case of Grenfell Tower, London, 2017

What is it that turns a material fact into a rules-based credo: material into materialism, capital into capitalism; the transition hardens the options available to the initial, existential event, often turning it to dogma, doctrine, a fetish.

This impulse is at its heart political — one can be feminine (a cultural construct in early twentyfirst century gender discourse), or one can be feminist, an entirely different political stance with different consequences and discursive options. So too with material: materials in architecture are just that: the materials used to make buildings, streets, cities, sometimes deliberate, often inadvertent and unavoidable.

Materiality, in architecture, describes material qualities: texture, colour, transparency — qualities of surface through which we interact with the materials that make up buildings: we touch the brick, check our hair in the glass, clean the moss off the concrete.

Materialism is the overweening desire to accumulate the materials that are considered of worth, whether or not they are useful. Worth, as materials go, becomes cultural, not the materials themselves, although they become marked by association. In so far as materialism was the accusation once hurled at the Joneses and all those who wanted to keep up with them, materialism in architecture occupies a particular niche: the choice of materials to raise the status of a building. This is the Grenfell Tower example.

The materialism of the aluminum cladding was

more than an earnest choice of insulation panel; it was meant to raise the status of a block of council flats to ameliorate its presence in a very expensive district, Regent’s Park. The materiality of the aluminum cladding was visual, flammable and inexpensive.

Grenfell Tower technical facts and political speculations: designed and built in 1967 in concrete, a marginal amount of insulation on the inside walls. Despite the valorous critical re-evaluation of Britain’s extensive postwar brutalist movement, housing towers such as Grenfell looked old and ugly. What was revealed in the weeks after the fire was the diverse and rich life contained between its old and ugly concrete floors and walls — not the tight old London working class communities that had gone through the Blitz and who until Windrush and the empire coming home were white and deeply rooted in London as a place. No, Grenfell 2017 was hugely diverse: the new London which because of the numbers of 1960s council towers still has economic diversity built into its heart.

Nonetheless, Grenfell flats were cold, its architecture a failed socialist model: some new clothes were needed. This is where a discussion of the material culture of architecture becomes relevant. The 1967 architecture was straight-up modernism: concrete was exposed, potential fires were contained within each concrete unit, each unit had fresh air, long views and floorby-floor communities of similar economic

circumstance. Come 50 years later, the model and the architecture has long been discredited.

Its facelift solution was two-fold: increase insulation and make it look glossier by covering the outside with gleaming silvery aluminium insulated panels.

It is these panels which are the material expression of a cultural appreciation of architectural style; not architecture, but the look of architecture. That these panels were a cheapjack product is another consequence of ideological change where government is less responsible for the care of its citizens than in the postwar era, therefore there is less money allotted to housing, social welfare or community support. Government is concerned, however, with appearance. Things must look successful, not crumbling, to attract investment. Council towers all over Britain have been newly clad in insulated panels, many of which fail fire tests.

This is what material culture is: a sense of ourselves through the materiality of our choices.

It isn’t about art, or architecture, or practices deemed progressive, or even conservative in the sense of conserving what one has. It is about both inadvertent and conscious practices that establish stature and identity, for better or worse. n

Grenfell Tower before the addition of insulated aluminum cladding. Designed in 1967

by Nigel Whitbread for Clifford Wearden Associates, built 1972-4.

Grenfell Tower cladding after the fire of 14 June 2017

Grenfell Tower renovation, 2012-16, Studio E Architects

www.m ylo n do n .n ews/news/west - l ondon- news/ gren f ell-to wer-bef o re- fire- t ore- 13189075

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www.mi rro r.co .u k/ n e w s / u k- n e w s / all- w ar n i n g s - f e ll- de af ears- 10620149

th e co n ve rs ati o n .co m/ f act- che c k - i s - t he - t y p e - of- c l a d d i ng- u s e d o n - g re n f e ll- to w e r- actu ally - ba nne d - i n- b r i t a i n- 7 9 8 0 3

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Eladio Dieste was a Uruguayan engineer who developed reinforced brick shell construction for large span installations such as factories, workshops, storage and agricultural buildings.

The Church of Christ the Worker, 1955-60, in Atlántida, with its vertical rippling walls, is almost the only example of his brick work most of us know about, but he worked up until the late 1990s.

Ceramica armada or reinforced masonry was Eladio Dieste’s material, a material arising from the particulars of Uruguay over his lifetime, from 1917-2000. Dieste has lingered on the edges of the discourse of modernism, overshadowed by the Latin American triumphs of Neimeyer in Brazil, Barragan in Mexico. Dieste’s work was grounded in Montevideo and only toward the end of his life did he work outside Uruguay.

Hector Abarca, architect and archivist, describes a lecture Dieste gave in Lima in the 1990s — ‘attended by few… it was a lot of maths and old b/w slides. Real archival material not well appreciated in the 1990s.’

There is not a diversity of material to be found on Dieste, however the richly definitive resource is Stanford Anderson’s Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art of 2004, assembled from a symposium Anderson held at MIT in 1999 after he visited both Uruguay and Dieste for the first time in 1998. It includes analyses of his many projects, the technology of ceramica armada, his innovations, historical appraisals, Dieste’s own writings plus technical appendices that explain everything about vaults and reinforced and prestressed brickwork.

Stanford Anderson’s lecture, ‘Eladio Dieste: A Principled Builder’, was published in Seven Structural Engineers: The Felix Candela Lectures, the Museum of Modern Art, 2008, also prohibitively costly if you can find it. There is a copy on the MOMA website.

Julian Palacio, on a 2012 Norden Fund grant, went to Uruguay to visit Dieste’s work. His 2014 lecture, ‘Material tour de force: the work of Eladio Dieste’ is on the Architectural League NY website.

In 2017, Heinz Emigholz made the film Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (19172000). It was streamed on MUBI in November 2018. The film visited 29 Dieste buildings still standing in 2017, from bus terminals to warehouses, gymnasiums and garages; some churches, a shopping centre, but mostly huge brick arched shells in semi-rural, semi-derelict districts. Emigholz arranges the film as a series of stills: a fixed camera in a number of locations — static and silent except for the wind blowing the trees and grass, dogs wandering in and out of the frame, traffic sounds, children, barking, but very little activity and none of the forced dynamism of a moving hand-held cine-camera.

And oh, how inadequate is that little description for the solitary beauty of these

b rick: the material of El adio Dieste stephanie white

On S i t e r e v i ew 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Eladio Dieste, Horizontal Silo, CADYL Agricultural Cooperative Limited 19761978 Young, Rio Negro, Uruguay Span 28.5m, length 120m, height 15m, area 3420 m2. Capacity 30000 tonnes of grain This grain silo is located in an area of ​​ extensive agrarian production. The work was left unfinished for economic reasons, but was adapted to operate partially, without full capacity or the installation of the mechanized loading and unloading system. The roof is formed by a set of double curved vaults resting on a reinforced concrete edge beam founded with vertical and inclined perforated piles filled at the site. The vaults are made of hollow ceramic bricks (vaults 25x15x15) joined with sand mortar and portland, finished superficially with a layer of mortar of 3 cm painted white to reflect the solar radiation. Filling the silo was to be by a bucket elevator and conveyor belt hung from the top of the vault. The floor of the silo was designed as a triangular hopper buried at a height of -12.37m with the slope of its sides sufficient to discharge the grain by gravity to a lower tunnel, located at -14.10 m.

This explanation from www.fadu.edu.uy/ eladio-dieste/obras/young/ The Stanford Anderson book (Eladio Dieste, Innovation in Structural Art) has drawings of the cross section and foundation details on p110. The fifth image down (left) shows the top of the hopper, but a concrete floor was poured when the project was curtailed by economic circumstance.

It is easy to get completely transfixed

by Dieste’s engineering feats: they are magical and paradoxicallly practical.

However, we are thinking about material culture, and this horizontal silo, forty years on, is still full of grain, still a silo.

Emigholz’s film, which is without dialogue, just printed building names and dates, puts this silo into a peaceable landscape where agricultural rhythms pass days full of birds, wind, trucks and dogs, men with shovels and ladders, weight and angles of repose of grain.

all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , D 2017, 95 min Streetscapes – Chapter IV / Photography and beyond – Part 27 / Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917– 2000) Film Galerie 451 filmgalerie451.de

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buildings as Emigholz filmed them. They go on and on, one after another, great ribboned caverns, the background to a fruit packing plant, or a big garage full of cars and mechanics, or a wool warehouse stacked with stinking filthy fleeces in great bundles on their way to huge steaming washing vats, overhead conveyer belts, tatty bits of wool falling through the air, men in singlets heaving fat bales around — it is mediaeval, the scene under a Sistine chapel of waving brick.

One of the most beautiful scenes in The Buena Vista Social Club was Ruben Gonzalez on an upright piano playing for a class of elegant little Cuban gymnasts in the Ballet School and National Centre for Gymnastics, a stained and crumbling classical building, formerly the Merchants Association on the Paseo del Prado. The building was beautiful – cream and shadowed, arched and colonnaded, a space originally meant for something else but, by necessity and opportunity, a ballet school – colonial architecture, colonised by one of the arts of the revolution, ballet; a colonial art, but revolutionary in its insistence despite blockades, poverty and the passage of time. Dieste’s buildings strike me the same way. Revolutionary design for conventional use. These are not specimen buildings, they are, in Uruguay, fabric.

The material culture of mid-century industrial Uruguayan architecture: brick.

Brick. Julian Palacio, in his 2012 Norden Fund lecture, puts Dieste’s use of brick in the context of both a Latin American tradition of adobe block, and a ‘push back against the Modern Movement’s machine aesthetic and use of industrial materials such as concrete, steel and glass’. Dieste was influenced by Joaquin Torres Garcia and his universal constructivism movement to develop ‘a modern Latin American language that would permeate all of the creative arts’. This is the language of de-colonisation twice over: the development of an architecture that was not colonial Spanish, but also not international modernism, itself, allegedly, a de-colonising architecture. Thus structure not decoration; brick not concrete.

It is interesting to consider the economic conditions of Uruguay during the arc of Dieste’s career. The Batlle era, 1903-33 used a collective leadership model based on the Swiss Federal Council: a presidency (ministries of foreign affairs, the interior and defence) that shared power and responsibility with a national council of administration (education, finance, economy and health). It seems prodigiously progressive: social welfare, nationalisation of foreign-owned businesses, taxes waived for low incomes, a national telephone network, unemployment benefits, an 8-hour work day, all of this before 1915. The split executive model lasted until a military coup in 1933, a fallout of the Depression.

Uruguay’s subsequent prosperity increased 4

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Solsire Salt Silo (1992-94), Montevideo.

One of several horizontal silos. The lenses are set at the peak of each section of vault, the point of zero stress because although the roof acts as a longitudinal vault, each lateral section is an independent structural element. All stresses are carried to the side footings, allowing the end tympanum walls to be completely glazed, as below.

Deposito per la lana ADF, Juanicó. Canelones, 1992-94

all images from: DIESTE [URUGUAY] (Dieste [Uruguay]) Heinz Emigholz , 2017, 95 min Streetscapes – Chapter IV / Photography and beyond – Part 27 / Architecture as Autobiography / Eladio Dieste (1917–2000) Film Galerie 451 filmgalerie451.de

through its role supplying beef, wool and leather to the Allied forces in WWII –Allied, because nineteenth century Britain was briefly involved with Uruguay in conjunction with its role in Argentina; Britain’s WWII debt to Uruguay was paid off by nationalising long-established British-owned rail and water companies. The end of WWII and the loss of such a lucrative market plunged Uruguay into inflation and civil unrest.

The collective executive model was briefly reintroduced, but Uruguay never recovered its enviable status of a prosperous Switzerland of the South: it struggled through the 1950s under increasingly repressive military rule, then in the early 1960s came the Tupamaros insurgency, a direct response to the poverty many Uruguayans found themselves in. The US Office of Public Safety began to operate in Uruguay in 1965, teaching ‘security’ protocols of intimidation and torture.

It is tragic reading this history, the 1970s and 80s were a violent period of military rule that mirrored neighbouring Argentina, including a cessation of civil rights and, inevitably, desaparacidos. This was Dieste’s time. His first work was in the mid-1940s, his last in 1994. He started out in a prosperous era which subsequently collapsed: Atlántida, was built in 1955, by which time there clearly wasn’t the money to build in anything other than the most available, least expensive building material.

It happened to be brick, augmented with tiny amounts of steel, and the thinnest of concrete coatings.

A viable brick industry depends on geology; not everywhere has clay. Uruguay is a triangle between two rivers, Rio Plat and Rio Uruguay, and the Atlantic Ocean. Much is flat grazing land, and at the inland point of the triangle is higher, volcanic ground: the north margin of the Patagonian micro-plate where it meets the South American continental plate. A collision in the Permian age laid down a deep layer of volcanic ash and calcite in coastal marine swamps and lagoons, which under subsequent pressure resulted in a deep clay deposit. This has made for both a fertile grassland ecology for cattle and sheep, and an endless supply of brick-making material.

Reinforced brick: this is how it works, after all the engineering calculations of course. Moveable formwork, a Dieste innovation, supports one full arch at a time. The surface of the formwork has on it a wooden grid that places each brick. In the spaces between each brick a steel grid is laid and then mortared in. The formwork drops away below, leaving 3-4” brick/reinforcing/mortar fabric with a thin screed of concrete weather protection on the outside.

There are a wide range of arch and folded plate configurations. The arches generally spring from a horizontal edge beam datum, increasing their lateral and longitudinal radii to the centre, and then subsiding to a parallel edge beam on the

from the top: Municipal Bus Terminal, Salto 1971-74 Service Station, Salto 1976 Camino de los Estudiantes, Alcalá de Henares, Spain 1996-98

other side of the space. Calculating the greatest and least points of compression allows a variety of profiles providing clerestory lighting – it is so interesting how stress is in constant flux across the surface — not in motion, but in calculation.

The arches themselves are either pre-stressed or held by tie-rods, not Dieste’s ideal. His ongoing project was the most minimal and integrated solution to the roofing of space with the most economical of means. As each site, each function and each orientation is different, each site was an opportunity to do yet another magical structure. Sometimes the longitudinal walls are absent and the whole structure is supported by short end plenums, other times the ends are open, or glassed, and the roof spans the short dimension. There are a number of shelters that butterfly off a single column. Purely vertical walls are laid conventionally, however within this construct of the vertical wall, they ripple and lean – this the how the Atlántida church was done: the walls start as a straight line which then expands to a deeply waved wall which nonetheless maintains its centre of gravity along the original baseline.

As an engineer it was the engineering that was the project; brick was the material of default, rather than choice. But he made a virtue of that default, exploiting brick and the way it was laid, shaped, mortared, coursed; its internal strengths and weaknesses, the precise optimal size of a brick related to its shear values. He calculated the optimal size of reinforcement, the strength and dimensions of the mortar, the way to pre-stress a fabric, not just a beam, and the precise points where there is zero tension in a curved structure which allows a lens that can be filled with glass.

Given the economics of Uruguay over Dieste’s career, the use of brick was perhaps not a choice, but a given. Brick was the material culture of the region, and what Dieste consequently did with it is rooted in this fact. His focus was not diverted by a plethora of building materials giving endless choices and variations.

The influence of the straitened economics of postwar Uruguay comes up in almost every essay on Eladio Dieste along with that modernist virtue of an economy of means. It is possible that straitened economies are the enablers of a kind of genius, which, when paired with a sense of place and material produce truly unique architecture.

The material culture of architecture is based on an economic and political culture responsible for the supply of materials. While institutions of the state appear to have been given a generic, and for Uruguay, an expensive international style, Dieste was building factories, garages, churches, gyms. Brick was his, and their, material. n

On S i t e r e v i ew 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

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deve lop i n g for m wi t h i n t h e m ate r i al cu lt u r e of a rc h i te ct u r e stephanie white

The following article by Ted Cavanagh discusses the changing use of wood in North American culture under three design strategies: the nineteenth century development of dimensional lumber, the twentieth century development of wood product manufacture, and a proposed twenty-first century use and re-use of wood as sustainable product, as outlined in the work of the Coastal Studio, a summer program at the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia.

Coastal Studio’s ongoing project is the development of innovative design and construction techniques that marry new technologies with traditional methods and materials. It emphasises lightweight, complex structures that have minimal environmental impact, and construction strategies that can be simply communicated to local craftspeople.

Why I have positioned the wood vaults of Coastal Studio with the work of Eladio Dieste, is because they both have taken a common local building material through a complex array of conditions including economic stringency, sustainable product, faith in engineering rather than art, and, in both, a desire for the lightest, most minimal, most elegant solution to spatial volumes.

Coastal Studio has been working for over ten years on structures that use either short or thin pieces of wood, both of which are relatively useless to a construction industry that presently operates with dimensional lumber – 2 x 4s, 2 x 10s, 4 x 4 posts, 4’ x 8’ sheet material and custom-dimensioned laminate beams.

Out of a deceptively simple program: a place for children at summer camp to eat their lunch, say, and a seemingly clear form: vault of some sort that responds to the folds and hills of the local landscape, comes a complexity of material detail and construction that has little precedent.

This isn’t some sort of luddite experiment in vernacular building, rather it uses sophisticated modelling – structure is engineered and tested with software such as Rhino, Grasshopper and Kangaroo – that is then translated via the medium of semi-predictable, weather-impacted, hand-workable wood into buildings of great delicacy and responsiveness.

The structural forms themselves have precedent, the lamella roof for example was patented in 1910, the double curve of the gridshell dates from the late 1890s in Russia, but neither they, nor vaults in general are commonplace in North America — contemporary examples tend to be exhibition buildings in Europe and Japan (Buro Happold and Edward Cullinan Architects’

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2002 Weald & Downland Open Air Museum; Shigeru Ban, Buro Happold and Frei Otto’s Japan Pavilion at Expo 2000). Perhaps North American forest product management, timber processing, standardisation of product and construction industry obduracy preclude innovation and experimentation in commercial projects. Coastal Studio is one of the places that such research can and does occur.

Brick vaults too have a long history; the Catalan vault, a method of laying un-reinforced layers of tile each at an angle to the one below, was used extensively in both Europe and the United States at beginning of the twentieth century, but the construction skills were lost as the century progressed. Dieste used traditional masonry but also developed a construction method that did not rely on traditional masonry skills. The building of the moveable wooden formwork is as critical as the science of posttensioning (common in concrete work) and the engineering of multiply-curved self-sustaining surfaces. Dieste’s work did not rely on just one threatened skill set, vulnerable to industrial change, but on a diversity of skills.

Each of Dieste’s buildings was a research project, approaching issues of site and program in a different way from the last, always aiming to have thinner shells, longer spans, more daylight, less material. These appear to also be the aims of Coastal Studio.

The projects from both Coastal and Dieste stand in the public realm and are seen and used by local communities. Each project seeds the idea that architecture can be responsive, sustainable, beautiful, unusual and useful in communities that rarely see or are given anything other than industrial product. Dieste’s grain storage shed is hedged about by steel silos, the kind one can see in agricultural landscapes across the world. The Cape Breton vaults of Coastal Studio are no doubt just down the road from a steel building storing graders and snowplows.

Working outside convention reveals the conventions themselves, the taken-for-granted material culture that renders itself invisible.

The vernacular is only vernacular to the outside, inside the culture it is the culture, and is rarely interrogated. As the examples of Dieste, Coastal Studio and Richard Collins’s work on p17 show, each step, each decision, requires interrogation, testing and evaluation. If this happens within a material culture of architecture that provides ready building material at low cost (because it is the lingua franca of local construction) then this very act of interrogation is the thing that advances the architecture. n

i m a ge s : d a l c oi a s t a l s t u d i o. c om

from the top: Ross Creek lamella under construction, 2010 Camera Obscura, Cheverie, brick shell in construction showing formwork, 2012 Cheticamp Farmers Market, 2014-15, in use 2015 Cape Breton Highlands National Park Pavilion, under construction 2015 all projects, Coastal Studio, Halifax Nova Scotia, a student design-build program under the direction of Ted Cavanagh, the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Wood reinvents itself every century. The material remains the same but the building culture changes. Currently, the material culture of wood is realigning. Are we headed to a cellulose fibre future, or a mass timber redux?

Or, is it a future of diversity with no singular popular way? Wood construction is ubiquitous, historic, ephemeral, malleable, sustainable, unpredictable, vulnerable to weather, insects and fire. Material culture is inherently social, not just technical, and new technologies are based in social consensus … as history shows.

Lumber was essentially a new and experimental product for house structure in the early nineteenth century. Lumber products were based predominantly on milling, a formal and linear process that produces dimensional lumber, sash and moulding. Building components are defined by dimension, profile and section.

Dimensional lumber reacts differently than timber or even planks: posts made of the entire cross-section of a tree are stable, and timber that squares the cross-section is only slightly less so; planks tend to instability in one direction as they slice across growth rings; and 2x4 lumber that cuts growth rings on all four faces can bend and twist. Selecting lumber needs a trained eye; seasoning and storing it is just as critical; assembling it into a building must allow expansion and contraction.

It was probably the potential for buildings to tear themselves apart, as much as to collapse structurally, that made early balloon frame houses so risky to build. Lumber was described as dimensionally inadequate, as mere stuff, as sticks. Architects bridled against its impermanence, often for good reason: ‘In its green state … in drying it will shrink, warp and twist in every way, drawing out the nails, and, after a summer has passed, the siding will gape open, letting the wind through every joint. Such was the stuff used for building in 1833 and 1834.’1 Lumber is politically and economically a nineteenth-century commodity. Its production combines aspects of agricultural harvesting and mining – basic extractive industries that depend on the boundless resources of the land, that privilege monocultural production and that define numerous by-products as waste.

Its industrial processing is simple and linear; it follows an assembly line sequence – a harvested product is made to conform to the mechanical exigencies of production. Giedion cites the wood-frame slaughterhouse of nineteenthcentury Cincinnati in Mechanisation Takes Command and by 1901 Frank Lloyd Wright was praising lumber as the supreme product of the machine.

The predominant site of lumber’s application – the nineteenth-century home – accommodated significant socio-cultural revisions, including an ascendant bourgeois domestic morality, a spatial reconfiguration of room and use, a social reorganisation into family units, gender

the culture of wood construction t e d c ava n ag h

design strategy research roles and neighbourhoods, a dramatic increase in household goods and appliances, and new considerations of health and efficiency of domestic arrangements. The coincidence of these transformations with the introduction of a new building technology created a set of associations (as tropes, as limitations, as possibilities) between technology and culture – between the ‘American home’ and the limitations and possibilities of frame houses.

I have co-opted Gwendolyn Wright’s description of the vernacular to apply to this innovative, hybridising commercial culture of building: ‘People have to choose which elements from high culture and traditional culture have meaning for them. They have to decide how to allocate a limited budget; they say what matters to them now, and what still matters from the past. And so they create new cultural forms.

The values that determine what to accept, what to reject, and what to alter draw from a variety of sources. These are both positive and negative, innovative and conservative.

They include political liberalism, religious conservatism, folklore, ethnic traditions, the desire to be different, and the messages of advertising or social conventions.’2 Building innovation advanced in the early 1800s in the context of a double hybrid – the coincidence of vernacular building from many cultures and the many overlaps generated by the ascendant commercial culture of the time.

Twentieth century wood products were based on engineering principles. Plywood, glue-laminated beams and parallel-strand materials are derived from innovative structural understanding, analytical processes and a new spatial appreciation. Plywood is a material of the twentieth century: engineered, laminated and effectively isotropic, material qualities quite distinct from timber or lumber. Softwood laminate or ply can be reunited with itself and, with the addition of glues, produces a material with improved structural properties.

This improvement comes at the expense of material flexibility. More rigid and more brittle than lumber, it is more difficult to form and transform. Its decreased workability requires a different set of tools and processes. However, its isotropic nature suited twentieth century engineering theories and any limitations were glossed over easily in favour of plywood’s predictability and uniformity.

Plywood is a good example of a modern industrial commodity. Value is added to a basic material in the production process while changing our understanding of that material’s properties. Plywood’s processing is complex;

it demands dexterity, care and judgment before and during production. Like other products of industrial alienation, there is a loss of ‘nearness’ and a reduced potential for ordinary interaction with wood in this form.

As with lumber, early versions of this new wood product often merited the public’s sceptical view: ‘The early plywoods were glued with vegetable or blood glues, and having virtually no moisture resistance, became almost a term of abuse. The introduction of phenolic glues changed all this and, incidentally presents an interesting picture of the way in which the public image of a material can be changed.’ 3 It can take as long as 50 years before a new product becomes mainstream. Today plywood is perceived as stronger than wood, and an ideal, stable, planar substrate, more obviously manufactured than lumber. As a result, it is open to ambivalent interpretation: sometimes as material, sometimes as product.

‘Traditionally, a material was thought of as an elementary system whose task was to give structure to a more complex system.

Only design could then put together various appropriate materials, formed according to different geometries, so as to produce objects capable of performing complex functions…’ 4 When materials themselves are designed products, then this concept starts to become much more complex. In his stackable plywood chairs, Aalto found it necessary to re-produce plywood manufacture, customising the process rather than using the stock components of standard production. Both structure and aesthetic appearance required this level of engagement in the process of manufacture. A different strategy is where designers accept the planar nature of plywood and investigate the formal potential of planes and their details of intersection.

Materials and components of industry as stock items assembled into a kit-of-parts is openended, plug-in, replicable and economically opportunistic. Re-designing the components and materials of the building for improved efficiency, ergonomics or aesthetics restocks the shelves of industry. The developing, changing, relationship between wood products and industry, taste, commodification and production leads me to the current project of Coastal Studio, a twentyfirst century project that sits at the genesis of a third design strategy, neither the acceptance

1 Charles Cleaver, ‘Early Chicago Reminiscences’, Fegus Historical Series 19 (1882): 40 2 Gwendolyn Wright, ‘Dilemmas of Diversity: Vernacular Style and High Style’, Precis 5 (Fall, 1984) p118 3 J E Gordon, The New Science of Strong Materials, or why you don’t fall through the floor. London: Pelican Books, 1967. p 151 4 Ezio Manzini, editor. The Material of Invention.

Cambridge MA: MIT Press, 1989. p 39 5 Coastal Studio, a summer program at the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University. dalcoastalstudio.com

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and use of stock items, nor the reprocessing of manufacturing techniques, but rather the investigation of a raw product – the wood lath. 5 In a series of design-build projects over the past decade Coastal Lab has investigated simple vault structures that shelter a variety of community activities. There is a progression of vault form from the 2010 Ross Creek lamella – a 120m barrel vault, to the 2012 Camera Obscura brick shell in Cheverie – a 20m2 decreasing catenary vault, to the 2014 Cheticamp Farmer’s Market 80m2 wood gridshell, to the 2015-present 300m2 gridshell for Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Each project has been an exploration of material, structural principles and construction within an architectural program of unserviced shelter from rain and wind, in particular, southeasterly suettes which blow from plateau to coast, often at 200 kilometres an hour.

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Ross Creek lamella, 2010

Camera Obscura brick shell in Cheverie, 2011-12

Farmer’s Market grid shell in Cheticamp 2014-15. top: overlay of survey, engineering and architectural models

The first barrel vault was made from a thousand similar metre-long pieces made from locally harvested full-dimension 1” x 6”. The oneinch thickness for each piece was the minimum dimension to prevent wobble at its butt joints.

Zollinger designed this technique in the 1920s, reconsidering nineteenth century material in a twentieth century way.6 Our twenty-first century update was made thinner and lighter using a hand-held circular saw, a double-mitre chop saw and CNC-made bolt holes. The length and degree of angle at the end of each piece predetermines the overall width of the vault and thus the building. It is interesting how dimensional lumber limits building form. In this case, a semi-circular cross-section is the only possibility with this construction technique.

The 2012 vault is masonry and is less constrained than the lamella vault, moving from semi-circle to a catenary form and from a constant cross-section to a shrinking one. The repetitive material unit is face-brick, three layers thick that with mortar creates a three-inch thick shell that works in compression. It is based on a nineteenth technique developed by Rafael Guastavino7 and has been updated by the use of digital modelling. This parabolic brickshell frames the tidal landscape, acting as a camera obscura, a device which records the rising tides of the salt marsh at the mouth of the river.

Gridshells are structures made of thin wood members. There is a reiterative process of calculation that creates structural hybrids between grid and shell, allowing the thin laths, the material of the grid, to act like a shell.

Underpinning gridshell construction is a set of simple premises: each lath is continuous in cross section, the wood grain is straight, each lath spans the entire distance, each lath is locked where it crosses another lath, the lath is restrained at each end. It is simple carpentry.

While lath was occasionally used in the twentieth century, it required complex mathematics and intricate physical models. The advent of three-dimensional structural software has allowed more complex visualisation and form-making within the time limitations of a design-build studio with a different cohort of students each summer.

Wood lath as a structural material depends on the type of wood, the cross-sectional profile of the lath (the strength of wood along its grain is aligned to act extremely efficiently), node connections, the structural performance of the overall form, the springing of the shell and the roof-to-wall connection.

6 German engineer, Friedrich Zollinger, 1880-1945, who developed the lamella roof.

7 Spanish engineer and builder, Rafael Guastavino, 1842-1908, who introduced a version of the Catalan tile to the United States in 1885.

8 Wood with rectangular cross-section bends easily in one direction. Planking occurs when trying to twist or force curvature in the other direction.

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Cheticamp Farmer’s Market, 2014-15

The type of wood has been consistent through both the Coastal Studio gridshell projects: hardwood keeps the cross-sectional area of the wood lath manageable – we experimented with ash, but now use red oak. White oak would be better in weathering, but is only available in Quebec, an unsustainable thousand kilometres away. Our red oak lath is locally-sourced, green (not kiln-dried) and milled fresh, while it retains a high moisture content and so can bend. It is cost and energy efficient because it isn’t kilndried and we can get it from small local sawmills.

There are many different types of grid shells.

The project looked at here, the Cheticamp Farmer’s Market, was our first, and has led to the more complex Cape Breton Highlands National Park building still in construction. The farmer’s market tested the basic properties of the wood chosen to make the grid shell. The scale of the project – a pavilion that accommodates 20 merchant stalls – was workable for small groups of students. It consists of two concrete walls with a gridshell spanning between and has a crescent-shaped floor plan with open ends for optimal circulation. The orientation and form of the pavilion deflects wind and the cladding is strategically placed to reduce uplift. Such a

structure draws upon the strong local boatbuilding and woodworking culture and its use of locally sourced greenwood echoes the bentwood forms of the region.

We tested a series of laths with different thicknesses and found that 3/4” was the thickest that a twelve-foot lath could be to loop back on itself without an explosive failure. This was an advance on structural tables that required 1/4” material to achieve the curvature we needed. 3/4” – three times that recommended by the tables – bent to failure at a curvature far in excess of what our project required and probably contributed to the ability to connect the lath as it twisted or planked8 through some tight situations. In hindsight, even thicker wood lath would have been better; the tests could have been made more precise by investigating shallower curves, curves closer to the actual design.

For structural integrity the laths are continuous from one support to another, meaning that a six-metre span is composed of diagonal laths up to twenty metres long. Because of practical problems with finger-jointing in thinner lath (green wood shrinks as it dries to its eventual moisture content), scarf joints were used.

Several times during the project design

decisions were made based on a combination of factors: expense, remote location, available fabricators and the skill set of our crew. We were working with unusual applications, outside the experience of local or even North American practice. The glue, for example, specially formulated to bond with green wood, had to be imported from Europe and is normally used with large presses in factory conditions.

Another issue was grading. During the milling process, each individual lath is inspected to ensure its integrity. An acceptable lath has a relatively straight grain pattern without too much deviation and little to no knots or cracks which would compromise the integrity of the entire system. Inspection is based on a structural ideal of a semi-isotropic material; an example of the organic having to conform to a standard. Grading is a convention that only accepts wood for which there are grading rules. In our case, there were no graders available for milled hardwood in Nova Scotia. As our millwright had softwood grading credentials, the engineer specified the softwood grade for the initial quality inspection.

This kind of detail reveals the industrial and bureaucratic culture of wood construction that we conventionally work with and within.

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Cheticamp Farmer’s Market. Node exploration — clamping, lashing, bolting; testing each node fastener as lift, lash, clamp, rest, then repeat. As it rests, the wood confodrms to its new curve.

The gridshell is erected slowly; this process takes a few days as the oak sets into position with time.

Interstitial lath block noeds in their final position a combination of lashing and clamping right: the build up of 3/4” lath members as they approach the bolt connection to the concrete base. The cladding is translucent polycarbonate.

During milling, inspection and assembly, our wood remained relatively wet, bending easily into its desired shape. It then dries to create the strength and rigidity of the structure. The laths in a grid shell are connected at nodes where they cross; this connection allows the shell to hold its planned shape as there is only one possible set of coordinates that spatially locates each node. However, during erection it is necessary to allow the nodes to move: the node connection has to be fixed in its final location but must slide along the other laths as the shell is lifted into place. We tested lashing as an effective structural connection, something based on a project in which we participated in Iqaluit in 2013 (part of Canada’s pavilion at the Venice Biennale) where the komatix, or sled, has lashed joints rather than mechanical fasteners – lashing responds better to dynamic loading and the uneven terrain a sled must traverse. For us, lashing was an effective way to slide and then cinch the laths during the stages of lifting before fixing the laths in their final configuration.

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Deciding where and how the shell attaches to a vertical wall determines the visual delicacy of the roof. The clearest solution is a simple bent steel plate embedded in the concrete side walls with a single bolt connection to each wooden lath.

The number of single bolt connections from the bent steel plate to the lath can be cut in half if the lath is paired at a node with one going in a perpendicular direction.

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Coastal Studio works with buildings that have unique and discrete construction processes. The structures themselves are lean, the process is critical and nuanced, and innovation is necessary as there is no convention to adopt. Conventional construction has valuable lessons, but is more difficult to read and observe than it is to analyse lean and innovative construction. Models of an innovative building process emphasise structural and architectural performance; observation and testing are critical to the development of new construction methods.

The various models built for our projects are observed and read closely. Each is only a partial representation of reality – models over-represent certain aspects so that readings and observations of folds and adjustments can lend direction to redesign. Each model adds valuable information.

At the same time, each model adds variable information. Often models conflict. It is up to the designer to negotiate this diversity of readings in order to interpret a best possible path, and to anticipate and negotiate a realised project.

That said, these projects themselves are 1:1 models of an untypical and commercially untested construction method and a not yet easily sourced wood product. It is for these reasons, plus the circumstances of their making as a studio project, that reinforce their model status at the same time as they fufill a program, meet health and safety rules, insurance, maintenance and public use.

Today, models are definitely closer simulations than they were in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. And, engineering theory is starting to exploit wood’s complex nature. Imagine counting on the structure of grain travelling twenty metres — a principle known by carpenters now expanded to a scale previously unimagined.

It is here that the students working with me start to perceive the nature of materials for this century. Innovate by understanding materials, working with carpenters. At the same time, work with engineers to understand light-weight structures. It produces true prototypes, not yet efficient in terms of process but definitely a sustainable practice in terms of material. n

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above, from the top: The plan shows the building fitting into the landscape. The 300m2 grid shell roof will shelter a theatre and reception area. It flows into landscaped berms to the north and south.

Gabions create an amphitheatre in the steep mountainside to the east. Larger concerts are held in the meadow to the west.

Curved 350mm heavily-reinforced concrete walls were built the first summer and stood Serra-like through the first winter.

A huge 1:4 model was tested by suspending sand-bags from each node. This helped the engineer verify the computer model. The model was allowed to recover between tests. above left, from the top: A light, open-web stainless steel truss ties the wood shell to the concrete walls.

The wood lath is formed into two gridded mats attached at the nodes. Unlike the Farmers Market, the laths were draped individually over a two-and-a half storey scaffold.

The shell will be clad in sheet aluminum.

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yucca indigo w il l ow nicole dextras

chronos

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Chronos, a new character in development for my A Dressing the Future trilogy wears an eco-garment based on desert plants such as Yucca and Agave.

These photos reflect learning to process Yucca fibres, dyeing with Indigo, setting up a loom, weaving and twining, plus using a drop spindle.

Chronos was animated by Igor Santizo who engaged the public about natural fibres in the the Ocean Cement space on Granville Island during ‘The Social Fabric: Deep Local to Pan Global’, The Textile Society of America’s 16th Biennial Symposium in Vancouver September 2018. column 1: Igor Santizo as Chronos in a garment made from yucca, abaca (a species of banana), silk and dyed willow bark. He holds a sheaf of stripped yucca leaves. He is armed against the sun with expanding screens protecting the head and spine, sheathed leaf sleeves that shade and let breeze through. Bottom image, attaching the sleeves to a willow armature column 2: a wheelbarrow of uprooted yuccas from a construction site. 25 yucca leaves yielded 40 feet of twined fibre ready for dyeing and then weaving.

Indigo dyed fibres. Background is abaca fabric with a fan of processed yucca leaves. Cotton string balls and yucca cordage. Yucca leaf fibre processed and dyed compared to same fibre spun into cordage. Cordage was easier and faster to dye and rinse (15 min.) compared to the leaf (1.5 hours). column 3: loom made from a folding clothes horse strung to make the checkerboard pattern woven with yucca fibre and abaca/silk fabric. The 3D squares were designed as ventilation for a desert traveller.

The top half is woven willow bark dyed with Indigo.

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My focus as an artist is to create environmental art and ephemeral installations based on the principles of a socially engaged art practice.

Adressing issues of sustainability, consumerism and the fashion industry, the Botanical Wearables segment of my current body of work began with the Weedrobes series – dresses made from fresh flowers and leaves.

The concept is based on a future world where the desire for goods remains despite the lack of means to produce them. This world is not the oapocalypse but one where the slow erosion of natural resources plus the crippling effect of economic breakdowns have caused the fashion industry to collapse beneath the weight of its own greed. Here the elite, still craving status, turn to artists to fabricate garments from the rapid reclamation of the natural world.

This series began as humble desire to combine live plant materials with my personal experience with fashion, which includes growing up in a store and working in a garment factory.

Beginning in 2005, each summer I experimented with techniques to create a completely compostable wearable garment. I adapted basket-weaving methods and through trial and error learned much about the local plants at my disposal.

As I mastered the technical aspects of the Weedrobes I began to stage street interventions with the garments such as Laurel Suffragette on Robson Street in 2011, in order to discuss issues of fast fashion. These were well received but ironically the garments themselves were so seductive that they also elicited a misplaced desire to consume. The series evolved into the Little Green Dress Projekt where I made twenty-one dresses over a period of two months on site for the Earth Art exhibition at Van Dusen Botanical in 2012. Here the decay of the garments was demonstrated to the public for the first time and the concept of accepting the passage of time was more apparent. The project raised questions about the sustainability of the fashion industry and a served as an introduction to slow fashion.

In 2011 during the Occupy movement, I began the Urban Foragers {house of eco drifters} series, which took on broader social issues such as self-sustainable living within a nomadic lifestyle.

I created garments that converted into portable shelters while also housing one’s food supply.

They are inspired by my long-standing interest in portable shelters and my research into low-tech fabrication techniques that minimise the use of plastics and metals. The premise for Urban Foragers is that the dresses are prototypes that could be multiplied and personalised to create a highly mobile and healthy itinerant community. A video, shot in California, explores the concept of sharing food resources as each dress contributes to a communal meal and that the spaces between them allow for flexible common area sites.

In 2013 the StoreFront, objects of desire series

t he culture of material s nicole dextras

wearable botanicals was developed during an art residency at the Lansdowne Shopping Centre in Richmond BC. It is a faux-retail installation consisting of ephemeral fashion items such as clothing, handbags and shoes set up as a trope for consumer culture. The line between desire and ownership is further blurred with standard marketing strategies such as branding and interior design.

As I did not have access to the interior of the store, I instigated interventions within the public spaces of the mall. The Extra D’extras MakeOvers performance, where I adorned the hair of shoppers with plants (as a spoof of the ubiquitous labcoat-clad department store clerk dispensing beauty samples) was a great success. I also worked with local performers to animate the displayed clothing in the mall. The Mobile Garden Dress, worn by Nita Bowerman made a salad from the vegetables in her skirt, which she then shared with shoppers. Sir William the Explorer, played

by Billy Marchenski, wore a grass and leaf long coat and roamed the mall looking for plunder in exchange for magic beans.

StoreFront is an ongoing project with new pieces created every year with the aim of installing a more comprehensive exhibition in the future.

In 2015 I began a new series, A Dressing the Future, a trilogy of tableaux photographs portraying creative survivors set in dystopian scenarios. The first in this series, Persephone’s Reflection depicts a roughly furnished fruit warehouse, where invasive plants are threatening to engulf the living space. The agricultural economy has collapsed due to rampant forest fires and a young woman uses her ingenuity and skills to combat the isolation and instability of her situation. In this re-telling of the ancient Greek myth, Persephone eats the pomegranate not as banishment from the living world but because it’s healing properties will nourish and sustain her. Furthermore she fashions her stylish clothing from pomegranate peels, dates and fruit leather to preserve her self-esteem and dignity. She copes with her seclusion by building terrariums with figurines of herself recounting her happy childhood in the ancestral orchard.

My intent is to offer an alternative to the reductive post-apocalyptic fictions depicted in Hollywood films, which exploit the drama of natural catastrophes to manipulate our current fears about environmental degradation. Further pieces made in 2016-17 include Desert Queens, and Forest Warrior and Chronos.

The Weedrobes philosophy is based on being a free thinker, creating one’s own sense of style while also raising awareness about the impact of

industry on our eco-system. Our most effective tool for change is for consumers to demand more equitable products. It may be impractical to wear clothing made with leaves but our future depends on the creation of garments made from sustainable resources.

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The Mobile Garden Dress is based on a hoop skirt that supports over forty potted edible plants. A wide variety of plants are incorporated dependent on the season and the locale but usually include lettuces, cabbages, tomatoes, peppers and herbs. The Mobile Garden Dress seen here in a shopping mall interacting with shoppers.

The skirt acts as a summer shelter, where one can camp temporarily in urban areas.

Like a true nomad, her camp can be quickly transformed; her hoop skirt collapses into a lightweight framework, her organic cotton tent fabric becomes an elegant dress and all her belongings fit onto her wheeled structure.

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Forest Warrior is a wearable sculpture shaped as a

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large androgynous cloak on wheels, which holds native plants and seedlings. The ethos of this piece is a botanical conservation anti-superhero wandering the landscape protecting native plants – a champion tree-planter cape fit for the legacy of Joseph Beuys’ Seven Thousand Oaks project. It also points to the lack of green space in modernist urban design. The sculpture can act as a stand-alone piece in an exhibition and or be animated by a performer. In a gallery opening or event setting Forest Warrior can engage with the public by handing out tree saplings or it can activate an outdoor guerilla style intervention by attempting to plant tree saplings into the cracks of pavement as a gesture of reclaiming the built environment. Forest Warrior adapts to the local environment it is exhibited in by incorporating native tree plants of the region into the cape.

The principle design element in this piece is based on a folding honeycomb cellular structure.

The integral flexibility and the pragmatic compact portability of this structure will help reduce the overall carbon footprint of the piece.

I have adapted paper folding and origami techniques to both the cape armature and the inner components. The armature’s base is a half elliptical shape constructed out of wood with vertical ribs gathering at the neckline.

It is supported by casters and it breaks down into lightweight components for travel. The cape’s three-dimensional skin is fabricated out of recycled tent cloth and oilskin fabric, cut and sewn into folding and expanding diamond shaped cones. These various sized compartments hold native plants and seedlings forming a bushy, lacy silhouette primarily around the head and shoulders. This composition alludes to the lavish neck ruffs of sixteenth century male dress, which ironically grew to such outlandish proportions that they were banned in Spain under Philip IV because they were seen to diminish the manly vigor of the wearer. For this reason my focus is on a gender-neutral wearable project that explores the garment more as a sculpture than traditional clothing.

The foundation for this new piece is rooted in my Urban Foragers {house of eco drifters} series, which consists of three large dresses that transform into portable shelters and gardens.

Their aim is to support a sustainable lifestyle for the new urban nomad by growing one’s own food supply and building community through public engagement. During the production of the Urban Foragers series from 2011 and 2013, I developed many key concepts to my art practice such as supporting communal food resources and fabricating collapsible structures from sustainable materials. I bring all of these notions and expertise to bear in the creation of Forest Warrior, which also converts into a shelter by means of additional folding panels made from lightweight recycled fabric. These enclose the front of the cape and create a full elliptical tent shape.

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forest warrior When I initially began making garments from plant materials in 2006, I looked at historical European fashion as my point of departure in order not to reference or appropriate the designs of ancient cultures that have adorned themselves with plants throughout history. Even though my work was successful in many ways it led to a predominance of female clothing which sometimes detracted from my objective to create a link between the body and the environment.

The Forest Warrior cape can be worn by men and women and has many associations with ritual, disguise and daring. Contemporary artists such as Nick Cave, Lucy McRae, Guerra de la Paz whose artworks often refer to the garment have greatly inspired me. My objective is to add to this collection of voices one that also presents issues of environmental conservation to the discourse. n

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above: Forest Warrior, worn by Hunter Long, wanders in a dystopian landscape searching for suitable soil to plant his trees — photographed at WWU Western Gallery column,right: Forest Warrior is a prince among thieves: he rescues abandoned lots for trees and then distributes them to the public to plant in their gardens. facing page, left column: The wooden structure is based on a folding diamond grid for easy assemblage, storage and travel. Pockets are fabricated from a recycled canvas tent and the tree-planting seedling belt is made from oil cloth. middle column: Details of willow bark weaving for the vest. The inside and outside of bark gives different hues of brown.The neck ruffle is made with tree lichen, Lobaria pulmonaria, dried leaves and knitted Kibiso silk. column at far right: Forest Warrior’s cape is filled with native plants such as the Blue Spruce seedling in top photo.

Others seedlings include ferns, vines, grasses and shrubs.

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m ate r i a l ge st u r e s stephanie white

tools and resistance

Clearly there are gaps between visualisation, drawings, models, and the wrestling with the actual materials of construction. The roles each play come with their own conventions, languages, tools and expectations, none entirely convincing.

Richard Collins is a maker of models; his tools are both hand and digital. He makes veterinary and medical models; he makes architectural models, specifically here, with Metis.1 In the following essay he asks, why make a physical model?

There is an undoubted power in a model that comes in part from its miniature world, its incomplete and thus provocative presence, and, Collins maintains, evidence of the ‘gestures of making’, the title of an essay by Vilém Flusser.2 He quotes Flusser: ‘To have original ideas’ does not mean to be creative. Creating is a processing of ideas during the gesture of making. Nor are hands creative when they force finished ideas, that is, stereotypes, onto an ad hoc prepared material, as is the case with industrial production.

Hands are only creative when, in the course of their struggle with a raw material they have just grasped, they need to develop new ideas.’

Collins describes the interaction of the right hand with the left and the physical qualities of the material in between them as a dialogue between the hands and the objective world.

Tools, with their specificity, introduce a distance; they interrupt the ‘gestural dialogues of making’.

Digital fabrication uses a sequence of actions based on multiple layers of information, producing forms of great complexity that can be altered and reconfigured at great speed.

Nonetheless he writes, ‘complete formal freedom only exists in a virtual environment because in a physical situation there will be material resistance.’

It is possible that the gestures of making are reflexively formed by the qualities of the material and, in an extrapolation beyond the model and this is where Collins’s essay connects to Cavanagh’s on the previous pages, the substance of the materials of architecture. n

1 Metis is an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism founded by Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker at the University of Edinburgh in 1997. Its aim is to connect architectural teaching, research and practice.

Their work focuses on the city and the complex ways in which it is imagined, inhabited and representationally encoded. www. metis-architecture.com 2 Vilém Fluser, ‘The Gesture of Making’, in Gestures, trans. by Nancy Ann Roth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) pp 32-47

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above, clockwise: Axe Table saw CNC Router Saws Table saw thickness Bandsaw

In the package of work Richard Collins sent for this issue of On Site review was an assemblage of his tools, worth reproducing here. These are the things that stand between the gesture of making and the material made.

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left, clockwise: CNC Router tool set 1mm, 5mm spiral cutters 1mm spiral cutter, 20mm straight cutter Adjustable collets Snapped straight cutter Melted polystyrene on cutter Flat and ball-nosed spiral cutters

t h e material of the model richard collins

On The Surface Metis 2000-2014

In the autumn of 2014 the Aarhus Arkitektskolen exhibited On The Surface, a retrospective of the work of Metis, an atelier for art, architecture and urbanism. The show was re-exhibited in the Sculpture Court of the Edinburgh College of Art in the spring of 2015. The work on show featured seven projects that Metis had developed between the years of 2000 and 2014.

The exhibition comprised three primary modes of representation: models, drawings and one large composite drawing – a carpet, measuring 10m by 16m, that was printed with a carefully photo-montaged collection of imagery from the seven projects, including drawings, photographs and renders. This drawing provided a spatial anchor that located seven tables, each constructed from two sheets of glass layered on top of a pair of bespoke wooden trestles. Sandwiched between each pair of glass sheets were three drawings printed on a matte watercolour paper. On top of each table, unrestricted by vitrines, a model was situated.

Of the seven models, I had begun work on one in May 2014, but primarily as a resource to be photographed and which required further development. One model was comprised of original material from an installation in Glasgow, 2005. For the remaining five models, made specifically for the exhibition, I worked with a range of tools and techniques and drew upon material which included drawings and sketch models.

above: On the Surface exhibition when it was at Aarhus Arkitektskole right and below right: View from gallery: models on drawings on carpet below: Models under continual construction

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A persuasive architectural model demands close attention; it requires observation from more than one perspective; it demands to be touched. It has a material presence that tells of its construction and its condition. It is a distilled synthesis of an idea. It is the summary of a process of design, the communication of a method of making and is the result of an explorative speculation. The meaning and significance of the model is not arrested, but is open to interpretation. The fragmentary nature of the model, its island condition, suggests an alternative reality. The form is clearly different from what it signifies, yet what it presents can be recognised, imaginatively transformed and abstractly occupied.

The most influential force changing the nature of models, both their form and how they are made, comes from advances in digital fabrication and related technologies. However, digital technologies can encourage linear and unproductive methods. With the application of digital fabrication there can be a simplification of material, whereby material complexity is compromised to achieve formal complexity, or expediency. I would argue that the advantages of using digital fabrication for model making are when the technologies are not used in an automatic or algorithmic manner, but with a reflective and critical understanding of making.

Moreover, in order to be sensitive to the materials that are chosen, one must consider the material properties early in the process of design rather than at the point of using the technology..

Also, digital technologies can encourage linear and unproductive methods. The advantages of using digital fabrication for model making are in a more productive approach that does not use the technologies in an automatic or algorithmic manner, but with a reflective and critical understanding of making.

When a Computer Numerically Controlled Router (CNCR) is used to manufacture components at a 1:1 scale for construction, clearly it is important to specify the material properties in advance and be confident that those properties are predictably. However, when a CNCR is used not for a 1:1 constructional detail, but for an explorative and speculative representational model, how can a method of working be developed that ensures a material sensitivity?

Simplification of material is evident across a range of digital fabrication technologies, otherwise known as Computer Aided Manufacturing (CAM) technologies, including both additive techniques such as 3D printing and subtractive techniques such as laser cutting and Computer Numerical Controlled (CNC) routing. CNC routing is closest in nature to more traditional techniques of making, a cutting tool is directed into a medium and material is removed. Unlike the application of laser cutting, the workpiece and the cutting tool come into physical contact. The nature of the material, its 18

geometry and density, its melting point and the presence of a grain or any irregularities affect how it is machined. The favoured materials for CNC routing are foams, modelling boards and manufactured boards such as MDF or plywood, but also natural softwoods and hardwoods.

Despite the differences between these materials, they are frequently treated as a predictably consistent, plastic substance. Material complexity is sacrificed to achieve complexity of form.

When digital tools are used on materials, the properties of the materials have to be calculated prior to fabrication. The dialogue between architect and the material of construction is altered. Without digital fabrication, representative drawings are interpreted by those who will construct the project. This interpretation involves a knowledge and understanding of material that will critically inform how the construction is realised. With digital fabrication architects generate coded data that scripts the process of construction directly via technological applications. How can a method of working be developed that ensures a material sensitivity is retained? How can a process develop into a sophisticated technique, that does not negate, not rout out, but critically investigates and responds to material?

In the same way that a model – its making, its material, its model-maker – is able to discard preconceptions and conventions in the process of its making, I wish to take two examples of models and how they were made to show the complexity of materials and how digital fabrication is both confounded by and exploits their qualities.

There were several contexts in which these models were constructed: the virtual space of a Rhino model; the workshop environment in which they were made; and the site of display in which they were exhibited. The experience of making two of the models, Egypt and Liepaja, are detailed here to show how contingent and provisional is the relationship between tools, material and intentions.

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Computer Aided Design (CAD) for Computer Numerical Control (CNC): A set of instructions is developed for the router. In addition to drawing out geometry, layout and orientation are also described. Colour is used both to distinguish parts and also to articulate stages of machining. Ideals of form are depicted. Multiple versions are expanded to explore options and alternatives.

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Egypt The model for Metis’s Great Egyptian Museum project was the most challenging and in many ways the most engaging. Metis’s starting point for their proposal was the renowned measurement of the pyramids in carried out in 1881 by the archaeologist Flinders Petrie, a survey carried out through a triangulation of projected lines. Metis took a representation of the geometrical lines from the site of the survey and folded and refolded them onto the proposed site of the museum. The brief for the museum required a series of galleries and archives to house the Egyptian national collection of antiquities. Metis proposed that the galleries take the form of five large ‘vessels’, grouping the collection into curated themes of culture, scribes and knowledge; religion; man, society and work; kingship and state; and the land of Egypt. Each vessel had a unique and complex geometry but was also understood as being part of a coherent whole. The material proposed for the actual construction of the vessels was weathering steel and it was important that the set be closely linked by their common materiality,. These vessels would be interlinked by a series of bridges allowing visitors to create their own itinerary. The vessels were raised above the ground, creating a constructed landscape of shaded, interconnected folded planes.

As part of their competition entry, Metis had constructed a card model. The model showed a sectional cut through the ground, folded landscape and the five vessels, revealing floor plans and points of connection. The new model required for the exhibition used a palette of materials. The ground was represented by solid hardwood with the folded landscape above made from planes of plywood. The structures holding the vessels above the ground, the internal floors and the bridging elements would be 3D-printed.

A dark and very dense tropical hardwood was chosen for the vessels to impart a heavy, monolithic feeling, with intricately embellished surfaces. The choice of material (in both cases, model and proposed building) signified a crisply folded precise wrapping and protective securing of a more delicate interior.

The process for making the new model began by digitally tracing hand-drawn plans and taking references from the card model. This information was aggregated in a digital model, with elements coded by colour, in layers and in groups, resulting in a dense set of digital material (see the drawings to the left). Rather than one illegible stack, several iterations and selected model parts are arrayed in the virtual space. The distances between the parts are not arbitrary but located at specific distances, allowing multiple virtual iterations to be moved back and forward in connection to other virtual material. Sections that would be laser cut could be worked on independently and then checked back against sections that would be CNC-routed

or 3D-printed. As well as modelling in three dimensions, two-dimensional nets mapping the facades of the vessels were digitally unfolded, rotated and categorised in isolation.

The typical materials used for CNC routing are flat, uniform and have a consistent density – typically MDF, plywood or modelling foam.

Standard techniques include a ‘safe margin’ around the area to be cut. The wood selected for the base of the Egypt model had an irregular form but was relatively straightforward to machine. When preparing to CNC rout this piece it was necessary to establish a way to reference the digital model to the physical. This did not require a faithful modelling of the exact physical dimensions of the wood in virtual space, but only the more significant points of calibration. The tool paths that were generated were designed to extend beyond the material present to ensure the desired areas were fully machined.

Routing hardwood to create the vessels proved more challenging. The hardwood selected had been salvaged from a furniture workshop that was no longer operating – it was not possible to find any more material that matched the density, colour and texture. The dimensions of the block would accommodate the cutting of the five vessels. The geometries of the vessels were outside the standard limits of the CNC equipment. On the first attempt a failure resulted from using the automated software supplied with the CNC. The software script instructed the cutting tool to travel directly from one cutting stage to the next. As a result, unable to lift the cutter high enough (because the wood was outside of standard limits), the tool travelled through the block damaging the piece. The clash was spotted quickly and the damage limited, luckily there was enough material left in the remaining volume to machine all five blocks.

The CNC automated programme was no longer a possibility, but it was possible to rewrite the scriped movements. The solution was to digitally draw vector paths for the cutting tool that would ensure the cutter would never need to lift whilst in the work-piece. The tool would approach the work-piece at the appropriate depth and would cut a trench along a predefined path without rising from that path until outside the hardwood. The machining could also be paused to allow the tool to be extended further when appropriate. Writing the tool paths involved drawing two-dimensional pathways on drafting software, establishing different depths with colour coding, and calculating effective offsets for each line based on the radius of the cutting tool. When each of the pathways had been drawn, the combined drawings were output1ed as g-code.14 After the experience of the first failure, the cutting pathways were first tested with a low density, low-cost foam.

The foam was used to highlight any miscalculations or unforeseen errors. After this

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The Great Egyptian Museum project: from top: Folded web, vessels and hyperlinks Card model by Metis (left). Routed ground condition in spalted beech Testing tool paths in low density foam Unexpected clash between routing tools and material

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trial run, the hardwood was carefully secured, the cutting tool calibrated and the machining speeds set. The subsequent machining would last more than 20 hours and was processed in stages over three days, with frequent checks. The tool-paths were drawn with the inclusion of tabs, sections of cutting that were omitted and that would hold the pieces in place. They were positioned with the intention of being easy to remove, that is on straight flat sections rather than on corners.

After the CNC routing process was finished the five pieces were cut free using a bandsaw and tenon saw. Once separated into individual pieces, the surfaces were smoothed using chisels and sandpaper.

The next stage, which involved the laser cutter, also presented challenges. Laser cutting is typically performed on flat sheets of stock material with an orthogonally referenced starting point. Often, if a mistake occurs when cutting a design, a new piece of material will be inserted and the cut performed a second time.

In contrast, for laser engraving our vessels, the laser was required to engrave precisely on multiple sides of the three-dimensional forms.

The forms already embodied a considerable amount of work and any misalignment would have been clearly visible. The strategy developed involved positioning the block and sending small marking lines with very little energy so that only a small trace of burning would be left on the wooden surface. The position of the trace was observed, followed by adjustment and recalibration. This process was repeated until the correct position was found and a stronger engraving command could be sent. There was a further repetition, engraving more darkly and more deeply. Four to five repetitions were typically required before moving on to the next facet. There was a significant amount of handling, positioning, propping and securing.

The hardwood is secured for machining with clamps, screws and weights below, from the left: Routed form and 3D printed inserts, laser-engraved surfaces and oiled finish View from ground surface towards folded ground planes and elevated vessels

Positioning the vessel in the laser cutter with a card jig.

Channels are carved, cutting around the desired forms

The vessels are manually rotated and secured by whatever means possible

Post-machining, the block is removed but far from finished

A close up of a vessel mid-way through laser engraving

Eroded material and marked surfaces

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On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Liepaja In May 2014 an architectural competition was announced to develop a derelict bathhouse in Liepaja, Latvia. My experience with this project was quite different from all of the other models I made for the On The Surface exhibition. With the other projects I was working with material that had already been developed for past competition.

The model for Liepaja however was developed in collaboration with Metis in order to be photographed for competition boards alongside drawings, computer renders and textual description. The photographs included a perspectival section illustrating the proposed interior, the screen wall and the gardens and an arrayed collection of individual parts. In order to be exhibited the project had to be developed into be a coherent whole.

The most fundamental aspect of the project was the dialogue between the architecture of the existing bathhouse and the proposed architecture that would face it. A sectional model was key to show how the connection between the two architectures would be articulated via a series of parallel gardens. For the model, these strips needed to be more than a superficial etching, they needed to be clearly embodied in the material composition of the model.

The proposed intervention in the original bathhouse was a transformation of the rooms that had contained baths, into spaces that could be entirely filled with water: bath-rooms. To show this in a clear and powerful way only the intervention would be modelled, the existing structures would be represented via etching.

The new building, proposed to complement the existing bathhouse included private apartments with mezzanine levels, rooftop pools and a carefully defined interface of public and private areas. Using 3D-printing allowed for sharply detailed structure in a uniform material that foregrounded the spatial arrangement.

The feature of the proposed architecture that required most resolution was the external screen wall. This perforated wall formed a boundary that would filter both light and lines of sight between interior and exterior. This element proved very challenging to create. The form of the boundary was complex, similar to a ribbon of varying thicknesses, wrapping in and out around the building forms. There were moments when the boundary ribbon would join back on itself.

The form had integrated staircases and extruded sections that specifically related to the forms that it masked. Its character demanded a coherent form – a single entity that was distinct from the rest of the model.

The perforations in the modelled screen had to be carefully proportioned, abstracted sufficiently from the literal dimensions that were represented so that they would read appropriately at a scale of 1:200. At 1:1 the perforated wall would be relatively straightforward to construct and smooth. Bricks would be placed according to a

rationale of solidity and openness and changes in geometry would use the physical dimensions of the bricks and a gradual alteration of how they would be placed. At a scale of 1:1, faceted corners would read as curves. However, the techniques associated with hand (or machine) laid bricks are not directly scalable to a 1:200 model.

Three approaches were developed to make the scaled-down peforated wall; each required several stages of abstraction and adaption. The least successful approach was FDM printing.

The stated resolution of the ‘Dimension Elite’ is 0.178mm; this refers to the height of each layer that is extruded. On paper, or more aptly on screen, this approach should have worked.

However the test pieces proved unconvincing.

Even with an abstraction or exaggeration of geometries the material did not look promising.

There was very little tactile appeal and the appearance too closely resembled the printed apartment interiors it was supposed to contrast with.

The colour, texture and grain of laser-cut wood was much more appealing. Initial tests using this second approach of cutting a perforated pattern onto a flat section proved persuasive. There was a requirement to adapt the geometry to account for the material ‘lost’ through being burnt away, but such adaptations could be made relatively quickly using CAD. Design options were tested on sample materials, the resulting perforations were reviewed and the design adapted as required. Cutting patterns on the curved sections was much more difficult and required careful manipulation and fastening of the work piece. If the whole piece were kept intact certain sections would be impossible to laser cut. Prior to lasercutting any perforations, the wooden form was created through CNC routing. First tested on a piece of cheap readily available softwood, pine, the exploration developed an understanding of the physical form and what level of detail could be expected. The problem with using this type of wood is that the open nature of the grain (characteristic of the tree’s fast growth) is prone to splitting and cracking, particularly problematic when thin sections are cut across the grain of the wood. However, without doing this, it was impossible to achieve the geometry of the screen wall that was desired.

Before routing a block of hardwood, adjustments were made using the knowledge gained from working on the block of pine.

above: A digital model maps out the material requirements of the physical model Materials are selected and brought together to test adjacencies

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above, left: Testing printing options using fused deposition modelling Laser cutting to the limits of what is possible with the material Challenges to the perforation of the curved façade right: Orientation of the model in relation to the grain of the wood was always important The thickness of the model had to respond to the material being used Material testing informed the formal possibilities of what could be modelled

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top: CNC routed beech, stage one of machining.

Stage two, the block of beech is flipped over and machined from the underside.

Post-machining, the securing tabs are carefully removed. left: The single piece has been machined and cut free, the offcut material can be seen on the left.

Markings from the cutting tool can be seen on the façade. 3D printed components are slotted into place and adapted if required. a ll i ma g es: ri c h ard c o lli n s

Critical sections of geometry were thickened.

The block was also referenced so that it could be machined from both sides. Machining tabs were included that held the piece together during the automated process and were then cut away using a bandsaw and tenon saw. The sequential series of machining passes created an expected and quite appealing texture. To machine a block of wood in this way is not an efficient use of material; if there were a requirement to make multiples of the form such an approach would be difficult to justify economically.

A considerable amount of time, effort and material had been put towards the creation of the CNC routed piece. If the form were left uncut it would have a greater physical presence when experienced directly. However, if the form were sectioned the subdivided pieces could be laser-cut creating the perforations that were so significant to the design. The experience of the perforated subdivision would be especially persuasive when experienced through photography and enlargement. At the time of the competition, photography of the model took priority and the form was divided. By cutting, even with a fine saw, material was removed. If the pieces were to be re-joined, the form would be distorted This led to me trying out a third approach.

The third approach involved using the Objet printer, which uses polyjet technology. The stated resolution of the ‘Objet Connex 260’ is 0.03mm. The accuracy is much better than with the Dimension Elite and it is possible to print in a range of materials. However, when printing details smaller than the recommended limits, cleaning away the support material is problematic. The structure of the secondary support material will break down in water, but it does not dissolve, it only delaminates. Problems

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can occur because the model material that is used alongside the support is hygroscopic, and when it draws in fluid it becomes weaker. As the structure of the support material breaks down it expands and can cause the weakened model material to break.

During the testing phase there were several ruptured walls, the breakage occurring at the stage when the support material was being removed. The more support material there is relative to model material, the higher the chances of breakages. If the support material can be manually scraped off, then delicate structures stand a much better chance of survival. After using a chisel to scrape off the surfaces, a pin was used to prod out support material from the perforations. The support material is a jellylike, soft waxy material that crumbles relatively easily. However it does adhere to the surface of any model material that is supported by it. The surfaces of such supported sections have a matte roughness that contrasts with any unsupported surfaces, which will be much glossier. To remove more support material and improve the surface quality the forms were hand-sanded.

After an acceptable smoothness was achieved with a rough grade of sandpaper, the same process was continued with increasingly finer grade sandpaper. When the majority of support material had been removed, a small amount of water was introduced with wet-and-dry sandpaper to ease the action of sanding and aid the removal of debris.

Out of the three approaches this was the most successful. However, it was not a complete success as under the heat of the exhibition lighting an extended section started to deform.

This challenge was addresses hours before the opening with some materials that came to hand.

From the top: left, Polyjet test piece. A scaffold of ‘support’ surrounds the perforations. Right, testing material palette and levels of transparency.

Polyjet printed entire perforated wall, directly after printing on build platform.

Left, manually removing support material from delicate perforations. Right, slowly sanding the surfaces to remove unwanted blemishes.

The polyjet printed wall slotted over the other 3D printed components and was held above the wooden surfaces. below: Photographed model, from above and in section.

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Looking here at the models and the complexities of their making for the On The Surface exhibition, I discovered much about tools, materials, techniques and intentions.

Tools have been developed to shape material; they are capable of more applications; they can perform more efficiently; they have limitations.

The limitations of CNCR is dependent on the materials used.

Materials most commonly used with CNCR are compliant – metal, foam, man-made boards are much less resistant to the pressures of making. They too have their limitations and often privilege sight over tactility. Nor are the limits always physical, sometimes they are no more informative or persuasive than a virtual model.

Less homogenous materials with similar physical limitations can be more informative and more persuasive because they are not neutral, because they offer resistance through grain, knots, spalting and colour variation to the attitude of the maker. Such materials come with associations, that are haptic and tactile, not just visual.

Techniques have been developed for working with wood using tools, while work flows have been developed for using plastic materials with CNCR. What techniques have been developed for working with wood using CNCR? Techniques discovered in the making of the On The Surface models embody four things: 1 knowledge of how materials come together, a testing of construction 2 simplification of an idea in order to embody the essence of the project 3 creatively using one material to represent another 4 a cycle of testing, not a linear production; a process of testing, an attitude of testing Why make a physical model?

To re-state something I said at the beginning of this essay, a persuasive model is the sum result of a design process. It communicates a method of making and the results of speculative exploration. It has a material presence that tells of its construction and condition, without arresting its meaning or significance, that remains open to interpretation. Its fragmentary nature, its island condition presents a form that is recognisable, able to be imaginatively transformed and abstractly occupied.

In model-making there is deliberate allowance for the unexpected in response to material resistance. There must be an openness to redesign that allows the material to inform process. Judgement in making is not easily programmed or calculated, it is not a linear process. Fundamental is an understanding of the translation that is required when moving between a digital model and a physical model.

Every model communicates information, but the nature of how and what is conveyed is complex. A model is a material essay that discovers new knowledge or understanding and

then tells these discoveries in a meaningful way.

In his introduction to Writing on the Image, Mark Dorrian describes essay writing ‘as a dynamic and vital process, an ongoing interaction of thought with its materials that develops in ways that are frequently unexpected. It is not as if what was prepared or conceptualised beforehand is simply set aside, but rather that it becomes reorientated and reconfigured…’.

This dynamic and non-determined approach was constructive in framing the relationship of architectural models to digital fabrication technology. I had two prepared questions: have the advances and increasing availability of digital technology changed or even superseded the specialised role of architectural model maker? and, is the appeal of digital fabrication that it promises to make the production of models easier, and if so, how does this impact what is made and what it communicates?

A third question emerged that reconfigured the focus of the research: why is an architectural model so compelling? The answer is found in the significance of gestures of making, the importance of visual analogy and a questioning of what matters in the creation of a physical architectural model.

I am a maker of models. Trained as an architect, I developed both digital and non-digital skills in both making architectural models and understanding their significance. I currently manage a suite of digital fabrication equipment that includes laser cutters, 3D printers, 3D scanners and a CNC router. My role involves the application of digital fabrication technologies for the design, development and production of technical, artistic and architectural models.

Key to the creative production of such models is an understanding of non-digital techniques of making, an appreciation of the materials that are involved and a sensitivity to the situations of their use and display.

There are challenges with digital fabrication and, when used unreflectively, can be counterproductive. Often models made with digital fabrication are only superficially interesting and lack creative appeal. A common misconception is that taking a digital design and using digital fabrication to produce a model will be easy and will always result in what one expects. However, it is possible to take a reflective approach to making and a considered understanding of the complex relationship between intention, material and technique. With such an approach, digital fabrication can be applied in more productive and creative ways.

This was tested by the models made for On The Surface, which were sited in a complex and carefully integrated constellation of different modes of architectural representation. It was the interrogative use of digital fabrication that revealed the possibilities and limitations of these technologies. n

The writing of Mark Dorrian in Urban Cartographies, Writing on the Image, and The Exhibition as an ‘Urban Thing’ along with discussions that took place during the design and exhibition of On The Surface by the art, architecture and urbanism atelier, Metis, guided the questioning of the role played by an architectural model and the importance of making.

Reflection on this specific case of model making was influenced by a broader examination of the nature of representation in art and architecture that included close reading of Robin Evans’s Translation from Drawing to Building, Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier’s Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge and Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.

For insight into what makes a model compelling and attractive, Susan Stewart’s On Longing and several books by Barbara Maria Stafford proved invaluable in understanding how an artefact can be encountered and why it may generate meaning. In addition to the physical nature of a model, what gives it presence and significance derives from the process of how it was made. Vilém Flusser’s The Gesture of Making opened up an avenue of thought on the inseparable human aspects of making and Bruno Latour’s ‘Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?’ From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern guided the discourse in an attempt to understand the defining quality of objects and things.

How to situate my personal and specific descriptions of using digital fabrication technologies to make models in a context that moved beyond the personal, but retained the importance of material and technique, was supported by the exacting technical descriptions of making by Gilbert Simondon.

Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, Metis: Urban Cartographies (London: Black Dog Publishing, 2002).

Mark Dorrian and Adrian Hawker, “The Exhibition as an Urban Thing,” Intersticies: Journal of Architecture and Related Arts, 2015: pp 7-16.

‘On the Surface’, a retrospective exhibition of the work of Metis was first exhibited in the gallery of the Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark between 10th October and 14th November 2014; it was also exhibited at the Sculpture Court of the Edinburgh College of Art from the 27th March to 6th April 2015.

Robin Evans, Translation from Drawing to Building and Other Essays (London: Architectural Association, 1997).

Alberto Pérez-Gómez and Louise Pelletier, Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997).

Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, First published 1936, trans. J. A. Underwood (London: Penguin Books, 2008).

Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC.: Duke University Press, 1993).

Barbara Maria Stafford, Body Criticism: Imaging the Unseen in Enlightenment Art and Medicine (Cambridge, Mass: The MIT Press, 1991).

—— Artful Science: Enlightenment Entertainment and the Eclipse of Visual Education, Second printing 1999 (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1994).

—— Visual Analogy: Consciousness as the Art of Connecting (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 1999).

—— Echo Objects: The Cognitive Work of Images (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2007).

Vilém Flusser, ‘The Gesture of Making,’ in Gestures, (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014) pp.

32-47.

Bruno Latour, “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?

From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern,” Critical Inquiry, 2004: 225-248.

Gilbert Simondon, Being and Technology (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2012).

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Almost three tons of concrete are produced every year for each man, woman and child on the planet.

It is now second only to water in terms of human consumption. Yet how has the astonishing take-up of this new medium within little over a century been accommodated into our mental universe? While it has transformed the lives of many people, in Western countries it has been widely vilified, blamed for making everywhere look the same, and for erasing nature. Architects and engineers, although they have primary responsibility for ‘interpreting’ concrete, are not the only people to employ the medium, and many other occupations - politicians, artists, writers, filmmakers, churchmen - have made use of concrete for purposes of their own. The results are often contentious, and draw attention to the contradictions present in how we think about our physical surroundings.’1 —Adrian Forty

In this quest to define a material culture of

architecture we must address concrete as both a building material and as a cultural artefact.

Epithets such as Bob Marley’s 1973 concrete jungle ‘Where the living is harder’ or ‘the concrete jungle’, a 1982 film about a women’s prison, reinforce concrete’s obduracy. The Berlin Wall was made of concrete, as is the Israel/West Bank separation barrier in places known to be advantageous to snipers. These are not fences, or steel barriers, they are opaque, graffiti-covered, high walls of reinforced concrete, mechanically installed and militarily guarded. It is the ungiving nature of concrete that was declared essential for a protective USA southern border and that rallies the imagination of its proponents.

Concrete is immutable, like the Coliseum, and it is this immutability that both protects and raises the ire of those caught in such immutable facts.

Raw concrete was and still is identified as the material of war, from the massive concrete blocks of the Atlantic Wall in WWII, to the pillboxes that still occupy every headland looking over the entrance to Halifax Harbour. Nothing is as sheltering, safe and bullet-proof as concrete.

It repels attack. The concrete seen by Andrey Chernykh at the Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site, functional and unadorned but now in ruins, is so easily interpreted as a kind of nuclear holocaust Land Art – photographs allow this denatured response to great plinths toppled in the wake of a nuclear explosion. But being there, as Chernykh was, is not art, it is a warning of the scale of concrete’s vulnerability.

In the past decade of news coverage of both the destruction wrought in Syria and the waves of bombings in Gaza City, one is struck by the sheer amount of concrete and rebar left in great tumbled piles of collapsed buildings. No trees, no wood, no parks or lawns, Palestinian refugee camps and Gaza itself are dense concrete worlds.

Why is concrete the building material of choice?

There are geological reasons: North Africa and the Middle East sit on a shield of limestone, interleaved with layers of sandstone.2 Calcareous, limestone derives from fossils and shells, sand comes from the edges of the ocean, oil from the animals and vegetation that lived there: it 24

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technology and brute use is geology itself that produces the wealth, the tensions and the landscapes of the Middle East, and has done so for a long time: the pyramids are sandstone blocks, faced with limestone sheets.

Photographs of Palestine in the 1920s show a sandstone architecture. However, quarrying and building in stone is not the process for quick reconstruction in war, concrete clearly is.

Concrete debris can be re-used as aggregate: it isn’t as strong, but there is lots of it. All the steel reinforcing bars and mesh can be hammered out and re-used, and concrete can always be mixed in small batches, by hand if necessary. Not that the entire Gaza Strip is in rubble; one can find concrete companies with perky websites there just as anywhere else. The Israeli blockade allows the entry of construction materials from Egypt only for the Palestinian Authority which does not operate in Gaza. Nonetheless, the territory sits on limestone, abuts an ocean full of sand, and is provided with rubble of all kinds on a regular basis.

How does one get from limestone to concrete?

Limestone fired at 1450C frees CO2 from calcium carbonate to form calcium oxide, or quicklime.

Gypsum is added, and depending on geography, a number of other additives such as fly ash, blast furnace slag, silica fume, various clinkers, sometimes metakaolin (to make it very white).

Strangely, cements are considered natural materials, I suppose because they are made of ‘natural’ mined minerals, such as limestone and bauxite. Calcium sulfoaluminate low-energy cements require lower kiln temperatures, less limestone, thus less fuel consumption and CO2 emissions, but ‘significantly higher’ SO2 emissions which, if I recall, leads to acid rain.

Green cements using waste containing calcium, silica or iron, can replace clay, shale and limestone in the kiln, and other waste material can be used as fuel rather than coal or natural gas. Majd Mashharawi, a young civil engineer in Gaza made headlines in 2018 for her concrete block, Green Cake, made from building rubble and ash from domestic fires to power generators.

The blocks use less cement than standard concrete and have passed strength tests for construction.

Novacem, a UK research facility, has developed a magnesium silicate-based strong cement which absorbs CO2 as it hardens, making it carbon negative. Geologically speaking, limestone is very common throughout the world, as are magnesium silicates. Although one can develop a new carbon negative cement, getting it to replace existing, long-standing industrial processes is more difficult.

At the opposite end of the concrete research spectrum are engineered cementitious composites, ECC3, a ductile concrete that does

not use coarse aggregate but rather a coated network of fine polymer fibres within the cement that slide under stress, so no irreparable breaches, just thousands of fine cracks, dusted with cement, that self-repair with water. ECC’s flexibility – its internal slipperiness – does not allow it to shrink and crack. Forty times lighter than conventional concrete, clearly it is valuable in earthquake zones. In 2003 it was sprayed in a 20mm layer over 600m2 of the cracking, leaking, spalling 1995 Mitaka Dam in Japan.

I include this research as it is interesting – concrete is not static but evolving, but this only marginally affects the material culture of concrete, which is less about capacity as it is about associations as the use of concrete bounces between the crude and the sophisticated.

concrete’s ubiquity in war WWII USSR-made concrete bombs used concrete casings for bombs up to five tons, filled with either explosives or chemicals. Inexpensive but fragile Soviet slate mines assembled cast asbestos concrete slabs (or slates) into boxes filled with explosives – only the fuses were metal and so the bombs escaped mine-detectors.

Solid low-collateral damage small-dimension concrete bombs were used by the US Army in the late 1990s and again in the Iraq War. In theory, they produce less collateral damage in civilian areas because there isn’t a wide spread of shrapnel. Some concrete bombs are loaded with explosives; many are concrete alone, relying on speed and weight to knock out a narrow target – a 300kg concrete bomb was dropped by a French Mirage on a Libyan tank in 2010: effectively a GPS laser-guided boulder.

Iran’s ultra-high performance concrete, UHPC, is made of sand, cement, powdered quartz and, variously, polypropylene fibres, long steel fibres and various metal-oxide nanoparticles.

The stronger the concrete bunkers (and UHPC is seven times stronger), the larger and more penetrating must the missiles be. The larger the missiles and bombs, the larger and more reinforced the bombers must be. The Guided Bomb Unit-57A/B Massive Ordnance Penetrator of the US Air Force weighs 15 tons and can penetrate 200’ of hardened concrete.4 On one hand we have great chunks of concrete dropping from the sky onto tanks, on the other we have nanotechnology escalating bombing and bunkering to a scale unimaginable to civilians.

1 ‘The Metaphysics of Concrete’ uploaded to YouTube

by UCLLHL on 27 February 2012. Professor Adrian Forty, UCL Bartlett School of Architecture.

2 Stewart Edgell , ‘Significance of reef limestones as oil and gas reservoirs in the Middle East and North Africa’, 10th Edgeworth David Symposium, University of Sydney, September 4-5, 1997.

3 Victor Li, University of Michigan, early 1990s. Li states: ‘Engineered Cementitious Composites (ECC) is a material micromechanically designed with high ductility and toughness indicated by multiple microcracking behavior under uniaxial tension.’

4 ‘Smart concrete’, The Economist, 3 March 2012

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TopFo to IP U447438. www.t opfot o.co.uk

concrete’s longue durée The 1962 UPI photograph above is headlined: ‘First farmers for 2500 years to settle Gilboa in Israel’ and captioned: ‘David’s Curse Lifted, Mizpeh Gilboa, Israel. Two of the new settlers at Mizpeh Gilboa are pictured mixing cement and sand for their new houses. So far six permanent buildings have been erected in the settlement plan according to the settler’s choice. Water is still brought up by tankers from Nurit, but a pipeline [from] Beisan Wells is planned.’ 5 The headline indicates the myth of terra nullius prevalent at the time of the 1967 War: that no one lived in this new land, and if they did, they weren’t taking advantage of it. It also shows how concrete allows relatively unskilled fabrication: a couple, sand, rock, cement and tankered-in water. And yet the results are so permanent that they take on the inevitability of geology. It is the re-mineralisation that cement goes through that so distorts the legitimacy of construction.

Thomas Rau proposes that nature is a bank and if we treated it as such we wouldn’t exploit it as we do.5 Every building should be considered as a bank of materials, valuable because finite, like currency, which circulates over and over again through time and society, an idea that presupposes a certain salvageability as whole material units rather than the pulverising demolitions that usually happen when a building reaches the end of its usefulness (not necessarily its life, but the limits of appreciation of its value).

It is assumed that buildings have a life span.

Le Corbusier’s work at Chandigarh is a hugely complex architecture built with a single material, concrete, which once cast cannot revert back to its original ingredients – the chemical reaction when water meets quicklime cannot be undone. Correctly built, this kind of architecture is forecast to have an infinitely long lifespan; deconstruction and reuse of the materials is not considered. Unlike concrete buildings regularly demolished in the western world, Le Corbusier’s Chandigarh project persists: there has been little development pressure to constantly rebuild in what was once the de-colonising, developing, third world. The utopian socialist roots of modern architecture that meant something in the developing world, passed out of fashion in the developed world where it is now seen as a style (or a necessary utility), not as something for social good. Indeed, by the 1970s, projects just

twenty years old, such as Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis, were totally discredited as the social ambitions of the architecture did not match at all the political and social fears of race and poverty.

Architecture as a material bank references a pre-industrial model where buildings were assembled and dis-assembled by hand. Rau extends it to industrial processes, with the circularity potential of each material as the precondition for its use. This has the potential to redevelop modernism without the extravagance of material exploitation that came so easily to the West, where the environment was assumed to be infinitely patient, self-healing the wounds we inflicted by fire, by mining, by impermeable cities, by voracious appetites. An architecture of circularity assumes an impermanence to buildings whereby they can be constantly in flux, parts replaced, parts repurposed. This points out how much our future will necessarily be the polar opposite to the both the still, eternal, unmoveable architecture of Chandigarh, and the wrecking ball.

S ha u n F y nn

an architecture of intentional material archaeology Two projects that understand the complexity and contradictions in the use of concrete are Wang Shu’s Ningbo History Museum of 2008, and Frida Escobedo’s Serpentine Pavilion of 2018.

When much of China seems to be the playground of capitalist architectural excess: an excess of ambition and money, the new China seemingly free of inhibiting content, we have Wang Shu building from the rubble of villages destroyed to make way for new projects. Ningbo History Museum is built from tile, brick, concrete and stone salvaged from other buildings, sites of collapse, rubble: each piece comes with a fragment of history and unrepeatable form, giving an elasticity to its use: fit is unpredictable but follows very old techniques. New concrete, and it is extensive, is poured into bamboo formwork. There is a patience both to assembly and to the concept as a whole: the building evolves from its materials. Wang Shu is reclaiming China’s deep past — not historicism, but a sophisticated historical thinking.

Frida Escobedo’s architecture in Mexico uses common, often salvaged, found materials; for the 2018 Serpentine Pavilion in London, she didn’t import her palette from Mexico, but looked for its equivalent: mundane inexpensive materials easily accessed. She found UK-manufactured concrete roof tiles and stacked them into semitransparent walls that shade and shadow, define and obscure: a complex architecture made of a materially insignificant building product.

Wang Shu was building a museum, a strongbox of treasures; Frida Escobedo was building a pavilion to be taken down after four months. Both treated an insignificant (because so everyday) material culture of a local architecture and rendered it fugitive, otherworldly and exceptional. n

F e r na nd o G u e r r o

© 2018 Iwan Baan

from the top: left: ‘First farmers in 2500 years to settle Gilboa in Israel.

TopFoto IPU447438. above: Oscar Niemeyer, Museu Nacional da República, Brasilia, 1958 Le Corbusier, Secretariat, Complexe du Capitole, Chandigarh, India, 1952. www.studiofynn.com Wang Shu, Ningbo History Museum, Ningbo, China, 2008. Fernando Guerro, photographer. ultimasreportagens.com Frida Escobedo, Serpentine Pavilion 2018. © Frida Escobedo, Taller de Arquitectura, www.fridaescobedo.net

5 Thomas Rau and Sabine Oberhuber. Material Matters, 2018. Dutch version only. thomasrau.eu

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We arrived at a gas station at the edge of the small town of Karkaralinsk in north-eastern Kazakhstan, as the sun was approaching its zenith. We stopped to stock up on extra fuel before the long journey to the Polygon, the former nuclear weapons testing zone officially known as Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site. This is my first ever trip as an atomic tourist. Tour guides Dmitriy and Vladimir pack up the last of

Forensics of Nuclear Landscape andrey chernykh

Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site Kazakhstan

the fuel canisters in the back of an old Toyota Prado and we are ready to go. We pass by the sign warning to be mindful about the proximity to the Polygon of a list of prohibited industrial operations there without a permit.

Looking at the drawing of the nuclear site boundary, I had not realised that it would be the last time I would see anything resembling a border.

from the top: View from the top of the crater into the vast steppe of the Polygon Wandering cows near the Field site Stopover at village Mrzhik A ndrey Cher ny kh

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We drive through the rolling planes of the Kazakh steppe. The landscape is boundless and stretches endlessly into the distance with fewer and fewer hills, fading away in the blue hues of the sky. After a while the paved road starts to narrow and eventually altogether disappears to make way for gravel and dirt. Relying solely on a satellite signal, Dmitriy navigated the map on his laptop with sharp precision.

At Mrzhik, a village walking distance from the nuclear site’s border, an elderly Kazakh woman was drying her clothes outside. She was kind enough to let us use the well but felt reluctant to stay and chat longer. Mrzhik, a small village of around 500 people nestled in the middle of three hill ridges that stretch further south, is one of the villages narrowly missed by the radioactive fallout from the first surface nuclear tests in the early 1950s. After detonation, wind picked up the smoke and dust rising to form a mushroom cloud, and carried it for 100 km south, depositing radionuclides onto the plants and soil. One of the radionuclides is Plutonium 239 with a halflife of 24,110 years.

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Despite this, the landscape looks tranquil and abundantly biodiverse. A light breeze was gently swaying the grasses in the little creek nearby; village geese waddled in to drink. As we pulled up the last bucket of water, Dmitriy mentioned,’Did you know that the Polygon is the only nuclear test site in the world where people live? Even here in this little village, they don’t know where exactly the testing site is. To this day I am still amazed that this is their reality’.

He chuckled and grabbed a full water container to take to the car. The sun has already began to descend, the wind was slowing down and it was time to make camp in the middle of vast rolling hills of grass. There was no sound or animal in sight as we watched the sunset, chatting, drinking beer and eating traditional Russian camp food of dry smoked fish, hard-boiled eggs and cold cut sandwiches. The sun set, silence came and the night sky was peppered with millions of stars. In my tent, I thought of the Field and the Ground Zero. How contaminated is it? Will the radiation affect us in some way?

The site accumulated such a negative stigma over the years that I couldn’t help but feel eerie about the possibility of some terrifying unknown that might await us tomorrow.

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

‘...That’s the Zone. It may even seem capricious. But it is what we’ve made it with our condition. It happened that people had to stop halfway and go back. Some of them even died on the very threshold of the room. But everything that is going on here depends not on the Zone, but on us!’

— Stalker

A nd r e y C he r ny k h

2 Our crossover drove over the hill, bobbled a bit and steadied itself as we descended down towards a more levelled plane. Dmitriy pored over his laptop to find the ever elusive accessible path as he gave directions to Vladimir out loud.

Suddenly, a bend around the hill gave us a hint of car wheel tracks and we took our chances that would be the path that would lead us to a more defined road. Surely the path started to become more treaded. Dmitry pointed to a cluster of low mountains in the far distance. Our destination should be just beyond.

Revving the engine Vladimir pushed ahead.

It was half an hour before our Toyota started climbing and the road started to zig-zag around much bigger hills. We reached the valley where the road stretched between two hills and around the bend we started our descent.

The turn revealed a wide, open landscape the horizon as a straight line and the sky a vast soft blue. The scene was interrupted by small structures poking out of the ground; assessing the distance, they appeared quite far from each other. As we approached, they were coming closer together, and I realised that they were forming a line leading to the centre. Dmitry said, ‘There! You can really see them now, those are the

‘geese’ measuring towers, they kind of look like geese in profile.’ As soon as the towers aligned, a sharp turn revealed a path running along them.

Vladimir steered the car into it. Exhilarated, I rolled down the window, took out my DSLR mounted on a tripod and held it tight against the door of the car to minimise the turbulence. It filmed the approaching tower and the impression that one was flying over the blades of grass.

Closer and closer, the road started to meander and at times the camera revealed the towers tightly lining up along a single vanishing point.

The tower was really close now, and at about three stories tall seemed monumental in a vast open steppe. We parked the car in its shade and got out to take a closer look.

above: Approaching and examining the geese towers

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3 Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site was the main location of the Soviet Nuclear Testing Program 1949 – 1989, home to a total of 456 nuclear explosions. In the arms race with the United States, the Soviet Union developed the program quickly following the Trinity Test by the United States in 1945. The 18,000 sq. km area in northeastern Kazakhstan, previously a natural reserve, was selected in 1947 based on a quick aerial survey of the area, without taking into account thousands of settlers located within the region.

It was swiftly developed into a military test base for nuclear weapons technology. Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Site became a vast landscape of experiments of surface, aerial and underground tests. It was at one of the test areas, Opytnoe Pole (Experimental Field), that Soviet Union entered the nuclear age with a detonation of nuclear device RDS-01 ‘First Lightning’ on August 29, 1949 at 7:00 a.m. (GMT +6).

The communications infrastructure at the Field was a sophisticated network of underground cables that ran for kilometres connecting the towers that measured the magnitude of the explosions. Before the first test the Soviets were closely following the set up of the Trinity Test in Nevada – a steel tower with a nuclear charge hoisted up at the top. Key replicas of potential targets like buildings, infrastructure, machinery, military targets as well as animals were positioned around at various distances in order to test the impact of the explosion. A set of facilities built about 10 km from the ground zero monitored the measuring equipment in the towers and the explosion itself.

Semipalatinsk nuclear testing site remained active for 40 years. During that time Soviet propaganda convinced the residents of the Polygon that nuclear weapons were a worthy investment that would make their nation stronger in the event of a nuclear war. However, local residents including nuclear scientists, military personnel and independent animal farmers have not been properly safeguarded from the tests.

After numerous surface and aerial experiments in the 1950s and early 1960s people began to report illnesses, majority of them being various types of cancers, however the authorities denied these having any connection to nuclear tests. By the late 1980’s along with policies of Perestroika by the last Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev, people had become vocal critics of the nuclear program, calling on authorities to close the site and end the tests once and for all.

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from the top: Map of the Field site showing concrete structures, radiation levels and the path of the journey travelled Archival image of the Field just after the nuclear test.

‘Experimental Field after RDS-1 explosion, 1949’ Nuclear Weapons Complex. The XXI Century Encyclopaedia, Russia’s Arms and Technologies; Volume 14, 2013. p 262 Radioactive craters at the Field Archival image of the detonation of a first Soviet nuclear bomb RDS-1 (Joe 1) from: Kuran, P. (Director). (1995).

Trinity and Beyond: The Atomic Bomb Movie (Motion Picture on DVD). USA: Visual Concept Entertainment (VCE)

all i mag e s : A n dre y Ch e r n y k h, e x c e p t a r c hi v a l m a t e r i a l n o te d i n th e capti o n s

The total power of 116 nuclear tests (86 atmospheric and 30 surface) performed at the Field left the landscape ravaged with craters and ruins. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Semipalatinsk site was closed in 1991 by the president of newly independent Kazakhstan.

Without a proper demilitarisation plan a lot of infrastructure and equipment was left intact. An economic recession followed, which resulted in years of looting on site by local villagers and unsuccessful attempts to secure the site. There

is a severe shortage of warning signs or any kind of proper safeguarding from the radiation. A shepherd from a local village can easily walk into an irradiated area and graze his livestock without any knowledge of presence of radiation. Scrap metal scavenging continues to this day; the site suffers from neglect but most importantly a lack of proper rehabilitation planning. It stands as an impressive collection of artifacts and landforms, a testament to a bygone nuclear era.

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

4 My feet touched the ground and I felt a bit like an astronaut on a different planet, donning heavy rubber boots, latex gloves and a respirator.

We were in the vicinity of the ground zero and our Geiger counter indicated a higher level of background radiation. ‘Try not to pick up anything without your gloves’ said Dmitriy, as three of us approached the tower. The structure was well advanced into the process of decay.

Its chipped concrete revealed steel armature underneath. Each floor featured a wide window looking into the distance. The steel frame of the window originally held a perforated metal panel that protected the measuring equipment during the explosion. Most of the steel elements were gone, taken by the scavengers, including the metal stairs leading to the next floor, metal hardware for the doors, sometimes entire doors themselves. Standing in one of the rooms, the tower was perfectly aligned with the next tower about a kilometre away. ‘Radionuclides are all over the grassland here, about 10-15 centimetres deep into the soil, that’s why no one knows how to manage such a vast territory of contamination’, said Dmitriy looking out the window. Outside I took my time examining the tower’s walls. Time and time again this structure had experienced total destruction, and yet it withstood it all. Cracks, bullet holes, fractures, shrapnel, gouges, every violent imprint imaginable, it was all in the walls.

Dmitry waved me back to the car to head further.

The next tower was similar to the first one, battered concrete construction with grasses growing taller around it as if the landscape was slowly swallowing it. The next tower was different. Gone were the rooms with wide windows and doors, this time it was much more slender and longer with a massive wedge back support disappearing into the earth. It was also black with cracks running along the surface stretching all the way back and around. ‘You might want to close the window right about now, the dust is radioactive’, said Dmitriy, as I was trying to get the perfect shot. We drove a bit further when Dmitriy abruptly said to Vladimir, ‘Stop the car, we’re going to have to walk from here.’

On S i t e r e v i ew 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

above: View towards the centre of the Field left: Dmitry examining the inside of one of the concrete bunkers below: Various concrete ruins scattered around the Field site

A nd r e y C he r ny k h

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An drey C h er n yk h

Slender monolithic towers of concrete construction with wide chamfered edges looked more decorative than structural. Nonetheless, they were oriented towards something invisible in the centre, resembling giants standing strong, frozen in time. We walked over to one of them and noticed a melted surface texture.

If the concrete could melt, this would be the place for it, at 500 metres to the epicentre of a nuclear fireball. At the base of the tower, we saw a large piece of what looked like a melted rock mound. ‘Melted soil’, said Dmitriy, ‘there are a lot of these around because the explosion often displaced large volumes of soil, scattering it across the field.’ Looking in the direction of the towers I imagined chunks of earth flying like fireballs in the sky and dropping all around in a field of raging fire. ‘During the tests, this place must have been hell on earth’, I said looking around me. ‘That is a good way of putting it’, smiled Dmitriy. Vladimir turned on the Geiger counter and brought it closer to the melted chunk. The numbers oscillated between 2.1 to 3.8 millisievert per hour (mSv/h), which is above the 1.0 millisievert per hour normal background radiation levels.

Directly east there was another line of identical towers stretching into the distance, the two closest of them toppled to the ground, presumably by one of the tests. However, there were no towers north or west of the centre of where I was standing. Instead, the landscape featured more low lying structures of bunkers, shafts, walls, columns and other concrete chunks at least partially submerged in the landscape.

We examined one of the bunkers north of the Ground Zero. The concrete framing the entrance was completely blown off by what must have been an incredibly powerful shockwave, as all that was left were rebars flung back and frozen like hair blowing in the wind. The objects did not conform to any alignment and seemed to be

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A n dre y Ch e r n y kh

scattered all across the field. The orientation of the structures and the dugout trenches towards the centre, suggested a loose circular orientation, which slowly allowed me to trace a rough mental plan of the site.

We explored numerous other structures whose purpose at times was a challenge to decipher.

One thing was clear; the Field has become an outdoor museum for one of the most horrific weapons ever invented and the consequences of nuclear tests on the country’s iconic landscape.

above: Melted earth and the damage inflicted from a nuclear test on one of the structures on site

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

5 The cloud of dust was rising behind us as our car sped up in the south direction from the Field to find a camp ground for the night. We drove along the defined diagonal path that circled the ground zero in the middle of the two converging trajectories of the measuring towers. Around the centre I managed to trace a low mound,

above: The water filled crater in the centre of the Field site left: Concrete blocks with various angles of inclination used to measure the intensity of the force of the blast Semipalatinsk Nuclear Test Range, Ground Zero. ‘Photographic Images of the Results of Nuclear Detonation on August 29, 1949’.

Appendix to the Report, by Beria and Kurchatov to Stalin, on the preliminary data obtained during the test of the atomic bomb The central tower before and after the experiment, from a distance of 500 m below: Looking back from the centre of the Field site, towards the vanishing geese towers in the distance

A nd r e y C he r ny k h

heavily grown in, bending around the centre akin to the defining brush stroke on the canvas that completed the image of the Field for me. The Cartesian alignment, long distances, scattered cryptic structures, all reinforced a sinister intent. Media’s portrayal of the nuclear era and its images of mushroom clouds left a lasting impression on our collective imagination. The Ground Zero felt like a black hole pulling you in, commanding you to pay attention even if testing infrastructure was no longer there. During an opportunity to visit a site such as this, one couldn’t help but project those images onto the site. That precise relationship created the sublime feeling of the landscape. The Field, albeit utilitarian in its form, was designed with an approach straight from an authoritarian playbook, by establishing visual centre of gravity, via view corridors among built form is a universal language of attention, power and command.

The degree to which the nuclear site is preserved is a sign that today’s Kazakhstan still grapples with the dark Soviet past, as locals look towards the future trying to reconcile their relationship with the monuments of communist regime. The structures are products of the people and a specific time period in history.

Their scale and purpose serve as important reminders of the past leaders’ recklessness in the pursuit of power. What is remarkable is that the structures proved to be able to vividly record the surrounding biophysical processes and military operations on their concrete surfaces. What the site awaits now is a thoughtful preservation and re-purposing of its artifacts in their natural setting. This next step will be an important chapter in this young country’s history – an act reinforcing a local commitment to reconciliation with a turbulent history and creation of a new economic and cultural asset for the region. n

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The Hard and the Brut: a j ourney through Parisian Brutal ism ro b i n w i l s o n

hidden stories of the picturesque

In 2016, I and the photographer Nigel Green (working together in the art practice collaboration Photolanguage), were commissioned by the publisher Blue Crow Media to research and illustrate a Brutalist Map of Paris.

This article reflects on the period of research, site exploration and recording that led to the production of the map, and a recent journey of return to social housing projects by Jean Renaudie and Renée Gailhoustet.

Our response to Parisian brutalism was not simply architectural and historiographic, but emphasised the peripatetic and experiential circumstances of the commission as a project of urban photographic documentation. The official architectural itinerary gave us a project to reassess the notion of brutalist material aesthetics in general terms and in relation to the contemporary city as found.

We applied an understanding of brutalism across the journey in its totality. We did not reserve our brutalist attention only for those periods within the privileged sites of authored

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architecture, but traversed Paris according to a brut itinerary. The map reflects exclusively the architectural aspects of this research; a parallel exhibition at the Institut Français in London explored the intersections of the architectural sites and the wider urban foray. We presented a selection of images within the main library space of the Institute as the covers of an imaginary French architectural journal, La Revue Générale Brutaliste, bordered by invented editorial titles and notations. Printed on hand-made Japanese paper, these postured as archival items from the history of the fictional journal from the 1950s-70s, with its cover design evolving as if over time in a manner inspired by the covers of period editions of journals such as L’Architecture D’Aujord’hui. Of the ten covers, two featured anonymous found objects and brutal gardens, incorporating fallen, discarded and neglected urban spaces as part of an official legacy of the brutalist canon.

Edition titles and editorial notes open the presentation of architectural brutalism beyond the language of architectural history and

authorship to more indeterminate, speculative modes of expression, registering contingent urban details and events of a brutal character.

These include graffiti, signage and the comments and exhortations of individuals encountered at each site.

The project began, and still grapples with, a question of definitions: the identification criteria of a brutalist building or space, and how to transfer a certain historical understanding and experience of brutalism from the UK context (British buildings, British criticism), to the Parisian one. Necessarily, we returned to Reyner Banham’s definitions of brutalism in his December 1955 essay in The Architectural Review, ‘The New Brutalism’, and found a quite fluid set of terms, aesthetic genealogies and qualifications, almost exclusively directed to establish the brutalist credentials of the work of a single architect: the British practice of Alison and Peter Smithson. below: Nigel Green and Robin Wilson, Photolanguage. Two covers of the imaginary French architectural journal, La Revue Générale Brutaliste, prepared for exhibition at the Institut Français in London

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Significantly, this originating thesis of brutalism was not conceived through the medium of concrete, but through the steel and panel system construction of the Smithson’s 1954 Hunstanton School in Norfolk. It was developed through the production of imagery, in relation to exhibitions produced by the Independent Group, principally, The Parallel of Art and Life, 1953, which included the work of photographer Nigel Henderson.

Rather than functioning as the basis of an architectural movement, ‘The New Brutalism’ article is better understood as a discursive vehicle for Banham’s broader project of cultural criticism at that time – a temporary scaffolding erected in episodic activities of journal criticism and discarded when the focus of Banham’s critical allegiances shifted. That said, one can extract from Banham a set of working principles for identifying brutalist buildings: memorability, the ruthlessness of the spatial system as image (the clarity of a building’s visual identity, and formal legibility as a programme); a clear exhibition of structure; materials as found. Active within this set of values is a propensity toward primitive or essential material expression, drawing influence from the use of beton brut (raw concrete) in the later works of Le Corbusier, as well as from

examples of Art Brut and Arte Povera.

The Australian architectural historian John Macarthur makes the point that Banham’s articles in this period were published within the wider frame of a set of editorial campaigns in The Architectural Review from the 1930s onwards championing, through diverse and sometimes contradictory forms of expression, the revival of the eighteenth-century aesthetic category of the picturesque as the basis of a renewed urban aesthetic of dynamic contradistinctions.

Banham’s declared stance was to reject The Architectural Review’s concerns for the picturesque as a parochial reaction to modernity.

Macarthur, on the other hand, refers us to a broader understanding of the spectrum of the picturesque as inclusive of a theory of ugliness and disgust, a longer philosophical reflection on material aesthetics to which brutalism can quite plausibly be understood to be an extension. Within the context of this programme of aesthetic reflection on the tensions between new forms of post war modernity and, broadly speaking, Romanticism, Macarthur defines brutalism as a form of ‘hard picturesque, which is aesthetically challenging, as opposed to a soft and facile picturesque which panders to familiar sentiments’.

One would have to concede that with the arrival of projects like the Brutalist Map series, and the abundant appreciation of brutalist architecture on social media, its status as ‘hard’ aesthetic is itself transitioning, or has already transitioned toward something more familiar, and that brutalism has lost its shock value, its inherent material and aesthetic force of critique as an antithesis to dominant, ‘soft’, aesthetic sensibilities. This signals a moment in which we can re-look and reassess the impact of the work of the period and, importantly, to begin a process of more acute differentiation within the common categorisation of brutalism, through acts of return, reflection and re-presentation.

Within our documentation of Paris and acts of return we re-propose and reposition the material values of the ‘as found’ and the ‘hard’. We explore authored and anonymous urban formations with equal interest, and look to differentiate a hard from a soft brutalism – pockets of the hard picturesque persisting or reconfiguring within the recognised or authored sites of the architectural itinerary.

The work of Nigel Henderson provides a useful bridge between brutalism as an ambition for reductive rigor within material and architectonic expression and that of its manifestation as urban observation and representation. The historian Andrew Higgott proposes that the brutalist values in Henderson’s photography have to do with the recording of an ‘authentic inhabitation’ of the city, the witnessing of its incident and patterns of life.

While we should be wary of the photograph as a means to access sociological truths, Henderson’s photography provides a useful point of convergence for many of the complex cultural vectors of the time, in the way it channels older picturesque, Surrealist and Dadaist concerns, alongside the emergence of pop culture and a new socio-political awareness of its urban subject matter. It emphasises a heightened material awareness of the city as a space of accretion and contingency. Henderson’s concerns parallel those of the Smithsons in their complex reflections on the social and environmental implications of the ‘as found’ sensibility, which continued into the 1990s and across the spectrum of their built, written and graphic production.

‘Peter Samuels’, 1951.

Photograph by Nigel Henderson (1917-85) copyright Tate, London 2019

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the map: a material itinerar y To journey in search of the brutalist architecture of Paris – and to follow the itinerary of the map – is to travel beyond the Parisian Périphérique in all directions, to the new town zones of the 1960s and 70s. Bobigny, Créteil, Ivry and parts of la Defense were the particular sites of our attention.

The brutalist element of Parisian urbanism does not represent a simple shift in the style and materiality of the city’s renewal or extension – a brutalist strata within an accumulation of historical styles – but was also an attempt to manifest wholly new Parisian environments: satellite cities of a new, multi-polaire solution to urban growth.

Examples of brutalism within the city centre are rare. The concrete, concertina-like conference building within Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss’s UNESCO complex (1958) is perhaps the most powerful example. This is, itself, disconnected from the surrounding historic city of the seventh arrondisement by the perimeter fencing and landscaping of UNESCO site, subject to a layered condition of cordon-sanitaire. The brutalist mapping of Paris (its making and subsequent retracing) requires a migration to new cities; journeys into enclaves of alternative urbanism, that, on one’s return to the centre, leave a dreamlike impression on memory – the sense that one had ventured to a space of sufficient difference as to be of a parallel history to the present reality.

Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss’s UNESCO complex,1958

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The map itself proposes a ‘coherent’ itinerary across diverse sites; its format neutralises the many contradictions in identification that the commission engendered. The application of the nomenclature of brutalism to a period of production spanning 30 years, across periods of changing material technologies and economies of labour, produces as many misalignments as compatibilities.

Within a purely architectural pursuit of the ‘as-found’ the apprehension and expression of the conditions of the building site, the moment of assemblage, is paramount. It is the creation of a material expression at the intersection of labour and the medium of construction. Historian Adrian Forty provides a diverse discussion of the ‘discourse of concrete’ in the modern and late modern periods as a combination of the trace of both the ‘primitive and the sophisticated’ in the dialogue between engineering, or system, and its execution.

The term beton brut itself derives originally from an item of correspondence by Le Corbusier and describes the material finish of his later works in the post-World War Two period, particularly the Unité d’Habitation in Marseilles.

Whilst the notion of the material finish ‘as found’ has come to define brutalism within the current understanding of the canon, and even traced back to William Morris, craft revival and the authentic

Le Corbusier’s l’Unité d’Habitation under construction.

expression of materials, it was more a product of the conditions of the building site – the fact that there were multiple contractors working on the Unité’s construction, with different levels of skill. A similar material discourse is in evidence at Le Corbusier’s Maisons Jaoul in western Paris, Neuilly-sur-Seine (1951 – the earliest building recorded on the Brutalist map). Here, within a ‘raw’ palette of materials, the trace of the making hand is discernible in the cementing of the brick joints, the working of the exposed sections of the concrete slab (producing an expression of the barrel roof profile and of the lower floor slabs on the end elevations, like a section cut). However, Forty notes that there is a level of contradiction between means and ends at the Maisons Jaoul in relation to materials, in that the brick work was executed by a skilled and experienced craftsman, but who was instructed to conduct the work with a loose hand; and that a less experienced contractor for the concrete made a particularly bad job of the first-floor concrete slab and then overcompensated with a very precise and crisp moulding of the roof slab. The loose hand of the skilled, the over-compensation of the less capable; a now largely indecipherable material and ideological dialogue between restraint and excess, across the professional classes of design and construction.

Le Corbusier, Maisons Jaoul, Neuilly-surSeine,1954-56. Unpainted cast béton brut and roughly detailed brickwork.

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Paul Bossard, les Bleuets, Creteil, in 1962

A 1962 housing complex by Paul Bossard in Créteil expresses something approximate to Le Corbusier’s treatment of materials at the Maisons Jaoul. Forty makes interesting observations here about the logic of construction. For, with Les Bleuets, as they are called, there is a combination of the hand-made with a precast panel system.

Bossard evolved the design from his student diploma project and, against the norms of professional roles within the French building industry, undertook to design the precast system himself and oversee in detail its assemblage on-site. The large pieces of shale embedded in the roughly textured concrete panels were placed by the construction workers at the site whilst the concrete was still wet, with the variability of skill in this process of rapid, ‘primitive’ appliqué embraced as a part of the material ethos of the project.

Forty, with reference to the work of architect Vilanova Artigas in São Paulo, makes a useful comparison between the play of the primitive and the sophisticated across European and South American brutalism. For Artigas, as Forty quotes, the ‘ideological content of European brutalism […] brings with it a cargo of irrationalism’.

Within this cargo is the conceit of the persistence of an aesthetic of austerity – of the primitive inflection of the hand of the unskilled labourer – way beyond the actual period of post-war material shortage in Europe. Within South America, on the other hand, unskilled labour remained a fundamental part of the economics of the building site.

However, whilst a late Le Corbusian aesthetic may have continued to influence the manipulation of the concrete surface well into the 1970s within aspects of architectural practice in the UK, the scene in Paris by no means yields evidence of such an allegiance. In assembling the itinerary of the map we quickly realised the necessity of abandoning the material relationship to the traces of manual labour as an essential benchmark of the brut and, instead, reconfigured the terms of brutalism according to the material and technological cultures of the precast system and the machined surface. Here I focus (among the many possible examples) on our encounters with the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet.

Breuer, Nervi and Zehrfuss’s 1958 UNESCO complex Paul Bossard, le Bleuets, Créteil, 1962

Nig el Gre e n / P h o to lan g u ag e

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the combinator y system: material futurity and unmappable zones Within the multi-phased project at Ivry and subsequent smaller developments at la Cité Rateau, la Courneuve by Jean Renaudie (1987), and la Cité de la Maladrerie, Aubervilliers by Renée Gailhoustet (1984), it is the complexities of the plan and its social thesis – to be achieved at scale – that dominate the material and constructive regime. Through the vertical layering of a triangulated or star-shaped plan, subsequently subjected to morphing actions of cut and rotation, Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s architecture accedes to a radical principle of difference. The combinatory system of Les Étoiles, as Iréné Scalbert has identified it, of overlap and interconnection proposed a unique space for every household that prioritised the spaces of collective living over provision for the individual.

This allowed complexity and irregularity within the plan to generate an evolving appropriation of space, from interior to exterior.

The work of spatial complexity, variation and interrelationship – the ‘effect of one apartment configuration upon another necessitated neverending adjustments’ – is ultimately directed toward facilitating self-management by the inhabitants within the evolution of different patterns of communal encounter and life across the commercial, professional and domestic strata of the cité.

Certainly, at Ivry and the other Parisian sites of Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s combinatory’ architecture, the honesty of material expression in relation to structure and the traces of labour is not an absolute value. In these sites, there is little conception of a model or ideal viewer; no desire to play with the perceptual acuity of a sophisticated eye at a material level; there is no concession to material conceit in Artigas’s terms. By contrast, there is a more genuine democratisation of material aesthetics in Renaudie and Gailhoustet by the priority afforded to the pragmatics of the constructive task toward the achievement of hitherto unattained spatial complexity en masse.

Another reflection on the discourse of the material surface here is time: its positioning in relation to temporal categories. Material surface on later brutalist work is not, for the most part, an index of the actions of making and labour on the building site. Whilst surfaces bare the traces of use and abuse and of weathering over time, the materials of Renaudie and Gailhoustet do not register the past tense in this way. Concrete Jean Renaudie, Cité Rateau, la Courneuve, 1987 The main urban interface with rue Rateau

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On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

N i g e l Gre e n / P h ot ol a ngu a ge

surfaces are of a serviceable smoothness, with no particular level of attention to precision in the finish (being neither especially precise nor loose). A concrete render protects facade and structural members at street level and also facilitates the use of colour in the later phases of Ivry. Large, bespoke, precast panelling defines much of the housing façade and exhibits an equally pragmatic materiality – a robust agent of spatial tectonics in service of the speculations of the plan. As a speculative space, anticipatory of an as yet unknown future of social relations, the material traces of the past as an ‘as found’ aesthetic and an ideological implication of labour, have no place. The present temporal immediacy of the material and spatial system is thus made ‘neutral’ in support of the project’s programmatic futurity.

This particular category of space within the work of Renaudie and Gailhouste lead us to the complex threshold spaces between the architecture of the ‘combinatory’ system and its surrounding urbanism.

As producers of the brutalist map we capture the external, iconic image of the architecture of our itinerary. As architectural tourists to the work of Renaudie and Gailhoustet we cannot experience the architecture as do inhabitants of the interior life of the ‘combinatory’ system.

However, we can, as travellers within the urban conditions at the fringes of the wider city, validly report back our experience of the contact, or, indeed, contract, between the city in the spatial inter-zones and thresholds of transition from the older, normative urban order to the space of ‘difference’. Spending sometimes uneasy periods in these zones, we recorded them with uneven levels of care and detail. I realise now that their conflicting combination of attributes might define them to be pockets of the hard picturesque of the contemporary city – difficult urban space persisting within the more formally recognised and accepted brutalist environment.

It is an ‘ugly’ brutalism, one that has evolved, not toward broader popular acceptance, but to a more virulent state of repulsion: unmappable.

Jean Renaudie and Renee Gailhoustet, Cité les Etoiles, Ivry Town Centre, 1972

N i g e l Gre e n / P h o to lan g ua ge

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These are frequently traversed spaces, serving a successful domestic interior, and yet are also subject to the effects of failure and withdrawal as urban spaces. They are highly wrought spaces of architectural authorship, of extreme spatial and material deliberation, but also of contingency and decay. They are a programmatic hybrid that defies easy assimilation.

Cité Rateau presents a dynamic, fragmented cliff face to its main urban interface with rue Rateau, whilst to the rear the scheme cascades down from 7th to ground floor in the overlapping and constantly shifting orientations of the terracing characteristic of Ivry. The street frontage is deeply incised and hollowed, a space of transitional access to the apartments at ground floor and successive deck levels, with staircases visible as their own volumetric expressions behind the frame of the outer facade panelling.

The volumes of the apartments break beyond this framework at higher level in a stepped rhythm descending to meet the more diminutive housing around it, and anticipating the more complex volumetric arrangements behind.

The ground floor of this façade yields a surprising complexity as one journeys through it and extends in places to the depth of something more like an under-croft. The material palette is more variegated than that of the earlier Ivry, with brick and seemingly more provisional breeze-block sections appearing amid the cast concrete, concrete panelling and render. A mid-grey paint occurs intermittently, picking out a sequence of surfaces as if there had been an attempt, not to colour code the surfaces according to architectonic performance, but to lead the eye through complex recessional plains, to tempt engagement in a scopic exploration. (It is likely, of course, that this spatial play of grey is not original, but a later effort of maintenance, which pursues and erases the interventions of graffitists.)

Here structure morphs into screen and ‘decoration’ with columns diversely shaped – splayed and spread as if they were assembled from something like the splintered fragments of the façade panelling system. Staircases and horizontal first floor connecting walkways further fragment the visual field and are, in turn, supported by a smaller, seemingly ad hoc structural system of columns, like concrete props or scaffolding. Despite Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s incredible capacities of spatial

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imagination and draughtsmanship, one cannot help but think that this is a space beyond drawing, beyond specification, and perhaps in part given over to the contractor to provide improvised solutions based on practical knowledge.

Only one figure traversed this space during our visit – a lone female seemingly unsure of her destination. Post boxes in one section of what was apparently conceived originally as an open foyer, seem to have been long abandoned.

Almost all of the fenestration at the ground level was closed with an industrial grade metal shuttering, and it was unclear what type of space, or combination of spaces, was behind it: domestic, storage, commercial or studio.

This complex space of circulation, screen, shelter and structure would seem to provide myriad opportunities for appropriation: for concealment, for storage; for the chance encounter or the ambush; the improvised event and activity, industrious or celebratory and social. Yet, the space seems hollowed and left latent. Although suggestive in equal measure of a space of urban deviancy and of architectural festival, it plays host to neither. The materials of the architecture of ‘difference’ have the appearance of being merely scenographic, the vacated shell of the propositional thesis. Less the connecting tissue of the ‘combinatory’ system to the surrounding city, such spaces now appear like the uncertain buffer zones between Renaudie and Gailhoustet’s utopianism and the spaces of the everyday. n

N i ge l G r e e n/ P hot ol a ngu a ge

bibliography Reyner Banham, ‘The New Brutalism’ The Architectural Review, December 1955, pp. 354-61 Adrian Forty, Concrete and Culture: A Material History.

London: Reaktion Books, 2012 Nigel Green and Robin Wilson, Brutalist Map of Paris London: Blue Crow Media, 2016 Andrew Higgot, ‘Memorability as Image: New Brutalism and Photography’, in Higgott and Wray (eds) Camera Constructs Farnham: Ashgate, 2012, pp 283-94 Philip Johnson and Reyner Banham, ‘School at Hunstanton’, The Architectural Review, September 1954, pp 148-58 John Macarthur, The Picturesque: Architecture, Disgust and Other Irregularities. New York: Routledge, 2007 Irénée Scalbert, A Right To Difference: The Architecture of Jean Renaudie. London: AA Publications, 2004

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above and facing page: the undercroft spaces of La CitĂŠ Rateau, La Courneuve, by Jean Renaudie, 1987

N i g e l Gre e n / P h o to lan g u a ge

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t he uninscribed surface

Suzhou gardens are the quintessence of the classical Chinese garden. Occupying fairly small spaces of no more than a few acres, Suzhou gardens unfold to display a profoundly sophisticated world – a labyrinth of layered arrangements in a succession of increasingly complex views creating a density of overwhelming experience. This is a place of the uninflected surface, never homogenous or repetitive, constituted by a diversity of concrete variances. White surfaces appear on walls, passageways, corridors, parapets, balustrades and other masonry works. Closely tied to its context, a white surface assumes a multiplicity of identities, each an irreplaceable singularity, caught up in a local and regional situation through a network of interrelations. As such, it opens new dimensions of experience without ascribing to any standardised category or normative tier. To observe a white wall is to study the materiality of its original uniqueness, to suspend all intellectual assumptions and to engage long strand senses.

The role of whiteness in Suzhou gardens, so culturally embedded in the discourse of Chinese architecture and gardens, I apply to Eileen Gray’s E1027 house of 1926-29 in Roquebrune-CapMartin, France. It too reveals a sophisticated labyrinthine set of layered spaces held in tension by a series of white walls. Whiteness is a hinge that embodies both trans-cultural continuity and differentiated intentions. From this I observe how material substance leads to cultural, spatial and visual meaning.

readings Ames, Roger T., ‘Meaning as Imaging: Prolegomena to a Confucian Epistemology’ in Cultural and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, 227-244. Edited by Elliot Deutsch. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

—-, ‘The Meaning of Body in Classical Chinese Thought’ International Philosophical Quarterly 24, no. 1 (1984): 39-54.

Fung, Stanislaus. ‘The Interdisciplinary Prospects of Reading Yuan ye’ Studies in the History of Gardens & Designed Landscapes 18, no. 3 (1998): 211-31.

Fung, Stanislaus, Liu, Shida, Sun Yu. ‘Aperspectival effects in the Liu Yuan, Suzhou’ Architectural Journal no.

568 (2016): 36-39.

Graham, A. C., ‘Conceptual Schemes and Linguistic Relativism in Relation to Chinese’ in in Cultural and Modernity: East-West Philosophic Perspectives, 193-212.

Edited by Elliot Deutsch. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1991.

Hay, John, Kernels of Energy, Bones of Earth: The Rock in Chinese Art. New York: China House Gallery, 1985.

Keswick, Maggie, and Charles Jencks. The Chinese Garden: History, Art & Architecture. London: Academy Editions, 1978.

Liu, Dunzhen. Suzhou gudian yuanlin. Beijing : Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe, 1979.

yuxin qiu

Suzhou Gardens of China Eileen Gray’s E1027 in Roquebrune Le Corbusier’s murals in E1027

to start Several assumptions underlying the present paper need be clarified.

1 Essentialism versus cultural relevance: garden practice has plural meanings. The classical Chinese garden came to prominence through the expansion of garden culture in the latter half of Ming Dynasty (sixteenth to seventeenth centuries). I inherit the historical consensus and situate Suzhou gardens under a broader framework of classical Chinese thought — meaning is imbricated in specific material appearance. I draw on literature from both east and west to avoid the pitfalls of essentialism and cultural segregation.

2 Archeological recovery versus status quo analysis: investigation of the present garden condition is a different task from the archeological recovery of its historic layouts and transformations. What one sees today in Suzhou gardens includes a great deal of Qing and even more recent alternations, not the initial configurations. Instead of pointing out the design intentions for specific features in original garden making activities, I reveal the cognate sensibilities inherent in the classical Chinese garden as a practice pertinent to the modern discipline of architecture and landscape architecture.

3 Lived experience versus objectified images: photographs are the objectification of a subjective vision and are, ultimately, only the approximation of the lived experience. Keenly aware of the disjunction between the two, my work — theoretical articulation based on visual material — presents photographs with the advantage of pointing to nuanced details in concrete situations.

As can be seen here, observation of the details of architecture has to cope with a mutable, shifting, ambiguous, weather-inflected environment. A photograph stills this moving complextiy for a moment, so that we can think about this moment deeply, visually, intellectually, and then return to the complexity that is any architectural space.

Mostafavi, Mohsen, and David Leatherbarrow. On Weathering: The Life of Buildings in Time. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. The World of Perception. London; New York: Routledge, 2004.

Munakata, Kiyohiko. ‘Mysterious Heavens and Chinese Classical Gardens’ RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, no. 15 (1988): 61-88.

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, and Donald A. Landes.

Phenomenology of Perception. Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2012.

Pérez Gómez, Alberto, and Louise Pelletier. Architectural Representation and the Perspective Hinge. Cambridge: MIT Press, 1997.

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‘All things are born of being, Being is born of non-being.’2 ‘Something substantial can be beneficial while the emptiness of void is what can be utilised.’3 — Lao Tzu, Tao. Te King

rock Rock as an aesthetic artefact is of unique importance to Suzhou gardens. Despite the presence of gigantic and complex assemblages of rocks known as jia shan (false mountain), it is the single boulder, small but sophisticated, known as Taihu shi (the rock of the Great Lake) that deserves particular attention here.

Taihu shi, taken from deep riverbeds, bears little trace of human craft and is revered for its primitive presence. Years of attrition and corrosion in water have chiselled it to be porous and foraminate. Then it is shaped to be even more grotesque, more tortured. Appearing dull, blunt and artless, Taihu shi are nowhere near a piece of art, however, in the cramped space of Suzhou gardens, Taihu shi usually occupies a dominant place, disproportionate to its clumsy appearance. Its particular setting is against a whitewashed wall. (Figure 1) To understand this primal rock’s aesthetic importance one must consider its combinative appearance with the colour white. It is apparent that a white wall accentuates a rock’s presence – a typical figure-ground relation.The mute white wall is the context and precondition for the emergence of the rock which obtrudes itself as a single piece with object-like visibility. The white wall sets up a stage, provides a clear field where one’s gaze, patrolling in freedom, searching

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The view out of the window of the Chamber of ladder cloud. A Taihu shi, gnarled and crude is placed in front of a white stuccoed wall. Hua bu xiao zhu (A little structure of splendor steps) Image taken from From Liu, Dunzhen. Suzhou gudian yuanlin, Beijing : Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe,1979. p355

for objects, lingers near the rock. Awareness accumulates and intensifies, gradually evolving into mature consciousness and then into intentional attentiveness. The observer turns from looking for the rock to looking at it. The rock is crystallised as a figure, springing forth from its ground.

The rock as a piece of art is not self-sustained, its meaning relies on its context. The favour that the white wall does the rock lies not only in the receiving and conveying of light, but also in modulating and modifying the nearby milieu inside the garden. In the midst of a jarring juxtaposition of diversities, it is too easy for the rock to disappear. Think it otherwise, without its white backdrop the rock would be engulfed by contesting and combating elements in the garden, submerged under arrays of materials vying for attention. Whiteness cools down the clamouring swarm of items and provides an interval, a breathing space. It establishes a realm of emptiness; it produces a lacuna: what is true of the rock is revealed, made sense of.

As ground in the figure-ground relationship, the wall is anonymous, unremarkable and unknown, but that does not mean it is without meaning; the wall is a latent and tacit presence.

Whiteness is not emptiness as void, vacuum or nothingness, but the inverse and the complement

of substance. The reality of the rock is not to be found only in the its substance but also in the vacancy of the whiteness enclosing the rock. The rock against the wall registers as art, a field to be surveyed, a realm of investigation.

In traditional Chinese culture, rock is endowed with abundant metaphysical connotations that almost promote it to a religious icon.

There are plenty of folk tales, imaginaries and mythologies related to rock; connoisseurship of rock is a faculty of knowledge called rock lore.

Symbolic meanings are at once immediate and delayed. They originate from perceptual and sensual engagement with the world, while at the same time going beyond, channelling upward to the transcendental realm and inward to an intellectual, reflective realm.

Whiteness, I contend, has a critical role in generating the rock’s symbolic values, elevating perceptual, visual reality into higher levels of spiritual, conceptual experience. On one hand, the white wall occludes the objects nearby and puts the rock in an unknown context. Rock emerges purified and stands in solitude, a single piece of rock and nothing more. now detached, it must be understood anew. On the other hand, whiteness replaces familiar, concrete, surrounding objects with more abstract, remote and unpredictable conditions. Principally it

focalises sunlight into its opposite, shadow; it registers the behaviour of light with rock and records their interaction. Light alters the relationship in unforeseeable ways, the rock becomes mysterious, the mundane and familiar become enigmatic and exceptional. The rock never discloses itself completely, nor does it stand out in full clarity. On the body of the rock, there is hardly any clear point on which to focus, stable edge to hold, or fixed margin to capture. Part of the rock is unseen and refuses to be configured. Its scale loses certitude, its size becomes indefinite, zooming in and out without any precision. Such indeterminacy prompts fertile imagination, arouses conjectural creation and stimulates speculative thinking. Rock’s embroiled volumes are like mountain ranges swathed in clouds, its tiers of outlines like peaks drifting in the mist. The rock in front of me grows into a microcosm teeming with plenitudes of the universe. It is a passageway accessible to the splendorous realm of otherworld. The single gesture that installs a rock against a white wall sets it off as a work of art. And whiteness, by partaking in this mechanism, presents itself as a part of the work of art.

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bamboo Although Suzhou gardens never run short of rare species, the most significant ones are still the traditional, classical and most common, without remarkable form, colour or scent. Bamboo, the symbol of the true Confucian gentleman, carries such significant metaphoric and allusive meaning as to be a privileged garden species, outweighing the more exotic, novel and luxurious.

Bamboo has straight slender stalks; the distance between each stalk joint grows longer with the height, evoking a gentleman’s moral trait of uprightness and habit of constant improvement. Bamboo’s hollow interior is associated with a predilection to be humble and modest, open-minded and eager to learn. These physical characteristics – the straight-up stem, the perpendicular disposition and the graceful clusters of foliage – are emphasised when bamboo is installed against the whitewashed wall, a typified configuration of its presence in the garden.

Unlike rock, bamboo and whiteness do not shape a clear relationship of figure and ground but instead cultivate a more close-knit alliance.

Sunlight penetrates bamboo’s waving foliage, casting its silhouette onto a whitewashed wall.

Dappled shade twists together light and dark in rhythmic play across the surface. There is a vast territory of grey between emerald bamboo and the pale white wall, a mingling of bamboo, whiteness and the sprinkling lighting effect that mediates the opposition between them.

The pattern of foliage bears great resemblance to its shade. It is even uncertain whether the white surface continues behind the bamboo, or whether the bamboo is a self-contained object in front of the wall. Unlike the static boulder, bamboo is always on the move with the soughing wind. Its leaves rustle in the air, and the stalks bow in the breeze, its shadow shimmers and glimmers, echoing bamboo’s shifting movement.

Distinction is almost indiscernible; the result is the vibration of their boundary and trespassing of their edge. Bamboo dissolves into whiteness while whiteness integrates with bamboo.

Both abandon their sovereignty and become a continuity and totality to be perceived as a whole.

Once encountering this entwinement, how does perception precipitate the bamboo?

How does it make use of this primordial phenomenon? What appears in vision is a patch of texture, a pattern of organisation, a particular arrangement. Each region of the white surface consists of something recurring but possesses its own specific shape, similar to the entire field but never precisely the same. Eyesight surveys and examines each part of the terrain as it glides and sails over it, capturing something kindred and cognate as the characteristic of bamboo. It is a model identified to be the idea of bamboo, which then leads to further exploration of other regions.

Since there are always new areas to be opened up and latent figures to be verified, the performance 42

Image taken from From Liu, Dunzhen. Suzhou gudian yuanlin.

Beijing: Zhongguo jianzhu gongye chubanshe,1979. p355

of my discovery continually renews and repeats.

Perception is the clarification progress and the intervention sequence. What is discovered is always inadequate and what is captured has to be tested again. Meaning fulfils as long as one discovers. It is never formed once and for all, rather it is an in-between status of being and becoming. It is a project that is inexhaustible, a steady effort of acting and reacting, creating and recreating. The sense of bamboo sharpens spontaneously in the progression of this conduct. Alternation between capturing and letting go, getting to know and remaining unknown switches between immanence and transcendence, a process in which symbolic meaning is polished and refined into fullness.

Bamboo is extracted from sensible stimuli into shape and form, honing a purified identity out of primordial materiality. Bamboo is finally established as a metaphysical Xiang, or iconic image, for gentleman spirit.

The whitewashed wall bolsters this process and is caught up in it. Without a clear-cut figure and ground, the relation between bamboo and the wall is better described as adoption or abiding. Firstly, whiteness contrasts with bamboo to set it off. It collects bamboo’s dancing fragments and puts together its fine particles, tempering them to a concordance. In a certain sense, the white surface presents a similar configuration to the garden’s first glance, both accommodating diversity and variances while maintaining their harmony and coherence.

Secondly, the white wall provides an abode with vacancy. It allows the bamboo to reside and repose in its shelter and initiates a sort of reliance or adhesion, restraining bamboo’s autonomy and freedom. The effect is in alternation between repulse and embrace, separating and reuniting, concealing and revealing. The white wall sustains a certain sort of constant visible pattern, while

retaining a certain degree of its opacity. It is a horizon fertile but impenetrable, rich but elusive, this its most energetic and creative state. Impossible to unravel analytically or treat objectively, whiteness is a unified field already pregnant with meaning and the expectation of sense. The white wall reveals the bamboo but acknowledges the limitation, without overdoing or forcing anything too soon. It is the prolonging of finality, delaying of the definite result, and a deference of completion. It is in no sense passive or inactive, but full of preparedness and resolution. Whiteness is a beckoning gesture and an attitude of patience and releasing. It is a domain of opportunity and possibility, an open territory prepared for appearing. It unfolds itself and won’t be used up, turning into a variety of concrete shapes that points to a unified mode.

Any representational figuration of bamboo is only a contingent happening and provisional encountering subsumed by the revealing capacity of whiteness. The white surface is a given task, and an inexhaustible one, bringing with it the investigation process that is also infinite.

Inexhaustible as it is, the task traces back to the palpable interweaving of whiteness and bamboo, which approximates it towards an iconic image in collective cultural memory.

Though Suzhou gardens exhibit close intimacy to the natural world, whiteness intervenes and differentiates nature, and gives it new values.

Whiteness places nature into various segments of the same spectrum and formulates a gradation of clarity. Whiteness reveals and conceals, discloses and occludes, highlights and omits, and fills in while wiping out something. The effect is articulation and, by this articulation, whiteness makes nature a work of art while simultaneously allowing itself, an unremarkable material, to be part of the remarkable artwork.

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Eileen Gray, E.1027, 1926-29.

Roquebrune-Cap-Martin, AlpesMaritimes, France. from ‘Maison en bord de mer’.

L’Architecture Vivante, editor Jean Badovicci. Hiver MCMXXIX, Éditions Albert Morancé.

ever yday life I now wish to turn to a case in a different and distinct cultural context, within the heart of the early twentieth century modern architecture movement. The swerving of direction explores the kinds of issues that can be raised and what types of insight can be sparked through a crosscultural comparison of similar white material.

Completed in 1929, E.1027 is the first and most significant architectural work of Eileen Gray, an Anglo-Irish emigrant to France. Despite her close engagement with the celebrated architectural circle in Paris during the 1910s and early 1920s, Gray has been long-overlooked and E.1027 has experienced many vicissitudes. Although the house survived the great peril of the Second World War, Eileen Gray’s authorship to it is continually threatened, and much of the specially designed furniture in the house has been lost with changes of ownership.

Eileen Gray used her own work to make the inattentive traces of human habits visibly apparent. She cared about human life. The main subject of her designs is always the living human being: ‘Life, the sense of life, is my inspiration’.

She built for the human body, attempting to nurture an equilibrium and balance all its parts.

These conceptions were fully embodied in her furniture designs, expanding and growing into the architectural scale of E.1027. Understanding that the nature of human life is constituted out of habits and saturated with instinctive attitudes (‘the world is full of living allusions, living symmetries, hard to find, but real’), she spoke of dwelling as a living organism’... ‘a building is an emanation of some continuous life force, a romantic idea in which nature seems to manifest itself.’ She developed a conscious distinction between two types of work (one retreats back into practical life and the other stands out

as a flaunting object) aiming for a balance between the aesthetic and the practical where art establishes contact with unremarkable daily life. Art retreats into latency, but still functions as a fertile and suggestive field: ‘every work of art is symbolic. It conveys, it suggests the essential rather than representing it.’ The flat white concrete walls that comprise E.1027 parallels the white walls of the Suzhou gardens. They are both latent and active; their practical role is to define and reveal the complex array of everyday life in front of them.

Hand in hand with Eileen Gray’s passion for the practical arts is her awareness of the peril of the spectacular object that requires a detached regard from a certain optimum distance, a matter of creating a look that captures attention. This eagerness for view, for aspect, was denounced

by Gray: ‘We must mistrust merely pictorial elements if they are not assimilated by instinct. ...The interior plan should not be the incidental result of the façade.’ To understand art and architecture as an object to be seen, intellectual rationale and reflective judgments must be applied, while pre-reflective knowledge and experience are diminished or marginalised: ‘The poverty of modern architecture stems from the atrophy of sensuality.’ Wanting to ‘make some reality penetrate [modern architecture’s] abstraction’ she held onto to a more sustainable, durable level of manifestation, a foundational and ground substrate pertaining to its primordial and inner emanation out of life.

This brings us to Le Corbusier’s 1938 murals inside the house, painted a decade after Eileen Gray abandoned E.1027 to Jean Badovicci, her partner in the late 1920s when the house was built. At the first glance Le Corbusier’s murals are also about everyday life, but in a much

more visible and clearly defined way – they are self-contained and theoretically eternal. This clamorous art demands a dramatically different manner of reading. Lines, dots, black white, everything is clear cut and geometrical. They are meant to be intellectually valid, an ideal and unambiguous status that seizes attention, eclipsing any possibility of mistaken distraction.

They are meant to stand apart from their surroundings, and to be seen in their own right — a work that bears an author’s signature.

As a monumental artistic work, the fresco stands out in this context risking the cohesive existence of tacit order. It concentrates on the thing itself, and occludes the surrounding world, darkening the very horizon on which the work of art is standing. It shall be noted that beyond the individual work itself, there is always a broader setting from which the art emerges. Under this condition, the white wall is conceived distinctively, intending to be a smooth, unified, plain and flat surface stripping off all its detail, cleansing of all darkness and disavowing any contamination. This is exactly part of Corbusier’s discourse on whiteness. He spoke of whiteness as ‘allowing the outline of things to stand out from the background’, a sort of X-ray beauty with supreme transparency. He believed that pure and immaculate white surface signifies an ideal status of completion, so that the truthful art of architecture – the interplay of volumes and masses – can be brought to light.

In short, the contrast between Eileen Gray’s white and Le Corbusier’s white embodies two paradoxical attitudes towards art, Le Corbusier’s is representative and obtrusive, Gray’s is more submissive and attuned.

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Le Corbusier mural, Les Trois Femmes, also known as Sgraffite, on the wall of the covered terrace defined by the pilotis of Eileen Gray’s house E1027, in Roquebrune, France.

Photograph by J-P Rayon, shows damage caused by its use as target practice in 1943.

Reédition, L’Architecture vivante, Da Capo Press, New York, c 1975

presentation and representation Le Corbusier’s claimed his murals to be ‘pictorial inventions that animate the house’. Entrez Lentement, one such mural is intensely garish and exaggerated, not without certain sense of sexual provocation. However, it is Les Trois Femmes, above, that I wish to discuss: the original whitewashed wall was kept largely intact. The mural was executed with simple and finely curved ink lines, tracing out the profile of two major figures, naked and posturing in an intertwining manner. This is a delicate and light touch painting for Le Corbusier, but still strong enough to stand out as a conspicuous work of art. Here I am less interested in speculating the meaning of Corbusier’s invention, or commenting on Eileen Gray’s indignation at these acts of vandalism, instead I concentrate on what and how the coming of the fresco alters and revises the ambient situation.

Let’s take a few step back away from the fresco and allow for a more inclusive vision of its spatial conditions. Situated at the border of interior and exterior, this is the place where the garden flows into the structure of the building, where the outside and inside unifies into one world.

The arrangement is unsymmetrical, with no identifiable building façade facing outward, an expression less of formal composition, more of an oblique and incidental collection of structures.

They post an opening gesture towards nature and welcome it as a filling of an inner blankness.

The white wall without the fresco would offer a setting more taciturn, still and composed, better prepared for taking on additional loads. Without

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the fresco it would be vigorous and energetic with potential, a mute surface favourable to the reverberation of nature, each complementing one another in a perfect way. Nature, a realm of display and performance, is made lucid and apparent. Before the advent of these frescos, the scene reminds us of the whiteness in Suzhou gardens.

One not only reads in whiteness the articulation and accumulation of nature, more significantly perhaps, it reveals the history of the architecture and its associated human life.

On stepping closer, one can read on the surface its own stories, inscriptions and disclosures expressed in its materiality. Witnessing wartime shootings, the surface is riddled with tiny cracks and dents. The abrasions and erosions are not only subtractions, but also add extra layers of historical depth. Simultaneous with deterioration is accumulation. Dirt, ash, stain, soot, grime, layers of residual substances accumulate on the bumpy surface, covering up the remote past and enabling renewals of the present. Both the subtractions and recollections give to the white plane the thickness of time — a palpable chronicle. Inscribed on the surface are also traces of human actions. The paint that abrades non-uniformly, the sockets that droop down to different heights, the buckets embarrassedly installed at the foot of the wall, all are tiny but significant gestures suggesting the signs of daily usage. Everyday life is prosaic, mundane and customary, repeating itself like the stream passing across the stone, carrying along in a

river of time, but hardly leaving any conspicuous marks. The conduct of people cannot be more familiar, but remains outside awareness exactly because of its universal acquaintance. As the principal constituent of reality, meanings are equivocal, but can hardly be rendered in an objective way. Flows of domestic activities call for a rightful claim, patterns of daily affairs need a material testimony. It is the very whiteness of surface here that configures culturally constituted behaviour, furnishing it with visible and discernible forms, a reservoir of concrete and typical dwelling practices.

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from the top: Looking westward from outside the courtyard of Hua bu xiao zhu (A little structure of splendor steps) in Liu yuan (Garden of lingering). From Fung, Stanislaus, Liu, Shida, Sun Yu. ‘Aperspectival effects in the Liu Yuan, Suzhou’, Architectural Journal no. 568 (2016), p38 Eileen Gray et Jean Badovici, E.1027 Au Cap Martin Roquebrune, 1926-29. Original caption from ‘Maison en bord de mer’. L’Architecture Vivante. Hiver MCMXXIX, Éditions Albert Morancé

remarks In Chinese garden, whiteness articulates nature.

As a human work, it augments and enriches the reality in nature by bringing forth what has been previously latent there, presenting the anonymous occurrences of natural existence that otherwise may not thrive or be accessible. It allows nature to manifest itself.

Eileen Gray’s whiteness, in addition to the articulation of nature that resembles the condition in Suzhou garden, has the alternative function of interweaving – the crucial and incessant exchange and reciprocity – of the practicalities of everyday life. These migrations and drifts are more intense than those happening in Suzhou gardens. The outcome is a harmony and equilibrium between whiteness and its surrounding milieu; less a one-off acquisition and more a mutual modification and modulation that is to be maintained and renewed.

Despite different cultural backgrounds, the Suzhou garden and E1027 have similarities. The colourless, austere and insignificant appearance of white is not spectacular, but is, rather, acknowledgement of limitations. It calls on the reality of existence with a patience for the appeal of the horizon, without forcing anything too soon. It is an attitude of waiting, delaying finality and definite result, the sense of release and inaction. Corbusier considers whiteness as a field for elaboration, thus drawing a well-worn distinction between art and nature, between upcoming and pre-existing. Standing out as a pictorial representation, it is certain of its power in a wider range of prosaic and everyday affairs. Eileen Gray shows more delicate sense of awareness, returning to the mundane world, seeking transcendence from the secular realm.

The departure between them is the difference between responsibility and awareness, the former a professional manner of speaking, the latter a pre-professional habit of listening and appealing. n

Eileen Gray, architect; Le Corbusier, mural. E.1027, view of the reconstructed built-in writing cabinet, 2016

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The power of the material object j o n at h a n v e n t u r a

the political potential of everyday objects

the semiotics of a politicised space The Great Exhibition of 1851 in London was a huge success, proclaiming the power of the British Empire through a plethora of designed objects that seemed, to some, to herald an age of machines and the negation of nature and beauty.1 In many ways the Great Exhibition revealed a schism between two factions of design: one that favoured narrative decorative design and one that proposed functional design. This deep and meaningful schism echoed throughout the next 160 years, resurfacing again and again. The transition from Art Nouveau to mass-produced products can be traced through the works of the English textile designer William Morris (1834– 1896), the Scottish designer Christopher Dresser (1834–1904), the Irish architect and furniture designer Eileen Gray (1878–1976), and the American industrial designer Raymond Loewy (1893–1986).

By the mid-1960s, the Ulm school of design, based on Bauhaus principles and typical of this schismatic ideological dilemma within design discourse, was split between Max Bill who favoured a functionalist market approach and Tomas Maldonado who argued for ethics as a basis for design. This is a moment worth further examination as it is still the current reality designers find themselves in.

The political potential of objects and the danger in their use relies on the innate nature of politics, the various norms inherent in everyday objects, not the one-off or design art pieces.2 In an unapologetic example, being offered a pink laptop because you are a woman is ten times more dangerous than viewing a table designed to represent the latest episode in a current war zone.

As design professionals of all disciplines deal with daily life in all its complexities, they cannot afford to deal solely with either aesthetics or function but must take into consideration sociocultural context as well. I wish to present here three adjunct and congruent themes that address the political power of objects as used in a particular political context: the commodity situation, the hermeneutic situation, and the design situation. The common denominator is the ability and the need of designers to assume the role of cultural interpreters.

1 Jeffrey A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999 2 Paul Betts, The Authority of Everyday Objects: A Cultural History of West German Industrial Design. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004

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S ha r on Da nz i g

Muslim prayer in an unrecognised Bedouin settlement

1 commodity situations The dialogue between objects and the spaces in which they are situated is enticing for semioticians and political researchers alike.

Boundaries erected to mark and create material delimitations can be found all around us. It is not only the walls, barriers, and fences of policy makers and urban planners that create this seemingly endless array of spatial partitioning however, the actions of individuals within those spaces can also manifest innate, personalised rebellions against official boundaries. Situating an ordinary and nonpolitical object within a specific spatial context can become a political statement, imbuing the users of that object with symbolic power. For instance, above, when Bedouins hold prayer in areas where Israeli authorities have removed ‘illegal’ settlements, this can constitute an act of a spontaneous and rebellious nature. Their devotions and the placement of their prayer carpets in this specific context shift the balance of power, even minutely, by reframing the boundaries of the space.

The Cave of the Patriarchs, right, is a place in which a continuous dialogue regarding the process of designing spaces through a complex choreography of objects occurs. The placement and reorganisation of objects in these spaces create a situation in which the actual users (Muslim and Jewish believers) manifest their needs vis-à-vis the constraints presented by Israeli authorities. The unique attributes of this place therefore lie not only in its geopolitical reality but also in the possibilities and situations created and maintained by the believers’ evershifting status quo.

An almost freestyle arrangement of plastic monobloc chairs outlines and maintains the temporal territory of the women’s section during a Jewish exception in an area of the Cave of the

Patriarchs / Ibrahimi Mosque that is used daily as a mosque.3 The banality of the chairs renders those women’s actions more powerful, almost negating the chairs’ design in favour of their occupation of space. While most of the chairs are vacant, their multitude in such a small place emphasises their existence as objects that take up space. In other words, the design of the situation, not the object itself, imbues the users’ action with meaning and a new ideology.

O r e n S a gi v

3 The Status Quo of 1994 addressed the arrangements for sharing the site between Jews and Muslims. To prevent friction between the two religions, the cave is split into two hermetic sections: Jewish and Muslim.

For twenty days a year, however, on special religious holidays and for twenty-four hours each time, one of the faiths takes control of the whole compound. These days are called Jewish or Muslim exceptions.

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(d)

Chairs and screens (3) The cave contains plastic chairs and folding chairs, which Jewish worshippers move into the chambers as required, but since they do not always return them after use, the soldiers are responsible for returning them. . . . (g) Candle pedestal A candle pedestal is situated in the inner court, adjacent to the Abraham Hall. Lighting candles in any other place save on the pedestal is forbidden.

— Shamgar Report, section 3G

 Apart from its various decrees, the Shamgar Report of 1994 following the Commission of Inquiry of the massacre at the Tomb of the Patriarchs in Hebron, holds fascinating detailed accounts of the locations of various objects in situ and their relation to the delicate religious balance between Palestinians and Jews. On the occasion of the exceptions, the entire Cave of the Patriarchs is transformed into an exclusively Jewish or Muslim space solely through the repositioning of objects. The excerpt of the report, above, demonstrates how the most basic monobloc plastic chair (as well as the simple action of lighting a candle) in a religio-political space becomes a manifestation of a politicised context and the way a designed object serves to ‘discipline’ one’s actions, to use Michel Foucault’s terms.3 In the context of the Cave of the Patriarchs, objects such as the monobloc plastic chairs seem so mundane, inconspicuous and undesigned that one might describe them as transparent.

Such objects serve a cultural transparency that highlights the political control of the space.

Oren Sag iv

Isaac Hall of the Ibrahimi Mosque/Cave of the Patriarchs.

Men’s section, above, and Women’s section, facing, during Jewish exception.

3 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Vintage, 2012

Arjun Appadurai uses the phrase ‘commodity situation’ to describe the situation in which this transparent chair (usually white yet on occasion black), its material (polypropylene), production technology (monobloc), function (stackable and lightweight) and low cost, collectively becomes what Roland Barthes calls a myth.4 Its inconspicuous ubiquity and global circulation make it ideal for creating boundaries, politicising a space and maintaining buffers between conflicting communities. Indeed, one can see from this excerpt from the Shamgar Report that even from the dry and pragmatic perspective of policy makers, the material potential of monobloc chairs is obvious. Their banality of use and low monetary value belie their sociopolitical function. (v)

Treading on carpets (1) The carpets have the status of religious objects for Muslims, and treading on them with shoes is forbidden. . . .

(3) In the corner of the women’s mosque is a footprint attributed to Adam, which can be accessed only by treading on the carpet. This is not encouraged, and anyone who requests access is required to remove their shoes.

— Shamgar Report, section 3G

2 hermeneutic situations Contrary to the banal potential of spatial conquest by monobloc chairs, candles used by a Greek Orthodox woman to celebrate the Assumption of Mary, below, allude to a different type of action. Rather than serving a political and aggressive purpose, this woman reallocates space in the glorification of the Virgin. The stairs are transformed from their earthly function into a sacred site. This almost spontaneous act of piety creates a bond between the personal devotion of the woman and that of her community, which attests to their shared faith. The significance of her action is derived not only from the objects and the space in which they are situated but also from her community’s mutually agreed-upon interpretation of what her action with these objects in this space means.

J o n ath an Ve n tu ra

In Agatha Christie’s 1926 novel The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, the repositioning of an armchair helps the detective Hercule Poirot solve a seemingly impossible murder case. And indeed the relation between a mundane object and a certain space standing in a specified sociocultural context imbues the object with an added layer of meaning. In a similar fashion, the forensics of space in the Cave of the Patriarchs, as described in the Shamgar Report, transforms a simple carpet into an explosive material manifestation of an intricate situation governed by the various religious factions and political agencies managing the site. Both examples demonstrate a transition from the simple semiotics of space and objects into the more complex venue of design hermeneutics.

The practice of design can be understood as the movement of a complete structure or configuration and its various parts –– an act of innovative translation to an existing part of a structural language. Daniel Dahlstrom’s model of the hermeneutic quadrangle illustrates this perspective, describing language as composed of four elements: the author (or designer), the text (object), the meaning (function and use of the object), and the audience (end users).5 In this model meaning is created through a shared interpretation or a dialogue between the author and the reader.

The constant creation of space in the Cave of the Patriarchs through the use and repositioning of objects, fosters an ever-fluid yet stern hermeneutic situation. The situation in which some objects are constantly in motion (carpets and chairs) while others are strictly static helps authorities politicise and control the various spaces of the cave. In this respect the act of unfurling the carpets uproots space from Jewish hands and transfers it to Muslim hands. This seemingly simple gesture creates a different hermeneutic situation with a nonpolitical object at its core. Again, the interpretative possibilities stem not from the design of the object but rather from its use by the various design partners.

Harnessing hermeneutics, or interpretation, to situate a scene in which we find a designed space imbued with various designed objects gives us a more complex understanding of what happens in this unique site. Using mundane objects such as lamps, stands, monobloc chairs, and carpets, the two religious groups define this religious space vis-à-vis the all-seeing eye of the military panopticon. The redefinition of space through design and the use of designed objects in the Cave of the Patriarchs create a ‘complex system of enclaves within enclaves, each characterised by its own set of objects’.6

Lighting candles on the Feast of the Assumption of Mary into Heaven, August 15, 2005, Gethsemane, Jerusalem.

4 Arjun Appadurai, ‘Introduction: Commodities and the Politics of Value’, in The Social Life of Things: Commodities in Cultural Perspective, ed. Arjun Appadurai Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988

5 Daniel Dahlstrom, ‘Language and Meaning’ in The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander. Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2015, pp. 277–86

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Be it the Muslim enclave with its carpets or the Jewish enclave with its monobloc chairs and prayer stands, both are situated within a larger enclave that is the Cave of the Patriarchs itself.

The typified objects used to define these enclaves bolster a unique characteristic—they are, in fact, flexible enclaves. The exceptional condition of the cave is evident through a meticulous decoding of its enclaves, each characterised by a different visual and material language. An image of the Jewish enclave devoid of chairs, scattered prayer stands, below, manifest the occupation of space. In contrast to the monobloc chair, these stands are not inconspicuous to the point of transparency – they emanate a Jewish air of erudition. Conversely, but in a way that strengthens the forensic argument, the Muslim enclave, highly guarded by Israeli soldiers (sitting on black monobloc chairs), is surrounded by police fences. Even more convincing is the heap of carpets: effectively two-dimensional in their conventional use, here they appear with a three-dimensional bulk, as if attesting to the unusual situation in which they are found. While militarised in nature, the layers of these variable enclaves enable the actual users of these spaces to empower their stance through spatial design.

This complex dialogue between the statutory agents (planners, government representatives, and military and police forces) and the religious believers praying in this intricate site imbues this controlled space with Jürgen Habermas’s concept of the public sphere.7 Mundane objects, in their complex nature, serve an active role in negotiating, defining, and maintaining flexible and temporal spatial boundaries.

Soldiers arranging monobloc chairs near the Western Wall for an upcoming ceremony.

I fa t F i nk e l m a n

(f) The cavern furniture and equipment The governorate is responsible for the cavern’s furniture. All the existing furniture is the governorate’s property. Bringing furniture onto the premises without the governorate’s permission is forbidden.

— Shamgar Report, section 3G

3 design situations: significant transparency

I fat F inkel man

Border police guarding an enclave of mundane objects in the Men’s Section during a Jewish exception: the Isaac Hall, the Cave of the Patriarchs/Ibrahimi Mosque.

6 Mary Douglas, ‘A History of Grid and Group Cultural Theory’. Lecture, University of Toronto, 2007 http://projects.chass.utoronto. ca/semiotics/cyber/ douglas1.pdf 7 Jürgen Habermas, “Religion in the Public Sphere,” European Journal of Philosophy 14, no. 1 (2006), pp. 1–25 8 Jonathan Ventura, “Design Situation,” in The Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Design, ed. Clive Edwards, online edition, forthcoming.

9 Guy Debord, ‘The Situationists and the New Forms of Action in Politics or Art’ [1963], trans. Thomas Y. Levin, in Guy Debord and the Situationist International: Texts and Documents, ed. Tom McDonough. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002. p 159

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Following Gadamer’s concept of the hermeneutic situation and highlighting the role of the designers of space, one might consider the circumstances of the Cave of the Patriarchs as ‘a design situation’8 — a reframing of a design action through the use and interpretation of the various design partners. Muslim or Jewish believers use objects vis-à-vis their presence in temporal and ever-changing spaces to take a stand against each other while all along maintaining a complex choreography mirroring that of Israeli government agencies. This complex dance mirrors people’s actions reflected through mundane objects, themselves devoid of such capacity.

The complex rearrangement of space at the Cave of the Patriarchs echoes the agenda of thinkers trying to tackle politicised urban space,

such as Guy Debord and Michel de Certeau. As part of the Situationist movement (1957–72), Debord encouraged urban citizens to reflect and understand the place and functions of the city in their lives: ‘Despite occasional differences in its ideological and juridical disguises, it is one and the same society—marked by alienation, totalitarian control, and passive spectacular consumption—that predominates everywhere.

One cannot understand the coherence of this society without an all-encompassing critique informed by the opposing project of a liberated creativity, that is, the project of the dominion of all men over their own history at all levels.’9 Debord identifies the potential of individual use in an urban setting, yet at the Cave the potential of this use is much greater — much

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less dramatic and rather mundane survival, but nonetheless is an action, taken against politicising the space, by the people as a collective, rather than as individuals. Actions, through mundane daily objects (monobloc chairs and carpets), occupy spaces, externalise power, and manifest ideological stances.

Henri Lefebvre wrote of the production of space vis-à-vis the rule of the city: the production of urban spaces is not natural but is a result of a carefully mediated economic, sociocultural and political process. His description is almost an exact depiction of the complex material choreography characteristic of the Cave: ‘From the start of an activity so oriented towards an objective, spatial elements—the body, limbs, eyes—are mobilised, including both materials (stone, wood, bone, leather, etc.) and matériel (tools, arms, language, instructions and agendas). Relations based on an order to be followed—that is to say, on simultaneity and synchronicity — are thus set up, by means of intellectual activity, between the component elements of the action undertaken on the physical plane. All productive activity is defined less by invariable or constant factors than by the incessant to-and-fro between temporality (succession, concatenation) and spatiality (simultaneity, synchronicity).’10 This complex material and spatial choreography elevates these mere objects, through the myriad actions undertaken by the persons at the cave, into a social space in all its intricacies. What the case of the Cave of the Patriarchs reveals, therefore, is a reversal of the conventional relationship between design professionals and end users, who take on the active role of design partners. These theories could be illustrated further in other sacred sites where the functional use of monobloc chairs, and hence the interpretation of object-space relations, is mutable. While at the Temple Mount/Al-Haram al-Sharif/Al-Aqsa the simple action of defining a space serves as a political and ideological notion of propriety, in the Western Wall Plaza the potential in a pile of mundane monobloc chairs (images on the facing page) can alter the very definition of a public space at any given moment: from a prayer area and a place of devotion to the venue of a civil event, and vice versa.

As per Certeau’s description of the daily acts of mutiny against the control of the urban space over the individual, it is the believers who struggle to define their own spatial identities.

Through the use and placement of objects, such as the mundane and transparent monobloc chairs or the more identified prayer carpets, they occupy and maintain a temporal delineated space. The major act of innovation in this case is derived not from the minds of design professionals but rather from the daily use of transparent or ordinary objects by end users.

Apart from their semiotic attributes, daily objects are used to delineate boundaries. A towel used at the beach to define a boundary

will signal other people that this place is taken.

Mundane objects define boundaries and social groups at the Cave of the Patriarchs in a similar yet much more complex fashion. Mundane (transparent) objects serve in this situation a dual purpose: first, to define and maintain fluid enclaves, shifting hands between the two groups of believers, and second, to occupy temporal territories buffered by material objects.

Interestingly the military, police and other government officials serve as mediators, creating and maintaining this complex choreography of objects.

While relations between space and objects can be found in every interaction of daily life, the Cave of the Patriarchs presents an intricate and complex state of affairs. Policy makers and government officials created a situation in which an ever-explosive reality must be governed by a detailed accounting of daily behaviours; at the same time the people of the cave create and maintain their own realities. As soldiers and police officers maintain the law, within these strict regulations the choreography of material reality allows the believers an amount of freedom. The rearrangement of mundane objects therefore serves not only to take a stand against Israeli lawmakers but also to take an actual stand while claiming dominion within a contested site.

Examining the actions of end users engaging with designed objects in contested sites such as the Cave of the Patriarchs illuminates the complex transformation of a space into a place, or of a ‘non-place’ to a place, to use Marc Augé’s term.11 For Augé people spend their days travelling between liminal, transitional places.

Narrative places or places where the production of space by end users, who assume the sociocultural agency of the designer as material philosopher, can lead to urban political change, minor as it might be at first: ‘Who will be tomorrow’s resisters? All of those who, renouncing neither past history nor history to come, will denounce the ideology of the present in which the image can be a powerful point of relay. All of those creators who, somehow or other preserving the circulation between the individual imagination, the collective imagination and fiction, will not give up incurring the miracle of the encounter. All the dreamers, finally, who are skilful enough to cultivate their own phantasies so that the off-theshelf imagination of the illusionists of the all-fictional becomes an object of private derision.’12 n

10 Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell, 1991. p 71 11 Marc Augé, M. Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity, trans. John Howe. London: Verso, 2008 12 Marc Augé, The War of Dreams: Exercises in Ethno-Fiction, trans. Liz Heron. London: Pluto, 1999. p 120

A version of this essay by Jonathon Ventura first appeared as ‘Just a Monobloc Chair? The Political Potential of Everyday Objects’ in Statu Quo: Structures of Negotiation, editors: Ifat Finkelman, Deborah Pinto Fdeda, Oren Sagiv, Tania Coen-Uzzielli. Berlin: Hatje Cantz Verlag, 2018

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The materiality of architecture is an elusive concept to define, yet one we must identify and articulate. On the surface, it deals with the materials of our built, usually urban, surroundings. However, let us suggest two options to tackle this broad and important issue. The first, is through the lens of semiotic knowledge. Based on interpretation and sociocultural context, this vista views materials as mirroring symbolic meaning. For example, while timber holds various engineering and technical qualities, the cultural difference between ash to the American culture, maple to the Canadian culture and cherry to the Japanese culture are all part of semiotic interpretation. In the same manner, colour is another important attribute, as we can clearly see by the almost automatic connection between red and Ferrari.

A second vista of interpretation relating to the materiality of architecture is what stands in the forefront in this piece – the political potential of materiality in the urban environment. Either to create geo-political boundaries between countries, to marginalise women in religious communities, or to enforce a superiority of one race over another – mundane materials and objects possess tremendous potential. It is this potential that stands at the heart of this piece.

Although rarely discussed, the materiality of architecture is crucial for understanding our daily surroundings. As we have seen in the previous article, in unique cases, like the Tomb of the Patriarchs, the materiality of architecture is closely linked to political cultures and power constructs, influencing the daily lives of everyone while mirrored in the mundane objects comprising these spaces. However, the political possibilities of objects as an inherent part of architecture and the design of urban spaces, is not restricted to these unique instances.

As designers, architects and urban planners find it easier to discuss materiality vis-à-vis the clean façade of semiotic knowledge – i.e., colour, finish and symbolic interpretation – the politics embedded in mundane objects must be considered as an important part of designing urban spaces.

In this epilogue we wish to present several snapshots, that albeit unique to Israeli culture, will hopefully trigger some thoughts in the imagination of everyone. As our world is rapidly changing, currents of cultures and people traversing borders and hateful agendas replace broadmindedness, material boundaries are one more step towards a segregated world.

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epil ogue: boundaries and the material ity of architecture j o n at h a n v e n t u r a s h a ro n da n z i g

instance 1 the materiality of religion As we can see all around us, the materiality of space and architecture can take the form of mundane objects or mere materials. The political potential of these objects lies in their design transparency, enabling an added layer of meaning. In this case, the Eruv string is a simple string circling an urban living quarter.

This religious solution enables the inhabitants to walk around the neighbourhood during Shabbat, while carrying objects. This is needed, since during Shabbat, religious Jews cannot transport objects, such as keys, for fear of violating the laws of Shabbat. T =he materiality of space here serves a dual purpose, it is functional for Jewish believers, while serving as an almost transparent boundary, symbolizing the identity of this space’s inhabitants.

The Eruv is a manifestation of minimizing religious manifestation in the public sphere, since it is clear and present for a specific

community, yet transparent and almost camouflaged for all the rest (secular or from other religions). Since this material manifestation is aesthetically minimalistic and materially transparent in its mundane essence, it is almost of no visual threat. Furthermore, it is not interpreted as a tactic of “religiousizing” the public sphere. On the other hand, albeit its invisible design and mundane materiality (it is hung 5m from the ground and is not considered as a physical barrier or border), the Eruv manifests a clear and uncrossed boundary. considering these attributes, the Eruv is in fact a burden to its community, yet a “light-weight” barrier to every other resident, creating a spatial oxymoron. In many cases, when the string is ruptured by the wind, the Jewish community members are asked not to leave their homes to keep the sanctity of Shabbat.

An Eruv string

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

a l l i m a ge s , S ha r on Da nz i g

instance 2 the materiality of gender The second example testifies to ever-growing gender segregation in various religious spaces around the world. The image was taken at the highly-popular tomb of Rabbi Yonatan ben-Uziel, one of Hillel’s disciples, at Amuka in northern Israel. As ben-Uziel died single, this site has become one of the most popular religious sites dedicated for finding a spouse, and especially so for women. Ben Uziel’s tomb is situated in the heart of the Galilea in a green and lush area.

Women usually climb the tomb’s roof and circle the building’s small dome seven times to find a spouse. Signposts situated in the site’s parking lot greet the visitors, laconically leading men and women to the main site via separate and parallel routes. After a few metres, a tall plastic fence separates the genders completely. The fence ignores the topography and scenery completely, situated according to the whims of local religious representatives. Indeed, as in many cases of spatial materiality, the cheaper the boundary, the more its influence of its surrounding and visitors.

The simplicity and mundane materiality of the fence led to its erection without any advice from professionals (such as architects or engineers) and leads to controlling the visitors de facto under religious supervision. Moreover, the main clients of the site, known for their belief – are women who find themselves excluded from this site through a simple material solution.

In the image we can see a simple wooden pole bearing two signs, indicating the way for men and women pilgrims. The simplicity of the signpost, almost bereft of design, imbues it with an almost territorial ability, imposing normative power on all.

top: A cheap and simple sign reading ‘road for men only’ punctures the mountainous scenery to separate between men and women on their way to Ben-Uziel’s tomb. left: Similar material manifestation in Choni Hame’agel’s tomb below: the neighborhood of Mea She’arim in Jerusalem; temporary walls denoting women’s and men’s domains.

all i mag e s , Sh aro n D an z i g

This simple method can be seen in the ultraorthodox neighborhood of Mea She’arim in Jerusalem. Prior to various holidays (typically before Purim), various fences and separation bridges are erected to separate men and women, thus creating two public spheres – a masculine one and an adjacent feminine one. These simple, cheap borders are easy to erect and disassemble create a deep notion of spatial segregation.

Through these simple boundaries, the local religious leadership maintain a highly efficient material system of controlled navigation through the streets. The graphic language of these borders is simple, clear and immediate, they function almost as an order. The linguistic and material scenery are married together to create a specific message – men and women must not mingle in our public sphere.

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instance 3 the politics of materiality In Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1975), Michel Foucault describes space as a repository of relationships of control. Indeed, the phenomenon of territorial segregation through found materials caught our eyes while conducting ethnographic research in the unrecognised settlements in Abu-Quaf, near Beer-Sheba. Almost every structure was surrounded and almost hermetically sealed by improvised fences. These spatial manifestations were a rather new occurrence. The eclectic choice of materials, their random built tactics and visual manifestation – simple and raw yet appealing and aesthetic – are curious and raise various questions. This material and spatial design, the result of a growing threat of movement, insecurity in their way of life and the institutional pressure to drive the Bedouin population to live in settlements, reveals a creative shift towards segregation and material boundaries. Trying to appropriate, even symbolically, their land, leads local Bedouins to almost camouflage their ancestral land, in the face of growing governmental stress. As a result, past tactics of segregation via natural topography gave way to improvised boundary-building through found and mundane materials such as old car tires, rusted chassis, scrap metals.

We can clearly recognize a material change in the Negev, brought by a clash between local culture and modern political processes. While the Bedouins, princes of free movement of the past, presently prison themselves behind makeshift fences, we can see a growing manifestation of spatial segregation. It seems that the meaningful pressure perpetrated by the government is taking its toll on local land owners, manifested in these instances of materiality. Facing this stress, the Bedouins use a fast, cheap and efficient material solution, manifested in found materials.

from the top: Fence near Tel Sheva in the Negev Sheep pen, west of Za’arura junction in the Negev Border between agricultural fields using car chassis, the Negev

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On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

a l l i m a ge s , S ha r on Da nz i g

The image, right, shows us the importance of temporality when dealing with the materiality of space and architecture. We can see that all the boundaries created in this space, on the northern beach of Tel-Aviv, are indeed temporary in nature.

The run-of-the-mill monobloc chairs could be moved aside and the red-and-white tape taken down. However, to every person passing by it is crystal clear that this space is taken, spokenfor and, therefore, prohibited to use. While seemingly insignificant, this image mirrors a much broader phenomenon gaining popularity in the personal and national spheres – the evergrowing segregation and seclusion of spaces.

This last image was taken during Israel’s Independence Day, manifested, among else by an aerial demonstration of the Israeli Air Force over the country’s coastline. Many spectators arrive and hold their place through a temporal marking of communal territory using a cheap marking tape or string. Every family or group of friends mark their territory, which sometimes include a no-man’s land buffer zone. This occupation of public space functions along the rule of ‘first comes first gets’. Early-arriving representatives mark their borders with light monobloc chairs, creating a three dimensional border. The rest of the group’s gear (tables, food, picnic things) will arrive later in the day with the rest of the group. This example, like the others, highlights another evolution in the tactics of seclusion and segregation of public space through material solutions. While previous examples were centred around institutional agencies, be it governmental or religious, this last example is different. This private occupation of public space manifests a willing, albeit temporal, initiative of individuals for segregation behind flimsy yet symbolic boundaries. Yet, all these examples show us the importance of materiality of space as an ongoing, sometimes violent, dialogue between individuals and institutionalised agencies. n

a l l i m a ge s , S ha r on D a nz i g

from the top: Young man on a horse, El-Araquib A temporary hamlet in El-Araquib in current dispute between the government and local inhabitants Individual segregation in Tel Aviv

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p o s tscr i pt s white

Olinger Architects, Cambridge MA T-Wall Housing Proposal​, Al Querna, Iraq

This is a project that illustrates the potential of using material artefacts, the material culture of war in this case, as the literal foundations for an emergency shelter architecture.

T-walls are the concrete units devised for the West Bank barrier wall in Israel. Different versions are used throughout Iraq and Afghanistan by the US Army: the 1.1m Texas, the 3.7m Bremer, the 6m Alaska. The 1m traffic barrier, Jersey, has sloped edges at the base and is used on highways seemingly everywhere.

In 2012, New World Design, Jeffrey Olinger, Heather Boesch, Darby Foreman and Cliona McKenna (the strategic consultancy group that was reformed in 2016 as Olinger Architects), developed a housing project based on T-walls for Al Querna, Iraq. The Arab Land Group, established in 2003 and headquartered in the UAE to work with the US Army, manufactures the barriers used in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The T-wall unit is both concrete wall and foundation: in this project the units are deployed in parallel in a punctuated grid aligned with wind and against heat gain. Houses are developed between them. A basic L-shaped house unit multiplies to make alleys and courtyards in a number of configurations.

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al l image s o f T- Wall h o u s i n g , I raq: w w w.o li n g e r.i o

The project is simple and subversive. It is useful and uses the defences of war. It is culturally cognisant and based on imperialist debris.

What Olinger has done is to appropriate a form that divides and obstructs, and to de-nature its malevolence as a form by embedding it in the construction of housing. n

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

Jean Dubuffet’s definition of art brut for la Compagnie de L’Art Brut, formed in 1948.

His Collection de l’Art Brut is in Lausanne. www.artbrut.ch/fr_CH/art-brut/qu-est-ce-que-l-art-brut

ON SITE r e v i e w

call fo r a r ti c le s on si te r evi ew 36: o u r mate rial fut ure

Denys Lasdun. Royal College of Physicians, London, 1960

Denys Lasdun felt his best building was the 1960 Royal College of Physicians, set into the Georgian terraces of Regent’s Park, London.

We don’t get this kind of photograph of outside space anymore, noir-ish, uncompromising, heroic, concrete: terraces for the dark life of the soul. The public spaces of modernism were adult spaces. They weren’t spaces of power but of public access, and that was, given the history of European property ownership and display, a serious business in a serious material. Concrete is critical here: no nostalgia, nor sentiment for any past.

There was a time, briefly, in the postwar era, when the future was not tasked with pulling the past, no matter how glorious, into the present.

There had been a rupture; everything was on the move: populations, society, industry, technology: the material language in architecture that responded to this upheaval was a new language.

A similar response occurred in Spain after the end of the Franco regime: the architecture of 1980s Barcelona in particular was unlike anything seen before. These periods are brief.

The future is heady, possibilities are open.

Mourning for the past is done.

We have, right now: habitat loss fierce weather complex diversity political chaos populations on the move What structures, materials and forms will persist, and what needs to be replaced?

This goes way beyond social desires, fears and beliefs: it is a material conversation where beloved tropes such as narrative, identity, myth, textuality – things that have sustained architectural discourse for decades – are luxuries we can not afford right now; they seem irrelevent in the face of both the present and our future.

What will survive? Can we design an architecture for survival that will itself survive?

Is there anything that we see around us now that can guide us?

deadline for proposals: 1 August 2019 use the contact panel at onsitereview.ca

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ON SITE r e v i e w Spring 2019

3 5 : th e materi a l c ulture of arc h i te c t u re contr i b u to r s to t h is i ssu e : Ted Cavanagh and his students worked with seven collaborating universities to design and build four community buildings using advanced wood shell structures (Birkhauser 2019). His research combines design, the history of technology and material culture to discover how knowledge is communicated and how innovation happens. www.dalcoastalstudio.com Andrey Chernykh is a landscape architect and urbanist based in Toronto, Canada. He strives to strengthen connections between people and landscapes they inhabit, through design thinking and the nurturing of ecological systems that support us all. andrey-chernykh.squarespace.com/ Richard Collins trained as an architect and has a particular interest in visual communication, representational methods and model making. He works in a teaching and research workshop, specialising in digital fabrication technologies, at the University of Edinburgh. www.richardcollinsdesign.com Sharon Danzig is an industrial designer who has recently focussed on the study of diverse populations with distinct cultural and design characteristics, such as the Bedouin community, the Ethiopian community and the ultra-Orthodox communities both in Jerusalem and Eastern Europe. He is the co-writer, with Jonathan Ventura and Haim Yacobi, of Fortified Design, the political role of urban design in the transformation of urban and rural, central and peripheral, formal and informal landscapes in Israel.

Nicole Dextras lives in Vancouver BC. Her art practice is rooted in the environmental art movement, where our fragile existence is presented through transformative installations that mark the nature of time.

Dextras has exhibited her work widely in Canada, the USA and in Asia, is much published and has appeared in television programs in Quebec, and will appear later this year on CBC’s The Exhibitionist. www.nicoledextras.com Nigel Green is a photographer, artist and lecturer.

Published projects include Dungeness (Photoworks 2003) and Reconstruction (Diaphane 2010).

Yuxin Qiu, MArch (Post-Professional) in Architecture History and Theory, McGill University. His research centres on two topics, the classical Chinese garden and early modernist architecture, and he is interested in representation and architecture as experience.

Jonathan Ventura is a design anthropologist specialising in healthcare design theories and methodologies. He teaches at the Department of Inclusive Design at Hadassah Academic College in Jerusalem and in the Design Graduate Program at Shenkar - Engineering, Design, Art in Ramat Gan, Israel.

He is a visiting researcher at the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design at the Royal College of Art, London UK. Stephanie White has been the editor of On Site review since its beginning in 1999, and its publisher since 2000.

On Site review is conceived of as a place to think about things, slowly.

Robin Wilson is a critic, curator and lecturer in history and theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London. He is author of Image, Text, Architecture: The Utopics of the Architectural Media (Routledge, 2015). Photolanguage (Nigel Green & Robin Wilson) is a collaborative art practice documenting and reimagining the legacies of modernity in urban and landscape sites.

Photolanguage.info

Cover image: The brick on the cover was scavenged from one of the old Union Bay coke ovens that used to sit crumbling beside the highway on Vancouver Island.

Coke is ‘the solid carbonaceous material derived from the destructive distillation of low-ash, low-sulfur bituminous coal’. Coke burns at a higher temperature than coal, thus its value. It didn’t stay on the island, it was exported by the shipload. Union Bay, owned (as was effectively the whole island) by Robert Dunsmuir, was a company town with a coal mine, a railway line, a wharf, the coke ovens and a coke washer. Labour was imported: Chinese, Indian, Japanese, Scottish. The coal industry was a significant, extensive, disruptive extraction enterprise, connected by water to the rest of the British Empire in all its outlines.

Jeffrey Olinger, AIA, believes that our collective imagination has the power to change the world for the better. Our work is highly collaborative and ranges across all scales from 60 unit perma-culture devlopment in Lincoln, MA (currently under construction) as well as a smart bike rack project with the MIT Climate CoLab called the Flycycle. www.olinger.io

Demolition of the Union Bay coke ovens, May 1968. ©Cumberland Museum and Archives.

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On Site review is published by Field Notes Press, promoting field work in matters architectural, cultural and spatial

On S i t e re v i e w 3 5: the m a te r ia l c ultur e o f a r c hite c tur e

For any and all inquiries:onsitereview.ca/contact-us Canada Post agreement 40042630 ISSN 1481-8280 copyright: On Site review. All rights reserved.

The use of any part of this publication reproduced, transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopied, recorded or otherwise stored in a retrieval system without the prior consent of the publisher is an infringement of Copyright Law Chapter C-30, RSC1988. back issues: issuu.com/onsitereview editor: Stephanie White design: Black Dog Running printer: Emerson Clarke Printing, Calgary distribution: online at issuu.com/onsitereview

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Our Happy Life Architecture and Well-Being in the Age of Emotional Capitalism exhibition 8 May to 13 October 2019

Stefano Graziani, photographer. Helliwell, J., Layard, R., & Sachs, J., World Happiness Report 2018, New York: Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

www.cca.qc.ca

The possibility of tracking emotions is key to the dynamics that control the neoliberal economy and to the ongoing, and often overwhelming, phenomenon of an immaterial and structurally unstable market of “affects.” The exhibition Our Happy Life is a three-act study on the new spatial models founded on the measurement of happiness; including a dissection of the political project behind methods of city data collection and application, an investigation of the emotional component of the real estate market, and a demystification of the idea of social space.

Our Happy Life is a narrative anti-manual which explores and interprets recent paradigms that are shaping our present perception of place, giving new identity to the materials of the private space of our homes, reconceiving our working environments, and transforming development itself through the planning of our cities.

Curator: Francesco Garutti Curatorial team: Irene Chin, Jacqueline Meyer, CCA Exhibition design: Bernard Dubois, Brussels Visual identity: OK-RM, London

Studying the forces that shape and transform human relationships with the environment, Lisa Hirmer’s work spans visual art, social practice, and writing. In We Are Weather, she explores how we recognize and represent environmental change at a moment when the Holocene, a geological era of climate stability, gives way to a new epoch, the Anthropocene, in which humans act as a planet-scale force.

This exhibition examines how we move from simply observing to registering these losses and understanding their accumulating effects.

Curated by Shauna McCabe; text by Elwood Jimmy L i s a H i r me r, Watc h i ng , D u l l Edges (t he nor t her n hemisphere of a 23° 2 7 ’ t i l t) , 2 0 1 7 , p hot og r a p h, 1 6 x 2 4 ”

Lisa Hirmer: We Are Weather January 17 – April 7, 2019

artgalleryofguelph.ca

Multitude, Solitude: The Photographs of Dave Heath Thursday, March 14, 2019 to Monday, September 2, 2019 National Gallery of Canada Canadian Photography Institute Galleries 380 Sussex Drive Ottawa, ON K1N 9N4 Canada www.gallery.ca

Dave Heath, Kansas City, Missouri (detail), 1967.

Gelatin silver print (printed 1968), 18.7 x 27.3 cm. The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri. Gift of the Hall Family Foundation, 2011.67.23. © Howard Greenberg Gallery and Stephen Bulger Gallery.

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the mate ri a l c ult ure of architec t ure 35: 2019