developing form within the material culture of architecture

Stephanie White

The article by Ted Cavanagh, in On Site review 35: the material culture of architecture, 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’ 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 in this issue 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.

Ross Creek lamella under construction, 2010

images: dalcoiastalstudio.com

Camera Obscura, Cheverie, brick shell in construction showing formwork, 2012

images: dalcoiastalstudio.com

Cheticamp Farmers Market, 2014-15, in use 2015

images: dalcoiastalstudio.com

Cape Breton Highlands National Park Pavilion, under construction 2015

images: dalcoiastalstudio.com

All projects, Coastal Studio, Halifax Nova Scotia, a student design-build program under the direction of Ted Cavanagh, the School of Architecture, Dalhousie University.

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.