on site review 43: time

how long does it last?

Brittany Giunchigliani

dust breeding

small slow landscapes

man ray and marcel duchamp

from David Campany’s essay in Singular Images: Micro or macro Dust Breeding resembles, to borrow the French title of another Man Ray image, a terrain vague. It looks like a waste ground or disused area, perhaps the overlooked edge of a city. It is an indoor image alluding to the outside, particularly when titled View from an Aeroplane. Modern Europe saw the terrain vague as a site of anxiety: ‘I will show you fear in a handful of dust’ warned T.S. Eliot in The Wasteland In North America there is more terrain vague than anything else. There, it appears more as a motif of boredom or entropy. Dust has a place in both schemes. It is abject, liminal, bodily stuff that threatens the modern and rational order. It is also a sign of dead time passing.

https://davidcampany.com/dust-breeding-man-ray-1920/

Elévage de Poussière (Dust Breeding) is attributed to Man Ray and Marcel Duchamp, 1920. Image found in Sophie Howarth, editor, of Singular Images. London: Tate Publishing, 2005

contributors

masthead: how we operate

A fragmentary introduction

Beyond Throwaway Achitecture. Time as a political act

The Afterlives of Temporary Architecture

Flowers in the Snow. Architecture, entropy and temporariness

What We Build Together. Material expression of ritual and care in southern Chile

Temporary Engaging with difficulty: Building Critique

Formalising Tirana

Architecture Passes. Noticing entropy, anxiety and indeterminacy

Lee’s Food Market, an unlikely story of longevity

The Ethics of Lasting. Middleton Inn revisited

45 High Street, Reading Massachusetts

The Short Life of Two Tiny Buildings

On a lighter note

On Site review 44: PLAY

fine print rebuilding

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

Always quite liked that for Abbé Laugier, the muse of architecture was female, and there she is, holding her divider, classical architecture in ruins at her feet. For us, it is not the primitive hut that is interesting, it is the water tower.

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This issue of On Site review was put together in Nanaimo on unceded Coast Salish territory, specifically the traditional territory of the Snuneymuxw Peoples who continue to live on this land.

both Alessio Mamo/The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/apr/01/ ukraine-rebuild-bucha-prompts-corruption-reconstruction

Two images from The Guardian of April 1, 2023, the top a church in Dolina after Russian bombing, and above, the ongoing mending of bombed apartments, this one in Kharkiv, at the beginning of the invasion.

Two significant typologies, both buildings from previous eras, the pre-soviet and the soviet, both damaged. The church can be reconstructed, in the way carpet-bombed Dresden was after WWII, but there is a political question whether future resources will be spent in this kind of reconstruction of a past that Ukraine wishes to leave behind: its historic, oft-unwilling, affiliation with the Russian Empire in its many guises. Given the schism between the Ukrainian and Russian Orthodox Churches, perhaps the rebuilding of a church on the site will be a different expression of faith.

The apartment building isn’t being reconstructed as an iconic building, rather it is being mended immediately. This is the difference between houses and housing. Houses come and go; housing is eternal. The two have entirely different time frames. g

on site review 43 on time

a fragmentary introduction

stephanie white

This issue started by thinking about architecture through the Annales School lens of history: the longue durée, cultural history factored by land, geology and climate (where structural questions arise about architecture’s longevity – is it all temporary?); histoire événementielle, a series of events (in architecture particular buildings have long been the subject of most critique – how long does this famous building actually live for?); and the formation, development and demise of social movements – a middle ground between spectacular events and millennial histories: the long era of modernism, for example.

This last one I am most interested in terms of the instant recognisability of late colonial architecture. I was reading about E R Braithwaite and his 1959 autobiographical novel To Sir, with Love, and found he had attended Queen’s College in Georgetown, Guyana, then still a British colony. And there was the building: a white, brise-soleiled, low horizontal stamp of indubitable tropical colonialism.

What exactly is modernity in the context of de-colonisation? It became an imperative in Africa and the Caribbean for public housing, schools, administration buildings – a sort of cheap, egalitarian architecture for institutions; a casting-off of hierarchies, whether colonial or social or ancient. Jane Drew and Maxwell Fry were the exemplars of this kind of postwar architecture: rather than the bludgeoning architecture of empire, they turned to the environment: weather, climate, materials. The AA had a department of Tropical Studies within it, revisited at the 2023 Venice Biennale. Kenneth Frampton’s critical regionalism of the 1980s continued this direction. Admittedly influenced by the Frankfurt School and its critique of capitalism and globalisation, he proposed an architecture of place, culture, climate: more direct responses to locale than theoretical approaches to society, politics and capital economic contingency. An architecture of place, culture and climate sits in the Annales sense of a longue durée, where architecture concerns itself with material fundamentals that transcend both events and social movements, no matter how new or old they might be.

Now, forty years since critical regionalism was floated, it seems to divert architecture’s possible response to division and strife. We cannot ignore the state of the world in 2023. We can no longer rely on climate as a touchstone. The neo-colonialism of trade pacts and treaties work much as did the old colonialism. Any idea of a social contract is near extinction.

What is the architecture for this?

Most empires start to have qualms at a certain point; their end beckons, and there are various remedial attempts to re-frame the colonial enterprise. The high point of British Empire was achieved towards the end of the reign of Queen Victoria, but it had started four hundred years earlier with Queen Elizabeth I, covering civil war, the industrial revolution and the rise of global capitalism. WWI, The Great War, dealt imperial hubris a death blow. By the end of the Second World War the process of literal decolonisation had begun, resulting in bloody wars of resistance: resistance to colonial status in the colonies, and resistance to this resistance on the part of Great Britain, eventually re-naming its empire The Commonwealth, and tying negotiations for independence to the Queen and to resource extraction, the main reason for having colonies in the first place.

At this point, just as my fingertips were touching what I thought was critically momentous, all the critically momentous essays for this issue of On Site review came in and I got totally distracted as I read, edited and conducted much, no doubt annoying, correspondence with the contributors. Now that the layout is done, I return to my introduction to this issue.

Time, being a concept deep and fathomless, has in this issue become largely a discussion of the temporary: whether it is achieved or resisted, whether it is a valid direction for architecture or simply cheap. Is time an eternal background factor to all we do, or is it a series of events we can control? There is something for every position here. Is architecture itself a series of events over a long history of civilisation? or is architecture a rather monotonous background to other more vital forms of civility and incivility? or, is architecture the face of social and political movements and revolutions: an evolutionary flag?

These are not rhetorical questions, rather they are topics addressed in this issue. Each contributor has sent us a very specific discussion, either of specific buildings or building systems. Collectively they speak about architecture’s place in a series of endings, from climate to political systems, from cultural hegemonies to a misplaced trust in globalisation.

The underphotographed Queen’s College, Thomas Lands, Georgetown, Guyana, 1951-1997 when it was partially destroyed by fire.

J P Ferreira, 1960

Beyond Throwaway Architecture time

as a political act

stefano corbo

In a recent article published on the Italian magazine Casabella1, Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani summarises the current debate on reuse and sustainability in architecture in a paradigmatic case study: the refectory of the New College in Oxford, originally opened in 1376. The refectory has a generous roof, whose timber carpentry was built with oak beams – 60 by 60 centimetres in section and 13 metres long. Around the year 1860, it became clear that the wood had been attacked by insects and needed to be replaced; the problem was to find a sufficient number of exceptionally thick, long beams. At first this seemed to be impossible, and that the building would be doomed to demolition. Then someone recalled that the College owned wooded estates, and an inquiry was made regarding large oak trees. Soon it turned out that there was an entire forest planted 500 years earlier, precisely to provide the timber needed for the replacement of the roof structure. The original builders had foreseen the deterioration of the wood and prepared for its reconstruction.

Magnago Lampugnani’s anecdote isn’t meant as a nostalgic celebration of the good old days, nor is an invitation to think of architecture as something necessarily ever-lasting. On the contrary, the refectory project is first of all a metaphor of the inextricable connection between architecture and time – the unstable tension between duration and decay, permanence and disappearance, firmness and fragility. Over the centuries, such tension has translated into different (built) forms: spoliation, appropriation, ruination, the quest for the ephemeral or for continuous change. In late antiquity, for example, most of the buildings erected in Rome were made almost entirely from spolia of other constructions – not only plundered artworks, but also reused building components such as columns, capitals, arches, etc. The act of spoliation was not simply driven by pragmatic reasons – to save labour, or scarcity of materials. Spoliation was also ideological, in the sense that appropriators of stones from the Roman Empire considered themselves as the prosecutors of that imperial glory: stones were the symbol of the past but also the foundations of the future.

For millennia appropriation has represented a less violent but more systematic way of incorporating the old into the new: Rome’s Theatre of Marcellus of 13 BC was first transformed into a medieval fortress and later converted into a palazzo for the Savelli family in the 16th century. Or, to remain in Italy, Rimini’s Tempio Malatestiano, designed by Leon Battista Alberti between 1450 and 1460 as a mausoleum for Sigismondo Malatesta and his lover, built by wrapping a 13th century Gothic church with a new façade which could counterbalance and partially hide the ‘uncivilised’ language of the Gothic elevation.

Appropriation, however, is not something only belonging to the past: in 1977 Frank Gehry transformed a 1920 detached house in Santa Monica by deforming its original configuration, and hybridising its image with a new disruptive lexicon. More recently, the 2004 Pavilion for Vodka Ceremonies designed by Alexander Brodsky consisted of 83 windows recuperated from a demolished factory. In their variety, all of these examples describe the ingenuous and sometimes desperate attempt made by humans over the centuries to deal with time: by celebrating it, denying it, dilating it or simply acknowledging it. Because facing the problem of time in architecture means, by extension, facing the problem of human caducity in its physical and symbolic expression.

The refectory of New College, Oxford also serves as a pretext to investigate the relationship between time and architecture today, in the general context of the current capitalist development. What does durable mean for architecture? What are the social and environmental costs associated to its durée? How does time affect the design of space?

Terms such as sustainability, circularity, reuse, upcycle have become commonplace: they not only influence the architectural discourse, but also suggest a wider paradigm shift in the role of the architect and their ethos. Such a shift manifests itself at various levels, from governmental initiatives – see the plan of the Dutch Cabinet to develop a circular economy in the Netherlands by 2050 and to achieve a 50% reduction in the use of primary raw materials (minerals, fossil, and metals) by 2030 – to the proliferation of architectural and curatorial projects on those topics – see Open for Maintenance, an exhibition/installation at the German Pavilion of the 2023 Venice Architecture Biennale. In this project, curated by ARCH+, SUMMACUMFEMMER, and Büro Juliane Greb, the German Pavilion is displayed as a series of maintenance works which include not only Germany’s contribution to the Biennale Arte from last year, but also leftover materials from over 40 national pavilions showcased at the same Biennale’s edition.

1 See Vittorio Magnago Lampugnani, ‘Sustainability and Duration’, Casabella 939, 2022.

https://hicarquitectura.com/2022/12/frank-gehry-house-gehry/

Despite the always present risk of reducing complex phenomena to fashionable trends, the German Pavilion and other similar projects pose urgent questions about the impact of architecture on the built environment. They do that by investigating the temporality of architecture as a material, conceptual and ideological practice, and by addressing the question of durée from a different perspective, one which refuses a vision of architecture as a mass-consumption, disposable, a-critical spectacle. In other words, opposed to so-called throwaway architecture which oft-times replaces buildings with devices, aesthetics with experience or the public with individualism, a variegated set of design positions have progressively emerged.

If in the 1960s, Archigram responded to the ‘irreversible escalation in the day-to-day demands of ordinary people for greater access to goods, services, and culture’,2 by imagining ever-changing cities (Plug-In Cit y, 1964), nomadic units (The Cushicle, 1966), or inflatable structures (Blow-out Village, 1966), today the idea of a durée for architecture is articulated as a political vector to address societal and ecological issues. This approach produces architectures that are different in scope, scale and premises, but that all share some common points: a critical awareness of the need to optimise existing resources and reduce waste, a total disinterest in dramatic gestures or formal acrobatics, and an emphasis on public instances. Most importantly, these architectures, and the body of ideas connected to them, all engage with time directly.

Yury Palmin, Divisare October 27 2016

https://www.labiennale.org/en/architecture/2023/germany

2 Simon Sadler, Archigram. Architecture without Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. p7

fARCH+ / SUMMACUMFEMMER / Büro Juliane GrebRO JULIANE GREB, Open for Maintenance – Wegen Umbau geöffnet. La Biennale di Venezia 2023

Frank Gehry, Residence Model. Santa Monica, California, 1977

Alexander Brodsky, Vodka Pavilion.. Pirogovo, Russian Federation, 2003

Theatre of Marcellus, Rome, 13 BC

Tempio Malatestiano, Leon Battista Alberti, Rome, 1450-1460

wikimedia

wikimedia

Radical in its intentions – to offer an alternative to the current processes of urban development triggered by the so-called Bilbao effect – and provocative in its formal outcome – a synthesis of artistic performance and typological innovation – is the work of the Berlin-based office Brandlhuber+, founded by Arno Brandlhuber. Over the years, Brandlhuber+ has developed a unique trajectory in which the peculiarity of the decisions informing their projects – lack of thermal insulation, exteriorisation of interior circulation, formal indifference – matches with the interest in the work of artists such as Rachel Whiteread or Gordon Matta-Clark. This combination of heterogeneous references and positions finds full expression in Brandlhuber+’s architecture, which explores the intrinsic potential of existing buildings to resist over time and generate new unexpected meanings. Coherently, Brandlhuber+’s message involves not only the design of space but also its representation. The visual body of drawings produced by the office, for example, depict a clear understanding of the role played by time in their work, especially when it comes to the dialogue between old and new elements in both 2D and 3D visualisations. Among the several projects developed recently, two are emblematic of Brandlhuber+’s inquiries: Antivilla (2010-15), and San Gimignano Licthenberg (2012).

Antivilla is located at the Krampnitz Lake, southwest of Berlin, and is the transformation of a former warehouse, built in the 1980s, which used to store lingerie produced by a nearby East German factory. The challenge of this project was to prove that empty buildings in risk of demolition can be made usable again. So, rather than demolishing it and replacing it with a single-family home, Brandlhuber+ decided to keep the existing load-bearing structure, and to remove only a few interior partitions. More specifically, the design process was informed by a series of different steps: first, the existing asbestos-contaminated globe roof was dismantled and replaced with a flat concrete roof, whose presence was emphasized by a sculptural waterspout. Second, inside the empty shell of the building, a functional load-bearing core containing kitchen, bathroom, fireplace, and sauna was inserted. Then, the existing façade was perforated by irregular holes which allowed the house to have a view of the lake.

Through a sequence of simple but bold moves, Brandlhuber+ presents us with an artificial ruin, a vacant building which has been given a new meaning and transformed into a domestic shelter. The ruin is at the same time romantic but blunt, intriguing but repelling, comfortable but extreme.

Brandlhuber+, Antivilla. Krampnitz, 2010-15

© Erica Overmeer https://bplus.xyz/projects/0131-antivilla

Brandlhuber+ https://bplus.xyz

Similarly, the San Gimignano project in Lichtenberg, Berlin, gravitates around the transformation of two existing towers – a silo and a circulation tower used in the past as central production sites for a large graphite factory. The only remnants of a larger industrial complex, these towers remained abandoned due to high demolition costs. Brandlhuber+ takes advantage of the existing situation to preserve their industrial character: one of the two towers serves as a workshop for different industries such as 1:1 prototyping of architectural units; the other tower works as a warehouse – an unheated storage space up 22m high. The silo tower only contains two floors: the ground floor and the first floor at 31.63m. By focusing attention only on those floors, the need for extensive technical equipment (ventilation and exit doors) shrinks and additional costs are avoided. Brandlhuber+ restored all original apertures of the tower and left them open, turning the interior into a semioutdoor space. Overall, Brandlhuber+ reduced their intervention to the minimum: an additional floor in one of the towers as well as an external staircase to provide access.

In using the framework of existing buildings and regulations as point of departure, Brandlhuber+ investigate new forms of interaction between public and private in contemporary cities; their projects explore radical forms of living and working via site-specific, acupunctural interventions in the urban fabric.

Different in formal expression but equally compelling, is the dialogue with the existing built environment which characterises the work of several architecture firms based in Barcelona. One of those is HArquitectes. The Centre Cívic Lleialtat Santsenca 1214, designed in 2017, is in fact based on the transformation of a 1928 working class cooperative building. The project develops across the definition of an interior urban void – an atrium that allows for the encounter between the old decayed structures and the new intervention. The role of this urban void is to celebrate the heterogeneity of the separate parts constituting the building and, at the same time, to ideally bridge past and future. The atrium is the moment where differences juxtapose and interact: the patina of the existing walls and the new polycarbonate roofs coexist in the same environment. In the progression of the spaces designed as well as in the overall process of mending, an overlap of textures, patterns, and colors take place. One may say therefore that the whole project is an example of assemblage as it is compact and finite in its multiplicity; all its different layers morph into a visual and functional unity.

Brandlhuber+, San Gimignano Lichtenberg. 2012-ongoing

HARQUITECTES, Centre Cívic Lleialtat Santsenca 1214. Barcelona, 2017

Adrià Goula, http://www.harquitectes.com

© Erica Overmeer

https://floresprats.com/archive/sala-beckett-project/

A few years earlier in 2014, also in Barcelona, Catalan architects Flores & Prats worked on an analogous project of adaptive reuse: Sala Beckett. In rehabilitating a former social club used in the past for family celebrations, memory is the red thread connecting old and new, on the verge between nostalgia and experimentalism. The building is transformed into a theatre and a dramaturgy school.

Instead of accommodating the new program in one specific and well-defined area, the architects fragment the program and diffuse it over every corner of the building. The building itself becomes the theatre: materials, decorations, object trouvé and interior vistas shape the main theatrical activity. The intervention in the old building reveals itself as a process of anastylosis where existing and new fragments are re-composed in a novel fashion. Notions of legibility and atmosphere regulate the relation between old and new, and connect the interiors to the history of the surrounding neighbourhood. Sala Beckett as well as the Lleialtat Santsenca Civic Centre are not questioning ideas of image and function. They constitute a composite artifact: a combination of old and new patterns, entropic relations, interior and urban components.

Flores & Prats, Sala Becket t. Barcelona, 2011-2017

The 2021 Pressens hus, by Atelier Oslo + KIMA Arkitektur, Oslo, follows a similar design strategy as the one employed in the Lleialtat Santsenca Civic Centre by H Arquitectes. The project consists in the transformation of two nineteenth century listed buildings located in the centre of Oslo. The new program – spaces for media and press activities, conference rooms, studios, café/restaurant – develops across two atriums. Around these two voids, the building reveals the passing of time and the dialogue between the existing vocabulary of steel beams and brick buildings and the new vertical order of posts and beams in laminated timber. The geometry of these two orders overlaps, revealing the continuity of past and future in the same building.

In going over these examples, it is clear that differences in formal vocabulary, materials and building techniques characterise their configuration. Nevertheless, when it comes to the overall relationship between time and architecture, all those projects address a similar concern: all of them question the socially and culturally acceptable durée for architecture, against and beyond market-driven interests. The way they do it is by being aware that architecture is not only about space, but is above all a matter of time – whether time is interpreted as a scar of the past (Flores & Prats), as a design material (H Architectes), or as a conceptual scaffold for future interventions (Brandlhuber+). Only by facing, embedding and interpreting time in all its manifestations, architecture can play a different and less invasive role in the built environment. Reusing rather demolishing, repairing rather than discarding, updating rather than replacing; this is what architecture can do to act as a catalyst for new collective and urban instances. g

STEFANO CORBO is an architect and educator at TU Delft – Chair of Public Building – where he also serves as MSc Coordinator. In 2012 Corbo founded SCSTUDIO, a multidisciplinary network practicing public architecture. www.scstudio.eu

Atelier Oslo + KIMA Arkitektur. Pressens hus, Oslo, 2021

Einar Aslaksen. https://atelieroslo.no/project/pressens-hus#298

The Afterlives of Temporary Architecture

brian holland

Temporary constructions are an increasingly common part of contemporary architectural production. They range from short-term pavilions, installations and exhibitions to building-performance mockups and urban placemaking events. They offer architects a much greater degree of design freedom than full-fledged permanent structures, in that they are often smaller, less expensive and inherently less burdened by regulation and the obligations of long-term durability. As such, architects routinely use temporary projects as laboratories for testing new materials and exploring alternative approaches to fabrication and assembly, or as trial balloons to shape or activate space in unconventional and creative ways.

More recently, as the discipline’s commitment to ecological engagement has grown, the temporary structure in its various forms has also become a site for progressive experiments in architectural recycling and reuse. No longer content to turn a blind eye to the widespread but wasteful practice of demolition and disposal, the designers of temporary projects are widening their attention spans to account for what comes before and after a temporary project’s limited run. Some of these architects build their short-term structures out of scrap materials or other byproducts of construction activities such as construction shoring

and lumber off-cuts. In these cases, the reappropriation of waste often constitutes a clever response to limited budgets, as in the common refrain, ‘one man’s trash is another man’s treasure’. Other designers work to ensure their temporary projects will have a second life—either as raw material for future constructions, or in their entirety as relocatable structures that live again in service to other communities—thus, widening the project’s circle of beneficiaries. Either way, efforts to account for the past, present and afterlives of temporary constructions hold valuable lessons for architecture more broadly. Despite being implemented at a limited scale and in the short-term, these efforts constitute valuable rehearsals in radical architectural resourcefulness, and they point the way toward more sustainable and impactful life cycles of use and reuse.

Through case studies, I offer three ways of thinking about the role of life-cycle design in temporary architectural projects: recovery of waste, preemption of waste, and extension of scope. Each of these approaches is illustrative of an entrepreneurial strategy I call piggybacking—where one project’s resources are opportunistically leveraged to the benefit of some greater, often public, good; where architects tease out hidden value from within the gaps of a market economy notoriously characterised by exploitation, inequality and waste.

figure 1: Building facade mockups.

figure 2 (facing page): Testbeds by New Affiliates, with Samuel Stewart-Halevy. Façade mockup repurposed as community garden greenhouse.

Both drawings by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho

reuse: recovering waste

First, temporary projects that build from waste, or that redirect their own waste streams or byproducts toward subsequent projects. In Germany, artists Folke Köbberling and Martin Kaltwasser took this approach to extremes in a range of temporary public structures they designed and built from salvaged materials during the early 2000s. Their projects were often visually striking; they made a conspicuous display of their salvaged components. Construction pallets, wood sheathing and discarded doors used as ad hoc cladding-framed legible public narratives around waste and reuse. Working with whatever unused materials they were able to scavenge from construction sites and city streets required that they develop a somewhat improvisational design process—one that allowed them to modify their designs in real-time during construction. This way of working brought challenges as well as pleasures: as their projects became more public and more permanent, the artists found that municipal authorities were often not amenable to changes made on the fly. Ultimately, their open and improvisational approach proved to be fundamentally incompatible with a public review process that demanded predetermination and certainty. As a result, Köbberling and Kaltwasser shifted their attention away from architectural installations and back toward the relative freedom of art practice.

Working with the irregularities of miscellaneous scrap materials is one of the key challenges in waste-recovery design projects. Jessica Colangelo and Charles Sharpless, of the architectural practice Somewhere Studio, tackled this challenge with a temporary pavilion as part of the Biomaterial Building Exposition at the University of Virginia in 2022. Their pavilion, called Mix and Match, was developed in response to the large quantities of waste lumber – offcuts, overages and

temporary shoring—generated by conventional housing construction in the United States. Somewhere Studio’s approach foregrounded the inherent inconsistencies of salvaged wood as features of the pavilion’s design: pieces were stacked in a vertical gradient from tallest to shortest, and half-lap joints constituted a visually expressive connection detail that accommodated dimensional irregularities. In developing Mix and Match in this way, Somewhere Studio leveraged design to highlight both the opportunities and challenges presented by salvaged materials in architecture.

Meanwhile, in a different corner of the building industry, large-scale commercial developments produce waste from short-term constructions in the form of construction mock-ups. For example, full-scale façade mock-ups up to one-story tall have increasingly become de rigueur among New York City’s newest high-rise projects. They allow design and construction teams to research, test and control for technical performance and design quality, and are typically discarded upon a building’s final completion (figure 1) Testbeds, a project by Ivi Diamantopoulou and Jaffer Kolb of New Affiliates, in collaboration with Samuel StewartHalevy and the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation, captures and redirects this waste stream for public reuse. Their project— they describe it as akin to a rescue operation1—is to reconfigure these discarded assemblages as the basis for any number of local community garden structures: sheds, shade structures, casitas, greenhouses or raised beds (figure 2). Much more than a simple reuse of raw materials, they aim to bring the ‘image of the growing city down to the ground’, recontextualizing the mock-ups while ‘humanizing the scale of the skyline’.2 New Affiliates completed a Testbeds pilot project in 2022 for the Garden by the Bay in Edgemere, Queens, currently featured in MoMA’s New York New Publics exhibition.

1. Akiva Blander. ‘From Playful Products to Clever Urban Interventions, New Affiliates Distills Design to Its Essence’. Metropolis, June 5, 2019. https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/newaffiliates-firm-profile/pic/56480/ Accessed Oct 13, 2019.

2. Testbeds, New Affiliates, https://new-affiliates.us/Testbeds. Accessed June 22, 2023.

borrowing: preempting waste

The next two projects exhibit a similarly resourceful disposition, but they also go one step further—demonstrating how, through borrowing, temporary projects might eliminate waste before it is created. Peter Zumthor’s iconic design for the Swiss Pavilion at Expo 2000 in Hannover, Germany, exemplifies this approach, both conceptually and practically. Designed to resemble stacks of wood temporarily set out to air dry, Zumthor’s pavilion was made of nearly one hundred vertical stacks of dimensional pine lumber arranged in something of a maze-like configuration (figure 3). To facilitate eventual disassembly, these stacks of lumber were held together without screws, nails, glue or conventional fasteners; instead, small wooden spacers were placed between each wood member and a custom-designed assembly of steel plates, rods and springs held each wall together in tension. Each pile of wood was inherently dynamic; as the wood shrank over time, the tension rods were adjusted accordingly. The pavilion, formally called the Swiss Sound Box, but which Zumthor referred to informally as the wood yard, effectively held these materials in trust for the duration of the exposition. Having spent several months air drying (and increasing in market value), the entire pavilion was carefully disassembled—almost as if it was never there—and the dimensional lumber was sold-off for use in subsequent construction projects.

Foregrounding a similarly logistical approach, Shelf Life, LeCavalier R+D’s proposal for the 2018 MoMA P.S.1 Young Architects Program, also borrows the bulk of its material resources to temporarily construct a series of labyrinthine spaces for public enjoyment. According to Jesse LeCavalier, the project’s designer, Shelf Life ‘intervenes in the material systems of logistics to recontextualize a major but invisible part of many people’s daily lives: the industrial pallet rack.’3 In a nod to the spaces

and furnishings of warehouses and big-box stores, standardised pallet racks were arrayed throughout the P.S.1 courtyard in tall stacks outfitted with seating, shading, misters and conveyance systems to serve the needs of MoMA’s summer-event programming. Instead of buying raw materials and reselling them on the open market, as was the case with Zumthor’s Swiss pavilion, Shelf Life involved a literal borrowing; the design team secured an agreement from an industrial shelving supplier to lend the 140 pallet racks needed for the installation. After the summer, the racks were set to be disassembled, returned to the supplier and re-dedicated to their customary service in warehousing and retail operations. Cleverly, borrowing these components instead of buying them allowed the designers to stretch MoMA’s notoriously small project budget in support of a larger and more immersive installation than would have otherwise been possible.

By borrowing construction components to preempt waste, these two resourceful projects demonstrate another way by which architectural materials might be given multiple lives: they deploy shrewd logistical manoeuvres to piggyback on – and briefly insert themselves into –existing supply chains. There are lessons here that can be applied to the design of less temporary buildings as well. Proponents of such an approach seek to address the much longer lifespans of permanent architecture — they research design for disassembly in which materials and components only temporarily coalesce into architectural form. In design for disassembly, after a building’s useful life is exhausted, it is to be carefully taken apart, returning all, or most all, materials and components to their original state, available for future uses. This is a simple idea in theory, but unsurprisingly, design for disassembly remains a wickedly complex problem in practice. We can therefore expect further experiments with small-scale, temporary pavilions and installations to play a role in the advancement of this work for some time to come.

3. ‘MoMA PS1: Shelf Life’, LeCavalier R+D. http://jesse-lecavalier.com/#/new-gallery-4/ Accessed June 22, 2023

figure 3: Peter Zumthor, Swiss Sound Box A temporary pavilion from borrowed timber. Drawing by Brian Holland and Jared Davenport.

doing double duty 1

Re cycling and disassembly processes that break products down into raw materials or constituent parts pose a particular challenge to designers in that they typically obscure linkages between waste and reuse, making it very difficult for consumers to see and understand lifecycles of production, consumption, waste and reuse — think of those tote bags announcing in bold typeface that they ‘used to be a plastic bag’. Each of the projects discussed so far engage this challenge in different ways through design. In contrast, the waste-stream piggybackings we now turn to intervene in advance of disassembly to capture not only the raw materials but also the embodied energy and social histories of designed artifacts. These next projects call our attention to instances of architectural reuse by creating legible narratives around these efforts and by challenging architects to anticipate and design for a project’s afterlife at the very outset of design—effectively doing double duty as two projects in succession.

Holding Pattern, Interboro’s 2011 project for the MoMA P.S.1 Young Architects Program, is notable for the way it enlarged the ambitions and possibilities of an ephemeral urban construction. More than merely fulfilling MoMA’s project brief of providing a dynamic stage for a summer festival, Interboro designed their installation with the project’s afterlife in mind. The needs of MoMA patrons were overlapped with the needs of a diverse array of neighbourhood organisations by designing for both groups simultaneously (figure 4). At the end of the installation’s time at P.S.1, the seventy-nine objects that Interboro designed and the eighty-four trees they planted were all given new homes among fifty local community organisations for long-term use and enjoyment. Through a process of extensive community outreach and inventive design work, Interboro leveraged the commission to realise not one but two projects: the first for P.S.1, and the second for the local community. Every element of the installation was uniquely charged and enriched by the designers’ ambition to leverage the project budget to serve not just a single institutional client for one summer, but a whole community of clients over the longer term.

figure 4: Interboro, Holding Pattern. Event installation with an afterlife of community service. Drawing by Brian Holland and Brenden Wohltjen.

doing double duty 2

The Jarahieh School for Refugees is the result of another resourceful effort to make two projects from one temporary-pavilion commission. Crossing continents and cultures, it captured the architectural by-products from an international exposition and put them to use serving refugee children in Lebanon. The project began its life in Italy: the Milan Expo of 2015 consisted of seventy temporary pavilions that amounted to an expenditure of 13-billion euros. Intent on putting this massive, short-term investment to longer term use, Save the Children Italy, working with the design practice AOUMM, made a commitment to the architectural reuse of its own expo pavilion in support of its larger philanthropic mission (figure 5)

During the design process the organisation connected with London-based CatalyticAction to plan for and implement the pavilion’s afterlife as a semipermanent school for Syrian refugees in Lebanon. CatalyticAction adapted the pavilion’s modular design, reconfiguring its six independent frame structures to support the needs of both the school and the larger community of the settlement (figure 6). After being disassembled and shipped from Italy to Lebanon, the structure was reassembled, insulated and clad by residents of the Jarahieh settlement working alongside the design team from CatalyticAction, who tapped into local skill sets and material knowledge as the basis of an inherently participatory process. The result is a multi-purpose school and community centre that leverages underused international resources with local skills and materials to improve the quality of life in the Jarahieh settlement –benefits made possible by piggybacking one project upon another.

Drawing by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho.

figure 6 (facing page): CatalyticAction, Jarahieh School for Syrian Refugees

Save the Children Pavilion reconfigured as school.

Drawing by Brian Holland and Kayla Ho.

figure 5: AOUMM, EXPO 2015 Save the Children Pavilion

radical resourcefulness

In these examples of recovering waste, temporary architectures extend the impact of discarded resources and provide those materials with a second life—piggybacking on the waste of prior constructions. Each of these temporary projects illuminates a promising form of social and ecological entrepreneurialism in contemporary architecture. Conceptually and practically, they point toward a more robust form of sustainability than is often considered in practice. They close loops to eliminate material waste, yes, but they also go further than that: by reusing waste, borrowing resources or doing double duty, they leverage one project’s resources in the service of another. In radically resourceful ways, their designers extend the tangible investments of their various stakeholders – clients, builders, designers and communities – across a project’s past, present and afterlife to serve multiple and often underserved constituencies. They demonstrate how, through practices of piggybacking, environmental sustainability might be made to dovetail with social sustainability.

What is certain is that any attempt to carry forward the lessons learned from these small, temporary architectures will face significant practical challenges when measured against the demands of larger, longer-lasting buildings. Nevertheless, given the magnitude of present environmental and social crises, we must continue to try. Design experiments like those reviewed here are tremendously promising as ‘generative demonstrations’4 providing legible examples of life-cycle design that could help transform industry practices of waste recovery and preemption, and suggest a hopeful future where buildings are made of recycled materials, designed to be disassembled, and planned for extended lives of environmental and social impact. g

BRIAN HOLLAND is an assistant professor of architecture at the University of Arkansas, and the creator and organizer of the Piggybacking Practices research project, which launched online in 2021. https://piggybackingpractices.com/

4. Dana Cuff. Architectures of Spatial Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2023. pp 159-187

Flowers in the Snow –Architecture,Entropy

tim ingleby

beginnings

The Swiss engineer Heinz Isler was a pioneer in the field of thin shell structures. He developed a series of form-finding methods that have informed the design of hundreds of reinforced concrete shells. Isler prototyped the most influential of these by taking advantage of his homeland’s frigid alpine winters: hanging sheets of saturated fabric overnight and returning to frozen forms that inverted became freestanding free-form shells.

A little-known footnote to this story is that Isler also pioneered several other structural types using fabric and ice. Perhaps the most enigmatic of these ‘playful experiments’ as Chilton called them, is the flower form. I have looked at this structural type, the flower form, in a series of self-built experimental structures of fabric and ice. Knowingly ephemeral, the only certainty is their demise which occurs not to a planned timescale but to the caprices of the weather. Such structural entropy makes further study and understanding inherently difficult but it can start to formulate ways of embracing and addressing temporariness in architectural construction.

That could stay, not forever, because we believe that nothing exists that is forever, not even the dinosaurs, but if well maintained, it could remain for four to five thousand years. And that is definitely not forever.

— attributed to Christo

In Christo’s terms, all architecture is temporary. In anticipating their demise, works of temporary architecture are unusually candid. Rarely is this strength exploited. By using principally fabric and ice, the story of my constructions is one of a death foretold. Although highly specific and undoubtedly quixotic by nature, to extend their lifespans offers three lessons that may benefit other architectures that also acknowledge their temporariness.

and Temporariness

Orko, ice and burlap cloth structure. Val-des-Monts, Quebec

lesson 1: agility

Architecture is rarely temporary by choice. Planning laws, land-ownership models and rising real estate values — bureaucratic and/ or economic imperatives, impinge upon the durée of buildings far more frequently than a building’s physical capacity to remain.

Over the last century, art rather than architecture has found ways to exist within, embrace, or subvert, the rules and regulation of such systems. The subway drawings of Keith Haring, Banksy’s murals, the (pseudo) anarcholibertarianism of Atelier Van Lieshout, Yona Friedman’s quest to free and empower nonspecialists – all offer insights into agile guerrilla tactics. These modus operandi question, resist or exploit such state-imposed strictures.

*

Built on a frozen lake in Val-des-Monts in Québec, Orko is a modest act of subversion. It shares some formal similarities to lávvu –temporary tented shelters used by nomadic Sami people following their reindeer herds, stable enough to withstand the winds of treeless plains in the higher arctic regions. However, Orko has no structural frame. Fabric is propped or suspended to create a thin skin which is then saturated using water pumped from beneath the ice. The fabric freezes, fixing the form; props and ties are removed, leaving a self-supporting structure.

Such an agile architecture designed to exist only for a short time, might exploit a grey area where planning permits and building codes are side-stepped, and land-ownership claims are difficult to enforce. Such acts of resistance, although anarchistic, need not necessarily result in anarchy. Nor need they preclude an architecture from ‘gathering the properties of the place’ as Norberg-Schulz wanted, with built forms retaining the capacity to respond to or reflect cultural, historical or material qualities of place.

Orko, lake water extraction as part of construction process.

Orko, the formation of ice crystals brings detail and delight

lesson 2: adhocism

Some burlap cloth, a macramé ring, a reel of cotton, an ice auger, a kayak bilge pump, a telescopic swimming pool pole, some nylon cord, a snow shovel, and a backpack cropsprayer.

This inauspicious collection of everyday items could be an inventory of objects dragged from the dark recesses of a garage blinking into the light of a yard sale. It is, in fact, an exhaustive list of items used in the construction of Orko; a testament to adhocism where ‘everything can always be something else’. Improvising with what is at hand rather than things devised for a particular purpose is to construct as a bricoleur rather than as architect or engineer.

Levi-Strauss observes that ‘the ‘bricoleur’ also, and indeed principally, derives his poetry from the fact that he does not confine himself to accomplishment and execution: he ‘speaks’ not only with things … but also through the medium of things: giving an account of his personality and life by the choices he makes between the limited possibilities. The ‘bricoleur’ may not ever complete his purpose’.

In this spirit Orko is a beginning rather than an end. As temperatures rose above freezing, the structure failed as it melted. Doubling down, the construction principles, structural strategy and materials were reclaimed and re-deployed to create a new structure, assuming its own distinct form in a new location. Oculus, a small shelter for two people, is a bricolage of bricolage.

To the bricoleur, temporary architecture is not an immutable object but a materials bank. Through architectural and structural strategies with multiple potential outcomes, and assuring the integrity of materials and components are preserved, shapeshifting reinvention is possible. Looseness and imprecision can extend an architecture’s life, albeit in a form that little resembles the original and may not have been fully designed at the outset.

Orko/Oculus, ice/fabric surface structure construction materials

Orko, salvaged materials following structure’s demise

Oculus, ice and burlap cloth structure. Val-des-Monts, Quebec

lesson 3: additive redundancy

A common measure of well-engineered architecture is efficiency. David Billington elegantly outlines efficiency in this sense as ‘the search for forms that use a minimum of materials consistent with sound performance and assured safety …’. Frei Otto’s theory of minimal structures is yet more expansive, ‘an attempt to achieve, through maximum efficiency of structure and materials, optimum utilization of the available construction energy’. The ice surface structures described here, even for someone with little or no construction skills or experience, are fast to construct, use cheap, readily at hand materials and are only a few millimetres thick. Despite no calculations having been made, they are highly efficient in their use of structure, materials and constructional energy.

Yet their virtues are also their vulnerability. Even at sub-zero temperatures, they are susceptible to structural failure. Sublimation – the state-change process of ice becoming vapour without first becoming liquid – poses the same threats as ice melt. At such minimal thicknesses, even a small loss of ice quickly causes buckling and structural failure. Attempts to mitigate this by increasing Oculus’ thickness by spraying it with frigid water proved largely futile as despite air temperatures approaching -10ºC much of the water ran off before it could freeze.

Oculus, sublimation

Oculus, structural collapse following ice loss

Oculus, attempts to thicken the structure only proved to be abortive work

lesson 3, part 2: additive redundancy

Two years later Oculus was reprised. Opportunely constructed before a heavy snowstorm, the ice-fabric form was engulfed overnight by a blanket of snow over 10cm deep, which was further thickened and compacted manually. Adding more material rather than using less might seem counterintuitive, however this additive redundancy enabled Oculus 2.0 to survive several weeks of fluctuating weather, including multiple spells in which conditions for sublimation or ice melt occurred that would have resulted in the collapse of a thinner version. The snow layer not only stabilises but insulates, making temporary occupation of these forms a more viable proposition.

For architecture that is intended to be permanent, additive redundancy would be materially and economically perverse. Where an architecture’s duration is constrained, particularly by entropy, additive redundancy becomes an interesting and valid proposition. Paired with the lesson of adhocism – that everything can indeed always be something else – additive redundancy through, for instance, oversizing components, materials or structure may further extend possibilities for reuse. Oculus was realisable because Orko contained a greater amount of fabric than its footprint strictly required. Extending this logic, a simple beam intentionally oversized for its first life could be subsequently re-used over a larger span or to take a heavier load in a second or even third life. From a strategy of additive redundancy a constructional grammar – oversailing beams, projecting columns, gathered fabric, and so on - may arise for a work of temporary architecture.

Oculus 2.0, ice and unbleached muslin structure. Val-des-Monts, Quebec

towards a ‘fast architecture’?

“I think it’s more important to make .., a lot of different things and keep coming up with new images and things that were never made before, than to do one thing and do it, do it well. They come out fast, but, I mean, it’s a fast world.”

— Keith Haring, 1982, CBS Sunday Morning

The world is still fast, but the term increasingly has negative connotations. From food to fashion, ‘fast’ is all but synonymous now with convenience, cheapness and disposability. Fast might be accused of creating or displacing as many problems as it proffers to solve. Temporary architecture is not immune to such charges. These are serious issues, but fast remains an indelible reality of our time. The structures described here are also fast. Even with little or no construction skill they can be made in a matter of minutes, conditions permitting. The artist and social innovator Theaster Gates has spoken of his belief that “most things have a second life, that there is a value in the discarded, and that objects and buildings can be reactivated and redeployed to serve a purpose beyond what they were originally intended for”.

A melted ice/fabric structure’s second life – if not already the product of something else – may assume either its original form or a new one, never made before. Work continues on finding ways these playful experiments might also directly offer utility. Preliminary measurements taken from Oculus 2.0 offer encouragement that the snow blanket may not only make such structures more resilient in unstable frigid climates, but may also help create stable internal environments potentially suitable for temporary occupation, akin to an igloo yet a distinct structural morphology. For now, situated between the philosophies of Haring and Gates, these modest constructions perhaps offer some clues as to how temporary architecture can accentuate the positives of ‘fast’, while ameliorating some of the issues of disposability and waste associated with it.

Though derived from an esoteric form of construction and structural type, the lessons of agility, adhocism and additive redundancy, are generalisable, applied alone or in combination with other architectures, but especially those with limited lifespans, such that like certain forms of art practice, they might question, resist, or exploit circumstances that would otherwise curtail their permanence. The lessons invite us to find ways of building more freely but still responsively and responsibly. They invite us to contemplate reframing the task of designing temporary architecture as an act of designing systems with multiple possible outcomes and lives, as opposed to a singular defined presence. In so doing, constructional grammar(s) may emerge that enable temporary structures to acknowledge and celebrate their transience, thereby architecturally distinguishing them from those which are to remain uncertainly. g

bibliography

Billington, David. The Art of Structural Design: A Swiss Legacy. Princeton, 2003

CBS Sunday Morning. ‘From the Archives: Keith Haring Was Here’. YouTube, 28 Mar. 2014

www.youtube.com/watch?v=W04j0Je01wQ.

accessed 19 January 2023

Chilton, John. Heinz Isler (Engineer’s Contribution to Architecture) Thomas Telford Ltd., 2000

Garlock, Maria Moreyra, and David Billington. Félix Candela: Engineer, Builder, Structural Artist. Yale UP, 2008.

Glaeser, Ludwig. The Work of Frei Otto, Museum of Modern Art, Greenwich, 1972

Jencks, Charles, and Nathan Silver. Adhocism: The Case for Improvisation. Expanded,updated ed., MIT Press, 2013.

Levi-Strauss, Claude. Savage Mind. University of Chicago Press, 1968.

Norberg-Schulz, Christian. Genius Loci: Towards a Phenomenology of Architecture. Rizzoli, 1979.

Tsui, Denise, et al. “Theaster Gates on Driving Community Transformation With Art.” COBO Social. 18 Apr. 2020.

www.cobosocial.com/dossiers/theaster-gatescommunity-transformation

accessed 19 January 2023

acknowledgements

All constructions and photography by Team HILL (Hockett/Ingleby/Lawes/Leeson)

TIM INGLEBY is an architect and an assistant professor of architecture. His teaching and research interests lie in contemporary architectural design, allied with novel formfinding methods, innovative structural systems, and the principles of construction.

Oculus 2.0, snow blanket consolidated, compacted and sculpted, enhancing resistance to structural entropy

What we build together

m aterial expression of ritual and care in southern Chile

brittany giunchigliani

Water, an omnipresent element within our bodies and the environment, holds a wealth of dynamic and collaborative qualities that are often overlooked in architecture and landscape architecture. In this line of work, the mechanics of water is inherently entangled with our material choices but is often over-simplified and undervalued. Critical geographer Jamie Linton argues that our perception and understanding of water has been reduced to a measurable unit – H2O, stripping away its inherent connection to bodies and the environment. Within spatial design, this process of modernising water has led to a rigid and impermeable built environment.

Beyond the abstracted understanding of how water affects the world around us lies an opportunity to reconceptualise the ways in which water shapes us. It degrades. It brings life. It is scarce. Its behaviours are versatile. If we give more attention to the movement, dissolution, transformation and interactions of water, the body and our environments, if we embrace a notion of wateriness in practice, might our work become more flexible, nimble and intentional? Thinking this way challenges the prominent western paradigm of self sufficiency, individualism and excess as we look to watery logics for inspiration. This inquiry invites us to look beyond our profession and explore strategies of artisanal fishers who intimately work with and in the sea.

In February 2023, I conducted field research in small coastal towns within the Los Ríos and Los Lagos regions of southern Chile. There, I had the opportunity to engage with a diverse group of artisanal fishers who rely on the sea for their livelihoods. From seaweed harvesters to crabbers to fisherpeople, each person’s relationship to the water was illuminated through different strategies of ritual and care. These were often shaped by wisdom passed down through generations within their close-knit communities and the specific demands of their respective trades. Consequently, this interweaving of knowing a place and professional necessity manifested in deliberate and meaningful material expressions along the shoreline.

Working with water has its own temporality - a diurnal and seasonal rhythm that requires one to be responsive with intention. Within these two rhythms there are different rituals: daily routines such as harvesting at specific times during the day depending on the tides, and seasonal tasks such as mending and replacing tools. These activities vary by fishing village and that which is being harvested. Each system, catch, place requires its own material approach, cared for not only by the individuals using them, but also the web of people that interact within this waterscape.

Field notes and diagrams from a meeting with Marcia Pérez, a multigenerational Pelillo harvester who lives outside of Ancud, Chiloé Island, Chile

all images Brittany Giunchigliani

Public

Luga Roja drying in the sun on the beach, Playa Chauman, Ancud, Chiloé Island, Chile

At Playa Chauman I met a family of seaweed collectors who harvest each morning at the public beach. When the tide begins to return, the mother and her two older children passively collect Luga Roja (Sarcothalia crispata) in the small, protected cove at the end of the beach. They use plastic woven sacks, a material that can be seen everywhere around the island, recycled from various other uses to hold their harvest. The bags are light, permeable and can hold roughly 25 kilos of wet seaweed. Once filled, they are carried from the shore up the beach to the warm sand where the seaweed is laid out to dry under the sun. After drying, the seaweed is loaded back into the bags and are transported to market and sold. When the bags start to break down, they are used at home until they deteriorate completely. Here, the rhythm of the sea and the bodies’ ability to carry are in constant conversation

In the small town of Pupelde on Chiloé Island, wooden stakes are spaced out along the beach — a passive, tidal collection system to capture Pelillo (Gracilaria chilensis), a common seaweed harvested in the estuaries of southern Chile.

access point to offload Pelillo (Gracilaria chilensis) from dinghies and flotillas, Castro, Chiloé Island, Chile

all images Brittany Giunchigliani

These micro-installations of the fishing community’s daily operations are nimble, intentional and in conversation with the environment. Here, architecture does not serve as the foundation, nor does it act as the saviour; and in some towns such as Los Molinos where communal dinghies and wooden pallets are left on the shore, it is not even necessary. Instead, architecture is just one voice engaged in a dialogue with fishers, the sea, materials and the day’s catch. Architecture’s significance is small in scale, discreet and relational; capable of being adjusted, removed or replaced.

While different artisanal groups often use trade-specific tools and work in distinct coastal areas, there are similarities in the southern Chilean fishing landscape they all share — access to certain materials, how goods are bought and sold, climate, sense of place and a shared cultural identity. Chilean industrial and mechanised fishing industries use permanent piers and warehouses developed and maintained solely for that industry. In contrast, many artisanal fishers, such as seaweed harvesters or individual pescadores, rely on access to public beaches or local paths that lead to the water. The responsibility for maintaining access points – to take care of them – is shared. The line blurs between the individual and the collective as multiple families, ages, and professions collaborate to maintain communal tools, manage beaches, and generate income.

Co-management of this waterscape reveals a particular intimacy – one where the environment and the fishers are in constant dialogue. The market is not necessarily the driver of how and where the days’ catch is offloaded rather it’s the shape of the beach, the depth of the bay, the materials used to stack, store and move the goods from boat to shore; a dialogue observed through small, fluid, site-specific material choices. For instance, .

Even though the customary materials have changed over time, from jute and wood to plastics and styrofoam, many of the tools are still fastened, affixed, or used as they were by grandparents: knowledge is passed down, along and through time, to people young and old, and assumes a material form through these micro-installations that are cared for by the artisanal fishers and their families. The techniques of harvest and collection embed the strategies of those who came before and ways of working that will guide those who come after.

It is through these material expressions in the coastal towns of southern Chile that offer insight into qualities of wateriness that are applicable to our practice as designers. Working closely with the sea, artisanal fishers have honed their craft through generations, weaving together traditions, materials, and a deep sense of place. Water’s influence imbues a greater need for adaptability and resourcefulness that can be observed in these quotidian rituals of care. It is not through the simplification of these approaches that we are able to gain insight but rather through water’s synergetic nature that we can better learn to build together.

Corral used to store Pelillo before being dried; this area is co-managed by an extended family and some neighbors, Ancud, Chiloé Island, Chile.

Rope used to hoist a bag of seaweed up the face of a cliff from the harvest area below, Ancud, Chiloé Island, Chile

Seaweed harvester carrying a bag of Luga Roja (Sarcothalia crispata) in a commonly used plastic woven sack, Playa Chauman, Ancud, Chiloé Island, Chile

all images Brittany Giunchigliani

BRITTANY GIUNCHIGLIANI, a Baltimore-based landscape designer, explores embodiment in the landscape through a feminist lens. Brittany holds a Master’s in Landscape Architecture from Harvard Graduate School of Design.

www.littlejonquil.com and @ourbodiesmadeofwater on Instagram.

A communal dinghy used by the local fisherpeople to bring their daily harvest to shore; after the catch is offloaded the dinghy is returned to deeper water and anchored for future use, Los Molinos, Chile

Wooden table loaded with bags of crabs offloaded from a boat offshore; the harvest is placed on stairs while the fishers anchor the communal dinghy after use, Los Molinos, Chile

Wooden palette left on the beach to aid fisherpeople offloading their catch from the communal dinghy, Los Molinos, Chile

all images Brittany Giunchigliani

Online Etymology Dictionary

temporal (adj.)

late 14c., ‘worldly, secular’; also ‘terrestrial, earthly; temporary, lasting only for a time’, from Old French temporal ‘earthly’, and directly from Latin temporalis ‘of time, denoting time; but for a time, temporary’, from tempus (genitive temporis) ‘time, season, moment, proper time or season’, from Proto-Italic *tempos- ‘stretch, measure’, which according to de Vaan is from PIE *temp-os ‘stretched’, from root *ten- ‘to stretch’, the notion being ‘stretch of time’. Related: Temporally.

Yona Friedman. ‘Guidelines for People’s Architecture’, Mobile Architecture, People’s Architecture. Rome: MAXXI | Museo nazionale delle arti del XXI secolo, 2017

I am interested in the etymology, origin and meaning of words. I can get lost in an old fashion paper dictionary, and the Online Etymology Dictionary can be a serious work disrupter. The whole question of temporary architecture raises many, many questions: who decides what is temporary? Is it a political decision, driven by commerce, the politics of capitalism, or by fashion?

Temporary: Are refugees camps temporary architecture? This camp could be any camp.

One of the oldest camps is Cooper’s Camp in West Bengal, India, opened after partition in 1947. Made up of mostly Hindus living in mainly Muslim East Bengal who fled across the border. After 70 years Cooper’s Camp is still home to some 7,000 people. From Kenya to Palestine to Turkey.

Tents fill the outskirts of Dagahaley refugee camp in Kenya’s Dadaab refugee complex on July 24, 2011. The United Nations refugee agency, UNHCR, estimates Dadaab is receiving 1,300 new arrivals each day, adding to the numbers in the already drastically overpopulated camp. Dadaab was opened twenty years ago, with a capacity of 90,000 people. Current estimates place the refugee population here at around 380,000 people. The European Union aid commissioner vowed yesterday to do all that is possible to help 12 million people struggling from extreme drought across the Horn of Africa, boosting aid by 27.8 million euros ($40 million).

temporary (adj.)

‘lasting only for a time’, 1540s, from Latin temporarius ‘of seasonal character, lasting a short time’, from tempus (genitive temporis) ‘time, season’ (see temporal, late 14c., which was the earlier word for ‘lasting but for a time’).

The noun meaning ‘person employed only for a time’ is recorded from 1848. Related: Temporarily; temporariness.

The Palestinian camps/temporary homes began to appear in 1940: temporary shelters, temporary architecture. Not all look like tent cities, some are more like shanty towns.

Politically, camps are always temporary, even if they are 70 years old.

Though we have seen amazing architecture structures over the years, people are still living in tents. disposable: ‘that may be done without, makeshift: ‘the nature of a temporary expedient.

short-lived: ’having a brief existence’. provisional: ’as a temporary arrangement, provided for present need or occasion’

Prospector’s tent on waterfront, Dawson, Yukon, Territory, 1899, these camps were not temporary structures but portable, when the prospectors moved on they struck camp. These tents were also used by geologists and archaeologists.

Temporary employment, like temporary architecture, is taking on a whole new meaning, as workers are fighting back at being temporary or considered disposable.

Courtesy of Glenbow Library and Archives Collection, University of Calgary

Phil Moore/AFP/Getty Images

homeless (adj.) ‘having no permanent abode’, 1610s, from home (n.) + -less. Old English had hamleas, As a noun meaning ‘homeless persons’, by 1857.

1680s, ‘one who flees to a refuge or shelter or place of safety; one who in times of persecution or political disorder flees to a foreign country for safety’, from French refugié, a noun use of the past participle of refugier ‘to take shelter, protect’, from Old French refuge ‘hiding place’, from Latin refugium ‘a taking refuge; place to flee back to’, from re - ‘back’ (see re-) + fugere ‘to flee’ (see fugitive (adj.)) + -ium , neuter ending in a sense of ‘place for’.

http://www.shigerubanarchitects.com/works/2020

2020 South Kyushu Flooding / Paper Partition System. Voluntary Architects’ Network (VAN) and Shigeru Ban Architects provided 1300 units of Paper Partition System (PPS) as a relief to support for flooding in southern Kyushu, Japan.

temporary = political = disposable temporary = social = memories

www.shigerubanarchitects.com/SBA_NEWS/2022_ukraine/ VAN+ Shigeru Ban Architects provide the Paper Partition System (PPS) for shelters of the increasing number of refugees staying in neighbouring countries of Ukraine. This is a simple partition system to ensure privacy for inhabitants and has been used in numerous evacuation centers in regions hit by disasters, such as the Great East Japan Earthquake (2011), Kumamoto Earthquake (2016), Hokkaido Earthquake (2018), and torrential rain in southern Kyushu (2020). above, PPS system in a college gym, Uman.

Shigeru Ban Architects and Ikea: life in a box without the Allen Wrench — temporary privacy screens at the Hoita Elementary School Ukraine Refugee Assistance Project Slovakia, is a project supported by IKEA (the mega centre for disposable items).

The question is why temporary?

Foster+Partners has designed two residential towers on Al Reem Island, UAE, currently under construction close to the north eastern coast of Abu Dhabi city. When complete in 2024 it will house 280,000 residents, as well as providing schools, medical clinics, shopping malls, restaurants, sports facilities, hotels, resorts, spas, gardens and beaches.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyclone_Mocha

One million Rohingya refugees live in Cox’s Bazaar, Bangladesh, fleeing persecution, widespread violence and human rights violations in Myanmar.

Aftermath of Cyclone Mocha, Cox’s Bazaar. May 2023.

makeshift: an interesting word, make shift:

makeshift, adj., 1680s, ‘of the nature of a temporary expedient’, which led to the noun sense of ‘that with which one meets a present need or turn, a temporary substitute’ (by 1802).

permanent, adj.

‘enduring, unchanging, unchanged, lasting or intended to last indefinitely’, early 15c., from Old French permanent, parmanent (14c.) or directly from Latin permanentem (nominative permanens) ‘remaining’, present participle of permanere ‘endure, hold out, continue, stay to the end’, from per ‘through’ + manere ‘stay’ (from PIE root *men-(3) ‘to remain’).

— Nikolaus Pevsner, An Outline of European Architecture. London: John Murray, 1943

This might explain why we have an abundance of churches that are not temporary or disposable.

Kumbha in Kumbh Mela literally means ‘pitcher, jar, pot’ in Sanskrit. It is found in the Vedic texts often in the context of holding water or in mythical legends about the nectar of immortality...The word mela means ‘unite, join, meet, move together, assembly, junction’ in Sanskrit, particularly in the context of fairs and community celebration. (from wikipedia)

Who decides what is temporary? Have you gone for a walk in your neighbourhood, and find there is something missing — a whole community missing, buildings and stores, and wondered where all the people have gone? In their place a hole, and soon another glass tower.

What is possible

What is possible!

Tens of millions of pilgrims attend Kumbh Melas every three to four years, praying the holy waters will free them from the cycle of rebirth. The Kumbh Mela is planned/ designed to be erected and inhabited as soon as the monsoon season ends and the riverbanks emerge from the water, and then dismantled before the flood waters return.

Who decides what is temporary and makeshift? If a structure no matter how temporary or makeshift can be constructed to accommodate 200 million people, does that not suggest the possibility of creating many small permanent communities?

Canada’s national database estimates that there are approximately 235,000 homeless people across the country.

What if – the planning and management model for a Kumbh Mela, one of the wonders of modern management, and, say, Foster+Partners with their global and political clout, collaborated to build permanent shelter, not for money, but for humanity?

Maybe it is just magical thinking.

Imagine what is possible. g

Anne O’Callaghan

Dharmendra Chahar

200 million Hindus gathered for the Allahabad Kumbh Mela in 2019

‘Nearly everything that encloses space on a scale sufficient for a human being to move in is a building; the term architecture applies only to buildings designed with a view to aesthetic appeal.’

from the series, Walking Toronto

ANNE O’CALLAGHAN uses a range of media to emphasise the idea behind an artwork over how it is made or what it is made from. O’Callaghan and lives and works in Toronto.

engaging with difficulty building critique

stephanie white

The week before she died, in September 2022, Hilary Mantel wrote ‘what makes craft into art is the margin left for contingency, the space made for ambiguity’.1

Dennis Rovere2 sent me a book last spring: Building Critique. Architecture and its discontents3, which asks ‘Can architecture be critical despite its interdependent relationship with power and profit?’ and then answers with eleven essays that range from theory to activism. The editors’ introduction, ‘A Critique of Practice or a Practice of Critique’ lays out the issues: as critique is at the centre of progressive thought, it was long thought that deconstruction of certain practices revealed structural weaknesses that were either naturalised ideology, unsustainable hierarchy or myth. Critical architecture of the 1970s and 1980s meant to translate largely academic critical theory into design work: projects themselves illustrated disjunctions between social reality and capitalism with which the practice of architecture is indubitably intertwined. Commercial and institutional architecture was untouched by this critique which became increasingly de-politicised and ineffective. Post-criticality engages a different set of social parameters, casting architecture as a way to propose alternatives to socially weak critical architecture which was difficult to apply to practice.

The essays in Building Critique are characterised by what the editors call ‘gradual openings’ to other lines of influence, mainly sociology and geography, poststructuralism, feminism, postcolonial theory and media studies. The very fact that we are in an era of global migration means that the direction of thought is no longer solely from the global north to the south, or from the centre to the periphery, but is multi-directional: the global south is arriving in the north with different, no less sophisticated, spatial and social understandings.

The basic referents are neither new, nor surprising. Manfredo Tafuri’s Architecture and Utopia: Design in Capitalist Development came out in 1978. Henri Lefebvre’s The Production of Space in 1974, and The Critique of Everyday Life in 1988. Bourdieu’s conception of habitus was articulated in lectures at the Collège de France in 1982-3. Out of these seminal texts comes the sense that a critical spatial practice is a mode of action, an engagement with hegemonic structures, not a withdrawal from them.4

muf 5

Lisa Fior’s essay in this book, ‘Don’t make it sound heroic; that’s why we have put the keynote last’ states at the very beginning:

Since muf started working together in the mid-1990s, we have been trying out ways to expand a project brief in order that it reflects more than the source of funding and the limited indicators of success. This way of working includes the acceptance of compromised briefs and then expanding their scope through a willfully literal interpretation. Often , this also means working for free and then making it sound better by calling it ‘unsolicited research’.

And a bit later:

We wedge the door open for other people and other agendas so that they can enter and complete the brief in ways that are sometimes obvious and sometimes less so. We describe this as ‘unsolicited research’, the extra work necessary to make a project both meaningful and bearable.

1 cited by Gaby Wood in The Guardian, 25 Sep 2022

2 On Site review 40 contributor, and author of The Xingyi Quan of the Chinese Army, Penguin Random House, 2008

3 Gabu Heindl, Michael Klein, Christina Linortner, editors. Building Critique. Architecture and its discontents. Leipzig: Spector Books, 2019

4 Chantal Mouffe, ‘Critique as Counter-Hegemonic Intervention’. EIPC European Insititue for Progressive Cultural Policies, 2008 http://eipcp.net/transversal/0808/mouffe/en

Clearly this is a long and fairly subversive process, to leave hidden directives and clues to future designers of public spaces, for that is muf’s terrain – the public spaces of London, and for the public filling such spaces. The process starts before design, continues during construction and is active after the project is signed off, supposedly complete. Fior calls it wedging open a door by degrees. She cites Ruskin Square beside the East Croydon train station, meant to fit into a masterplan by Foster+Partners, masters at ensuring the clarity of their projects. Wilfully literal, quotes from Ruskin justify design moves: ‘A healthy manner of play is necessary for a healthy manner of work’ framed the site as a garden with sports facilities: not the British obsession with football, but for Afghan refugees fostered in the community who play cricket. The garden, a temporary re-wilding of a derelict site, introduced ground rules – landscapes can host young people, that the formal next to the wild is a design language, and that Ruskin’s epigrams are references for future design decisions by the developer and other designers. Termporary moves, over time, come to be seen as embedded and logical. A Ruskinian ‘festival of toil’, part of a requisite art strategy for planning permission, was developed by muf’s Katherine Clarke and a local organisation that works with young men, who ultimately made their own work clothes, a clay oven, cast aluminum tools and built furniture from site hoardings. This material making and un-making of a site is a strategy that seeds its future. g

formalising tirana

suzanne harris - brandts , ervin goci

self-built does not mean temporary

When many people think of temporary architecture they conjure images of camping tents, perhaps a pop-up market stall or food truck. But the temporary is also often conflated with informality in what are preferably called ‘self-built communities.’ An example of this is the neighbourhood of 05 Maji (5th of May) on the northern peripheries of Tirana, Albania, originally self-constructed by rural migrants arriving at the capital in the early 1990s following the collapse of Enver Hoxha’s communist regime. For decades, residents have established inter-generational roots and supported the city’s socio-economic activity, despite their neighbourhood being unrecognised, and often erroneously framed as ‘impermanent’ or

‘temporary.’ There are deeper historical reasons behind Tirana’s property informality, driven by a nationwide post-communist politico-economic crisis resulting in long periods of legal ambiguity and entire city districts being frozen in ad hoc and contingent bureaucracy. In the decades since the 1990s, residents and their advocates have worked to register, or formalise property, including following an April 2006 law on the legalisation, urbanisation and integration of unauthorised constructions — with varying degrees of success depending largely on the politicians in office and their plans for transforming the city.

On 31 January 2020, the Council of Ministers solidified 05 Maji’s temporary designation by declaring it a ‘forced development area.’ The government claimed such redevelopment was necessary following damage from a 2019 earthquake, and the relocation of residents from other earthquake-effected areas. Yet, schematic proposals to re-develop the district date back to 2012, following the forcible eviction of 21 Roma families in August 2006, leaving 109 people homeless.1 Now, a fresh round of mass evictions, land seizures and demolitions of approximately 400 residential buildings aim to make way for a new neighbourhood of the future: the iconic Tirana Riverside Project, a 29-hectare ‘smart city,’ ‘pandemic-proof’ eco-district for 12,000, designed by the famous Italian firm Stefano Boeri Architetti. The Tirana Riverside Project was proposed as a key component of Prime Minister Edi Rama’s vision to rebrand the Albanian capital, in turn attracting greater tourism and investment to the city. It is connected to the larger TR2030 Masterplan also by Stefano

1. Centre on Housing Rights & Evictions (COHRE). Global Survey on Forced Evictions: Violations of Human Rights. 2006 https://www.hlrn.org/img/violation/GLOBAL%20SURVEY%202003-2006.pdf Accessed 10 May 2023.

Status of the 05 Maji neighbourhood in 2018, prior to the start of demolitions and new construction.

The new, monotonous construction of the Tirana Riverside Project (right) in the 05 Maji (5th of May) neighbourhood, Tirana, Albania.

Status of the 05 Maji neighbourhood in 2023, partially demolished (maroon) and with the start of new construction of the Tirana Riverside Project (black).

Proposed plan of the Tirana Riverside Project that will replace the 05 Maji neighbourhood.

all images Harris-Brandts + Goci

Boeri Architetti, with both iconic proposals held up as evidence that the government is improving Tirana, in turn increasing voter popularity. Yet, in Albania’s flawed democratic context with chronic corruption, concerns these initiatives are greenwashing a type of urban development propelled by money laundering put designers like Boeri in an awkward position and belie their claims that their work is headed toward a more habitable and inclusive future.

Explicitly, there is no legitimate reason for the demolition of the 05 Maji community. Construction is not condemned and the world has dozens of convincing examples of in situ upgrading for self-built communities alongside the infill of new public greenspace. There is

also a missing logic in promising housing to those impacted by the earthquake while causing a new humanitarian crisis by displacing current residents. As urban scholars, we found ourselves asking what it would mean to acknowledge this community’s existing strengths, respecting residents’ desires for the future and basic human rights through tenure security. This question brought us to the temporary on several fronts from the suspended violence of a neighbourhood gradually in the unmaking, to the perversion of mass expulsions leading the way for a future of ecological urbanism in flux, and the reality that such iconic urban proposals are themselves often temporary, frozen amidst politics and changes in government.

Location of the new TR2030 Master Plan and Tirana Riverside Project over 05 Maji.

all images Harris-Brandts + Goci

the suspended violence of a neighbourhood in the unmaking

The experience of being in 05 Maiji underscores how absurd it is to describe this community as temporary. Multi-level, solidly built, reinforced concrete buildings are carefully maintained by inhabitants who have lived here for decades (Fig 03). While walking the streets and talking to residents, the area does nothing but conjure a deep sense of embeddedness and permanence, of inter-generational living and tightknit community. Concrete columns extending from top floors underscore residents’ dreams of remaining in-place (Fig 04). Houses were constructed this way to allow for incremental vertical expansion once children become adults, get married and start their own families, building new apartments above existing ones. It is a highly sustainable approach to urban intensification, both extending the service life of buildings and allowing families to age in-place. In many ways, 05 Maiji is full of the design principles architects strive for, exemplifying a walkable 15 Minute city with a diverse demographic base, small-scale urban agriculture and the fostering of strong socio-cultural networks.

Nonetheless, by 19 January 2022, forced evictions and property demolitions were well underway. In a flash of violence, entire sections of the neighbourhood were reduced to rubble, cherished family memories strewn across the streets for all to see. As compensation, residents were promised replacement apartments and rental subsidies through vague contracts. They were given little choice but to accept their offers. During the years needed to complete the project, residents will need to relocate elsewhere, severed from their current social networks and far from their places of childcare, education and employment. In addition to the social and mental tolls, the economic losses are tremendous, including not only the value of property but also of local economies and business networks, of established places of employment and hybrid live-work spaces. If residents eventually decide to return years from now, they will be thrust into an entirely new way of living: their former custom-built architecture, agricultural plots, livestock and fruit trees replaced with monotonous, generic apartment blocks flanking highly aestheticised recreational

Self-built houses in 05 Maji, Tirana, Albania.

all images Harris-Brandts + Goci

corridors. In portions of the neighbourhood already cleared and on-track for completion, there is little optimism that the previous community life can be shoe-horned back into these sterile new apartment buildings. And while residents will soon be able to walk designer dogs through a riverfront leisure spine or play tennis with new upper-middle-class neighbours, they cannot sustain their livelihoods through urban agriculture or customise their residences to accommodate family growth. What is most likely then is that in the face of their inability to meet community needs these apartments will become another type of temporary urbanism, sold off to speculative investors as vacant assets or converted into turnkey Airbnbs.

As of July 2023, approximately 50% of 05 Maji remains frozen asis, partially demolished, partially in-tact, with residents on constant standby for the next round of demolitions. It is a situation where people perennially prepare their most precious belongings for immediate evacuation, fearful of an eviction that might come today, tomorrow, in a month’s time, or perhaps never at all. 05th Maji is thus temporary not because it is self-built but rather because it is in an ongoing state of threatened erasure—a state that has meant everything is suspended in the temporary: normal daily life put on hold, the desires to invest in and upgrade properties seized. Planting new crops or hanging wedding photos—even cleaning the windows—all potentially acts in vain. The psychological damage of such an existence does not end with demolition but stays with residents in the years to come. As the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR) notes, forced evictions like this “intensify inequality, social conflict, segregation and invariably affect the poorest, most socially and economically vulnerable and marginalized sectors of society, especially women, children, minorities.”2

The violent erasure of 05 Maji is an example of what Urban Sociologist and Colombia University Professor Saskia Sassen has termed expulsions 3 It is a phenomenon now witnessed across the city and one growing with intensity, as the work of Albanian architect and urban scholar Dorina Pllumbi has shown.4,5 Overall, these expulsions lay bare the challenges of retrofitting cities for more climate-conscious futures and the risks of such efforts being hijacked and greenwashed by corrupt elites.

2. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights (OHCHR). Forced Evictions: Special Rapporteur on the Right to Adequate Housing https://www.ohchr.org/en/special-procedures/sr-housing/forced-evictions Accessed 10 May 2023.

3. Sassen, Saskia. Expulsions: Brutality and complexity in the global economy. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2014.

4. Pllumbi, Dorina. ‘Kombinat: The Unseen and Their Architectural Oddkins’. Architectural Design, vol. 92, no. 2, March 2022, pp.30-35. https://doi.org/10.1002/ad.2790

5. Pllumbi, Dorina. ‘Is Tirana’s Rapid Transformation Progress or Erasure?’ Kosovo 2.0. 14 July 2022. https://kosovotwopointzero.com/en/author/ dorinapllumbi/

Concrete columns extending from top floors support future construction for inter-generational living.

The remains of property demolition from January 2022.

all images Harris-Brandts + Goci

mass expulsions to create a sustainable urbanism in flux?

In the face of a global climate crisis, we have been told that our cities need to be better prepared, freshly equipped with sustainable design features like green corridors to improve air quality, reduce heat islands and enhance local stormwater retention. It follows a longstanding critique that our buildings are too static and unresponsive to their environments. In other words, we need an urbanism that is more fluctuating and temporary. What we have not been told, however, is how implementing such projects in corrupt and semi-authoritarian contexts like Albania’s risks not only failing to accomplish sustainable goals but also catalyses gross human rights violations through forced evictions. Described by Stefano Boeri Architetti as a reclaiming of the landscape, the Tirana Riverside Project stretches two kilometres from east to west, the TR2030 Masterplan then wraps around the urban core in concentric ‘green rings,’ both projects impacting large swaths of the city. It’s a zone so large that it would take over four hours to walk it in its entirety. With whole districts identified for clearance and replacement with new forest trails, it is more a claiming of vulnerable lives to bolster elite power and profits. While “obsessing over the many novel ways a housing complex can be designed to accommodate trees,”6 the project misses the larger mark of protecting civilians and preventing the coerced and involuntary mass displacement of people from their lands and communities. Ironically, it is the proposal itself that has become the greatest threat to area residents, not future climate hazards or pandemics.

As architects and urban designers embrace the idea that cities need to be more integrative of ecological systems, we need to have a serious conversation about what this means when imposed on existing contexts. Simply rolling out a new green carpet over established communities is not going to get us where we want to be, socially or environmentally. We also need to discuss how green initiatives are being usurped by corruption, acting more as illicit revenue generation and money laundering schemes than livelihood improvement in communities.

On a very real level, Stefano Boeri Architetti’s projects impact the entirety of the city, exacerbating affordability far beyond their local footprint through the fuelling of high-end speculative development. The cool calculations of demolition compensation do not take into account the rising cost of living these projects fuel, let alone the embodied energy of destroying buildings and their surroundings. Narratives of ‘restored landscapes’ further work on an ideological level to demoralize existing communities. Native plant species are introduced using the rhetoric of ‘natural belonging’, maliciously implying the unnatural presence of area residents who are largely stigmatized rural migrants framed xenophobically as non-natives in the capital city.

6. Boeri, Stefano, Maria Chiara Pastore and Livia Shamir. Green obsession: Trees towards cities, humans towards forests. Barcelona: Actar, 2021

Newly built monotonous apartment blocks for the ‘Tirana Riverside Project,’ a 29-hectare ‘smart city,’ ‘pandemic-proof’ eco-district designed by famous Italian firm, Stefano Boeri Architetti.

all images Harris-Brandts + Goci

temporary urban ideals: election cycles and frozen development

Initiatives of the magnitude of TR2030 and the Tirana Riverside Project will require decades to realise, a whole generation of time stuck in temporary construction while a new layer of the city is built up incrementally. During this time, there will be electoral changes and shifting political will. New politicians will make new promises and nullify the existing projects of their predecessors, leaving behind frozen development and a scarred landscape. Our increasingly uncertain existence on this planet likewise means that today’s buzzwords such as ‘smart city,’ ‘zero-emission polycentric neighbourhood,’ and ‘pandemicproof design’ refer to architectural ideals that, too, are temporary, soon rendered obsolete by technological advances and increasingly deficient understandings of what constitutes resiliency. Re-designs, re-calculations, and adjusted goals will all be necessary. There is a risk that the areas seized by the government to realise these projects will be privatised in the future. Once added back to the public land bank to create green corridors, there is no promise these areas will stay public territory. In a few years time, they may be sold-off to new developers keen to

profit from idyllic riverfront views. This reality means that the mirages of the Tirana Riverside Project and TR2030 are temporary while having incredible consequences. They are subject to continual alteration as their computer-rendered images are translated into built reality. The value of these projects thus lies less in forging new, stronger communities and more in propping up Albania’s elite. So long as current flawed governance structures remain in place, politicians will continue to turn to these types of iconic urbanism to bolster their wealth and popularity.

For now, the multiple realities of 05 Maji sit uneasily side-by-side in a state of the temporary: the vernacular buildings of a once thriving selfbuilt community are juxtaposed with the violence of demolition sites and new sterile, mass-built, vacant mid-rise apartment blocks. Children play amidst the rumble of nearby bulldozers; families hang laundry adjacent to the destroyed houses of their neighbours; tall orange trees grow beside freshly poured concrete. In 05 Maji, the true costs of formalising Tirana are on display for all to see. g

SUZANNE HARRIS-BRANDTS, OAA, is Assistant Professor of Architecture & Urbanism at Carleton University. She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from MIT and is a founding partner of the design-research collaborative Collective Domain.

https://architecture.carleton.ca/archives/people/suzanne-harris-brandts

ERVIN GOCI is a lecturer at the University of Tirana’s Department of Journalism and Communication, and an urban activist engaged in Albanian grassroots movements for tenure security, public space, urban commons and environmental justice.

https://www.fhf.edu.al/wp-content/uploads/cv_Ervin_Goci.pdf

The multiple realities of 05 Maji sit uneasily side-by-side in a state of the temporary.

all images Harris-Brandts + Goci

ARCHITECTURE PASSES

NOTICING ENTROPY ANXIETY AND INDETERMINACY

tiago torres - campos

In her 1927 novel To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf narrates the stories of the Ramsay family in their holiday house in the Hebrides, Scotland.1 In ‘Time Passes’ – a short middle chapter with no people in it – Woolf weaves ten turbulent years of family misfortunes during WWI with observations about the house crumbling while it is left unvisited. Time both contracts to offer glimpses of war devastation and expands to the point where the reader becomes attuned to dust accumulating on the window sill.

The simultaneity of the two radically different temporalities increases distortion. We learn about the death of important characters – mother, two sons and a daughter – in short parenthetical sentences. Lengthy descriptions ‘give voice’ to the house: people disappear, walls crumble, furniture dissolves and so does space itself. Small air currents creep indoor to inspect the different rooms. As day and night go by, and seasons, and years, the house is suspended in a viscous entropic state. Objects and materials inside and outside the space are not completely solid anymore, but also not yet completely dissolved. The narrative, at times congested to a point where time can no longer be measured, gains contours of delirious prose.

Though the tone in ‘Time Passes’ is apparently calm – or calm enough to notice and care about dust falling – it coats anxiety, obviously related to war and death, and possibly the influenza pandemic as well. Dust becomes a way to read entropy as disorienting depression. The viscous states of matter denote a disquiet sense of groundlessness before a world undergoing profound and uneasy transitions. As the house and its structures slowly disintegrate, so too do the world orders and systems of reference, changing irreversibly before and after the ten years in the middle chapter.

Extending beyond the novel, Woolf’s prose carries fraught significance with its undertones of melancholy, anxiety and paranoia. These are recurring themes in her work and personal life, punctuated with mental and physical illness, and they are foregrounded more explicitly in some of her essays, such as ‘On Being Ill’ (1925) or ‘On Gas’ (1929), where she links hallucinatory experiences at the dentist with the trauma of physical pain and emotional distress.2

If we can read Woolf’s unsettling account of ashes and dust as architecture – which I’m willing to, in the way one accepts architecture as a temporary suspension of entropy – we should also be prepared to labour through our states of anxiety and paranoia brought forward by the inevitable disintegration of any architectural condition, especially when it reflects any ethical, political, and social tension in key moments of transition. In this short essay, noticing a most humble material – dust on a windowsill – is also studied as a work of the mind as it begins to recover from these states. Thus positioned, architecture perhaps verges on the idea of geologic,3 through which an ethics of matter opens the possibility for noticing conditions connected at radically different scales.4 *

1 Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse (1927) London: Penguin Books, 2000

2 See Virginia Woolf, ‘On Being Ill,’ in The Criterion, T. S. Elliot (ed.) 1926. p32 The essay was reprinted in Forum (1926) under the title ‘Illness: An Unexploited Mine,’ and later, in 1930, as a standalone volume by the Woolfs’ Hogarth Press. See also Virginia Woolf, ‘Gas,’ in The Captain’s Death Bed & Other Essays. London: Hogarth Press, 1950, pp219–22. The relation between the experience of being under anaesthesia and the trauma of psychological distress has been studied before. Eberly, for example, relates expressions such as ‘waters of annihilation’ and the experience of feeling through a narrow hole that progressively dilates both to the metaphor of childbirth and to the ‘dissociative state related to sexual abuse,’ which Woolf survived from at a young age (See David Eberly, ‘Gassed: Virginia Woolf and Dentistry,’ in Virginia Woolf Miscellany, Issue 89. New Haven: Southern Connecticut State University, 2016.

3 Geologic is here defined centrally to the Anthropocene theory, as a set of entangled relational conditions that emanate their own aesthetic and cultural sensations. It enacts ways of thinking geologically with and through landscape and architectural conditions, by accepting human existence entangled within more-than-human materialities that unfold across deep time and at multiple scales. Ways of thinking attuned to the geologic can only partially reveal the complexity of infinitely connected conditions.

4 In conversation with architect Tom Wiscombe, Timothy Morton refers specifically to ‘Time Passes’ to discuss architecture. He says that in Woolf’s narrative of the house ‘there’s [sic] no people in it. It is just dust falling in the sunlight in the window frame and that kind of stuff. And it is so beautiful. … And it is how you have to think if you are in architectural space.’ (Morton with Wiscombe, Sci-Arc).

Woolf’s description of the house slowly dissolving reveals a desire to engage with entropy, similar in many ways to how dust has been described architecturally as a spatial index for dynamic readings beyond registrations of building or form. In ‘Time Passes’ the house becomes the narrator of the passage of time, not as an internal and intuitive Bergsonian duration – as in other parts of the novel – but as an external and material poetic account of matter. The house becomes an assemblage of insentient apparatuses that scrutinize it internally and register entropy.

If dust unsettles established orders of permanence and control, Teresa Stoppani then claims that engaging in a way of thinking that notices dust as a transitive verb – dusting, meaning both removing through cleansing and sprinkling with pulverised matter – implies a radical approach to architecture that questions existing official histories or institutionalized spaces of representation, and demands new systems of reference.5 Dust as agent of performative change that forces time to be brought into the architectural realm, may desecrate architecture – perhaps the reason why it has been consistently removed from representational systems – but it also activates a relation between ‘making and undoing … at work with and on the materials of architecture.’6 Dust exerts both external and internal pressure, that is, it both accumulates on architecture and breeds from within. An architectural practice that notices dust in the ways suggested by George Bataille, is one that engages more honestly and openly with entropy by registering materiality across different stages of integration and disintegration.7 *

Woolf’s narrative of the house is activated by light, both cosmic and electric. The sun dictates the opposition between diurnal stillness and nocturnal chaos, and it varies seasonally. We are allowed into a world of entropy witnessed through the insentient ‘eye’ of the house and the help of a rhythmic lighthouse beam. The lighthouse, both distant and present throughout the novel, pulsates light into the house – two short beams and a longer one – allowing it ‘to scrutinise’ its own interior. It is through light that Woolf describes dust sedimenting, both chemically and geologically.8

Light photons also accumulate on the surfaces inside the house as they lose energy and sediment in materials weathering through bleaching or fading. Woolf describes the house as an architectural condition that exists in between states of matter, in between still being solid and already disintegrating into particles. Light helps diffuse boundaries across scale and it expands the threshold between the dusty interior and the much wider territory it connects with, to the point when it stops being any of those specifically, or in fact, acquiring the possibility of becoming any of those at any given moment. The expanded threshold becomes a porosity of light, waves and particles.9 It is something not quite architecture anymore but not yet geology either.

8 The properties and qualities of light help Woolf examine in detail the dust particles in suspension and observe their eventual deposition in layers that coat the house itself. In chemistry, this tendency for particles in suspension to settle out of the fluid that keeps them in fluctuation and come to rest against a barrier is called sedimentation. In geology, the definition of sedimentation differs; it often refers to the opposite of erosion and it involves actions of building up in layers or horizons.

5 Stoppani studies convergences between Bataille’s 1920s texts ‘Dust’, ‘Formless’ and ‘Architecture,’ all three included as entries in his 1920s ‘Critical Dictionary.’ Teresa Stoppani, ‘Dust revolutions. Dust, informe, architecture (notes for a reading of Dust in Bataille),’ in The Journal of Architecture, 12:4, 2007. p437

6 Stoppani, ‘Dust revolutions,’ 441.

7 See Georges Bataille, ‘Critical Dictionary,’ in Encyclopaedia Acephalica. London: Atlas Press, 1995. pp35–36; 42–43; 51–52

9 When zooming out of To the Lighthouse to look more widely into Woolf’s work, it becomes possible to relate some of her literary devices with significant discoveries in physics throughout the twentieth century. In fact, it is not uncommon to read about the relations between Woolf’s stream of consciousness and Einstein’s relative space-time continuum. Woolf was a contemporary of Einstein. The Theory of General Relativity was published in 1916 and Woolf’s first novel, The Voyage Out, was published a year earlier. She was very much attuned to the scientist’s revolutionary ideas, mainly through her friendship with Bertrand Russell. In To the Lighthouse, more specifically, the architectural space is revealed through light and dust, engaging even if in a free, literary sense, to the wave-particle quantum model. There is a significant number of scholars who assert Woolf’s tangible and premonitory relationship to the wave-particle model that came to define quantum physics throughout the century, in anticipation of the physicists themselves, like Planck, Bohr, Heisenberg, or Schrödinger. It is precisely this duality of qualifying matter according to the wave-particle quantum model that Timothy Morton attributes to the qualities of architectural space described in ‘Time Passes’. See Paul Tolliver Brown, ‘Relativity, Quantum Physics, and Consciousness in Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse’, in Journal of Modern Literature, Vol. 32, No. 3, 2009. pp39–62; and Mark Hussey, ‘To the Lighthouse and Physics: The Cosmology of David Bohm and Virginia Woolf’, in New Essays on Virginia Woolf, ed. Helen Wussow. Dallas: Contemporary Research Press,1995 pp79–97 For a more thorough explanation of how Morton engages with Woolf’s novel, see Timothy Morton in conversation with Tom Wiscombe, in Sci-Arc (2016), available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x2lbtwd3KZU.

Starting with a perhaps quintessential Scottish discussion of whether to visit the lighthouse depending on the weather, the narrative is also coated with cinematic qualities akin to film noir, which denote a disembodied and dislocated experience of voyeurism. The noir-like experience is not unexpected given Woolf’s interest in cinema, then still an emerging art.10 In her brief essay ‘The Cinema’ from 1926, Woolf focuses on the qualities the moving picture eventually adds to still photographs mainly through the manipulation of time.11 Written synchronously with To the Lighthouse, it seems plausible that the experiences Woolf describes in ‘The Cinema’ may have affected her writing more widely.12 In the essay, Woolf seems to load the marginal with endless possibility with the description of her experience at a screening of Robert Wiene’s The Cabinet of Doctor Caligar i, when she suddenly glimpses ‘a shadow shaped like a tadpole [that] appeared at one corner of the screen.’ The experience, she adds, triggered ‘some monstrous diseased imagination of the lunatic’s brain.’13

Woolf’s glimpses of the house, seemingly tangential to the novel’s narrative, are unexpected appearances that materialise and immediately vanish. They resemble the accidental interferences flickering in old cinema screens, which are marginal to the projected movie, but strong in triggering a way of thinking that is alien to the chronological order of the projection. Instead, they dislocate the audience’s attention and briefly detach them from the cinematic immersion. They augment the thick and porous threshold between the conscious and the unconscious. Light in ‘Time Passes’ does not only scrutinise the surfaces it dusts; it examines the dusted dust itself. It connects the making and undoing of materiality across deep temporal scales, not necessarily always in a chronological order but also sometimes noticing how marginalia are dragged laterally or obliquely into the described scene. It may even allow the following of a dust speckle in its queer movement before it deposits. The interferences unsettle the immersive experience and glitch the brain into a world of different dimensions. The flashing light not only accentuates paranoia, giving the scene an uneasy feeling of being controlled or surveyed by military searchlights, but it also complicates time. The story unfolds with the expectation of that visit, which never actually happens. Unlike dust, which is literally tangible, the lighthouse is a future that is there as expectation; a destination illuminated in brief rhythmic flashes, but never fully realized.14

10 Laura Marcus argues that ‘Time Passes’ ‘can be read as a form of experimental cineplay,’ through which Woolf’s writing as ‘ghostly realism’ is indicative of film as a media that is ‘complete without us.’ Laura Marcus, The Tenth Muse: Writing about Cinema in the Modernist Period. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007, p120, quoted in Caleb Sivyer, The Politics of Gender and the Visual in Virginia Woolf and Angela Carter (PhD Thesis, School of English, Communication & Philosophy, Cardiff University, 2015), p22

The ghostly presence of Mrs Ramsay at the end of the chapter is described as a film projection on to the interior of the decaying house: ‘… and faint and flickering, like a yellow beam or the circle at the end of a telescope, a lady in a grey cloak, stooping over her flowers, went wandering over the bedroom wall, up the dressing-table, across the wash-stand …’ (Woolf, To the Lighthouse, p149)

11 Virginia Woolf, ‘The Cinema’, in The Nation and Anthenaeum Vol. 39, No. 13 (1926), pp381–383, available online: https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/thecinema-by-virginia-woolf-from-the-nation-and-athenaeum.

12 The ten years between the first and third chapters of the novel also have an important resemblance in the gap of ten years that Woolf alludes to in ‘The Cinema’. In the essay, these ten years pass between ‘the present in which the early films are being viewed and the past of the realities they record’ (Laura Marcus, ‘Cinema and Modernism,’ in Discovering Literature: 20th Century (2016), available online: https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/cinema-andmodernism)

13 Before Woolf, and at a screening of a Lumière film, Maxim Gorki comes remarkably close to this undoing of the orders in representational systems with his attention to the marginal and the eccentric, when he glimpses a strange flicker passing through the screen, which stirs the picture to life.

14 The literary formulation rehearses a previous journey in Woolf’s first novel The Voyage Out. Deceivingly conventional in her plot, Woolf’s proposed voyage is less external – when Rachel embarks on ship to South America – than it is internal – when the main character journeys from a sheltered education to emancipation. When Rachel dies, the journey remains unclear; an anticipation that never happens and whose end approaches when she ‘kept her eyes fixed upon the peaked shadow on the ceiling and all her energy was concentrated upon the desire that this shadow should move.’ See Virginia Woolf, The Voyage Out (1915, New York: The Modern Library, 2021).

Woolf notices dust as a labour of the mind in its process to recover from depression. She works through material (dis-)organizations and humble matter as a way of engaging with the world. The process may help thinking of an architecture that can help address our indeterminate times and refine an ethics of matter that begins to explain how matter comes to matter, that is, an ethics engaged with productive reconfigurations of matter, and how it ‘feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers.’15

Woolf’s architectural condition is not just reconfigured in space or time; it reconfigures the spacetime it activates both inside and outside the house. Noticing is a set of decisions of how the process is registered and how it may be continuously reconfigured. In traversing across scale – from the dust speckle on the windowsill to the vastness of the ocean illuminated by the lighthouse beam – noticing becomes a way of ‘knowing [that] is a direct material engagement, a cutting together-apart, where cuts do violence but also open up and rework the agential conditions of possibility.’16 It suggests the need to be accountable for the marks it causes and the entanglements it chooses to notice.

In an age when architectural practice committedly engages with the geological impacts of human-induced action, stories like Woolf’s may expand in their possibility to narrate the anxiety of having to live tangled amongst planetary existential crises, which intensify and complicate sea level rise, pollution, erosion, and socio-environmental injustice. These narratives may also talk about the possibility of retrieving to some state of humility, one where it matters how stories are told, and how they productively reconstruct the world every time they are told.17

One could argue that Woolf’s stream of consciousness in the novel – which in ‘Time Passes’ becomes more of a stream of unconscious consciousness – reveals an idea of architecture that verges on the geologic.18 By steering away from conceptions of architecture as material organizations to come closer to poetic accounts of matter, we may also become more attuned to thoughts that notice and engage in productive transitions of living indeterminately.

15 Karen Barad, “Matter feels, converses, suffers, desires, yearns and remembers”, interviewed by Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin, in New Materialism: Interviews and Cartographies, eds. Rick Dolphijn and Iris van der Tuin. Open Humanities Press, 2012. pp48–70

See also Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007

16 Idem, p52

17 Haraway quotes what she considers to be an important lesson from social anthropologist Marilyn Strathern: It matters what ideas we use to think other ideas (with). … It matters what matters we use to think other matters with; it matters what stories we tell to tell other stories with; it matters what knots knot knots, what thoughts think thoughts, what ties tie ties. It matters what stories make worlds, what worlds make stories.

Marilyn Strathern, The Gender of the Gift. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988. quoted in Donna J. Haraway, SF, 4.

The author makes a similar argument in relation to the experience of Manhattan’s environmental phenomena in Tiago Torres-Campos, ‘Duck and Cover: Experiencing the Anthropocene in 21st Century Manhattan’, in Pidgin Magazine, Issue 27. Princeton: Princeton University School of Architecture, 2020. pp132–147

18 In To the Lighthouse, light enables both the stream of consciousness and, one could argue, a correlated state of mind that will be here called a stream of unconscious consciousness.

TIAGO TORRES-CAMPOS s a Portuguese landscape architect and associate professor at Rhode Island School of Design. He co-edited ‘Postcards from the Anthropocene’ (2022) and completed a PhD in Architecture by Design, through which he explored architecture and landscape as conditions of the geologic.

www.cntxtstudio.com

LEE’S FOOD MARKET An Unlikely Story of Longevity

david murray

The ongoing life of Lee’s Food Market is an unlikely story. A simple 1948 one-storey building was the origin of this family business – a corner store in the post-war Edmonton neighbourhood of Strathearn.

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After WWII, during the Alberta economic boom, every new neighbourhood in Edmonton was given a commercial core, a slight expansion of the ubiquitous corner store. A permit to build was approved on June 16, 1948 for a one-storey wood-frame building that would accommodate a meat market and a grocery. The first business, the ShopRite Food Market, occupied one half of the building; the other half was Hart’s Drug Store. By 1951 the store was owned by James Lee and known as Lee’s Food Market. James was joined by his brother, Tom, who had come to Canada in 1925 to work as a chef on the railway. James, who lived behind the market from 1951-3, and Tom ran the store for a few years until James returned to Hong Kong, selling the store to Tom in 1954.

Tom Lee, now operating the business on his own, decided that he needed help with running the store and in 1954 he summoned his grandson Stanley from Hong Kong to join him in Edmonton. Stanley had escaped the Chinese revolution when his grandmother, See Pui Lee and Tom’s wife, took him to Hong Kong in the late 1940s. Stanley, 16 years old, arrived in Edmonton to assist his grandfather and to finish high school education at Victoria School. In 1956, just two years after arriving, Stanley was so immersed in Edmonton culture that he purchased season’s tickets to Edmonton’s Canadian Football League team, the Edmonton Eskimos.

In 1958, Tom Lee bought the adjacent vacant lot to the west and built a one storey infill building with a family apartment in the back. The front of the building was leased as a neighbourhood commercial space.

Stanley, now 19, returned to Hong Kong to be married, then came back to Edmonton with his new wife Donna, and two children followed – Tony in 1959 and Cindy in 1961. They lived at the back of the new one-storey infill, Donna tended the store and Stanley ventured into local business - insurance, real estate and development.

A momentous decision was made in 1965 when Tom and Stanley hired prominent local architects, Sinclair Skakun Naito, to design a second floor on the 1959 building, and to completely re-design and unify the exterior of these two buildings. This is when Lee’s Food Market expanded into the entire floor space of the original 1948 one-storey building. It was a stylish modern International Style transformation that has now endured seven decades of civic growth as Lee’s Food Market and continues as a popular neighbourhood destination in 2023.

1957 aerial photo of the Strathearn community, Edmonton, Alberta

The newly transformed building shortly after it was completed in 1966. This photograph was taken during Edmonton’s annual Klondike Days festival celebrating the 1890s gold rush and Edmonton’s participation in it.

Edmonton Archives

The very young, very new firm of Skakun & Naito, 1958 before Sinclair joined them.

image suppied by Nadine Harder, Casey Skakun’s daughter

Lee Family archives, supplied by Cindy Lee

The extended Lee Family photographed in 1962, in the apartment behind the original 1959 one-storey building. standing: Donna and Stanley Lee sitting: See Pui Yee and Tom Lee on the floor: Tony and Cindy Lee

above and left: Donna working in the store, 1964.

Donna with Tony in front of Lee’s Food Market in 1960.

Tony and Cindy, growing up in the store, 1964.

Lee Family archives, supplied by Cindy Lee

Why is this? The development of shopping malls and the ubiquitous use of the automobile since WWII diminished the need for local corner stores, most of which in Edmonton are now gone. There are several reasons why this business has survived so long. By good fortune the location continues to serve a willing neighbourhood, aided by a large seniors’ complex nearby. Family-run corner stores are typically not viable as businesses anymore, supplanted by chain convenience stores and caroriented malls. The fortunate location of this corner store has contributed to its longevity.

The decision to transform the buildings in 1965 brought gravitas to this prominent location and to the Lee family businesses. The multigenerational Lee family is an important link that has helped secure the continuity of this important corner store, allowing it to flourish well into the twenty-first century.

Perhaps even more important for the conservation of Lees’ Food Market is, first, the strong family ownership during the first half of its life and, second, the beneficial stewardship over the last 23 years by a dedicated conservationist, current owner Joe Clare, who has deliberately resisted persistent redevelopment pressures for this prominent corner location –prominent for its central location in this neighbourhood and also because of its visibility to a recently-completed light rail urban transit line. Under normal circumstances, progress would typically dictate that this type of urban location would be densified with new development that would probably erase the former memories of the site.

Edmonton has a progressive City Plan that supports the conservation of this important historic resource.

From the 2020s Edmonton City Plan, Charter Bylaw 20,000:

Essential City - Not everything in The City Plan is about making something new. Much of our work is about keeping things the same. A critical part of The City Plan is rooted in stewardship and preserving the attributes most valued by Edmontonians today that were handed down to us from previous generations. As a community, in return, we continue to deliver on what makes for a safe and liveable city as part of our gift to future generations. This is the essential city and it comes to life through many of the Intentions and Directions of The City Plan.

Future City - Cities are constantly evolving and responding to a changing world. Expressing and igniting transformative change is necessary to allow the city to respond to emerging opportunities and deliberately shape the place we want to live in. We have an opportunity to proactively alter Edmonton’s course. This is the future city and it comes to life through the Big City Moves and many Intentions and Directions that collectively will help us transform.

David Murray

The future of Lee’s Food Market, as unlikely as it might seem, is now on the path to long-term conservation. The owner will be submitting an application to designate the property as a municipal historic resource, under Edmonton’s progressive heritage conservation program. Progress will not destroy this memorable iconic building and business, but progress will play a part in its survival. Under the municipal designation program, the City will consider rezoning the property to allow substantial residential densification, as per City policy, to allow multi-storey residential development on the back portion of the property while preserving the 1965 building at the front.

Lee’s Food Market is a story of good fortune – fortuitous development decisions, fortuitous ownership, supportive City policies including Edmonton’s Corner Store Program with generous grants for rehabilitation and streetscape improvements, and a wonderful location where this unlikely longevity has been cultivated for over 70 years and will continue to flourish.

A plaque at Commonwealth Stadium, honouring the earliest of Edmonton’s CFL supporters. The Edmonton Eskimos, formed in 1949, had won the Grey Cup in 1954, 1955 and 1956, when Stanley Lee got his first season’s tickets.

Joe Clare, the current owner of the Lee’s Food Market building, and Tony Lee, a prominent Edmonton businessman, in 2022.

Tony Lee

Tony and Cindy Lee, in 1964. The first Canadian-born generation in a story that started with their great-grandfather’s arrival in Canada in 1925, and their parents’ emigration from Hong Kong in 1954 and 1958.

Good fortune all around.

DAVID MURRAY is an architect in Edmonton, Alberta, who specialises in the evaluation, protection and conservation of historic building resources. He has a keen interest in the human stories that are embedded in his projects.

David Murray

Lee Family archives

Research assistance: Erik Backstrom

The ethics of lasting Middleton Inn revisited

james moses

Settlement implies a benign and sympathetic occupation, the selection of a specific and favored place, and the engagement of that place to economical use; settlement is the establishment of home. Our growth is the opposite of settlement. We have forgotten the rule that the use of a place must not be separate from the abiding in it; we are intent on uses so disrespectful and unnecessary that the place becomes un-abidable.

— W G Clark, “Replacement”, 19911

To question architecture’s longevity in the climate crisis is critical as we come to terms with the fact that the carbon embodied in most of the planet’s existing buildings will linger in the atmosphere for three hundred to one thousand years. Extending the lives of buildings to amortise that carbon is increasingly obvious and urgent given the International Energy Agency’s forecast that global floor area will increase from 244 to 427 billion m2 by 2050, a trend that means a doubling of area by 2060, equivalent to building all five boroughs of New York City each month between now and then.2

While climate is the most pressing issue of our time, in the United States the interrelationship of race, power and democracy at the heart of both the mythology of the country’s founding and persistent conflict among its peoples, leads to the question of what should be done with buildings originally made to serve problematic, or worse, institutions. How should a building be re-purposed when the social conditions of the time in which it was built are abhorrent? As an opening to such conversations, consider the Middleton Inn in Charleston, South Carolina, designed by Clark and Menefee Architects between 1982 and 1985.1

When the Middleton Inn was published in the architectural press shortly after its completion, the images were bracing. The architecture seemed both fresh and timeless. Its tactility and grounding in the landscape softened the abstraction of its expression; the simplicity of forms and materiality seemed appropriate and allowed its site to play an equal, and at times dominant, role in the composition.

Forty years later, the architecture of the inn retains this sense, while merging even more fully with its site. Except for some interior finishes, the buildings feel like they could have been designed within the last five years. This does not imply that the project was ahead of its time, rather that it exists outside of time and that the influence of place is the driving force behind the architecture.

se e also

Boles, Daralice. “‘A Place Apart’. Progressive Architecture, May 1986, pp.83-91. Clark, W G and Charles Menefee. “A House and a Waterside Inn.” 9H: On Rigor, 1989. pp 104-109

McCarter, Robert. Place Matters: The Architecture of W.G. Clark. ORO Editions, 2019.

iea.org/data-and-statistics/charts/global-buildings-sector-co2-emissions-and-floorarea-in-the-net-zero-scenario-2020-2050. Accessed 6/25/2023

1 Clark, W.G. ‘Replacement’ in Richard Jensen, Clark and Menefee. Princeton Architectural Press, 2000. pp 10-13

2 IEA, ‘Global buildings sector CO2 emissions and floor area in the Net Zero Scenario, 2020-2050’. International Energy Agency, 2022.

James Moses

The inn contains fifty-five guest rooms in four buildings. The largest, the focus of most critical and journalistic interest over the years, contains twenty-four equal-sized guest rooms and a large, double-height common room. A bridal suite above the common room, the highest floor of the inn, has a view over the tree canopy to the Ashley River to the north. In plan, the building is configured as an L enclosing two sides of a lawn. The other sides are defined by thick understory shrubs, live oaks and cedars, making an outdoor room that accommodates overflow activity from the common room. The building perches on an escarpment. From the lawn, the land steps down to a swimming pool and its deck, and then down to the Ashley River.

The main building is actually made up of multiple smaller buildings. The twentyfour rooms are set within four identical individual modules separated at ground level by steps allowing passage from the upper level of the escarpment to the lawn below. The modules are connected by a continuous roof that makes the ensemble read as a singular building. A two-story version of this module is repeated in the three smaller buildings that are dispersed on the site, also organized as Ls, although with the timber and glass bays oriented outwardly, the opposite of the arrangement of the main building.

The buildings are Janus-faced, with the south and west sides, oriented to the dense woodland, being tawny stuccoed concrete masonry with a few small openings, rendering these sides almost mute. This heavy wall and continuous roof create an armature that anchors the rooms. Although the walls are two concrete block wythes thick and contain insulation and an air space, the expression is consistent with heavy, monolithic construction. More than that, the thermal mass provides protection from the hot south and west sun. Most of the rooms are accessed on this side of the building from a brick walk. The north and east sides, oriented to the river, are more open, with multiple panes of glass set in a timber grid, giving the appearance, if not the reality, of a multi-story curtain wall. All the exterior timber is painted a glossy black, masking its actual material nature, similar in effect to the stucco concealing the concrete masonry. The choice to conceal is deliberate and departs from the domestic work of Clark and Menefee, which tends to expose both block and timber. It is possible that this is related to differing programs: the inn is a public accommodation that may require a level of refinement, or politesse, that a house does not.

all drawings, Clark and Menefee Architects

Organizational clarity extends to the rooms themselves. The plan is cellular and repetitive, mirrored about a chimney and a shared straight-run in situ concrete stair providing access to the upper level rooms. One enters each room from outside, unmediated by interior common space, passing across a clear threshold. The upper-level entry decks, each shared by two rooms, are sheltered under the joining roof, the soffit of which is painted haint blue, a common practice borrowed from the local Gullah tradition. The Gullah are AfricanAmericans of the lowcountry, descendents of enslaved persons who worked the rice and indigo plantations of the area. They have carefully preserved elements of their African traditions and language. The haint blue soffit was originally made with indigo pigment and was believed to ward off ghosts from a home.

One moves from space to space not through an interior network of corridors, but by moving through the landscape. In this way, the architecture aligns with Clark’s recognition that the harm human habitation causes the planet is a given. He argues for an architecture that can atone by intensifying our experience of the landscape, bringing us closer to nature and a greater sense of belonging.

Clark and Menefee Architects

James Moses

a problematic landscape

The inn is sited in the exceptionally fertile riverine landscape of the Ashley River watershed in lowcountry South Carolina. It is not uncommon to see alligators, dolphins, otters, bald eagles, osprey and egrets. The natural world is very close. Ashley River Road, which leads to the inn, is lined by live oak and cypress hung with Spanish moss – these trees dominate the landscape, their ample shade providing relief from the heat, if not the humidity, of the lowcountry.

Indigenous Peoples, the Kiawah, lived here before they were removed by European settlers who established a plantation-based rice and indigo economy. The Ashley is a tidal river whose fresh- and salt-waters mix at Magnolia Plantation, about six miles downstream from Middleton Inn, and one of three plantation estates still existing on this stretch of the river, none of which operate as agricultural enterprises, but as tourist destinations.

The site’s history is as problematic as its physical qualities are beautiful. The Middleton Inn (or as it is known legally, The Inn at Middleton Place) sits adjacent to Middleton Place, one of nineteen plantations across fifty thousand acres (about seventy-eight square miles) once owned by the Middleton family. Having emigrated from Barbados, Edward Middleton settled in South Carolina in 1678, building The Oaks, a plantation at Goose Creek, about twenty miles north of Middleton Place. Henry Middleton acquired the land that became Middleton Place in 1741 as part of his wife Mary Williams’s dowry. Here he planned both buildings and gardens, built by the enslaved people he owned — some of the oldest non-Indigenous gardens in the country. The Middleton family occupy a key place in both American and Southern history and culture: among them were a President of the First Continental Congress, a signer of the Declaration of Independence, a Governor of South Carolina and Minister to Russia, and a signer of the Ordinances of Secession, which sparked the Civil War. Over generations, the Middletons enslaved at least 3500 people, the means for creating and accruing wealth enough to place the family in the 0.1% wealthiest Southern Whites by the start of the Civil War.3

The Middleton Inn owes its very existence to its relationship to Middleton Place. They are legally separate but interdependent, geographically adjacent and occupying the same territory. The agent of the corporation that owns the Inn is also the president of the non-profit entity that governs Middleton Place. One can move easily and without recognition of a line between the two properties. Middleton Place is a key aspect of the inn’s public profile online and in publication. The inn fosters Middleton Place as a tourist and event destination, not merely a protected historical artifact.

The relationship of these two entities brings into relief enormous questions that underlie much of American politics today; first and foremost, how do we square the values of democracy with the historical facts of colonisation, removal of Indigenous Peoples, manifest destiny and the institution of slavery? Sylvester Magee, who was born into bondage, was the last known enslaved person in the US. He died in 1971. The USA is only about two generations removed from the experience of (lawful) slavery.

3 Ager, Philipp, et al. ‘The Intergenerational Effects of Large Wealth Shock : White Southerners After the Civil War’. American Economic Review 111 (11), 2021 pp 3767-3794

https://www.americanrivers.org/river/ashley-river

The Ashley River rises out of the Wassamassaw and Great Cypress Swamps, and becomes an estuary, having joined the Cooper and Wando Rivers, before emptying into Charleston Harbour.

After passing by an equestrian center and the inn’s business office, neither a part of Clark and Menefee’s ensemble, the approach to the buildings that comprise the inn is through a continuation of the oak and cypress woodland.

https://www.bing.com/maps

In 1989, Hurricane Hugo apparently wiped out a significant number of these stately trees. But the chiaroscuro is returning, as a satellite view suggests: the four buildings that comprise the Clark and Menefee project are barely visible through the canopy.

Clark and Menefee Architects

plantation as monument

Cultural geographer J B Jackson distinguishes between two types of monuments: hortatory and vernacular.4 A hortatory monument, such as a war memorial, is an ‘echo from the remote past suddenly become present and actual’ that reminds us of a shared obligation, ‘keep[ing] us on the beaten path, loyal to tradition’. These monuments are in places where there is a shared and ‘strong sense of religious or political past’ and a concern about origins. A vernacular monument, such as Colonial Williamsburg, is unconcerned with specific people or dates and recall how everyday life used to be, often as an evocation of an imagined golden age when things were better.

Middleton Place has qualities of both a hortatory and a vernacular monument. It provides a sense of how life used to be for some living on the Ashley River in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. At the same time, the primary story being told is the Middleton family, their lives and accomplishments as central to the story of the region and the country.5 The buildings of Middleton Place, including some slave quarters, workshops and barns, have been restored, preserved, conserved and maintained in a hortatory veneration: not re-purposed, but frozen in time — a present and actual echo of an elite antebellum South.6

from Conde Nast’s Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours:

Many travelers approach plantations, a cornerstone of tourism in the South, as they would parks, museums, or historical sites: a beautiful place to learn something about local history before having a cocktail or going out to dinner. But plantations need to be experienced differently. Black people were enslaved, raped, tortured and killed for hundreds of years on these lands. They are America’s concentration camps. Rather than shy away from the painful truth, plantations must expose it. They are a vital educational resource with which to combat modern-day racism.7

contingent architecture

It is clear from W.G. Clark’s writings and Clark and Menefee’s body of work that their architecture is inextricable from the craft of building: that without building, there is no architecture. There is a clarity to the construction, a directness in the tectonic expression. The relationship to the ground is intentional. In the details, there is confidence without obsessiveness. The buildings are beautiful in their sufficiency. Firmitas, utilitas, and venustas are all at play. And the hope for a lasting architecture is central to Clark and Menefee’s thinking.

Is it unfair to discuss the architecture and construction of the Middleton Inn within a framework that was so clearly not at issue in its design? The architecture of the inn seems to have been conceived apolitically and without explicit reference to Middleton Place, turning instead to a specific relationship between architecture and landscape, without obvious social concerns beyond accommodation of social occasion. But building sites are not neutral ground. Clark’s exquisite text ‘Replacement’ makes very clear that his values primarily regard architecture’s relationship to the natural world. The messy world of human relations, which can be so difficult to comprehend, much less interpret, makes architecture, more than any artistic discipline, contingent. Kenneth Frampton wrote that ‘behind our preoccupation with the autonomy of architecture lies an anxiety that derives in large measure from the fact that nothing could be less autonomous than architecture’.8

One way in which architecture’s optimism for the future is expressed is in a building’s capacity to adapt to new realities. Buildings that last outlive their original programs and are maintained, and loved, for reasons that transcend use. Middleton Inn is surely one of those buildings. Its architecture is informed by, but not reliant on, the program for which it was designed. The inn’s longevity will require adaptation to new sociopolitical realities that will follow a different trajectory.

4 Jackson, John Brinkerhoff. The Necessity for Ruins and Other Topics. University of Massachusetts Press, 1980.

5 Hunt, Judith Lee. Beyond the Power of Fortune: The Middleton Family of South Carolina, 1784-1877. University of Florida, Ph.D. dissertation, 2005. ufdcimages. uflib.ufl.edu/AA/0%3/69/97/00001/beyondpoweroffor00hunt.pdf.

6 We should note that in 1860, the eve of the Civil War, the vast majority of Southern Whites did not enslave a single person, but were yeoman farmers, working their own or rented acreage. The institution of slavery was not primarily a question of economic viability, but of wealth creation by a relatively small number of families, an aristocracy.

see also Doyle, Barbara, et al. Beyond the Fields: Slavery at Middleton Place Middleton Place Foundation, 2008

7 Enelow-Snyder, Sarah. “An Ethical Guide to Plantation Tours.” Condé Nast Traveler, 2021, cntraveler.com. Accessed 6/9/2023.

see also Davis, Allison. “Please Don’t Get Married on a Plantation: After Charlottesville Can You Hear Me?” A Practical Wedding, 2018. apracticalwedding.com. Accessed 6/8/2023.

8 Frampton, Kenneth. ‘Reflections on the Autonomy of Architecture: A Critique of Contemporary Production’. in Diane Ghirardo ed., Out of Site: A Social Criticism of Architecture. Bay Press, 1991. pp 7-26.

Moses

Middleton Inn, embedded is earthworks and climbing fig vines, conveys a sense that it is locked into place, that it has been there for a long time and will remain for longer, joined to the land. It reads as a ruin in a landscape running free.

JAMES MOSES is an architect in Massachusetts, teaches graduate design studios at Roger Williams University, and is a graduate of the University of Texas at Austin. James’s fourth great-grandfather Isaiah Moses, a German-born Jew, was a Charleston grocer and planter. He and his wife Rebecca Phillips purchased The Oaks from the Middleton family in 1814. The house burned in 1840, shortly after they failed to sell the property, including fifty enslaved persons.

bigbendstudio.net

jmoses@bigbendstudio.net

James

45 high street reading massachusetts

jeffrey olinger

We celebrate moments in the urban fabric where quirky incongruencies form novel civic forms. Older, pre-modern cities are littered with such places, and are beloved for their humane scale and visual variety. As Jane Jacobs observed ‘Every cat needs its corner’.

Sometimes it is geometry that shapes such novel forms, a force that supersedes the regular order of the city, evoking an uncanny sensibility of the passage of time because each quirk reveals a places’ temporal layering. Triangular parcels are quirky urban misfits, left as open space for multiple reasons, but principally because the shape of the parcel resists the conventional overlay of an orthographic building structure.

Flatiron parcels are a kind of incidental urbanism and are formed as collateral parcels of land in a dynamic city. Daniel Burnham’s eponymous Flatiron Building in New York City is the product of conflict, where Broadway’s ancient route survives Manhattan’s gridiron, which at 5th Avenue creates the parcel’s unique 23° corner. One of our projects, Inman Crossing in Cambridge, MA, is the product of divergence, where the 36° flatiron parcel is formed from a fork in the road, with travellers to Medford turning west, and travellers to Charlestown going east. 45 High Street ’s 33° flatiron parcel in Reading, Massachusetts is a product of paths converging at the historic Reading-Maine Railroad Depot located at the apex of the project site.

When our firm began conceptualising the layout of 45 High Street, the dinner game Zeno’s Saganaki sprang to mind: a piece of fried saganaki cheese is divided by each diner until it can be subdivided no more, replicating in food form Zeno’s ancient ‘Dichotomy Paradox’. Similarly, 45 High Street ’s parcel can be studied as fractal pattern of diminishing nested rectangles. This study helped us to understand the serrated nature of the parcel’s edge.

We aslo, in general, attend to the rhythms of civic development, where architecture is a dynamic combination of space and culture over time. Designs reconcile themselves with the current tastes of the city expressed through the mundane language of zoning and civic regulation. Many of our projects begin with an underutilised property with the potential to achieve a more productive purpose, a purpose initially defined by our developer clients.

Duration and frequency are two ways of reading architecture’s accommodation of the spatial and cultural stresses that underly all projects. In 45 High Street we evaluated a myriad of time scales, breaking down the program into clearly articulated cycles of time. For example, the ground level retail is subject to short cycles of activities intrinsically linked to the schedule of the MBTA commuter rail train station across the street. The cadence of the train creates a regular ebb and flow of occupants and establishes the design of flexible transient spaces.

If we scale up our time considerations we find that the daily cycles of spatial uses, such as parking garage activity and residential occupancy patterns, shift the focus from the scale of the individual to the scale of the unit, whether that be an apartment, retail storefront, or parking space. Weekly time cycles begin to address community concerns over waste management and the scheduling of shared building amenities, that impact the city at the scale of the building. Monthly cycles address issues of tenancy and impact the city at a neighbourhood scale. Seasonal cycles allow for the broad strokes of a building’s yearly activity which speak to events that impact the city at a civic scale. Annual cycles further expand the impact of the project to a regional scale.

We have responded to our urban misfit of a site, its flatiron slice of Reading’s history, with a layered, diverse and accommodating project. Its vitality is revealed by the complexity and sophistication of the interwoven time cycles that interact with it. g

above: red property lines, black building footprint opposite: 45 High Street. Originally, a site of unrealised potential. Program shifts from aging commercial, to a more public and visible commercial, retail and residential. Surface parking is garaged and screened. Density is increased, enlarging and engaging the immediate community. Everything that was there is still there, with an added dynamism that comes from time scales and cycles, material complexity and a more focused architectural form.

JEFFREY OLINGER AIA is principal of Olinger Architects, Cambridge, Massachusetts, a firm committed to designing projects that unlock the civic potential of each site.

http://www.olinger.io

the urban uncanny; all things are temporal

Olinger Architects

all images Olinger Architects

THE SHORT LIFE OF TWO TINY BUILDINGS

Edmonton Alberta

david murray

‘The Mite Block, billed as the world’s smallest two-storey building, has been sold for $3,000 and will be torn down’ as published in the Edmonton Journal on July 30, 1960. “Asked about the historical value of the building, (the new owner) said Edmontonians should be glad to see it go because ‘it isn’t good for anything, and it doesn’t look good on Jasper Avenue’.

A Tiny Building on a Tiny Lot: 1914 - 1960

In 1913, Arthur Bloomer, a real estate and insurance agent, constructed the wedge-shaped Mite Block on Edmonton’s Jasper Avenue with just 2.7m of street frontage. It was a substantial terracotta brick building, that over the years served numerous occupants including the last owner, George Andrew Collins’ Imperial taxi business.

Henderson’s Directory: 9701 Jasper Avenue

1920 – F.H. Clark, Jeweller

1930 – Pete’s Dollar Taxi

1940 – Diamond Taxi Limited

1950 – Blue Diamond Taxi

1960 - Imperial Taxi

In 1947, Ripley’s Believe It or Not, in a newspaper cartoon feature, declared The Mite to be ‘the smallest two-storey building on this earth containing all facilities.’

The Edmonton Journal in 1956 reported that the Mite Block was a ‘surprisingly solid’ building with a full-size concrete foundation, modern plumbing and an electronically-operated door between the front waiting room and the general office on the ground floor, which could be controlled from upstairs by pushing a button. ‘In this way, it is possible for one man to be upstairs on dispatching duties while keeping the general office safely locked. At the same time he can admit persons who have business upstairs. This arrangement is necessary because there is only one outside door in the building and therefore only one way to get to the slightly cramped staircase.’

When George Collins sold the building in 1960, he had immediate regrets and tried to reverse the sales agreement but to no avail. The City Archives and Landmarks Committee publicly expressed regret. ‘It’s disappointing to hear that the building will disappear, but I guess we can’t stand in the way of progress’, and suggested that if it could be saved, ‘it would be a first-rate attraction for any store’.

Progress is the excuse given for the demise of this tiny building. The acceptable durée is simply as long as the building doesn’t impede progress. Is this not the excuse that we hear time and time again? An ever-expanding Alberta economy demands that urban properties be constantly redeveloped. 1960 was in an era before there were any incentives to retain historical buildings in Edmonton. Had this tiny building miraculously survived another 35 years, this delightful and unlikely structure might have benefited from the City’s initiative to designate and conserve significant historical resources, which was formalised in 1993.

Edmonton Archives B.4388

The Edmonton Journal, Wednesday August 17, 1960

A Comic Book Façade for a tiny Comic Book Store: 1986 - 1991

In 1985, the architectural rejuvenation of Edmonton’s historic south side district began with the Old Strathcona Building Front Improvement Work Program. It was a federal program in Canada that was intended to offer incentives for the hiring of unemployed workers affected by the downturn of the economy in the 1980s. Old Strathcona is the repository of a substantial inventory of recognised historic buildings, dating from the preWW1 period, centred around the southside main street, Whyte Avenue. I was appointed the architect for the program and over the course of four years, we completed numerous historic façade restorations and rejuvenations along Whyte Avenue and adjacent streets.

One of our projects was a commercial building, the Wee Book Inn used book store, next to the historic 1891 Strathcona Hotel. It was actually two buildings, a 7.3m wide brick building and a narrow 2.2m wide annex, which had been an undeveloped lot in the early twentieth century, later filled with first a one-storey building and later with a second story.

‘Darwin Luxford opened the first Wee Book Inn location on Whyte Avenue in 1971, setting up in a building not much more than two metres wide. The narrow structure would inspire the ‘Wee’ in Wee Book Inn.’ — Edmonton Journal September 23, 2021

Darwin and his wife Liola started their bookstore in the tiny 2.2m wide lot in 1971. Within 2 years they also leased the adjacent building to expand their operations. They purchased both properties in 1979. It was then that they dedicated the narrow lot building to be the Comic Book Annex.

The Wee Book Inn was one of the first buildings in the Building Front Improvement Work Program. With the cooperation of the Wee Book Inn owners, we decided to restore the original brick façade, hidden behind the stucco. But if we were to uncover the brick building, what were we

going to do with the infill building in the original vacant lot? This was the comic bookstore, so my proposal was to construct a comic book façade for a comic book store. It was ironic moment in my career since I was professionally dedicated to the study and authentic restoration of historic buildings, not constructing false history, so I was amused by the permission I was given to bring a light-hearted idea to the serious business of conservation.

This is a view of the Wee Book Inn as we found it in 1985.

This early photo, shortly after amalgamation of Strathcona and Edmonton in 1912, depicts the first one storey infill building in this narrow lot.

Edmonton Archives EA-10-277

David Murray

The design of the façade paid amusing tribute to the early woodframed pre-WW1 facades of Old Strathcona. I would typically never deliberately reconstruct a replica façade in a recognised historic area, but the Comics store deserved some special treatment that paid tribute to the authentic historicism of the area without pretending to be anything but a cheerful take on the comic book business.

Unfortunately the life of this building was all too short. There was a fire in the neighbouring Antiquarian Book Store building in 1990, four years after the completion of the new facade, with a partial collapse onto the roof of the Wee Book Inn. The damage was so severe that the whole Wee Book Inn building was reconstructed — the comic book façade demolished, never to be seen again.

The Comics store and The Mite ended up being temporary architecture. For different reasons they outlived their times. Perhaps the Comics store in Old Strathcona could never could have been considered a permanent feature of the streetscape because it was so specific to the comic business. In fact, the current owner, Carey Luxford told me that his parents were contemplating reconstruction of the store before the fire, perhaps because the old building structures were no longer viable. Commercial businesses come and go over time. On Site review asks what is the acceptable durée for architecture? In this case, fate intervened to answer this question. It was ‘progress’ that ended the life of The Mite. If the fire had not destroyed the Comics store, perhaps progress would have also brought about its demise. It is interesting to me that both these buildings were fantasies in their own right, a little

unbelievable. The Mite owes its reputation to a cartoon depiction in the Ripley’s Believe It or Not oeuvre and the Comics store to the fantasies that are embedded in comic books, which often depict both super optimism and the super human – the heroic. g

acknowledgements

Research assistance: Erik Backstrom

Chris Zdeb, Edmonton Journal article - July 30, 2015 https://edmontonjournal.com/entertainment/local-arts/wee-book-inns-words-andcats-celebrate-half-a-century-in-edmonton

DAVID MURRAY, AAA, FRAIC, APTI, has a long history in preservation, rehabilitation of historic resources and urban design strategies in historic districts. He practices in Edmonton, Alberta. https://www.davidmurrayarchitect.ca

The Comics store is depicted as an unlikely over-stated cartoon hero in an early twentieth century streescape.

David Murray

James Dow

and on a lighter note literally

david murray

In 1976 we built this cabin at our land (no electricity). In 1977 it was struck by a prairie twister, knocked off its foundations and rolled down the hill. Definitely a temporary building by an architect who eventually learned how to fasten a building to its foundations.

Before the storm,

after the storm,

nothing for it but a cup of tea on the ceiling. from a photo-collage by Christl Bergström

calls for articles on site review 44 architecture and play

philosophy as play community building as play events as play education as play theatre as play humour as play lifestyle as play entertainment as play distraction as play

play as an invitation to engagement play as a invitation to participate play as design process play as critiique of seriousness play as political resistance play as rebellion against the paradigm of function play as communication play as negotiation play as body in space

There are several ways to think about play, the most obvious one being the one which children, with great imagination and entertainment, do, learning as they go. Then there is organised play, sports and such, games involving opposing players of great prowess, skill and combativeness. And somewhere in-between is play that involves messing around for the sake of meaningless joy: play for the sake of play.

There is another use of the word play, which is the looseness in a system. Mechanical parts that have some play are not highly machined, or if they once were are now worn, introducing a play between parts. This is very interesting, that play describes this sloppiness, where exactitude is not a factor.

The architecture of play is linked indubitably to Aldo van Eyck’s schools and playgrounds, and from there all the theories of education, learning and play that so dominated the twentieth century. Increasingly, either through psychology, ideology or health and safety regulations, play has become channelled, scheduled – something closer to a machined part in a busy life than poking about a ditch with a stick. for hours. till dinner time.

Somewhere in all of this is the sense that joy is for children, that eventually one puts aside childish things and gets on with some other form of life, usually something more grim, less joyous. Something we see in the tragic children of war who have been forced to put aside childish things almost from birth.

In the practice of architecture do we have works conceived, designed and built with joy throughout the whole process? Where the sense of play is there from the start, an architecture of simple pleasures, of ridiculous time-wasting that is vastly pleasurable? This transcends program and looks squarely at the process of making architecture.

What is the relationship between architecture and play?

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books of interest

Stefano Corbo, Exteriorless Architecture Form, Space, and Urbanities of Neoliberalism

London, New York: Routledge, 2023

https://www.routledge.com/ExteriorlessArchitecture-Form-Space-andUrbanities-of-Neoliberalism/Corbo/p/ book/9781032170817

Stefan Boeri et al., Green Obsession. New York, Barcelona: Actar Publishers, 2022 https://www.stefanoboeriarchitetti.net/en/publications/ green-obsession/

Benek Cincik, Tiago Torres-Campos

Postcards from the Anthropocene

Unsettling the Geopolitics of Representation

Barcelona: dpr-barcelona, 2022

ISBN: 978-84-949388-7-0

https://dpr-barcelona.com/postcards-from-theanthropocene/

Lacaton & Vassal, Strategies of the Essential, AV Monografias 170 (2014). Madrid, Arquitecto Viva, 2014 https://arquitecturaviva.com/publications/ av-monografias/lacaton-vassal-1

2G N°21, Lacaton & Vassal, Ilka & Andreas Ruby, Dietmar Steiner, Patrice Goulet, Espagne / Spain, 2002, Anglais-Espagnol / English - Spanish, Editorial Gustavo Gili https://www.lacatonvassal.com/ publications.php

ISBN 978-1841660585

https://www.trockenbrot.com/works/muf-this-iswhat-we-do/

Reimagining Children’s Museums, a three-year research project for the Association of Children’t Museums.

http://muf.co.uk/portfolio/childrens-museum-current/

Katherine Shonfield, Rosa Ainsley, Adrian Dannat, This is What We Do. A Muf Manual, 2002

architecture and time

Tim Ingleby

how long does it last

sometimes it is renewed forever other times, especially in times of experiment, not long

front cover: fishing structures in Pupelde, Chiloé Island, Chile. From an essay by Brittany Giunchigliani on pp 24-27

back cover: fabric and ice structure as a path to lessons found in temporary architectural constructions. From an essay by Tim Ingleby on pp 18-23