13 minute read
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.
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.
2 Simon Sadler, Archigram. Architecture without Architecture. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2005. p7
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 (above) 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.
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.
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.
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.
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
