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The Afterlives of Temporary Architecture
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.
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: pre-empting 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 pre-empt 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
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.
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.
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
4. Dana Cuff. Architectures of Spatial Justice. Cambridge, Massachusetts, MIT Press, 2023. pp 159-187
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/
