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Flowers in the Snow
Architecture, Entropy and Temporariness
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 free-standing 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.
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) anarcho-libertarianism 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.
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 crop-sprayer.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 form-finding methods, innovative structural systems, and the principles of construction.
