inTouch: Material Performance in the Making of Urban Places

11TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, LTH

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11TH ANNUAL INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE, SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE, LTH, LUND, SEPTEMBER 19TH 2016

11th Annual International Conference School of Architecture, LTH, Lund September 19th, 2016 Sustainable Urban Design Master´s Programme School of Architecture Lunds Tekniska Högskola Lund, Sweden www.stadsbyggnad.lth.se www.performativeplaces.com 3

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About

The annual international multidisciplinary conference happens once a year at Lund University. Each year new questions are posed with regards to sustainable urban design issues.

Professionals and students of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design fields from all around the world gather to discuss and gain knowledge from inspiring lectures and panel discussions.

The annual SUDes conference, sponsored by the Ax:son Johnson Foundation, allows participants and audience to exchange ideas and experiences in a flurry of lectures and discussions. The program for Sustainable Urban Design in the School of Architecture at Lund University intends to channel these creative energies into projects that address changing urban conditions and create enduring, livable communities.

The annual SUDes Conference is held at the School of Architecture every autumn and hosted by the School of Architecture, Sustainable Urban Design Master’s Program, and Ax:son Johnson Institute for Sustainable Urban Design.

This year’s conference, being already 12th in a row, with the title “In Touch - Material performance in the making of urban places”, touched the topics of materiality and its performance and explored the ways how the materials help designers to create livable public spaces for the everyday life.

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Contents 04

About

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Contents

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Foreword by Harrison Fraker

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The Conference 18

Jenny B. Osuldsen Landscrapers With Material Performance

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Jesper Magnusson Social Life And Materiality

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Manon Otto Building Super Local: Material Sourcing While Masterplanning ​ Jane Philbrick Artwork And Performancce

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Sacha Menz Going Into Perfection: Materials, Design, Details ​ Linda Camara In Touch With Wood ​ Alice Tasca In Touch With Process Of Making A Place

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Fredrik Lund Material And Place​

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Afterword by Harrison Fraker

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The List of Makers

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Acknowledgement 7

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Foreword

by Harrison Fraker “New materials, new fabrication techniques and the innovative applications of old, everyday, or recycled materials are enabling architects, landscape architects, urban designers and artists to create powerful and arresting new experiences of site, place and the city. These strategies are inspiring new sensibilities, demanding that we rethink every surface and material process in the city; and ask how they might intensify and enrich the everyday experience of a city’s many publics.”

The idea of ‘material performance’ is complex and operates on many levels. It starts with the thing itself – its physical properties: its weight/mass, its density, its transparency, its color, its hardness/ softness, its roughness/smoothness, its strength (tensile and compressive), its elasticity, its heat transfer qualities, etc., another words, all the measurable properties that have been developed over 3000 years of material testing.

All building materials come from some process of extraction, production and fabrication. These ‘hidden’ processes can be understood as an essential part of a material’s performance, because they are part of what transforms the materials from a raw state to useful form. In some cases the material process of fabrication is visible and apparent in its application; in others, it is suppressed, even hidden for other effects.

Nonetheless, the process of fabrication and its deployment remain potential contributors to how we understand material performance because it is embedded in its use.

And yet, these abstract measured properties and qualities are understood through everyday experience – what they look like, how they feel to the touch, what sounds they help reflect, even the taste and smell of their presence. This full kinesthetic experience creates deep memories of places, ones that can be powerfully awakened when the sensory qualities of materials are part of design thinking and the making of places.

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Our personal experience is mediated further through our cultural history and knowledge, both trial-and-error and scientific, that has enabled us to employ materials to perform a wide range of functions – from structural support, to physical enclosure, to visual effects, to thermal and acoustical effects, etc. Over time, through our cultural experience, materials acquire conventional meanings and understandings. We expect specific materials to be used in certain ways and within certain understandings of their properties and limitations. Innovation occurs when new properties, new materials, new construction or fabrication techniques are discovered that open up new forms and disrupt our expectations. Material performance, in all these dimensions, can be seen as one of the fundamental ways in which we understand the built environment. As such, it can be argued that urban design along with its social, economic and environmental responsibilities is fundamentally a material art.

At this moment new materials, new scientific knowledge at the nano scale, new digital fabrication techniques and the innovative application of old, everyday or recycled materials are enabling architects, landscape architects, urban designers and artists to create powerful and arresting new experiences of site, place and the city. These strategies are inspiring new sensibilities and demanding we rethink every surface and material process of the city. This conference seeks answers to the question of how materials can, not only create a more livable, enriched and meaningful everyday experience, but also how their performance can create a more sustainable future.

Professor Fraker is recognized as a pioneer in passive solar, day lighting and sustainable design research and teaching. He has pursued a career bridging architecture and urban design education and teaches design studio at Berkeley University. In 2014 was awarded by AIA/ACSA with Topaz Medallion for Excellence in Architectural Education. http://ced.berkeley.edu

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The Conference in Touch: Material Performance in the Making of Urban Places Peter Siöström, Louise Lövenstiërne, Andreas Olsson, Kateřina Vondrová, Cyril Pavlů Welcome and introduction to the SUDes Conference Jenny B. Osuldsen Partner at Snøhetta, Oslo, Norway; MLArch, Professor in Landscape Architecture at Ås Agricultural University, AxJohnson Guest Professor, Lund

Making Landscrapers With Material Performance Jesper Magnusson

Architect; Doctoral student at Department of Architecture and Built Environment, LTH, Lund, Sweden

Social Life And Materiality Manon Otto

SUDes Alumni; Landscape Designer at BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group, New York, USA

Building Super Local: Material Sourcing While Masterplanning ​ Jane Philbrick

Artist and educator; Founder of atelier re-wire; Partner, TILL, New York, USA

Artwork And Performance Sacha Menz

Professor for Architecture and Building Process at ETH, Zurich; Co-founder of s a m architekten, Zurich, Switzerland

Going Into Perfection: Materials, Design, Details ​ Linda Camara

Architect and Office Manager at Tengbom, Kalmar; Board Member at Smart Housing Småland; Master in Architecture at LTH, Lund, Sweden

In Touch With Wood ​ Alice Tasca

Architect and partner at studio ASA - active social architecture, Kigali, Rwanda

In Touch With Process Of Making A Place Fredrik Lund

Professor at Institute for Architectural design, form and colour, NTNU, Trondheim; Architect at Studio Fredrik Lund, Trondheim, Norway

Material And Place​

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Jenny B. Osuldsen Making Landscrapers With Material Performance “To be in touch, you always have to touch the material, figure out how it works and be close to it. Be in touch one-to-one and think big and larger than the projects itself.”

Jenny is educated as Landscape architect in Norway (MLArch 1991) and in the USA. She has been working with Snøhetta since 1995 where is one of the six partners. Landscape and architecture have developed at Snøhetta into a single idea creating a new and emerging spirit for architectural practices, worldwide. Jenny has been a member of the SUDes team as a guest professor since 2014. http://snohetta.com

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Materiality is a very present theme in all of Snohetta’s works. As Jenny points out in her presentation, the use of materials is often tied to local conditions and site specifics, which Snohetta designers always aim to recognise in their projects, whether working in Scandinavia or in other parts of the world. Jenny presented the traditional wood interior of the Oslo Opera as a warm contrast to the white marble exterior and the ‘cut’ through the rocky ledge of the Petter Dass Museum as revealing the intimate materiality of the place. But when working with projects around the world, the search for what is site-specific becomes one of the most important tasks in the design process.

As shown in the project of King Abdulaziz Centre, the specific materiality of the site can take a shape of a steel pipe facade, drawing the inspiration from the oil pipes in the surrounding landscape.

In the Snohetta’s office the research of different materials and prototyping in one-to-one scale allows the designers to explore how to work with the materials in the new ways. From traditional craftsmen’s techniques, through testing of digital fabrication and use of the robotic arm, they are able to carry out projects such as The Wild Reindeer Pavilion, which is a perfect combination of high tech 3d computer modelling work and traditional shipbuilding technique.

Š Ketil Jacobsen, Snohetta 19

Jesper Magnusson Social Life And Materiality “What we touch, touches us.”

Jesper is an architect with a PhD in urban design at LTH in Lund, Sweden. He has recently published a doctoral dissertation with the title “Clustering Architectures - The Role of Materialities for Emerging Collectives in the Public Domain” that explores how can material design facilitate humans’ co-existence in shared urban space. The dissertation is a study of public social life, addressing issues about how and by what means people meet and cluster in urban domains. http://www.arkitektur.lth.se/

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In his presentation, Jesper argues that every particular design solution and choice of materiality in the public domain has a major strategic implication on social communality and human co-existence. He demonstrates this hypothesis in several case studies where certain artefacts and architectural features support the occurrence of temporal social gatherings and interactions. He presents six main typological categories which involve the role of materiality. These are ‘Anchors’, ‘Base camps’, ‘Tickets and Rides’, ‘Monocore’ and ‘Multicore’ spaces, ‘Punctiform’, ‘Linear and Field seating’, and ‘Ladders’. The proposed activators also represent response to the challenges of segregation and polarisation in public space. The analysis reveals how the actors and activators can affect social life in the public domain.

Jesper argues that materiality, form and how we position objects in public space are always relational. A space and an artefact do not mean the same to everybody or even to ourselves. There is always a correspondence, a mutual relation, an affection between person and object or space; it is a relation that goes both ways. Therefore, it is important to focus on how architecture and urban objects, not only mediate social encounters among people and strangers, but also how objects of different kind can guide how and where people move and use the urban space.

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Manon Otto Building Super Local: Material Sourcing While Masterplanning “Puertas is a development model celebrating its site’s unique potential, inspired by the environmental challenges of our time solved by indigenous genius.”

Manon graduated from Sustainable Urban Design Master’s Program at LTH in Lund in 2013, with focus on climate sensitive urban planning & microclimate design in Nordic cities. After working as Landscape Designer at SLA in Copenhagen, she joined BIG - Bjarke Ingels Group in New York City where she leads the newly formalized BIG LANDSCAPE department as Director of Landscape Design NYC. https://big.dk

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When talking about materiality, we often think of small scale structures and precisely crafted building details. In Manon’s presentation, the presence of a specific material on site leads to the creation of a holistic large scale vision for an ecovillage. She explains how we can potentially masterplan a material supply or landscape strategy to be able to source the building materials on site. The material that is the driving element of her project is bamboo.

Due to unmapped geological conditions, the masterplan needs to provide flexible rules for adapting over time. The planting of fast growing bamboo species takes on an important role in the landscape strategy with a goal of regenerating the jungle ecosystem, providing building material over time when needed and reinstalling the costal conditions to protect from flooding. The adaptability of the plan is based on perimeter distances of productive landscapes of bamboo and farming around each building. The inspiration, as Manon states, comes from a traditional thinking of Mayan culture, where one lives in a very close connection and harmony with the surrounding landscape and is traditionally farming every possible piece of available land. In her case, this has been pushed even further to grow not only food but also a construction material.

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Jane Philbrick Artwork and Performance “Pristine white ground. Not a tree, not a sprig of green. Surfaces bright and shiny. Nice image but it will not sustain us, it will kills us. Rather think soft and think dirty.”

Jane is an artist, educator, and writer. Her large-scale installations and sculpture range in media from ultrasound and rammed earth to magnetic levitation and found space. Her current work explores artist’s interventions in the built environment. With colleagues from the Harvard Graduate School of Design, she is founding partner of TILL (Today’s Industrial Living Landscapes), focusing on brownfield regeneration and reuse. Past projects include re-wire, an international atelier for land-use planning funded by the State of Connecticut and sponsored by the New York Foundation for the Arts. http://janephilbrick.net

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Jane Philbrick’s presentation expresses the urgency and need for reconnecting with the living landscapes and creating an environment that will sustain our lives in cities, rather than creating just a fantastic image and spectacle. She draws the reference between the contemporary use of greenery in developments, which often becomes a “developer’s carnival of spectacle”, to the 1970’s performative artist who embodied the attention of subject and object. The works of Marina Abramović or Valie Export explore what happens when subject is reduced to an object and the moral dilemma it possesses for the viewer, creating the parallel to the landscape being just a shiny image without purpose, without any performance.

“The city is not a movie, we are not light entertainment,” is a statement by Antje Danielson, which Jane presents to raise awareness of the consequences of urbanisation on a global scale. She questions global development, whether it is still development in its meaning or just a rapid production. “What does it develop,” she asks. Even though we see opportunities in future technologies, we must be aware of not adapting future to current existing norms.

Philbrick points to the vision for self-driving cars without reimagining the streetscape, as it holds the opportunity to be something more than impervious layers of concrete, causing the death of soil underneath.

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Sacha Menz Going Into Perfection: Materials, Design, Details “We always talk about nature, sustainability, but we build bigger, heavier… We only think about our personal comfort, but do not think about community.”

Sacha is gratuated as an architect at ETH in Zurich (1989) and works as a full professor for Architecture and Building Process at ETH since October 2014 where he teaches various courses, focusing on the architecture and building process. In 2008, he published a book “Three Books on the Building Process“ on the topic. In 1997, Sacha co-founded the architectural office s a m architekten (sam architects and partners Inc). Since 2004, he is a member of the Federation of Swiss Architects. http://www.samarch.ch

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In his presentation, Sacha argues for rethinking the approach to sustainability, where not only the technical solutions for more efficient buildings need to be met, but most importantly we have to change the needs of personal comfort and space.

In Switzerland the average living area per person has almost doubled in the last 50 years, leading to buildings being bigger in private spaces but very much lacking the common social places.

Sacha presents three of his projects, described as three roofs, which demonstrate his search for the common space, construction efficiency and materiality.

Through optimisation and choice of the right material and building process, the structures can become self-sustaining with a minimum of supporting elements leading to an efficient use of space. As shown in the projects of the Swiss Re Pavilion, the use of steel allows for a shape defining leaf-like structure without additional support; in the Alpine Residence a combination of solid concrete base and wooden load-bearing frame creates a single open common space visually connected to its surrounding. The importance and opportunities of digital fabrication, which can bridge the traditional materials and high-tech construction, are presented in Sacha Menz’s latest project of the Architecture Institute building at ETH, Zurich. The large digitally fabricated roof covers a building, where the overall reduction and optimisation of installation and core space lead to over 90% usable area from which a majority is used as communal space, enhancing the social life in the building.

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Linda Camara In Touch With Wood “Get in touch with wood and industrial production!”

Linda works as an architect and office manager at Tengbom, Kalmar from 2010.

She has worked on a proposal for the new addion to the Linnaeus University in Kalmar as a head architect, the project is set to be completed in 2020. Linda is also involved in Smart Housing Småland, a ten-yearproject, focusing on establishing a creative innovation environment, where research, enterprise, design and architecture and the public sector will collaborate in order to address today’s housing shortage as well as tomorrow’s challenges. https://tengbom.se

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In her talk, Linda Camara argues that wood as a material in combination with industrial production and prefabrication can be a sustainable solution to the urgent need for housing in Sweden. The performative properties of wood, its capacity for absorbing CO2 and the possibility of local production present many benefits over concrete. She recognises that industrial production can be perceived as temporary, lacking in quality and not contributing to the creation on quality public spaces.

Thus, she encourages architects to work more creatively with it. Linda has been working with wood construction and prefabrication for many years and her work ranges from innovative smart solutions for prefabricated housing of minimal area, 10 m2, to multi-story residential wooden housing projects. Through the ongoing collaborative process across many disciplines, the wood production of houses will soon be able to provide residential dwellings with the same number of stories as traditional concrete structures. With the possibility of prefabrication, fast construction process and sustainable properties of the material, there is a big opportunity for wooden housing to contribute to the sustainable future.

Š Bertil Herzberg, Tengbom 29

Alice Tasca In Touch With Process Of Making A Place “We believe that architecture at any scale can positively impact its environment, and that the good design should be available for everyone, regardless age, race or income.�

Alice had her first experience in Rwanda in 2010, when she spent few months in the countryside researching the local materials and traditional construction techniques.

She moved to Kigali in 2011 to teach a design studio at the Kigali College of Science and Technology. She is highly committed to the social aspects ASA pursues and interested in the design social-environmental sustainability. These topics are also the fundamentals of the health and education facilities projects Alice is involved with. http://www.activesocialarchitecture.com

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Alice reminds us about the importance of social architecture and design that can empower lives in the context of Kigali, Rwanda, where she works with the ASA team.

In a country which is heavily dependent on agriculture and is continuously suffering from ongoing political and environmental crisis, the architecture goal and ideas become very simple: to protect from the natural elements. The architecture answers the direct needs of the people. ASA focuses on educational, health or sanitation facilities.

By involving the local communities in the process of making, they are able to develop a socially active ecosystem while educating the residents about various issues, such as sanitation, hygiene and nutrition. The process of making is more than building buildings; it is about building community.

ASA has been successful in introducing a special typology for Early Childhood Development and Family Centres. The space for community gathering has a strong symbolic value, because of the hierarchical systems and relationships rooted in the society. In order to create these facilities, ASA introduced a participatory design approach so the community meetings and workshops were held as an important part of the extensive research on techniques, local materials, traditions and culture, mostly related to the relationship between the child and the mother. The designers were able to develop the system with constructions flexible enough to allow for different communities to customise them.

These facilities become generators of social, educational and sanitary processes in the villages and the work of ASA in Rwanda only proves that even small scale project can positively impact its environment.

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Fredrik Lund Material And Place “I’m horrified by the weight of architecture.”

Fredrick’s poetic presentation of architectural wood collages with a combination of music explores the theme of materiality not only in a textual way, but also in a very sensual dimension. His presentation underscores by its sensuality; the connection between a building’s materiality and our senses, which is often forgotten.

He argues that we have to question the environment we live in, the urban, the house, the weight of it, its meaning and be very aware of how we design it. Not only so the objects become heavy permanent forms of walls, but also how our senses and feelings are enriched and stimulated by the places we create. He points out that this is something that nature does so well with its materiality, so he asks how can we learn from it. In Fredrik’s works, he presents material research and contextual studies as one of the possible approaches to creating places where we can connect with ourselves, with others and with nature.

Fredrik is a professor of architecture at The Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. He runs the regular course Three Houses that emphasizes the formulation of architectural concepts through drawings, models and words, and the ability to give shape to these.

Fredrik has a broad expertise in architecture and art, specializing in the art form and composition. He has a separate architectural practice and in parallel works on various art projects. http://studiofredriklund.blogspot.se

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© Fredrik Lund 33

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Afterword

by Harrison Fraker “Materials have the kinesthetic capacity to create deep memories, enrich social communication and communities, while contributing to a holistic strategy of sustainability.�

As with all the SUDes International Conferences, the purpose is to call attention to an issue or theme that can transform how we think about and design sustainable places. This year the focus is on the ways in which material performance can contribute to the process of both design and making.

As the presentations explore, from their touch and smell to their means of production; from their local sourcing to their efficient use and deployment; from their symbolic content to their associational references, materials have the kinesthetic capacity to create deep memories, enrich social communication and communities, while contributing to a holistic strategy of sustainability.

Too often the materials that shape and form our environments are taken for granted. If the many dimensions of material performance are considered and integrated in the design and production processes, they can enrich and bring new meanings to the experience of place. This conference opens the door to such an ongoing exploration.

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List Of Makers

Publishing director Book editors

Organization team

SUDes team

Conference manager Photographer

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Peter Siöström Kateřina Vondrová Cyril Pavlů Constantin Mihai Milea Cyril Pavlů Peter Siöström Kateřina Vondrová Louise Lövenstierne Andreas Olsson Per Tibbelin Mattias Nordström Viktor Wallström

Video Team

Staffan Lindström

Conference participants

Jenny B. Osuldsen Jesper Magnusson Manon Otto Jane Philbrick Sacha Menz Linda Camara Alice Tasca Fredrik Lund Harrison Fraker

Special thanks to

Ax:son Johnson Institute for Sustainable Urban Design Lund University Jenny B. Osuldsen Partner at Snøhetta, Oslo, Norway MLArch, Professor in Landscape Architecture at Ås Agricultural University, Norway Ax:son Johnson Guest Professor, Lund, Sweden Harrison Fraker, FAIA Professor of Architecture and Urban Design, Department of Architecture, UC Berkeley, USA William Wurster Dean Emeritus, College of Environmental Design Chair, Energy Resources Group, UC Berkeley, USA Ax:son Johnson Guest Professor, SUDes, School of Architecture, Lund University, Sweden AIA/ACSA 2014 Topaz Medallion Recipient

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Acknowledgement

Ax:son Johnson Institute for Sustainable Urban Design Lund University

Sustainable Urban Design Master’s Program School of Architecture Lunds Tekniska HÜgskola www.stadsbyggnad.lth.se

Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation

Axel and Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation Stockholm, Sweden www.axsonjohnsonfoundation.org

School of Architecture LTH, Lund University P.O. Box 117, 221 00 Lund, Sweden +46 46 222 00 00 www.lunduniversity.lu.se

Printed at Media-Tryck Lund, Sweden April, 2017

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