S K Y L I N E | 23 | The Serpentine Pavilion's Foundations
S K Y L I N E | 23 | The Serpentine Pavilion's Foundations
The color salmon, Google's new urbanism, pandemic lessons for architects
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Hello from California. It’s the third week of June which means the last days of spring, the end of the third driest rain season ever recorded, the start of Golden State’s official re-opening, and Juneteenth this Saturday. It’s got us thinking about celebrations, wildfires, our dwindling days of work-from home, and how any building is getting done with costs going through the roof.
In this week’s SKYLINE, Jason Sayer discusses opening day of COUNTERSPACE’s 2021 Serpentine Pavilion, Mitch Mackowiak illuminates Mathur/da Cunha’s study of water, Nicholas Raap explores Cooking Sections’ meditation on salmon, Jack Murphy considers collective living, Vivian Schwab ponders Lebanon’s future, Kho Jiho scorns tech architecture, Toshiki Niimi reflects on the slowness of details, and Aaron Goldstein reports findings from a year of walking.
– Tiffany Xu
Here are a few highlights from the coming week’s events. Find the full list at the bottom.
6/14 Beyond the Boards: Peterson Rich Office
at 9:00 PM; 6/15 League Prize 2021: Night 1 with Liz Gálvez, Germane David Barnes, Ivi Diamantopoulou at 6:00 PM 6/16 The State of the Nation’s Housing at 7:00 PM; 6/17 Rethinking Architecture from Modernism with Toyo Ito, Toshiko Mori at 7:00 PM; 6/21 Imagining Black Utopias in the Afro-Now at 11:00 AM.
6/11 – Concrete Kerfuffle
A typical haunt for those on the hunt for champagne and canapés, the Serpentine Pavilion opening shindig is usually where London’s art and architecture scenes come together. Less so this year, however, as Covid got in the way again, stirring a much more low-key affair to commemorate the 20th pavilion to land in west London, courtesy of SUMAYYA VALLY.
A criticism of the Serpentine Pavilions of late is that a year is not enough for anything of substantial quality to be produced on the site in Hyde Park. Designers have to grapple with contractors, rules and regs, and that infamous annoyance, health and safety (the latter much to Ishigami’s chagrin in 2019).
This year, Vally, who leads Johannesburg-based studio, COUNTERSPACE, has had twice the time to iron out kinks, afforded an extra year due to the pandemic. Despite this, she is feeling the heat for pouring 25,096 gallons of concrete into the ground for the pavilion’s foundations. This was supposedly because the Royal Park’s charity–which controls Hyde Park—stipulates that designers have to leave the lawn the pavilion sits on as it was found every year.
So much concrete has ruffled many feathers in part because it contrasts to the Serpentine’s artistic director HANS ULRICH OBRIST’S claim that “ecology will be at the heart of everything we do.” Vally, meanwhile, argues it’s a carbon negative building (the controversy has advanced so far that Architect’s Journal published a piece focusing on the term, ‘carbon negative’). Resting above all that concrete is a palimpsest which attempts to juggle motifs from sites throughout London, all part of Vally’s intention to encapsulate the architecture and lived experience of immigrant spaces in the city. The result is a pared-down, pinker Piazza d'Italia of sorts. But while that is a dazzling public space, architectural designer and co-founder of the POoR Collective SHAWN ADAMS doubted the pavilion’s appeal. While speaking to journalist MERLIN FULCHER on this week’s LNDWN podcast he commented, “Myself, coming from a working-class background, I couldn’t really tell you any people from around my area that [are] travelling to see the pavilion.” (Ed. note: Vally also erected four accompanying pavilions, at “sites significant to London's migrant communities.”)
At the opening, professional Instagrammer IWAN BAAN was caught on his phone, snapping the pastel-hued pavilion: “I like all the little nooks and corners in the pavilion where people sit, hide, hang out, lay down etc., that’s pretty great of this one,” he said. “It’s a landscape where every surface can be used to enjoy the park.”
– Jason Sayer, a journalist in London.
Pandemic Cruising
I’m turning twenty-nine this week and I still don’t know how to drive a car. One evening early in the pandemic I steered my bike into a massive pothole on Telegraph Avenue in Oakland and blew up my rear tube. So I started walking everywhere. Even after fixing the bike, I would turn errands into leisurely three or six mile hikes. It’s obvious, but walking around is the best way to look carefully at buildings. My neighborhood is rich with weird details. Improvised tangles of mechanical-electrical coordination, vegetal plaster ornament poking through J-channel and vinyl siding, corner conflicts straight out of Revit but built for real, some exquisite Victorians—many with aluminum replacement windows, and lots of other oddities only reveal themselves when the observer moves at slow speed. On one outing, I fixated on what appeared to be a monumental three-story backyard Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU). It turned out to be a tank house, a three-story mini-tower that once supported a redwood water tank and windmill, which is how hundreds of East Bay households got their water before pipes were laid in the street. This accidental sighting has turned into a semi-serious architectural-archaeological research project. I’ve documented forty-one so far, and met lots of people who are usually happy to indulge my weird obsession. I’ve recently started taking public transportation again, and while it’s not as romantic as in my pandemic-tinted memory, it does feel like my world is expanding a bit. Nonetheless, the architectural cruising and tank house hunting will continue, on foot.
– Aaron Goldstein, a designer in Berkeley.
Tracing Back Details
This past spring I visited a series of completed projects in Tokyo. In Japan it is common for architects to hold such visits for fellow practitioners to review their projects upon completion. While partaking in these conversations, I am always struck by the depth and specificity with which architecture is discussed.
In one instance, a window sill detail had been developed over the course of five projects; its origins could be traced back to details used by a former boss. In another instance, an architect explained how a builder introduced a ceiling detail, after seeing it in a Yoshiro Taniguchi drawing dating back at least 20 years.
With the world twisting rapidly over this previous year, it’s been difficult to ignore the gap between the urgency of current events and the work we do as architects. One reaction I had to these rigorous but insular conversations was doubt—maybe we should be zooming out and seeking more relevance to present demands. On the other hand, it is refreshing to be reminded that some aspects of our work don’t change all that quickly—that some of our best work emerges from knowledge accumulated over a longer time span, beyond what we can possibly discern from a focus on the current moment.
– Toshiki Niimi, a designer in Tokyo
Building Review: The Banality of Google
While Covid prompted some tech firms to extend remote working indefinitely, GOOGLE has announced the opposite: the company is at work getting Middlefield Park, a “new, town-like campus” on a forty-acre lot in Mountain View, through community review. The design by SERA Architects and Hassell Studios resembles a typical podium-style new urbanist development with housing and office space complexes over ground floor retail.
It is hard to imagine something more banal from a technology company. But this architectural conservatism is inevitable. During the industrial revolution, architecture developed in tandem with industry. Processes such as prefabrication and mass production were well-suited for architectural applications. But the focus of the digital revolution is primarily in virtual space. New architecture can be designed with parametric code and a veneer of screens and voice commands can be applied to “smart buildings,” but ultimately the physical production of buildings still relies on heavy industrial processes.
Technology has superseded architecture and is speeding away at 8.79433 Gigahertz. Architecture is too slow, too heavy to catch up. In this situation, architecture is necessarily conservative. Tech companies can either build sculptural monuments to their lofty ambitions or comfortable containers for the human workers. Until the humans, too, are eventually superseded.
– Kho Jiho, a designer in California.
DISPATCHES
6/3 – In Solidarity with Palestine
KIKI COOPER of Design as Protest hosted “Solidarity for Palestine” on Instagram Live last Thursday, with guests MIRVETTE JUDEH and RANIA QAWASMA. The conversation centered around occupation, displacement, imperialism, and violence imposed on the people of Palestine. Rania and Mirvette shared how the occupation affected the livelihood of their families, community organizing efforts, and career paths.
– Sara Abed, a landscape designer.
6/9 – Kaleidoscopic Waters
"And once you question rivers," DILIP DA CUNHA urged, "you question civilization." Less than ten minutes into their lecture at GSAPP on Wednesday, ANURADHA MATHUR and DILIP DA CUNHA had radically challenged my relationship with water. That Mathur/da Cunha can so deftly elucidate the core sensibility of their practice spoke to the length, rigor, and persistence with which they have pursued it. This time, they toured us through their pursuits along the length of the Mississippi River, among the orans of Rajasthan, in the definition of Mumbai, and toward a speculative seaside of Norfolk, Virginia.
Through each location, the duo circled back to their critique of geometry applied over landscape, which dulls the sensitivity one gains when attuned to the complex processes of wetness. Mathur revealed the improvisational, meandering spirit of Delta blues music as a window into understanding the Mississippi River as a series of meanders rather than curved lines. The kaleidoscopic, sprawling presentations of their research aptly crystallize processes of wetness. Layers of ink oozed and overlaid into the Mississippi screenprints, and Mathur shared process photos of block print panoramas of the orans she’s managed to craft without a dedicated studio space, the paper absorbing ink as eagerly as those barely perceptible desert oases cache moisture.
– Mitch Mackowiak, a designer in Tucson.
6/9 – [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]
“A body without color is no body,” said COOKING SECTIONS’ DANIEL FERNANDEZ PASCUAL and ALON SCHWABE at GSAPP on Wednesday during their lecture “When [Salmon Salmon [Salmon]]”. Focusing particularly on salmon (the fish and the color), the duo sketched out complex transformations brought upon both by industrial farming and consumer desires. Beginning with a video of a sparrow turned pink—or salmon to be more precise, the lecture followed the opaque entanglements of the color and the fish through many settings. Season-simulating lighting, parasite-killing lasers, and a color scale for shades of salmon (the color) to dye salmon (the fish) were just a few of the instruments discussed that construct “capitalism of the senses.” For Cooking Sections, investigating salmon (the color) was a means to talk about the extent of our current climate catastrophe: “We use color to say, it’s not only in weather or rain or temperatures, but it’s also in crisis in vision, how we see the world, the colors we see through our eyes are changing.” The impacts of their Climavore project are the material transformations Cooking Sections is able to execute, such as partnering with local restaurants to serve a Climavore menu (eating for the climate), or pressuring the Tate Britain to remove salmon from it’s café menus as a result of their Turner Prize nomination. “How do we divest, divert, or disrupt these systems? We all know we are living through climate catastrophe, what tools do we have to move away from that… what are the modes of practice that are needed today to engage with these questions?” It would serve us well to answer such questions.
– Nicolas Raap, a designer in New York.
6/10 – Futures for Lebanon
Centennial Ideologies & Ecosystems: Potential Futures for Lebanon, was the first of a three-event series, ‘Open Forum,’ organized by the Venice Biennale’s Beirut Shifting Grounds exhibitors SANDRA FREM and CARLA ARAMOUNY, Curator of the UAE Pavilion WAEL EL AWAR, and The GSAPP Collective for Beirut. In a cross-disciplinary panel discussion led by IYAD ABOU GAIDA and MAUREEN ABI GHANEM (GSAPP Collective for Beirut), five Lebanese architects, historians, ecologists, and activists explored the role of ‘difference and crisis’ in creating a fertile ground for togetherness. The event kicked off with a short presentation by Aramouny who showed their Venice Biennale project illustrating Martyr’s Square. Through a time-based lens, their figure-ground and axonometric line drawings illustrated a perpetually transforming space, one that remains unifying and activating as a node that defies divisiveness and otherness. From here the conversation moved into the broader interdisciplinary territory, engaging a vibrant and optimistic rethinking of the ecological, economic, and cultural challenges facing Lebanon today. The insightful discussion addressed issues ranging from “community in a sectarian state,” to “eco-socialism,” to “heritage” and “social amnesia,” to the right to infrastructure and administrative challenges of implementing progressive urban policy. The conversation was stitched seamlessly together by a collective desire to tackle the complexities of ‘difference and crisis’ through an interdisciplinary approach, by breaking the silos created through narratives one subscribes to, whether they are of sect, species, or discipline.
– Vivian Schwab, a designer in San Francisco.
6/10 – Designing intimacy, now?
“Connection is a resource that allows people to grow faster,” declared PASCAL HUYNH during the recent panel “Designing intimacy, now?”, a co-production of the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA) and the Royal Architecture Institute of Canada (RAIC) as a Special Event during the latter’s Virtual Conference on Architecture. Hosted by CCA Director GIOVANNA BORASI, the event explored ways of making spatial collectivity today.The talk featured BETSY and SHANE WILLIAMSON of Williamson Williamson in Toronto; DUSTIN COUZENS and BEN KLUMPER of Modern Office of Design and Architecture (MoDA) in Calgary; and Huynh, of Village Urbain in Montreal.
Williamson Williamson shared their Grange Triple Double, a multi-unit and multi-generational home where spaces can “mutate as required over the years,” and be connected or split up over time as family configurations and economies change. MoDA shared their nearly complete Grow, a twenty-unit building that offers a mix of unit sizes zipped together by a zig-zagging green roof—the phrase “hedonistic sustainability” was used. I was pleased to see Havel Ruck’s Inversion (2005) from Houston, where I currently reside, flash on the screen as a source of inspiration. Huynh, a filmmaker, shared his story of living collectively above a theatre before a new property owner stationed rent-a-cops in front of their door, effectively evicting them. This experience led him to co-found a company that develops co-housing.
Questions ranged from specific regulatory issues and economic challenges to of-the-moment issues: Has the pandemic brought about a big change in what people want? Not really. What’s the ideal size for a co-housing complex? Huynh says the sweet spot is between eighteen and twenty-five families—any fewer and the group isn’t sustainable, any more and things get too bureaucratic. Relationships are of paramount importance: in a neighborhood, they’re like old-growth forest, Huynh mused. But “not everyone knows how to live together,” someone observed later on. The challenge is sorting out how much collectivity is desirable and when. We’re creatures who want the power of the pack but also the nicety of the nest, whose privacy allows for the “ultimate intimacy.”
– Jack Murphy, a writer and designer in Houston.
IN THE NEWS
…In memoriam
…In tragedy
Newly renovated Donald Judd Architecture Office in Marfa severely damaged by fire.
THE WEEK AHEAD
Monday, 6/14
Beyond the Boards: Peterson Rich Office with Peterson Rich Office
9:00 PM | AIA New York
Tuesday, 6/15
Revolutionizing the Design of Parking Structures with Wendy DeCapite
12:00 PM | AIA New YorkLeague Prize 2021: Night 1 with Liz Gálvez, Germane David Barnes, Ivi Diamantopoulou
6:00 PM | Architectural League of New YorkNeighborSpace
6:00 PM | Chicago Architecture Biennial
Wednesday, 6/16
Urban Design Lecture Series: H+N+S with Dirk Sijmons, Pieter Schengenga
11:30 AM | Columbia GSAPPLecture with Noortje Marres, Caitlin Blanchfield, Samuel Stewart-Halevy
2:30 PM | Columbia GSAPPThe State of the Nation’s Housing with Gary Acosta, Clarence Anthony, Chris Herbert, Tracy Jan, Erika Poethig
7:00 PM | Harvard GSDOLIN Labs: PrideScapes, "LGBTQ+ Memorials: Design & Remembrance in the Landscape" with Jha D Williams, Manisha Kaul, Lily Lim, Mateo Paiva
6:00 PM | OLIN Labs
Thursday, 6/17
Rethinking Architecture from Modernism with Toyo Ito, Toshiko Mori
7:00 PM | Architectural League of New York
Saturday, 6/19
Imagining Black Utopias in the Afro-Now
11:00 AM | BlackSpace
Four desk editors run NYRA: Alex Klimoski, Phillip Denny, Carolyn Bailey & Nicolas Kemper (who also serves as the publisher). They rotate duties each month.
If you want to pitch us an article or ask us a question, write us at: editor@nyra.nyc
For their support we would like to thank the Graham Foundation and our issue sponsors, Tod Williams Billie Tsien Architects, and Thomas Phifer.
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