S K Y L I N E | 45 | Architecture off Autopilot
S K Y L I N E | 45 | Architecture off Autopilot
Lacaton and Vassal, Sanford Kwinter, Teresa Fankhänel
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Last week real estate company Zillow shut down a house-flipping-bot after it lost $381 million in a single quarter. What happened? Apparently, houses are pretty complex. Across the profession, despite the best efforts of algorithm writers and the people at Revit, buildings can be surprisingly allergic to autopilot. This week writers bring you a series of conversations probing background processes and elements that we take for granted: an ETH Zurich engineer looks for alternatives to our reliance on concrete, a symposium at the School of Architecture at UT Austin dove into plants - yes, the green things, and at Princeton Teresa Fankhänel argued for a closer look at the work of model makers. In their marquee lecture at the great hall in the Cooper Union on Wednesday evening, Pritzker Prize laureates Lacaton and Vassal even shared some advice on flipping residential properties, though Zillow would probably not want to hear it: “Never demolish, never remove, always add, transform, and reuse.”
The coming week promises more jabs at assumptions. Today at noon, at the GSD you can catch artist Krzysztof Wodiczko, whose iconic projections temporarily recast the building onto which they land (we featured a work of his, of Reagan’s hand on the AT&T Long Lines Building, in Issue #23). In Montreal, this Saturday the Canadian Center for Architecture opens an exhibit looking at norms as architecture: "A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention," rounding out the Center’s year-long investigation on care and family. We actually worked with them to include a slip about the exhibit in our next issue, speaking of which: on Wednesday, we will host a distribution debate for our November Issue, #24, on zoom and at a83, where Marianela D'Aprile will debate Mark Foster Gage on Victor Hugo’s hot take about the progress of technology, "The Book Will Kill the Building."
—Tiffany Xu
DISPATCHES
11/5 – Concrete Geometries
In contemporary construction, ETH Zurich professor and architect-engineer PHILIPPE BLOCK explained, structure accounts for three quarters of the building mass. In other words, a sizable quantity of the structure is there to keep itself up. Of that structural mass, more than half belongs to the spanning elements. “Considering that we are expected to build more than two trillion square feet of floor area in the next 30 years all over the world,” Block commented, “it is worth looking for a solution.”
In his lecture Rethinking Concrete Construction at Rice University, moderated by assistant professor JUAN JOSÉ CASTELLÓN, Block presented his research group’s projects KnitCandela (after the Mexican architect-engineer Félix Candela), HiLo, and Armadillo Vault. Their work explores structural geometry with the objectives of significantly reducing material use with attention to embodied emissions. “What you’re looking at,” he said as he paused on a slide of Armadillo Vault, “are 399 individually cut stone pieces that are held together by nothing more than gravity and geometry.” There is no mortar, no glue, no reinforcement holding the structure together: “This is what you can achieve when you get the geometry right.”
— Sebastián López Cardozo
11/5 – Plant Potential
The botanically minded gathered last Friday to discuss Plant Potential[s], the theme of a symposium organized by Meadows Foundation Centennial Fellow in Architecture ALEKSANDRA JAESCHKE of the School of Architecture at UT Austin. Presenters included artist OLIVER KELLHAMMER, “gangster gardener” RON FINLEY, architectural technologist MAE-LING LOKKO, architect EDUARDO ROTH, and theorist SANFORD KWINTER. The group discussed subjects as far ranging as “ecological nativity”, the utility of “nature” as a term, the entheogenic effects of plants, and the possibility of other intelligences.
All panelists shared a faith in the “liberatory potential of plants”: Kellhammer practices “speculative botany” and creates “open source landscapes,” which show radical alternatives to landscape architecture. Finley calls for a horticultural revolution and stresses the importance of being in the garden. He shared his political fight with the City of Los Angeles for “the right to garden and grow food.” Lokko investigates the potentials of organic waste from coconut, hemp, and rice production. He locates and develops technologies where waste originates, and shifts cultural conceptions around “low-tech” materials and processes. Roth showcased alternative ways to practice architecture from material sourcing to changing the role of the design professional. Kwinter stated that he was “enchanted in the [recent] explosion of interests in the plant world.” Whether valued for the sense of immediacy they foster, or their roles in exploring alternative relational systems, plants, and what they mean for future architecture, are full of potential.
— Nicholas Raap
11/9 – Of Models and Men
At Princeton’s Program on Media + Modernity lecture “Of Models and Men” TERESA FANKHÄNEL presented her research on the prolific architectural model maker Theodore Conrad and the mid-20th century “Miniature Boom.” Fankhänel argued for the importance of looking not only at how architectural practices use models but how architectural models are used in society. The work of Conrad—a New Jersey native whose studio produced over 3,000 models for leading architects of the day like Wallace Harrison, Edward Durrell Stone, and Gordon Bunshaft—shows how modeling materials, working conditions, and changing design methods transformed the role of the architectural model and consequently, how architecture was perceived by society at large. Detail, quality and craft improved, such that models became a regular design tool and an essential component of presenting architectural ideas. They acted as “previews” to accurately predict the look of the finished building, while new forms of model photography previewed the way the public would look at the building.
Recognizing the difficulty in doing model research—often models don’t survive in collections and aren’t attributed to the makers themselves but the designer of what the model is representing—Fankhänel called for more research into the roles of models and their makers, remarking that the “wider discussions of good design and craftsmanship [happen] in the representations which we argue over.”
— Nicholas Raap
11/10 - “Always Add, Transform, Reuse”
Pritzker Prize winning architects ANNE LACATON and JEAN-PHILIPPE VASSAL underscored the value of humility in architectural practice at The Cooper Union on Wednesday night. As part of the school’s Current Work series and AIANY Ratensky Lecture the two architects, joined by collaborator FREDERIC DRUOT, presented a smattering of recent social housing projects: Cité du Grand Parc (2017), Tour Bois le Prêtre (2010), and PLUS Paris (2004). Their guiding mantras—“Never demolish, never remove, always add, transform, and reuse” and “Make do”—have laid the groundwork for generous renovations in public housing with a quality that is hard to imagine achieving in the United States. On multiple occasions, they have managed to renovate without displacing the tenants or creating financial burden. At the Cité du Grand Park, the architects were allotted a two-day maximum to complete the facade extension and most residents remained in their homes during the construction. Tenants saw little to no rent raises after completion. “Architecture is about trying to organize a void in which life takes place,” explained VASSAL. “Architecture only exists because life was and will continue to exist there.”
— Anna Gibertini
11/10 – Architectural Healing
At the core of their practice, LI HU and HUANG WENJING, founders of the New York-Beijing based firm OPEN, ask how architecture can be generous—that is, to be in service of something other than itself. “Can architecture heal, which is a truly generous quality, to welcome all?” they posed at their GSD lecture “Imagine” on Wednesday night. For Hu and Wenjing, this question applies not only to people, both as individuals and as a public, but also to nature. The couple presented six cultural projects in conjunction with their manifesto, which they wrote ten years after establishing their practice. The manifesto and existing body of work is both advocacy and proof of concept of an architecture that can protect nature rather than destroy it. Spaces for gathering and connection also offer a solitary retreat. Working with the preconditions of the natural elements or unyielding industrial sites, they challenge existing formulas and leave space for improvisation, arriving at the unfamiliar territory of architecture that is poetic, modest, and radical.
— Sheila Mednick
IN THE NEWS
...MVRD's Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, a one-of-a kind ovoid art museum/storage facility, opened its doors to the public...
...meanwhile the Standard Hotel—a prime NYC party spot, a High Line landmark, and an exhibitionist's paradise—may be closing its doors...
...Foster + Partner's Tulip Tower was officially killed by the UK government over concerns about its environmental costs and "muddled architectural ideas"...
...while Goth rock architect Odile Decq's first high-rise tower completes in Barcelona...
...and finally, confirmation that NFTs are kinda dumb...
Housekeeping. Submissions due November 14 for NYRA’s inaugural essay contest!
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DATELINE
The week ahead...
Friday, 11/12
Interrogative Designs: Conversations with Krzysztof Wodiczko with Krzysztof Wodiczko, Rosalyn Deutsche, Erika Naginski
12:00 PM | Harvard GSD
Saturday, 11/13
A Section of Now: Social Norms and Rituals as Sites for Architectural Intervention
11:00 – 7:30 PM | Canadian Center for Architecture
Monday, 11/15
Wheelwright Prize Lecture: The Turn of the Screw and other short stories on dismantling and reuse with Aude-Line Dulière
12:00 PM | Harvard GSD
Crafting Place with Brigitte Shim, Eric Bunge
6:00 PM | GSAPP
Tuesday, 11/16
Architecture And Capitalism: Infrastructure (Social And Physical), Green New Deal
12:30 | PM New York Institute of Technology
Wednesday, 11/17
Close to the Sensory Landscapes with Reiulf Ramstad
5:00 PM | Cornell Architecture Art Planning
Glass House Presents: Inside the Museum, Outside the Discourse with Charles L. Davis II
6:00 PM | The Glass House
Distribution Debate: The Book Will Kill the Building with Marianela D'Aprile, Mark Foster Gage
7:00 PM | a83
CORE WORK with Kristy Balliet, Kelly Bair, BairBalliet
8:00 PM | CCA Architecture Division
Unraveling with Darell Wayne Fields
10:00 PM | SCI-Arc
Thursday, 11/18
Architectures of Care Lecture Series: Politics of Care with Silvia Federici
6:00 PM | City College of New York Bernard & Anne Spitzer School of Architecture
MIT Lecture with Donnel Baird
6:00 PM | MIT
Lecture with Abeer Seikaly
6:30 PM | Yale School of Architecture
Unreal Estates: The Fluid Histories of Property in Calcutta with Debjani Bhattacharyya
8:30 PM | UC Berkeley College of Environmental Design
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