This discussion is part of a series of interviews conducted for Arup’s Drivers of Change programme. See Drivers of Change for more information.
I met Tristram Carfrae at Arup’s Sydney office, which sits in a couple of storeys of a fairly anonymous block on Kent Street. The anonymity is typical for Sydney’s ultra-business-like CBD, but so is the casually wonderful aspect – in this case, overlooking the vast Barangaroo development site on the side of the city’s CBD, and the splintered skein of deep harbour out towards Balmain, criss-crossed with ferries and functioning as the occasional water-berth of the ocean liners, great white slabs of floating architecture that add a temporary residential function to the port, before moving on east to Hawaii or north to Hong Kong.
We sit in the reception and talk for a couple of hours, over a few plastic cups of instant coffee, and just behind a model of the National Aquatic Centre, the building designed by Arup, led by Carfrae, and Australian architects PTW with Chinese partners CCDI, and that opened in Beijing just over a month ago. Known colloquially as the ‘Water Cube’, it’s being seen as a new masterpiece of structural engineering, already enjoying a flurry of publicity that will only increase in fervour when the Games start this winter. But Carfrae's career extends well beyond the Cube, and he's generally thought to be one of the leading structural engineers of his time.
We talked about the Cube, and the changing practice of structural engineering that informs such projects, and how this is radically changing architecture, building and cities. We chewed over multidisciplinary working and design processes in general, as well as techniques new and old. I’ve organised this piece into loose themes, as the conversation jumped around a little.
There’s an extraordinary - and rather British, I must say - kerfuffle going on over the future of the Robin Hood Gardens estate in London at the moment. Essentially, the building, designed by Alison and Peter Smithson (aka The Smithsons) and completed in 1972, is in danger of being pulled down. Margaret Hodge, a UK culture minister, appeared to back the demolition of such buildings, suggesting a digital model could capture the essence of a building in its stead. She said:
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
I left London before I got to experience Robin Hood Gardens in the flesh, but I hugely admire the work of the Smithsons, for both their thinking and practice (such as the Economist building in central London, which I have experienced). Along with Cedric Price, Reyner Banham, Archigram and a few others, they provide a historical framework for much of the technologically-enabled and culturally-informed best practice of today.
Robin Hood Gardens, in an area of East London so historically rich you can almost hear the psychogeographers whispering, is essentially a concrete megastructure housing project that’s been in need of such attention for most of its life. Carelessly built and serviced, the design never stood a chance.
Long before the GLC disappeared, TLC for such buildings had disappeared. Recently, a handful of enlightened property developers have discerned the public appreciation of brutalism moving in the right direction, but at glacial speed. Here, demolition plans appear to be moving a little too quickly, nosing well ahead of public opinion and this critical rearguard.
But Building Design is quite right to point out the importance of the building in terms of design history, and also its latent opportunities for re-development (and the iffy process going on around the building). There’s nothing inherently flawed in such structures - and of course Hodge’s line about concrete is extremely revealing, as is the subtle giveaway of a very British insecurity over ‘expertise’. With some of that expertise, allied to willpower and a smarter framework that sees the development as an ongoing bit of work, Robin Hood Gardens can be turned around, and should provide a counterpoint to some of the lazier development blighting that part of London.
“When this was first built it was very modern and people were fighting to get in here. It was very cleverly built,” she says. The way it has upside down maisonettes, you never hear noise from anyone else. And the nice thing is that every room has plenty of light — one wall is all windows and you’re not looking into someone else’s house. I don’t think these people who are proposing thousands of new homes for this site have a clue.”
RHG needs a lot of work but it is an eminently saveable building.
I’m not in favour of preservation for the sake of it. We should demolish buildings that have outlasted their use, and replace with better or more suited to the needs of the time. These new buildings should have a sense of their likely life-span. (Cedric Price was once asked what to do about York Minster, and he replied “flatten it”. Buildings that have outlasted their use should be disposed of “like a worn-out pair of Hush Puppies”, he suggested.)
But RHG is important is in at least three ways, particularly in the context of Britain: an example of British modernism (and local culture needs more working examples of this), ambition and optimism (ditto, described by Peter Cook as “strange English romantic”) and apartment-based, high-density, affordable housing (ditto again, and that passes the CP test, as many cities need good examples of this more than ever.)
Building Design’s campaign has already drawn in an extraordinary list of support, almost a who’s who of contemporary architecture and urbanism. While their simple comments-based petition system is not exactly watertight, it appears to be hugely successful in terms of garnering a groundswell of opinion.
It’s odd to see one’s name alongside that of Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown, Zaha Hadid, Tony Fretton, Alain de Botton, Patrick Keiller, Benedetta Tagliabue, William Menking, Peter Cook, Iain Borden, William Mitchell, Joel Sanders, Stefano Boeri, Joseph Rykwert, Hugh Pearman, M Christine Boyer, Toyo Ito, Richard Meier, Ricky Burdett, Ted Cullinan, Kenneth Frampton, and hundreds of others. (You can sign the petition here, before March 7th) (See also Richard Rogers, who has written to the culture secretary Andy Burnham, and BD's and The Guardian'sJonathan Glancey.)
Sensing they’re onto a winner in terms of their relevance and influence, and maybe saving the building while they’re at it, Building Design is ramping up their activity, publishing article after article. It’s great to see an architectural magazine trying to make a difference in such concrete (ahem) fashion. Given the issues with existing built fabric in our cities - far more problematic in terms of sustainability than new building stock - you almost wonder whether campaigns such as these are the contemporary equivalent of Arts & Architecture’s pioneering Case Study Home program of an earlier age. I wonder what The Sesquipedalist will make of it?
“On most counts, Robin Hood Gardens should be a prime candidate for listing. It is the only housing built by architects who devoted much of their lives to the discussion of dwelling at various scales. Among architectural thinkers around the world today, these architects are seen as the most important to have worked in Britain in their generation. This is heavy weight to put against counter-claims that the buildings were not built as first designed, and experienced social teething problems owing to the almost universal post-industrial problems of the early 1970s in Britain.”
“Emphasis should be put on the place-making quality of this housing, heroic towards the Blackwell Tunnel approach, embracing towards the nurturing mounds of the green space between the snaking block, where a big sky opens amid the scattered street patterns of the East End. As for resident satisfaction, the present Bangladeshi population seems to have no problem about inhabiting these monumental cliffs, in a way that the Smithsons would surely have recognised as a fulfilment of their intentions.”
“This is no Holly Street or Aylesbury Estate, best destined for the dustbin. The pressure is on, and someone must decide whether or not we are going to look like international idiots who let Robin Hood Gardens fall prey to the bland machinery that calls itself “regeneration”, while effacing the useable legacy of the welfare state.“
The Park Hill flats in Sheffield indicate a partial precedent for Robin Hood Gardens. Also inspired by the Smithsons (and Le Corbusier before them), they were built in 1961, from designs by Jack Lynn and Ivor Smith, on the site of tenements so rough they were known as ‘Little Chicago’ in the ‘30s. Unfortunately, that malaise didn’t seep clear of the ground with the destruction of the tenments, and seems to have carried over into the new development. And particularly when the British lack of facility with modernism - save a few shining examples - led inexorably to poor implementation, careless use of materials, and little ongoing servicing. And thus, the flats quickly gained an unsavoury reputation.
When I were a lad in the Sheffield of the early 1980s (cue Hovis commercial), the Park Hill flats were the stuff of legend. Playgrounds would buzz with lurid stories of what happened over at Park Hill - and the city’s other high-rise social housing, at Kelvin and Hyde Park. Though the story I remember is the rather tamer tale of a TV set being chucked out of the window, from one of the higher storeys, my mind’s eye constructing the slow heavy fall and sudden implosion on concrete. It was as if simply living there was like being in a cold, damp Northern version of Beirut under siege, glancing nervously up at the silvery sky as you scurry between blocks, darting for cover and hoping not to see the silent, graceful arc of a television approaching your head. It wasn’t like that, of course, though it was certainly not pleasant (As with RHG, Ian R. Taylor, in a book I once reviewed, did find firm evidence of ‘community’ there nonetheless.)
I visited once, going to see my first girlfriend’s grandmother, high up in one of the blocks. I don’t remember much detail, but I do remember how distinctly different it felt to the suburban late-1890s semi I was living in over the other side of the city. Not better or worse, just different way of housing, subtly reinforcing the importance of these developments in Victorian cities.
“Park Hill was awarded a Grade 2* listing in 1998. Although an important milestone in the development of Modernist housing theory in post-war Britain, the public incredulity which greeted the award spoke volumes about the success of Park Hill and its 'streets in the sky'.”
Public incredulity knows no bounds of course, particularly when stoked up by the often architecturally short-sighted British media. Ill-considered lists of Britain’s most hated buildings hardly help. (How is Channel 4's Demolition progressive broadcasting, exactly?). In this sense, Building Design’s primitive petition with its untidy collision of expertise and punter, is perhaps far more democratic form than Demolition, even given that it’s preaching to the converted?)
Now, the Park Hill flats are being ‘re-made in Sheffield’ (clever, that) by developers Urban Splash. Europe’s largest listed building - which is an odd honour really - will be re-vamped to provide nearly 1000 apartments close to the city centre, with a third affordable and two-thirds, well, un-affordable presumably. (It’s the presence of the latter that will shift public opinion round on the matter, you watch.) Lee Garland’s photography, if a little sombre, indicates the muscular presence of the building - even more so when you see it in situ, banked back on the hill overlooking the central train station and city centre. It’s a powerful building, and with the care and attention that Urban Splash will lavish on it, it’s easy to imagine the building transformed.
I’ve seen many of Urban Splash’s conversions, particularly their early work amidst Manchester’s former textile warehouses and mills in the mid-’90s, and they’re usually pretty good renovations. It’s also interesting to see them now taking on brutalism, instead of the rather 'easier' warehouse conversions (which may be desirable now, but were also marked for demolition a generation earlier, apparently beyond redemption.)
Elsewhere in Britain, the Brunswick Centre in London, covered here before, may need more careful curation in its choice of retail and services, but is full of life for the first time in years and really seems to be working. Erno Goldfinger’s Trellick Tower has also gone from “eyesore” to “desirable” in the last decade. The Barbican and South Bank still feature in those ugly contests, but are increasingly being recognised as the gems they are.
Park Hill benefits from proximity to its city centre, a short walk away. As with the Brunswick, Barbican, Trellick and many others, being surrounded by good urban fabric helps. It’s a simple note, but absolutely key, and remains a problem in the case of Robin Hood Gardens. The surrounding context also needs to be addressed for the building to work - social, informational and physical - for this kind of high density living can easily reinforce an urban core, and is less well suited to the being sited on a periphery. East London has enough presence for it to work, and RHG is connected to the centre(s) of London fairly well but it will need careful local orchestration nonetheless.
Yet it can still work there. Wöhnpark Alt-Erlaa is situated outside the centre of Vienna, but with enough inherent density to anchor itself. That’s the promise of the megastructure. It’s on a different, more ambitious scale - it contains no fewer than 5 schulen, 4160 balkone and 7 schwimmbäder, most on the dach - and that, plus the integrated U-bahn, would make all the difference.
It does, of course, appear to be extremely well-built, benefiting from the Mittel-European comfort with aligning modernism and craft that was all but alien to Britain. Most of all, it will be well-run too, with a mix of residents (it's not strictly social housing). Again, the ongoing servicing and maintenance of these buildings - of both built and social fabric - will make the difference.
Back to RHG, and Stephen Bayley weighed in too, noting that “Robin Hood Gardens has been a social calamity” and reiterating that the Smithsons’ building was indeed flawed, but those flaws were embedded by the builders.
“Alas, their architectural reach exceeded the grasp of the builders and Robin Hood Gardens suffered from the start with a singular lack of commodity and firmness …”
He’s rather brutal himself, no pun intended, when apparently suggesting that the building rather suffered from its tenants:
“As Marx asked, does consciousness determine existence or does existence determine consciousness? Or to put it less correctly, do the pigs make the sty or does the sty make the pigs?”
Personally, I suspect the tenants were let down by the implementation of the building, and lack of ongoing service - as well as the post-industrial context Powers refers to - rather than any inherent piggery.
Bayley continues:
“(But) Margaret Hodge's remarks about concrete are ignorant prejudice. Concrete is a fine material, but needs maintenance and care as much as marble and oak need maintenance and care.”
Too right. And so to those comments of Margaret Hodge, and particularly her idea of preserving the building through a digital model. Here, again, is what she said (in Grand Designs magazine, perhaps the most influential British architectural periodical of its day. BD reproduced the article.)
“When some concrete monstrosity — sorry, I mean modernist masterpiece — fails to make the cut despite having expert opinion behind it, let’s find a third way. This is the 21st century — a perfect digital image of the building, inside and out, could be retained forever.”
Leaving aside her value judgement on modernism - which speaks volumes by itself - and the cultural relativism elsewhere in the article that underpins her notion that modern architecture shouldn’t be judged in the same way that 'historical' structures are, it’s this ‘digital image’ comment I find fascinating.
First of all, that particular train of thought could obviously be applied to any building. If I decided, say, that Tower Bridge or all of Poundbury were particular eyesores, would they too be replaced by digital models? Bayley spots this a mile off:
“The minister herself declares that historical purposes may be served by a detailed digital record of the building, an argument which could, I think, with equal force be applied to Uppark, Windsor Castle or Stonehenge.”
You might expect City of Sound to be the kind of place that extolled the virtues of digital modelling, and indeed I do. Building information modeling (BIM) and computer-aided design (CAD) have already revolutionised building, and the immense benefits are yet to be fully realised. Increasingly tidying up the more inefficient and unsustainable practices of construction, once BIM truly extends into four dimensions, generating and broadcasting data about the ongoing use of a building (incl. delivering the instructions for its de-construction and recycling) a more sustainable architecture can be realised. And once the building becomes a platform for other communication, from personal to civic, and if that scales up to a neighbourhood and city level, then we’re really going places. Truly revolutionary.
But I don’t think Hodge is talking about that. I think she imagines some kind of 3D fly-through. Perhaps wearing goggles. But she, and we, should be clear about the limits of models too. In no way do they - and we can even say, will they - approach the experience of a building. Simple as that. A cursory reading of Pallasmaa will make that clear. Few models can deal with the peripheral, never mind the multi-sensory experience of being there, and never mind the multi-layered historical weight of a place or space. Digging further into her Merleau-Ponty isn’t something I imagine Hodge does of an evening, any more than I do, but if she were to, she might reconsider her strategy of replacing buildings with “digital records”.
Experiencing a building in the flesh is so different to constructing and studying a digital model, that it’s frightening that Hodge - a culture minister - could even think to suggest it.
I recall walking into a small, very old cathedral in Milanese side-street, I think, lured by the sound of the choir, and once inside I hear their voices conjoin with the wails of black-clad kneeling women, rocking backwards and forwards near the altar, and sensing the sheer physical presence of that sculpted block of sound hanging in the rafters of the immense vaulted roof over my head, light puncturing the gloom through stained-glass windows and illuminating the sparkling motes of cool dust floating around me, some microscopic elements falling on to my tongue and fusing taste and smell with those being inhaled in my nostrils, the interior rushing away from my body as I begin to stand upright and breathe it all in, having ducked through the small threshold into its cavernous innards, my eyes adjusting to the gloom and slowly revealing the detail in the polished wooden pews that a million hands before mine had touched. All that, and more that I don’t have the words to describe, in a transition from outside to in, over a few seconds … And equivalent sensations might be enjoyed in a grain elevator, a converted power station, a public administration building, a swimming pool, a side street of SoHo at midnight, a small house in Tokyo in the early morning, a square in Melbourne at midday, a summer house in Finland at dusk, or in practically any kind of building. You will have your own examples.
Well, I’m sure a digital model will exist for that church, but I’m not sure I’ll get that same sensation when I click on it.
Let’s quickly put to bed this idea of digital models replacing a building. They can augment a building, and are certainly invaluable in design processes, ongoing running of buildings, education, heritage and a thousand other worthwhile pursuits. But they are not simulacra, for buildings exist.
So well done to Building Design for bringing this sorry bit of politics to the foreground of at least the architectural press, and good luck to them with their campaign. As a fan of the Smithsons’ thinking, and of several of their buildings, I'd like to see this pioneering architecture cared for.
Here’s the bullet-pointed version that cabinet ministers may be more used to:
Park Hill, Brunswick, Trellick, South Bank, and Barbican all show that British modernist buildings that were once though beyond salvation can be turned around.
Other high-density housing megastructures elsewhere indicate they can be done well in the first place, if carefully constructed and serviced.
Concrete is one of the most useful, pleasing and thrilling of materials.
Digital models have immense value, but not as replacements for buildings.
The Japanese architectural firm SANAA rightly have the adulation of the world's press bestowed upon them. After a steady, sure ascendancy over the last decade or so, they've now joined the big league with their recent New Museum of Modern Art on New York's Bowery.
However, this excellent book by the Barcelona/New York-based publisher Actar concentrates on what might actually be a more important aspect of their portfolio - houses. For as good as the New Museum appears to be - I haven't seen it, but it is by all accounts a great bit of building - we should be carefully questioning the value of innovation in museum or gallery design.
It's not that there aren't fine, adventurous buildings emerging that take advantage of those cities chasing the sometimes elusive Guggenheim effect. (cf. Steven Holl's Block Building for the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City.) And the civic aspects of galleries and museums are indeed vital and valuable for cities. But when this largely well-understood design problem gets solved anew, the attention it gets is slightly out of proportion.
For housing will always be a more valuable design problem. And from the perspective of Japanese architecture, and Japanese culture, it's perhaps the pivotal built form. Indeed, Kristine Guzmán claims here that "Japan's sociological unit is the home, not the family." Further, Japanese cities, often defined by density, provide a testbed for exploring ideas of habitation that should become increasingly relevant elsewhere. Particularly in those American and Australian cities that need to unlock their muscle memory for density, their sprawling perimeter eventually withdrawing from recently singed edges, folding in on themselves such that more people simply have to inhabit less space.
So these explorations in discreet, civil density are immensely valuable. To be clear, the buildings themselves won't translate simply to other cities, as the conditions are quite distinct. Urban Japan's societal norms and cultural values are still utterly unique. Several of the insightful essays here explore exactly what those values and conditions might be, all with varying degrees of success in terms of conveying them for an English-speaking audience. Some things will always be lost in translation, it would seem, and attempting to pin down Sejima and Nishizawa's work in one book of many photographs, one interview and three essays is like trying to nail jelly to a wall. Moreover, if one could distill the essence of their work, you couldn't simply relocate it in another city. It's so different, so distinct. Equally, we shouldn't kid ourselves that this is the kind of affordable housing that many of our cities so badly need. These are mainly works for individual clients (even if SANAA explore ideas of communities of little dwellings within that, as with the Moriyama House, and their materials are often inexpensive.)
And yet, this book is about work of the highest build quality, incredibly interesting engineering and architectural approaches that might translate, and some overriding concerns and concepts that should be of value almost everywhere. Most of all, a focus on houses, and on houses that reinforce a civic sense of connection with the surrounding environment and the enveloping informational context, while reinforcing discretion, privacy, intimacy and flexibility, and often in a high density context of small plots and tight spaces. As such, it's a rejoinder to the kind of architectural journalism that focuses on the iconic free-standing residence. (Exhibit A: a collection of a certain kind of Australian architecture, featured in A+U, ironically, a Japanese publication. This depicts "the isolated object in the infinite landscape" as Philip Goad has it. Here, SANAA's houses are often connected objects in a very finite space indeed.)
This balance between the personal and the civic, in the city, is explored in almost every single project here (there are a few exceptions). The projects are grouped into unfinished and finished, with seven of the former and five of the latter, and are drawn from an exhibition at Museo de Art Contemporáneo de Castilla y León. Each project is presented in drawings, photographs and models, with only a small paragraph describing each. As such, you're left somewhat adrift on the specifics of the projects. Yet, the projects are so obviously fascinating that this rather dry presentation inevitably shifts the reader into contemplative mode, meaning a far richer engagement with the work. I usually prefer more exposition rather than less, but on this occasion the blankness suits.
Blankness, or ideas of immateriality, translucency, weightlessness, and conjuring an innate simplicity are often to the fore in the exposition the book does offer up, in three contrasting essays by Guzmán, Luis Fernández-Galiano and Yuko Hasegawa. Novelist Haruki Murakami is even suggested as a totem in Fernández-Galiano's smart attempt to find some reference points for SANAA's work.
"His exploration of contemporary values through a hypnotic, jovial and surreal cocktail of lyrical levity, atmospheric sensuality and attention to material detail are perhaps a better parallel to SANAA's architecture."
Hasegawa's piece, 'Radical Practices in constructing Relationships', situates these houses in the context of SANAA's other work for museums and cultural centres, perhaps as you might expect from the curator of the Museum for Contemporary Art in Tokyo. It's useful, but rather side-steps the subject of this book.
Kristine Guzmán's is the most useful essay, moving easily through the multiple notions of 'Japan-ness' (after Arata Isozaki) that SANAA play with. She places Sejima and Nishizawa's work after that of Kenzo Tange and Tadao Ando, in terms of "integrating the aesthetic values of traditional Japanese architecture within a modern architecture." Guzmán suggests this may be "unconscious", though there's a revealing passage in the interview with Agustin Pérez Rubio that opens the book:
Nishizawa: "We are very much influenced by Japanese architecture. We have just never tried to quote directly from the Japanese past." Sejima: "We cannot avoid drawing some influences from Japanese tradition." Nishizawa: "It is not an option we can take."
Guzmán's essay continues to explore the importance of the house, of transparency, harmony with nature, shifting spatial function over time, transcendence, emptiness, and the values that SANAA's work stands for. It's fascinating.
In following the work, all three essays lead the reader back to the front of the book, to want to go through the projects again. The aforementioned interview is also relevant, allowing the architects themselves to frame what follows.
The setting for the interview is as revealing as anything, however. It takes place at a table in the studio shared by three practices, which is later used for eating at, and had previously been used for a client meeting, and before that, model-making. This multi-functional use of space is one of the more distinctive features of the projects here. Again, in describing a domestic architecture that enables the program to shift through different spaces over time, SANAA describe the useful 21st century urban home, a place where working and living co-exist, where private and public twist around each other, where informational media potentially pervades every space, yet where there is still room for shielded reflection and a relationship with nature.
(This last aspect is an ever-present theme in these projects, with large white spaces dotted with splashes of pot plants and flowers. There's little reference of this in the texts, but it's clearly a preoccupation of SANAA's. Their 'House in a Plum Grove' is the most overt attempt to synthesise the edifice with its environment, but almost all these spaces are also urban gardens. It's wonderful.)
Elsewhere, gardens become living rooms become offices become playrooms become basketball courts. Sejima and Nishizawa are working with a contemporary urban culture here, but also aware of the informational qualities of that culture - in that a space's function is now also heavily influenced by the personal technology within it. As Guzmán puts it:
"The link between the idea of information culture and certain notion of flexibility is explained in the book Blurring Architecture by Toyo Ito, where he reflects on space in 21st century architecture based on the Modern Movement, and says that an architecture that serves as a bridge between a biological and electronic body must have "a floating nature that allows for changes over time (...) because in today's society it is absolutely essential to do away with borders based on simplified functions and establish a relationship of overlapping spaces."
This is why SANAA are quite so interesting. In drawing from civic architecture and public space - parks, libraries, museums - they imbue domestic spaces with informality, intermediate spaces, chance spaces, private spaces that shift easily to public and back again, the freedom to occupy a space with an unintended function - in a sense, providing a platform for multiple behaviours and histories. SANAA's projects become a series of metaphors for understanding how informational spaces and physical spaces are beginning to entwine.
Further, in doing this mostly in the tightest of urban contexts - their 'Small House' here has a site area of 60m²; a typical Australian plot has shifted from a rationed 134m² just after WWII to 264m² today, with 600m² not unheard of - SANAA give us an optimistic vision for high-density urban living that is innately civic. When viewed through that lens, this collection could provide a pattern book for concepts, to be interrogated by architects, planners and anyone else who cares about the modern city. The ideas need translating, and some certainly won't take elsewhere - just as this text occasionally feels a little slippery, presumably translated from Spanish and Japanese into English. But that's a useful lesson too.
It's not at all perfect, the Japanese city, but there is still much to draw from it. Sir Peter Cook spoke warmly about the Japanese take on urbanism in a recent interview - he described it as "naughty thinking". We could well use a global outbreak of this naughty urbanism.
A further point to draw from this work is that of craft. SANAA can achieve such lightness in their architecture only through manufacturing of the highest build quality. The sense of weightlessness of 'House in Plum Grove' comes from interior walls of structural steel plates that are only 10mm thick, and exterior walls that only 50mm thick. This devotion to detail is also a useful tenet to reinforce worldwide. It's why it is encouraging to see SANAA's museum project apparently succeed in New York, after many Japanese architects had found American contractors incapable of their craft.
So as SANAA and their projects inexorably grow in size, their skill with at the domestic scale should be especially lauded. That's why this book is actually more important than the slew of recent articles on the Bowery. It does an excellent job of documenting SANAA's work on houses, up to late 2006, and by respectfully leaving room for interpretation, it offers up numerous prompts for how functional and informational flexibility and density might be enabled through their sheer craft with material, space and program.
The book's photographs shifts in and out of focus, as if aping these ideas of blurring and graduating transparency (also sometimes due to being shots of models). Some photographs often feel flatter than 2D, somehow. This doesn't always add value, but essentially the projects are presented extremely well, often imaginatively framed, sometimes captured in the grainy cinéma-vérité of DV screengrabs, and usefully accompanied by plans and sketches.
Yet as Hasegawa, perhaps un-helpfully given the context, notes in his closing essay: "SANAA's architecture has many elements that are impossible to understand unless one actually 'experiences' it. In contrast with modern architecture, SANAA has many aspects that cannot be revealed in 'representative' media such as plans, models, and photographs." I've only 'experienced' one SANAA building - the breathtakingly graceful Dior store on Omotesando, Tokyo - and can thus extrapolate a little from my understanding of that.
But only a little. And though Hasegawa is essentially correct that representation cannot begin to approach the phenomenological depth of experience that actually being there provides, the book is still ultimately composed of 'just' these "plans, models and photographs".
Certainly this key point - of documenting how the architecture enables change, multiple functions over time, and absorbs and responds to information flow - is rarely attempted, save for a few diagrams from the practice. It'd be interesting to hear more about how Sejima and Nishizawa might articulate these ideas, other than through their architecture. How might one represent that blurring, overlapping or "floating nature", as Toyo Ito has it. Information graphics, diagrams, automatic documentation? Ongoing Building Informational Modelling, forming a form of post-occupancy evaluation perhaps? Or film, even? Perhaps SANAA's architecture is too subtle to be so crudely pinned down. Either way, aside from the following images, the book rarely attempts it.
The design of the book is also drawn towards a purity of blankness, a floating abstract simplicity that sets the text gracefully in black sans- amidst white space. Photographs are generally full-bleed, with the most representative - of the book and the work itself - those of streetscapes or rooftops pinned down to the bottom of the book by the empty weight of the white Tokyo sky.
"A pretty sky just gets me wound up, and my head starts pounding. The city doesn't need a sky."
The lack of ornament in that sky is mirrored in SANAA's houses below, as well as this book. Everywhere, the ancient Eastern notion of "omnipresent emptiness" that Guzmán refers to.
And so, room for people emerges.
Houses: Kazuyo Sejima + Ryue Nishizawa. SANAA [Amazon US or UK]
I love this Honda Puyo concept car, just exhibited at the Tokyo Motor Show. Not least for its looks, its clear orientation towards high-density urban living - it can spin 360 degrees to park - plus the now obligatory 'green' credentials of electric motors and hydrogen fuel cell, but mainly because of two ongoing obsessions: sensory and behavioural aspects of the design.
Firstly, the car's roof explores tactility (as well as safety). According to Honda, "PUYO is a Japanese onomatopoeia that expresses the sensation of touching the vehicle's soft body.":
"The body of the Puyo is not traditional metal but a soft gel designed to look and feel like human or animal skin. As well as the marketing appeal of a such a radical finish, the soft exterior delivers improved safety performance, especially when it comes to pedestrian protection, something Honda leads the world on."
And secondly, the car's exterior has behaviour, in line with its conditions:
"The Puyo’s body can also glow various colours to change its look and – depending on how you view it – its personality. Honda says the changing colours alert owners to the condition of the vehicle, “facilitating a more intimate relationship between people and their cars”."
(It might enable the car to daub its own 'CLEAN ME' graffiti, perhaps.) This capability reminds me of Herzog & De Meuron's Allianz Arena, of course, but also Brian Eno's idea for re-equipping cars horns with a suite of aural motifs designed to communicate various messages - or provide a greater range of expression - to other drivers and pedestrians. The Puyo's visual approach may be quieter if no more discreet, but I do like the idea of the car communicating its state and behaviour with subtlety. It might have been more interesting to connect these two approaches and communicate state through tactility as well as visual feedback. I'd love to hear more detail of the various parameters involved, and associated interfaces (given that changing the exterior colour of the car will be of negligible use to the driver inside, leading to possible later confusion.)
"The RiN uses sensors to monitor the driver’s mental state. The futuristic concept can determine if the driver is flustered or calm and display the results on its modern dashboard."
Though if you need a car to tell you how you feel, I suspect you're beyond help.
In thrall as I am to the idea of buildings that move, transform, alter their shape or composition, I was drawn to this fantastical sketch in the latest issue of rather enjoyable Australian architecture magazine Monument (#81, Oct/Nov 2007). It's not actually a moving building - just a building inspired by sense that it might be able to reorganise its constituent parts to fit its context.
The magazine briefly mentions Mulloway Studio's three-storey residence, designed for the tight, post-industrial environment of Port Adelaide (which was evocatively dubbed Port Misery by the first European settlers, by the way). It's a complex little structure, comprising its own mixed-use microcosm of commercial tenancies, public space and residential space above, but also attempting to play with the idea of the Australian home - the sketch even has a Hills Hoist. The brick, drawn from the historic warehouses of the local surrounds (and their European forebears), is appealing, as is the fact that it's urban, mixed-use and medium- to high-density. (This issue of Monument focuses on residences and shares some of the issues I explored in the recent A+U on the same theme, but is far more balanced in terms of urban developments and shared spaces.)
Leaving these qualities aside though, I was drawn to the little sketch accompanying the text, perhaps indicating how the architects had arrived at the idea of the vertical garden. They'd drawn a suggestive fantasy involving the entire front section of the house being slipped off its 'hinges', with the back garden hoisted up into the air, replaced and propped to enable increased density. Monument describes this last section thus:
"An east-facing perforated brick screen reinterprets the suburban garden as a vertical plane that mediates and filters light and air, maximising cross-ventilation and illumination."
Forgive the hasty reproduction, but here's my sketch of their sketch.
For someone who has spent most of his career fusing what might be called 'the sharpish end of information technology' to other things, I've paradoxically retained an interest in vernacular architecture and design, which often deploys ancient solutions, refined by age, use and experience. (It's not actually a paradox, of course).
Here in Australia, a relatively new country if a very old inhabited continent, there are rich pickings amidst complex histories. Particular favourites are the Queenslander house seen in Brisbane - more notes on this later - but also the various architectural strategies and solutions employed by indigenous Australians. This is partly due to the nomadic lifestyle of some Aborigines - and therefore related to other transient, portable architecture I'm interested in - and partly due to the inherently ingenious solutions for dealing with Australia's climate and terrain. Recent research has exposed the idea that 'Aborigines didn't build' as essentially a deliberate and expedient strategy, conjured up to ensure that Australia could be seen, legally, as terra nullis (empty land) - and therefore ripe for claiming, clearing and settling. There were numerous kinds of building structures, as varied as their social structures and Australia's climate.
A new book out - Gunyah, Goondie and Wurley, by Paul Memmott, an anthropologist at the University of Queensland's Aboriginal Environments Research Centre - details the various architecture and design methods that existed before European occupation.
"There was a whole range of different shelters built in different styles depending on climate and social factors," Associate Professor Memmott, who compiled the book over 35 years, said. "There is clear evidence of complex spatial organisation and design based on social rules and structures. It's additional evidence that the Aboriginal lifestyles were well-organised, which unfortunately still comes as a surprise to people."
"Among the most striking designs featured in the book are dome houses that existed in the rainforests of tropical Queensland and northern NSW. The houses were interconnected, allowing clans to interact, and were high enough to stand in, so that the inhabitants could spend extended periods indoors during the wet season. "Winter houses" built around Port Jackson and Warringah in Sydney by the Gai-mariagal people were made using hardwood beams, clay, reeds and animal hides."
The co-chairwoman of Reconciliation Australia, Jackie Huggins, praised the book for debunking the stereotype of Aborigines being part of a primitive age. "Aboriginal people were among the first architects in the world in terms of ingenuity in providing shelter and accommodation," Ms Huggins said. [Sydney Morning Herald, 9 October 2007]
It looks fascinating, and I'm off to purchase asap. More to follow, I suspect.
"On the occasion of the 112th birthday of one of the 20th century’s most prescient futurists and global thinkers, The Buckminster Fuller Institute (BFI) announces the launch of the first annual BUCKMINSTER FULLER CHALLENGE."
"Each year a distinguished jury will award a single $100,000 prize to support the development and implementation of a solution that has significant potential to solve humanity’s most pressing problems in the shortest possible time while enhancing the Earth’s ecological integrity."
"The Buckminster Fuller Challenge seeks submissions of design science solutions within a broad range of human endeavor that exemplify the trimtab principle. Trimtabs demonstrate how small amounts of energy and resources precisely applied at the right time and place can produce maximum advantageous change."
Entries accepted September 4th - October 30th, 2007
The Living are a New York-based architectural studio, producing work which is both conceptually strong and physically impressive. As a result, David Benjamin and Soo-in Yang were able to give us a talk which was half-theoretical presentation and half-live science class demonstration.
Much of their work has been documented in two volumes: 'Life Size 1' and 'Life Size 2'. Their methodological approach is governed by a practice they call 'flash research'. These research projects are "open-source, incremental and small scale". Each has a budget of under $100k, lasts for less than 3 months, and produces a prototype as a proof of concept. The emergent ideas can be expanded, and taken into further research projects, so in a sense ideas can be daisy-chained together to extend beyond 3 months. The prototypes are generally full scale, and the result of "looping back and forth between hypotheses". They also ensure they publish "building instructions, so people can pick up where we left off."
The first project they showed Postopolis! was entitled 'Living Glass'. It's a fairly extraordinary piece of work that shows built fabric responding to interaction in real-time. By exploring different patterns of movement, and thickening, stretching and contracting of material, they are able to build a transparent wall with louvred "gills" across its surface. These gills open and close when a wire contracts, in response to some sensory input (they used infra-red but it could've been any of a number of stimuli). The end result is that the 'glass' membrane actually opens up when people approach, in order to let fresh air in.
They demo this in front of the Postopolis! crowd, and it's truly impressive. It literally draws a gasp from the audience. The transparent glass louvres bend and twist open as Benjamin breathes on the surface. It's a lovely movement, far more organic than mechanical (although this is work that blurs concepts like organic and mechanical together.)
Secondly, they show research which responded to the question "What if architecture produced its own energy?". They run through some example systems which collect and expend small amounts of energy, in balance. In other words, systems that can "harness energy and spend it at an equivalent ratio". They then show photographs of tests of a full scale prototype of a water-borne system, in Yang's bathtub (!). The system they've designed is to be deployed in a river or lake, indicating water purity in real-time. A series of these floating sensors could be cast out into the water, forming a "hovering cloud of light". The light changes, depending on the quality of the water. It's a lovely idea. They demonstrate the light in front of us again, pouring an impurity into water in which the sensors are immersed. The 'beacon' changes from green to red in a very satisfying fashion, but the important thing with this experiment is to note that this is approaching an energy-neutral system.
With all of their research, they publish a manual on their website, which extends the work into "a form of open-source construction", they say. Picking up on this topic, also raised by Lebbeus Woods, I ask how far they go in explaining their work. I think we cross wires slightly at this point as Benjamin answers from an intellectual property angle, indicating that their projects are at a stage with few issues inhibiting a full explanation of the work. I was actually asking as to the specific nature of the instructions, and how much 'architectural knowledge' they embed in the instructions – this to Woods' points about having to convey the 'rules of the game', in order to avoid the problems encountered by the design advocacy movement of the 1960s. Either way, its an interesting answer from Benjamin. He says thus far "the stakes aren't high enough" so they're on "an indie scale rather than being on a major label." But they're keen to ensure the research doesn't just "exist within a closed bubble" and further, they employ "or steal source code from the internet" in the work too. You can visit The Living's website to see how they explain their work.
Next, a project by students they taught at Columbia GSAPP, entitled the 'Huggy Wall'. This elicits the odd 'aah' of delight from the crowd (it's certainly one of the more participative presentations at Postopolis!). It's another 'reactable' material, featuring a cosy membrane-like substance enclosing itself around a person upon contact, literally giving the person a hug. It's only slightly disconcerting.
A further research theme is 'better, cheaper, faster; and asks "What if good architecture and bottom line development was the same thing?" Here, they attempt to take a weak material, which when bound together becomes strong (similar to Aranda/Lasch's experiments with 'packing'). The Living's constructions with these materials are based around an inherent structural integrity which enables objects to be "stackable and easily transportable", in this case in the form of a collapsible lightweight framing system. It's easily assembled with simple tools by non-experts in an hour (they show a video to prove this, starring themselves as the "non-experts"). It affords a structure that can be built for $9 per square foot.
Another project within this theme comprises a 'House of Doors', constructed from 384 salvaged metal and wood hotel doors i.e. 95% salvage material. We also see a tantalising glimpse of another project based around a user-created micro-network of 'motes', or communicable sensors, which create a street-level map of air quality (akin to their water-borne project earlier.)
In response to a question from the crowd, we began to get at a fairly subtle but powerful difference between reaction and responsiveness, in terms of how The Living saw their systems behaving. This again deserved more time than we could give it, but they responded by seeing that their simple processes of input –> processing –> output are predicated on a more responsive relationship than simply reacting i.e. their systems are not simply about the behaviour of a garage door, opening and closing in response to infra-red contact.
The way they responded to this question left me with the sense that The Living are truly exploring behavioural products, not simply reactive architecture. In this, they're producing fascinating cutting-edge work, which is also aesthetically complex and has rich sensory qualities, as the Living Glass projects show. If 'design dissolves in behaviour', as I've suggested here several times, borrowing Naoto Fukasawa's line, The Living are drawing us constructive sketches of what this might mean for the fabric of the built environment.
It's always a little risky meeting one of your heroes. It can be cruelly disappointing. However, this was as far away from that as you can get. Lebbeus Woods was incredibly generous with his time, his attitude and his intellect, and he effortlessly won us all over. Not that he had anything to prove – Woods is one of the most important conceptual architects and theorists of his time, and we were truly honoured to have him at Postopolis!.
The Storefront was packed by the time we sat down with Woods for our 'conversation'. We hadn't prepared anything as such, so Woods had no idea what questions we would ask, and despite a quick 'pre-game huddle' beforehand, we didn't really know what questions each other would be asking. Again, the instinctive informality of Postopolis! served us well though, as the conversation flowed relatively easily.
Geoff starts by asking about the constant theme of post-Earth landscapes and instability in his work. Woods replies with a grin –"I suppose that my life has been unstable!" – instantly settling any nerves. He says he was a "military brat" as a kid, always moving, and the autobiography figures into these things, one way or the other. He's also seen a lot of history: "There is a basic instability that we have to deal with in our culture. The earthquake and the war are the most obvious manifestations of it." (Indeed, Woods has often worked directly and proactively in areas that have suffered some kind of recent trauma e.g. Zagreb, Sarajevo, Havana, Loma Prieta earthquake, and now I hear New Orleans.)
Bryan asks about the political nature of architecture, as seen from a wide historical perspective of the Roman Empire and frontier architecture through to homeland security, borders, gated communities, etc. Essentially, Woods replies, architecture as we normally think of it as a profession and a practice is really "not very far from the Roman Empire". They're still building monumental buildings, which "are bowdlerising the hierarchy of power and authority in society". Even when it's a museum it's really about "the elite's ability to gather works of art". No more than that. He thinks that the work on gated communities and the like are part of a "defensive posture" that architects are forced into, inevitably securing enclaves of power and wealth. They're really doing no more than making it look good.
Woods wants some other possibility for architecture, and the reason he's here today is that blogs seem to have some sense of that, in that the internet is a place for "some other view of architecture to emerge". (This is fascinating, encouraging, and generous. I hope that a function of this kind of work, and these events, is in terms of approaching architecture from different angles, from the periphery.)
I asked about the role of architecture from a craft perspective, based on some of the conversations at Postopolis!, where we'd seen the notion of the master builder dissipating. I'd read about some recent work in projects in Vienna and Paris, centred more on creating a set of guidelines and rules for constructing things rather than specifiying the details of the implementation, which are carried out and configured on site. Does this enable an architecture which can thrive and use the conditions inherent in instability? Woods confirmed that was the idea. If there's to be another movement, "another direction in architecture". It has to engage and involve in some way; it has to "interactively involve them other than as spectators". Otherwise this is completely the society of spectacle. It has to engage them as creators.
Woods recalls living through the 60s, when numerous projects attempted to "empower people in lower economic class communities" via an approach known as "design advocacy". The architect became the advocate of the people and the community; they facilitated meetings with people in communities; provided space, tracing paper and pens and so on. Woods thinks this was a noble effort but also a total failure, as people just couldn't think in terms of designing - they weren't educated for that, they weren't prepared for that. So nothing much ever came of it. So it didn't come out as a real movement in architecture ...
So he thinks, yes, you have to engage people, but fundamentally you have give them the tools to work with, the rules of the game – "If you play poker, you have to know the rules of poker! You can't just throw cards around" – then some basic techniques. How you do things, not what you do. Then show some examples - "It could look like this. Or it could look like that, if you follow these rules ... This way, you're giving people a leg up." Some of his projects of the last 4 or 5 years, although it reaches back to work in Sarajevo in the '90s, is conducting these kind of practise, although he modestly wonders whether it will be any better than the design advocacy of 60s. It hasn't "got the momentum yet", he says. But the important factor is that people have choose to do it - he doesn't believe that it's something to be imposed from the top down - people have to want to do it. (This is all fascinating to me, given my interest in adaptive design, systems design etc., and particularly how you put creative power into the hands of people who aren't architects or designers.)
Developing this perhaps, Geoff notes how Woods' work often captures the imagination of those outside of architecture. Woods replies that "the irony is that he has always addressed my work to architects." Yet if it's ironic that others would pick it up, he's thrilled that they do, particularly if "architects are asleep" as he half-jokingly puts it. He does want to influence architects, though, as they have an important responsibility to society. He notes that he's approached architecture philosophically, drawing from ethics, cybernetics (from late '50s, early 60s), and so on, and this emphasis on the philosophical and visual side of communicating architecture may have enabled some of this transference to other disciplines or another form of discourse.
Picking up on the visual communication side, Bryan mentions that one of his favourite examples of Woods' work is in Michael Sorkin's book 'Against the Wall: Israel's Barrier to Peace', and actually was a game, rather than a drawing. Woods is clearly pleased that the subject of the 'border wall game' came up, and tells how, instead of creating a building or some other construction project, they created a metaphor for simultaneously keeping the structure in place and tearing it down. He felt that anything he did was going to endorse the wall, unless he could find a different way of approaching it. So he took on the idea of bringing the wall down creatively, in a creative act, using the idea of a game (deploying rules again, interestingly). He seems to enjoy the idea of using games in this context, noting "We all know it's just a game ... a very serious game."
I mention his extraordinary drawings, which are both detailed and impressionistic, therefore having a certain open-endedness that reinforces his earlier points, perhaps. I ask whether he's approached work with any other media, that might either engage a wider sensory range – beyond visual stimulation and communication, say into soundworks or communicate via the other senses – or has thought of working in film, say. He says that other than some installations, it's "not my thing, I haven't been there yet." (I like the subtle way Woods implies he's still learning, developing here.) In terms of film, he mentions an engagement with the film 'Alien 3' in 1993, which he worked on for a few weeks. However, he laughs, "you don't want to be designer working in movie industry!" You're the lowest of the low, apparently. He finds it amusing that architects complain that clients don't understand their work; they should try working with studio execs. Tantalisingly, he mentions he does have a fantasy of making a big budget Hollywood movie. He actually wrote a screenplay a while back, based on his underground Berlin project. He diligently read the Syd Field book. But he thinks that it would be too frustrating. In Hollywood, he says, you don't produce a product, it's always about the process. But he finds it an intriguing media.
He says "The drawings are about ideas ultimately. They're not about drawing." So he uses drawing to find an idea. "If you could use the movie in the same way - it would be incredible". And he know movies have been used in this way – it's clearly a medium he respects and admires, when done well – but he ends by saying that are by and large formulaic. (I suspect he's looking for a malleability and complexity to communicate his work that the economics of movie making just impinge upon (currently). His work to me often suggests film, as powerful as they are drawings. But I love this point about trying to search for ideas through the act of drawing – it's why, in my own small way, I occasionally scribble here on City of Sound, as well as write. I think blogs could do more to communicate through drawing.)
In terms of where his inspiration comes from, in response to a query from Geoff about this and his approach education, Woods says he can't honestly say where inspiration comes from, directly. He settles on reading as a major influence – "Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Sartre" – and then art, such as "plenty of Brueghel, Goya and Picasso" ... "Everything visual stimulates me", though some media less than others, he notes with a wry grin. But ultimately, "texts have a profound influence on the way I think".
In terms of education, he's taught at Cooper Union where he's been given real latitude. He makes a point of saying that he works with students as he would with any other people – "Students are just people, aren't they?!". He almost hates the term student. The most important thing is to set out to question, lay down some rules, develop modes of answering the question. The most important thing a teacher does is ask the right question. (He also runs the Research Institute for Experimental Architecture).
Bryan asks what Woods is working on today. Woods replies obliquely, beginning by outlining his approach to work. He's always worked alone, more or less. Never really had an office. He has collaborators, from time to time. Basically he sits down, spends a lot of time thinking, not necessarily doing anything, I read, I draw. "I've recently done some very large drawings". "The ideas that interest me now", he says, "are always around the artificial landscape, architecture being a method of reforming the earth's surface ... we're re-forming nature ... making a new earth. I used to call it "Terra Nova in my latinate years!"
He hasn't worked on any building-like structures as such, recently. The work in Vienna was Investigating architecture as energy - trying to look at architecture and making of space that way. "Socially", he says, "we all have to deal with the question of slums". References the Mike Davis book, and the importance of studying, and working with, favelas. It's something he's turning some of his attention to. He says "it's a little preliminary to say (what he's doing) but if we can do anything from the outside for those on the inside, it's going to be to empower them somehow, to transform the slum from the inside. It can't be us airlifting in ready-made solutions ..."
Again, this reinvigoration of, and reconfiguration of, design advocacy. Fascinating. He says he'll contact us first when these projects emerge, leading to his closing point. He says that he very much believes in books – he publishes books – but of architecture blogs and the internet, he says "I think what what you people are doing is so incredibly creative, that's why I'm here tonight." And with that, we close.
So many thanks to Lebbeus Woods for sharing his skill, experience and insight. He was a naturally witty, wise speaker – a genuine communicator, in an entirely off-the-cuff way; friendly, and extremely patient with our informal approach. Ultimately, a real inspiration as a theorist, educator and practitioner. He binds these three elements together so well, such that each informs the others, and then deploys these ideas in war zones and disaster-stricken cities. As highly regarded as his work is, it makes you think he deserves more credit still. Despite constantly challenging architecture to reinvent itself for contemporary conditions, there's clearly a love and value for what the practice and the profession should be. Despite this, he's rarely described as an architect and is, to a certain extent, marginalised by an architectural community in thrall to starchitects. Yet in terms of reconfiguring what architecture is, is there a more important architect working today?
Lifeform are a New York-based architectural firm, and Monica Hernandez runs the crowd the several great residential projects around the city. And that's residential in the widest sense, including dealing with NYC's very real homeless problem.
Consequently, their first project was the winner of an architectural competition based in the Bowery, an area with a rich and vivid history. It's a poor, edgy place, but also full of the real life of downtown Manhattan beyond Prada and Dean & Deluca. (I'd written about the original architectural competition, coincidentally.)
Based around an existing flophouse, they decided to build on the characteristics of that rather than trying to focus on creating longer-term living for the homeless. This is a switch on usual practice, and very smart I reckon. The old flophouse model had some extremely practical functions, in terms of short-term living. Hernandez outlined the key differences between the flophouse and the shelter: the former is about something that gives the user space, a private space at that, that you can lock up. The existing flophouse building had to be re-modeled, to add 3 more floors (for existing tenants), 2 for veterans, and provide 3 for people from street.
The approach Lifeform took was one based around a 'kit of parts', a reconfigurable unit that homeless people can quickly assemble and personalise. Lifeform had developed 3 main use-cases, or user archetypes/personae: Loner, Creator, Collector (though the differences weren't explained in much detail.) At this point, Hernandez passed around examples of the material used in the kit – I thought this was a great touch, and surprisingly rarely done during Postopolis!. The materials were drawn from the aviation and maritime industries, and light, durable and colourful. Assembly time is around 6-8 hours, and the "packaging contains the entire project" i.e. the crate holds all the kit of parts, and the crate itself becomes the platform. It can be shipped in a van or truck, and transported pretty much anywhere.
This kit of parts also contains the DNA of potential community, in that building your own shelter can be performed as a communal activity, and the various door on the shelter has openings onto long, narrow hallways, which can effectively become marketplaces or interior streets.
Although intended for homeless people, it's clear that the Kit of Parts could be applied to many other situations. Hernandez indicates some visualisations of how units can be put together to make large spaces for families or different uses, like a hospital for instance. This evolution has much potential: as add-on habitats, "stand-alone writing cottages", "children's gazebo" etc. Hernandez fielded a question about this, as to whether this project originally for homeless men has become a project of a larger market? She notes that one doesn't necessarily preclude the other, and that the project is still in development. Essentially, the kit of parts unit is about "dignified, ecologically responsible life", whoever uses it. The cost of a unit is probably circa $4-5k.
Hernandez indicates another project, Re-Order, in Brooklyn, is based heavily around analysis of the different living spaces and demographics of a community. Again, the principle is one of a kit of parts, here based around a catalogue of common units, activities and materials, which builders can select and configure, according to the site in question. These are prefabricated and again enable easy construction. As with the earlier Kit of Parts, possibility for community is emphasised, here with built-in common spaces that enable outdoor activities and retail spaces, provide daycare facilities, and so on.
Hernandez notes that throughout Lifeform's recent projects in Brooklyn, they're trying to use low-emisson glass, and green spaces in terraces and roof gardens etc, which again emphasises that materials and finish are as important as the configurable systems. It's also heartening to see prefab-based projects that are drawn from research into communities, such that a configurable framework can still suggest appropriate use rather than something too open-ended. As Lebbeus Woods would remind us later, architects still have a responsibility to provide direction, even in the most open-ended systems. Much closer to the practicalities and constraints of the marketplace, Lifeform's projects seem to suggest a delicate balance between open flexibility and suggested function.
JG Ballard: Kingdom Come Ballard running on only one or two engines, but still chock full of wonderful ideas and observations, and with a few lines that will resonate forever. Curiously full of holes (no CCTV on the original crime?) but as a depiction of an England rotten to the core, timely and useful. (****)
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