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imomusBrowsing at Pro-QM yesterday I saw a trendy German architecture magazine had run a special edition on "Poor Architecture". Is the Disaster Relief look fashionable this year? Is one man's martyrdom another's matinee, one man's tragedy another's aesthetic? Wouldn't you feel rather differently about that if you were actually in the disaster? What about poverty -- is it simply the absence of wealth, or is there something inherently good about it, as religious leaders from Christ to Buddha (via Gandhi) have told us?
I personally love the cheap look. I love shabby Indian stores on the Karl Marx Strasse. I love building sites more than what they turn into when they're finished. I love exhibition design, garden sheds and nissen huts. People at the top and people at the bottom are more likely to share values than people in the middle. I've noticed this time and again. There are links between a slumming liberal bourgeois class (that's me!) and second generation immigrants, for instance. The immigrant lifestyle becomes a look for these influential bourgeois -- weirdly aspirational -- and cheapness becomes an ecological and aesthetic virtue.
"The digerati use the same unvarnished plywood in their galleries, studios and workshops that the Chinese use to rack their vegetables. It has the same look. A simple plywood box may house a G4 Mac or a lobster," I noted in The Post-Bit Atom, sat in the exact place where New York's Lower East Side turns into Chinatown.
Going Tribal in Neubeca and Cosmopolitanism of the Poor are both articles in which I find lifestyle parallels between hipster creatives and immigrants, and Geodemographics put me in my place noted that people who cherish "encounters with the other" and seek out immigrant areas to live in can be very precisely pinned:
"E33s (Town Gown Transition) are post-materialists with links to academia. They don't really differentiate work from leisure." In the Neubeca article I expressed that same idea as "live-work spaces where the boundaries blur between personal and corporate, shop and living space... trestle tables... something medieval, some return to cottage industry, families working together, a certain amateurism" which "also resembles the extended family businesses the Turks run".
The only straw bale house in London (as far as I know) is in Islington. It's at 9 Stock Orchard Street, and it's designed by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till. "Considered the first modern building to use straw in England," says Sara Navrady, "the building combines new and old materials with new and old techniques to produce an eco-friendly urban creation... it incorporates several elements of sustainable architecture into its
design: passive solar heating, solar water heating, natural ventilation, a recycled water system as well as the use of vernacular, low-energy and recycled materials, not to mention a green roof and a composting toilet. The combination of work and home eliminates the energy consumed by commuting."
Sustainable architecture is also, paradoxically, cheap and temporary architecture.
In I love Lacaton and Vassal I quoted the architects of the Palais de Tokyo's "space of encounter" and "home of relational aesthetics" saying: “It is really incredible to see how African people can use a lot of different materials, the materials they have around themselves. They can find the simplest way to make the minimum essential things fit for a purpose... 90% of what you need to make a building is already present on the site". In Africa Lacaton and Vassal learned from people’s resourcefulness and how existing materials are endlessly used, reused and hybridised with very little waste. It's what Koolhaas learned from Lagos too.
"E33s like contemporary, experimental art," I continued in the geodemographics piece. "They don't have much money, and spend what they have on eating out, buying magazines, and foreign travel. E31s are progressives, tolerant of diversity -- but paradoxically intolerant of people they see as intolerant. They're into "being" rather than "having", eat vegetarian or organic food, and read The Independent or The Guardian."
London may have only one straw bale house, but it has lots of exhibitions in which you might well see a Shigeru Ban structure, or places like the Architectural Association on Bedford Square, where, at any given point, someone is sure to be doing a thesis on cheap'n'cheerful "transitional architecture", or Sambo Mockbee's Rural Studio, or the aesthetics of Disaster Relief Housing. It has any number of contemporary art spaces in which you'll find a painstakingly-reconstructed Simon Starling barn or something similar. Even the super-elite Comme des Garcons at the Dover Street Market is full of shabby-chic huts.
The tendency of the bien-pensant bourgeois to identify with developing world-style eco-cheapness infuriates some right wingers. A call for information on Disaster Relief Housing on the ArchNet forum was met by lots of helpful links -- and some peevish whining from someone called Frank John Snelling, who told anyone who'd listen that "There is no such thing as society because it does not exist in real life... Rethink your use of the word social" and that the true pioneers of disaster relief housing were the Seabees -- the engineers of the US Marine Corps. "Architecture is not a social tool," says Snelling, who elsewhere spells out his belief that architecture is war because its main purpose is to defend us from hostile elements and people.
Another peevish right winger is British National Party chairman Nick Griffin, whose Humanised Cities manifesto wonders "how London would have benefited if the £1 billion pounds 'wasted' on the Millennium dome had been invested in a building as majestic as the Notre dame cathedral, the Crystal palace, the houses of parliament, or the Pantheon of Rome. A building of that nature would have stood for over a thousand years and would have permanently enhanced the city. Instead, we now have a hideous commercialist tent-like structure, which was never intended to survive beyond the millennium exhibition. Modern architectural styles have the appearance of being plain, cheap and temporary."
Shigeru Ban broke through internationally with his emergency house for survivors of the Kobe earthquake (it used cardboard tubes and sat on beer crates) in the Cities on the Move exhibition. He's now building the new Pompidou Centre in Metz, working out of a temporary office on the fifth floor of the Paris Pompidou (on condition that he give them the "temporary" structure when he finishes). Ban told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist his discovery of cardboard tubes as a building material had been a question of making a virtue out of necessity:
"I designed an exhibition for Alvar Aalto, one of my favorite architects. I wanted to design an Aalto-like interior for the exhibition, but I didn't have a large budget; I couldn't use a lot of wood like Aalto used. So I looked for other materials and I found the papertube in my studio; its brown color is very much like wood. I went to the factory and found out it's very inexpensive and they can make various sizes, lengths, thicknesses and diameters. I used it and it was very successful."
"When I started using papertube nobody was talking about "ecology" or "environmentally friendly" or "recycling", especially in Japan as we were heading into the "bubble period" , an economically crazy period. Everyone wondered why I was using such cheap materials. Now everybody is interested in the environment, so it's easier to discuss the idea."
The ethics of disaster relief are pretty solid, but the aesthetics aren't always recylable. The buildings being erected at Chinnangudi by the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies -- to replace communities washed away by the tsunami of 2005 -- will never feature in urbanism exhibits or trendy design courses. But they get the job done.
What happens when you recycle values created by (sometimes tragic) necessity and make them into an "aesthetic of virtue" for a monied but guilty affluent elite? Do these values contain virtue or just guilt? Do they become weapons on the battleground of a less-than-noble struggle between the high and low bourgeoisie (or between the left and right), mere means to internecine distinction? And what's achieved by inverting traditional models of architectural virtue -- by saying that cheap and flimsy are the new solid, that low quality is the new high quality, that temporariness is sustainability, and that you should preserve things by constantly remaking them? Surely we're going to hit some recursive circles pretty quickly -- cheapness will end up being justified by the logic of luxury, temporariness by the logic of permanence, and bad taste by the logic of good taste.
And just how many generations of upward mobility does it take for people to come full circle back to the lifestyles and looks of their ancestors?
One of the most beautiful examples of high-low empathy I know comes in the documentary For All Mankind, when Neil Armstrong remembers looking down from Apollo 11 at the Sahara and seeing nomads. "In Africa there are a lot of nomads out in the desert. On clear desert nights you see... these little yellow dots that represent fires from all these nomads camping out. And you realize the broad area that you've over here. And each of these little yellow dots represent people -- all humans in an environment which I would consider more strange than the environment they might think about... me."
The awesomeness of the memory makes the astronaut tangle his syntax, but we know what he means. Those nomads bounce him back a flattering image of who he is and how far he's come.
I personally love the cheap look. I love shabby Indian stores on the Karl Marx Strasse. I love building sites more than what they turn into when they're finished. I love exhibition design, garden sheds and nissen huts. People at the top and people at the bottom are more likely to share values than people in the middle. I've noticed this time and again. There are links between a slumming liberal bourgeois class (that's me!) and second generation immigrants, for instance. The immigrant lifestyle becomes a look for these influential bourgeois -- weirdly aspirational -- and cheapness becomes an ecological and aesthetic virtue.
"The digerati use the same unvarnished plywood in their galleries, studios and workshops that the Chinese use to rack their vegetables. It has the same look. A simple plywood box may house a G4 Mac or a lobster," I noted in The Post-Bit Atom, sat in the exact place where New York's Lower East Side turns into Chinatown.
Going Tribal in Neubeca and Cosmopolitanism of the Poor are both articles in which I find lifestyle parallels between hipster creatives and immigrants, and Geodemographics put me in my place noted that people who cherish "encounters with the other" and seek out immigrant areas to live in can be very precisely pinned:
"E33s (Town Gown Transition) are post-materialists with links to academia. They don't really differentiate work from leisure." In the Neubeca article I expressed that same idea as "live-work spaces where the boundaries blur between personal and corporate, shop and living space... trestle tables... something medieval, some return to cottage industry, families working together, a certain amateurism" which "also resembles the extended family businesses the Turks run".
The only straw bale house in London (as far as I know) is in Islington. It's at 9 Stock Orchard Street, and it's designed by Sarah Wigglesworth and Jeremy Till. "Considered the first modern building to use straw in England," says Sara Navrady, "the building combines new and old materials with new and old techniques to produce an eco-friendly urban creation... it incorporates several elements of sustainable architecture into its
design: passive solar heating, solar water heating, natural ventilation, a recycled water system as well as the use of vernacular, low-energy and recycled materials, not to mention a green roof and a composting toilet. The combination of work and home eliminates the energy consumed by commuting."
Sustainable architecture is also, paradoxically, cheap and temporary architecture.
In I love Lacaton and Vassal I quoted the architects of the Palais de Tokyo's "space of encounter" and "home of relational aesthetics" saying: “It is really incredible to see how African people can use a lot of different materials, the materials they have around themselves. They can find the simplest way to make the minimum essential things fit for a purpose... 90% of what you need to make a building is already present on the site". In Africa Lacaton and Vassal learned from people’s resourcefulness and how existing materials are endlessly used, reused and hybridised with very little waste. It's what Koolhaas learned from Lagos too.
"E33s like contemporary, experimental art," I continued in the geodemographics piece. "They don't have much money, and spend what they have on eating out, buying magazines, and foreign travel. E31s are progressives, tolerant of diversity -- but paradoxically intolerant of people they see as intolerant. They're into "being" rather than "having", eat vegetarian or organic food, and read The Independent or The Guardian."
London may have only one straw bale house, but it has lots of exhibitions in which you might well see a Shigeru Ban structure, or places like the Architectural Association on Bedford Square, where, at any given point, someone is sure to be doing a thesis on cheap'n'cheerful "transitional architecture", or Sambo Mockbee's Rural Studio, or the aesthetics of Disaster Relief Housing. It has any number of contemporary art spaces in which you'll find a painstakingly-reconstructed Simon Starling barn or something similar. Even the super-elite Comme des Garcons at the Dover Street Market is full of shabby-chic huts.
The tendency of the bien-pensant bourgeois to identify with developing world-style eco-cheapness infuriates some right wingers. A call for information on Disaster Relief Housing on the ArchNet forum was met by lots of helpful links -- and some peevish whining from someone called Frank John Snelling, who told anyone who'd listen that "There is no such thing as society because it does not exist in real life... Rethink your use of the word social" and that the true pioneers of disaster relief housing were the Seabees -- the engineers of the US Marine Corps. "Architecture is not a social tool," says Snelling, who elsewhere spells out his belief that architecture is war because its main purpose is to defend us from hostile elements and people.
Another peevish right winger is British National Party chairman Nick Griffin, whose Humanised Cities manifesto wonders "how London would have benefited if the £1 billion pounds 'wasted' on the Millennium dome had been invested in a building as majestic as the Notre dame cathedral, the Crystal palace, the houses of parliament, or the Pantheon of Rome. A building of that nature would have stood for over a thousand years and would have permanently enhanced the city. Instead, we now have a hideous commercialist tent-like structure, which was never intended to survive beyond the millennium exhibition. Modern architectural styles have the appearance of being plain, cheap and temporary."
Shigeru Ban broke through internationally with his emergency house for survivors of the Kobe earthquake (it used cardboard tubes and sat on beer crates) in the Cities on the Move exhibition. He's now building the new Pompidou Centre in Metz, working out of a temporary office on the fifth floor of the Paris Pompidou (on condition that he give them the "temporary" structure when he finishes). Ban told curator Hans Ulrich Obrist his discovery of cardboard tubes as a building material had been a question of making a virtue out of necessity:
"I designed an exhibition for Alvar Aalto, one of my favorite architects. I wanted to design an Aalto-like interior for the exhibition, but I didn't have a large budget; I couldn't use a lot of wood like Aalto used. So I looked for other materials and I found the papertube in my studio; its brown color is very much like wood. I went to the factory and found out it's very inexpensive and they can make various sizes, lengths, thicknesses and diameters. I used it and it was very successful."
"When I started using papertube nobody was talking about "ecology" or "environmentally friendly" or "recycling", especially in Japan as we were heading into the "bubble period" , an economically crazy period. Everyone wondered why I was using such cheap materials. Now everybody is interested in the environment, so it's easier to discuss the idea."
The ethics of disaster relief are pretty solid, but the aesthetics aren't always recylable. The buildings being erected at Chinnangudi by the South Indian Federation of Fishermen Societies -- to replace communities washed away by the tsunami of 2005 -- will never feature in urbanism exhibits or trendy design courses. But they get the job done.
What happens when you recycle values created by (sometimes tragic) necessity and make them into an "aesthetic of virtue" for a monied but guilty affluent elite? Do these values contain virtue or just guilt? Do they become weapons on the battleground of a less-than-noble struggle between the high and low bourgeoisie (or between the left and right), mere means to internecine distinction? And what's achieved by inverting traditional models of architectural virtue -- by saying that cheap and flimsy are the new solid, that low quality is the new high quality, that temporariness is sustainability, and that you should preserve things by constantly remaking them? Surely we're going to hit some recursive circles pretty quickly -- cheapness will end up being justified by the logic of luxury, temporariness by the logic of permanence, and bad taste by the logic of good taste.
And just how many generations of upward mobility does it take for people to come full circle back to the lifestyles and looks of their ancestors?
One of the most beautiful examples of high-low empathy I know comes in the documentary For All Mankind, when Neil Armstrong remembers looking down from Apollo 11 at the Sahara and seeing nomads. "In Africa there are a lot of nomads out in the desert. On clear desert nights you see... these little yellow dots that represent fires from all these nomads camping out. And you realize the broad area that you've over here. And each of these little yellow dots represent people -- all humans in an environment which I would consider more strange than the environment they might think about... me."
The awesomeness of the memory makes the astronaut tangle his syntax, but we know what he means. Those nomads bounce him back a flattering image of who he is and how far he's come.