Month: June 2010

[Image: From “Floating City 2030: Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism” by Anthony Lau].

Continuing with a look at some noteworthy student projects—which kicked off this week with thesis work by Taylor Medlin—we now look at a proposal by Anthony Lau, submitted back in 2008 at the Bartlett School of Architecture in London. For that project, Lau designed a “floating city” for the Thames Estuary, ca. 2030 A.D. This “Thames Estuary Aquatic Urbanism,” as Lau refers to it, “gives new life to decommissioned ships and oil platforms by converting them into hybrid homes adapted for aquatic living.”

While the idea of offshore architecture has been relatively depleted of its novelty over the last few years, the presentation and imaginative extent of Lau’s idea is of sufficiently high quality to deserve wider exposure and a longer look.

[Images: From “Floating City 2030” by Anthony Lau].

“Most modern floating architecture involves new-build modular systems for mass production,” Lau writes. “Although this may be the most efficient for space planning, it often lacks character.” His alternative:

The multitude of hull shapes and sizes can inspire unique and inventive design. The proposal aims to express the beautiful forms and internal steel structures of hulls. The hulls serve as nautical reminders of the ship’s past and our previous closeness to water, which we will now embrace once again.

The level of detail in Lau’s resulting models is astonishing; bridged superblocks of partially rebuilt oil platforms rise from the wetlands, amidst floating gardens and forest barges, like scenes from a maritime-industrial Avalon.

You can see larger versions of these images (some of which have been cropped down and recombined to fit the vertical nature of this post, which means that you will see different groupings at this link) here.

[Images: Models from “Floating City 2030” by Anthony Lau].

As Lau writes: “By utilising the flooded landscape, a floating city of offshore communities, mobile infrastructure and aquatic transport will allow the city to reconfigure through fluid urban planning. Wave, tidal and wind energy will be ideal for this offshore city and the inhabitants will live alongside the natural cycles of nature and the rhythms of the river and tides.”

He adds that “this strategy for creating a self sufficient floating city by reusing ships and marine structures can also be applied to island nations such as the Maldives. Over 80% of its 1,200 islands are around 1 m above sea level. With sea levels rising around 0.9 cm a year, the Maldives could become uninhabitable within 100 years. Its 360,000 citizens would be forced to adapt and they could become the first floating nation.”

[Image: From “Floating City 2030” by Anthony Lau].

If Lau’s work piques your interest, you might also want to take a look at a report released last year by the Institution of Civil Engineers and the Building Futures group, called “Facing Up To Rising Sea Levels: Retreat? Defend? Attack?”

Looking to a 100 year horizon of climate change predictions, we will address how the urban, built environment needs to react now. Conservative estimates predict sea-levels to continue ro rise as the oceans warm and the ice caps melt. Coupled with isostatic rebound (the South sinking relative to the North) the effects grow ever more dramatic for large centers of population on the coast. Predicted weather patterns show increased rainfall intesity, leading to sever problems of surface water flooding in built up areas.

The ensuing paper explores the architectural implications of three different hydrological strategies: retreating from the coast, defending what we’ve built there, and attacking the incoming waters with aggressive engineering.

Interestingly, meanwhile, one of Lau’s initiatives since graduating from the Bartlett is to form a company focusing on urban bicycle infrastructure, specifically the Cyclehoop, “an award-winning design that converts existing street furniture into secure bicycle parking.” It’s also quite colorful. But perhaps a Boathoop is in the works for residents of his future Floating City…

For substantially larger project images, click here.

(Follow Lau’s Cyclehoop project on Twitter: @cyclehoop).

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

I’m a fan of this strangely megalithic museum and cultural center made from a series of concrete shells, colored white with crushed marble, proposed for the Czech city of Olomouc.

According to the designers, Šépka Architekti, the project “attempts to draw inspiration from both… a small scale of mediaeval subdivision of land on the one hand and the large scale of palaces, ecclesiastical and military buildings of the Předhradí beginning here on the other.”

[Image: Sketch of the Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti, looking vaguely like an inverted, institutional-scale variation on Neil Denari’s Useful and Agreeable House].

The museum is divided into five apparently separate but linked buildings; this is due to “the necessary separation of the individual functions of the exhibition halls, library, entry hall or bookshop and refreshments,” a “necessary separation” that also generates a convenient spatial identity for the overall project.

One of the coolest things about the design, though, is what Šépka Architekti call their “house in a house” idea, inspired by access to indirect sunlight: “Even in the cases when an upper floor is inserted in an individual building, daylight is ensured on the lower floor through placement of a smaller structure. We thus approach the topic of a ‘house in a house’, which ensures favourable conditions for the the display of exhibits on the walls while providing light from above on both floors.”

You can see the formal implications of this in the below image, where a massive, seemingly hovering trapezoid acts both as another, elevated room for gallery use and as a massive, light-filtering device for the skylights further above.

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

It’s a mass that casts shadows inside the building.

Provided the exterior concrete ages well, the museum’s fivefold street presence—briefly stepping back at one point to form a public plaza—is actually pretty stunning. It manages to allude to design languages as diverse as Neo-Brutalism, the Romanesque, a kind of Tatooine Moderne, and computer harddrive casings (although I’m reminded of Owen Hatherley’s recent quip about “a modernised classicism, monumental yet free in details, that usually gets subsumed under the meaningless retrospective coinage ‘art deco'”—here, we might say, “modern geometries, imposing in size, built from concrete, and thus subsumed under the meaningless retrospective coinage ‘Neo-Brutalism'”).

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

The results are quite beautiful in profile, even when simply rising up behind the walls of neighboring buildings.

In any case, the interior volumes also lend themselves well to defining an overall spatial experience, even while departing from one another just enough to keep each bay or gallery distinct.

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

As mentioned earlier, that interior is a mix of art galleries, a library, a bookshop/cafe, performance spaces, and, oddly enough, as if Photoshopped in simply to prove a point, a basketball court. Note that the stadium seating visible in many of these images has been mounted on rails for ease of rearrangement.

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

In plan, it’s interesting to remember that the separate units of the building here were generated from what Šépka Architekti referred to as the “small scale of mediaeval subdivision of land.” In other words, the buildings take their formal cue—at least abstractly—from ancient real estate divisions on the ground in Olomouc, not from some overzealous application of the architects’ own stylized form of site analysis.

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

The complete building, seen in slices:

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

Further, the “small scale of mediaeval subdivision of land” that I’ve mentioned three times now also means that what could very easily be an imposing, alien monolith made from smooth white concrete, stuck irresponsibly in the center of the city, actually manages to be appropriate in scale.

[Image: Central European Forum, Olomouc, by Šépka Architekti].

The building hasn’t been constructed, of course, and we have no real idea how the concrete will age; but I was struck by the images from the instant I saw them, flipping through a back issue of a10 yesterday afternoon.

Check out more images courtesy of Šépka Architekti.

[Image: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

For a stunningly realized thesis project submitted last month at the University of California, Berkeley, Taylor Medlin focused on what he called “Towards a New Antarchitecture.” Presented through a combination of miniature wax models and sculpted ice, the project aimed to show how new, more sustainable construction techniques could be developed for the continent of Antarctica.

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

The only slightly tongue-in-cheek project involved everything from Pykrete—sawdust-reinforced ice once proposed as a genuine alternative to steel in constructing warships—to semi-metalized igloos and ice curtain walls threaded with cylinders of glass.

Medlin even created sample ice blocks in a university freezer in order to test a number of these emerging material possibilities. He called this “Ice Experimentation.”

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

The overall project statement read as follows:

Antarctica, the most recently explored large land mass in the world, is also currently one of the most unsustainable place on the earth when viewed through the lens of construction techniques. There are over sixty research stations from thirty different countries already built on the continent, all of which are completely constructed out of materials foreign to Antarctica, necessitating huge logistical resources to set up and maintain life there. Though some stations have begun to experiment with energy collection techniques, most remain completely dependent on diesel generators consuming fossil fuels brought from the mainland.

Is it possible to develop construction techniques that take into consideration the materials already present in Antarctica as building blocks for design? And furthermore, what are the possibilities for energy production and conservation that have not yet been explored?

Through the design of a methodology of construction relating to ongoing research stations in Antarctica, I wish to show the plausibility and environmental advantages of designing research stations through the utilization of ice as a principal construction material.

Buildings made of ice as a sustainable alternative to projects like Halley VI is a compelling—if perhaps not altogether realistic—idea. Strengthening the ice they’d be made from, using a diverse series of additives—not unlike the “cake mix” mentioned in an earlier post—not only makes it more interesting but materially testable.

[Image: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

Medlin’s execution of the final project cabinet is jaw-dropping. Wax models, fisheye lenses, frozen ice maquettes, human figurines, and laser-etched descriptive text, all often lit from within, result in one of the most beautiful student presentations I’ve seen in a long time.

Here are some photos, taken by Medlin, starting off with the miniature wax rooms into which his lenses were embedded—reverse-periscopes looking down into a frozen world:

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

As objects, these are extraordinary; the design potential for portable lensed microcosms is something well worth exploring in other projects elsewhere.

But Medlin offered other ways of seeing into his final project. I think this is genius: in realizing that the fisheye lens approach would not work for everything he’d built, Medlin simply attached magnifying glasses to the exterior of the cabinet. You could thus look through them into a world, one expanding before your very eyes, stocked with people living infra-glacially in an imaginary Antarctic metropolis.

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

How cool is that!

Here are some of the interior sights those lenses allowed:

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

Finally, the ice structures inside of which Medlin’s Antarctic researchers—or future sovereign residents—might live ranged from cuboid huts to geodesic ice domes:

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

One or two of the resulting scenes are positively mythic, going back to the Nietzschean opening image of this post.

[Image: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

Medlin’s behind-the-scenes process documentation is also worth a look; we see him experimenting with battery-powered light sources, hot glue guns, freezer racks, and more. Again, here are some images showing the final display cabinet being assembled.

[Images: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

Now ready for public—and advisor—consumption, Medlin’s half-frozen, half-wax, optically activated demonstration cabinet of Antarctic wonders stood deservedly proud amidst its surroundings.

[Image: From “Towards a New Antarchitecture,” a thesis project by Taylor Medlin].

It’s worth clicking through the project Flickr page to see many more angles on the work, as well as several whole pages’ worth of preparatory images, including templates for the descriptive text that was laser-etched onto the outside of the cabinet.

However, it is also worth taking a spin through Medlin’s sketchbook. Extensively detailed in 149 separate scanned pages, it is a treat in its own right. From cave dwellings in both Italy and Turkey to Macchu Picchu, Australian Aboriginal stilt houses, and a bizarre glimpse of tree-borne “baby graves,” those sketches collectively form a pretty awesome record of Medlin’s recent globetrotting adventures (all of which were funded by a John K. Branner Fellowship, which Medlin’s fellow student Nick Sowers, often mentioned here, also deservedly received).

(In the archives: the Antarctic-themed Manual of Architectural Possibilities #1).

One of many things I hope to do next weekend while visiting family outside Philadelphia is take a trip to the so-called “Cave of Kelpius,” an artificially enlarged “cave,” complete with stone doorframe, on the banks of the Wissahickon.

[Images: The Cave of Kelpius, via Flickr-user veghead and U.S. History].

There, in the humidity and quiet of what is now Fairmount Park, “Philadelphia’s first mystical guru came to meditate and await the Second Coming.” He was called Johannes Kelpius, “and his followers arrived in newly-founded Philadelphia from Germany in 1694 and chose the wild and beautiful Wissahickon as the best place to await the millennium.”

Wikipedia adds that “this belief, based on an elaborate interpretation of a passage from the biblical Book of Revelation, anticipated the advent of a heavenly kingdom somewhere in the wilderness during that year. Kelpius felt that the seventeenth-century Province of Pennsylvania, given its reputation for religious toleration at the edge of a barely settled wilderness, was the best place to be.” That the heavily vegetated old valleys and hills outside Philadelphia were, at that time, wild enough to be seen as the possible site for an unnamed “heavenly kingdom” in the woods is not, in fact, all that surprising to anyone who has walked around on a particularly humid August evening, through the massive trees and rocky pathways of the region.

Oddly enough, though, this subterranean meditation chamber for a 17th-century doomsday cult—a kind of Rosicrucian NORAD in an era of breeches and buckled shoes—appears to be only a few hundred yards from the running paths on which my cross-country team practiced in high school. Yet it was something I had never heard of till a few weeks ago—probably because it’s more likely a former springhouse, and not the Waco-like cave of a mystical group at all.

[Image: The Cave of Kelpius, photographed by BLDGBLOG after this post was written].

Nonetheless, a quick visit to the Cave of Kelpius—now in the absurd position of being ringed with suburbs—is in the cards.

[Image: A sulphur tile from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

I had the pleasure last week of being introduced to the archives of Vikram Bhatt here at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, going through a mass of new material that is still in the process of being accessioned and catalogued.

Most of the files, artifacts, and documentary images found in this recently acquired subcollection are related to Bhatt’s work with the Minimum Cost Housing Group (MCHG) at McGill University. The MCHG—founded by Alvaro Ortega, Witold Rybczynski, Samir Ayad, Wajid Ali, and Arthur Acheson—describes itself as “an educational and research program with an international orientation that focuses attention on the human settlement problems of poor nations.”

[Image: A photo from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

Bhatt’s current work—and, now, the focus of the MCHG—is urban agriculture. There is, for instance, a program called Making the Edible Campus, winner of a 2008 National Urban Design Award. The awarding jury explained their decision as follows:

With simple, direct layouts [Making the Campus Edible] aims to employ underused corners and spaces within the public realm to grow produce linked to a food collection and meal delivery system, creating a sustainable prototype that could potentially be expanded to other university campuses and across the city.

This program is accompanied by Bhatt’s Making the Edible Landscape initiative, “a three-year collaborative project [that] aims to demostrate the value of including urban agriculture as a permanent feature in city planning and housing design.” The related “Edible Landscape Tools” catalog, featuring graduate student work produced in the winter of 2005, “gives a simple set of instructions on the basics of integrating urban agriculture into and around the home, and throughout the community. Areas explored include street furniture as planters, water reclamation, basic site planning and composting.” Or, as we read elsewhere: “The act of growing in cities exists and has existed for millennia for various reasons, including food security. Our goal is to formalize its existence and to establish it permanently as an urban feature.”

With the help of CCA assistant curator Pierre Édouard Latouche, I was able to see a voluminous quantity of archival material related to Bhatt’s earlier experiments with alternative building technologies. These included sulphur bricks of his research group’s own invention.

Sulphur is one of many chemical byproducts from, among other things, oil refining, and it is produced in such enormous quantities now that there is actually a sulphur glut. Is there a way, Bhatt asked, to reuse waste sulphur as a building material, reducing its unpleasant odor and strengthening its structural properties?

[Image: Brick-stacking in an image from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

A series of chemical experiments, using baking trays, different concrete mixes—which Latouche referred to as “cake mix”—and large kilns resulted in a functional prototype. Sulphur concrete, as it is known, is produced through “a very simple process and the use of energy is low,” The Ecology of Building Materials explains. “Sulphur blocks are even waterproof as long as there are not many fibers in the mix.”

For some reason the interest in this material disappeared after a very prolific period of use near the end of the nineteenth century, and the idea was first taken up again about 20 years ago by the Minimum Housing Group [sic] at McGill University in Canada, which has built a number of houses in sulphur concrete.

Bhatt’s group later discovered that these new sulphur bricks were also capable of being infused with full-color images transferred directly from the newspapers or other documents in which they had been wrapped.

[Images: A sample sulphur brick and tile from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

What you see in the above photo, as well as in the photograph at the head of this post, is an image that has transferred from a newspaper or magazine onto one of Bhatt’s sulphur bricks. This, too, then became a focus of experimentation for the group, leading to houses that had been pre-wallpapered, so to speak, with images taken directly from print media and chemically fused with the brickwork. The graphic possibilities of this sort of image-transfer technology seem well worth exploring in more detail.

[Image: One example of the endless modularity afforded by molded concrete. From the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

However, the bricks could also be “baked” into any mold a designer made for it, resulting in unique shapes, sizes, and formats—including the jack-like form you see above and in the left-hand side of the opening image. Buildings could be assembled like puzzle pieces, bright with baked-in imagery, produced from a deodorized industrial waste product available in huge quantities almost anywhere in the world.

[Image: The Ecol House, Montréal, Québec (1972). Ecol Operation, architects. Autonomous dwelling designed for use in developing countries. Photograph by Denis Plain © 1972. Courtesy of the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

For instance, the Ecol House project, constructed at McGill, “was built from modular components, often the result of innovative ideas and approaches based on simple techniques introduced and tested by the group,” we read in the catalog for Sorry, Out of Gas, an earlier exhibition at the CCA. “The walls were built, in part, of sulphur concrete blocks made by a method suited to small-scale production.” This was at least part of the reason that McGill’s Minimum Cost Housing Group became “an international point of reference for energy conservation, use of unusual materials, and experimental construction techniques” in the 1970s.

At one point, even Buckminster Fuller visited Bhatt’s labs; you can see Fuller in the image, below, talking to Bhatt in one of the black-and-white prints near the center.

[Image: Buckminster Fuller visits Vikram Bhatt; to the right of this photo is an image of the Ecol House project. From the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; photo by BLDGBLOG].

The boxes and boxes of materials, of which you can barely see the beginning here, is an amazing—and seemingly totally unexplored—resource, one that deserves a return visit. I will see what I can do to get deeper into this over the summer, with more images and more information, both, including, I hope, a Q&A with Bhatt himself.

For now, here are some more photos of the various documents and files that we were able to go through that day.

[Images: Sample documents and files from the Vikram Bhatt archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture; in the final image you can see Bhatt experimenting with the proper “cake mix” and associated baking trays. Photo by BLDGBLOG].

Larger versions of these—and one or two others—are all available in this Flickr set.

#CCA

This is pretty great: a volumetric rendering of military airspace in East Germany during the 1980s, as imaged in Google Earth. “The air space over the GDR was a complex three-dimensional thing,” we read.

[Image: DDR-Luftraum].

While the very idea of mapping military airspace is fascinating, the historical nature of the above image strikes me as its most provocative aspect. After all, what maps or archives now exist depicting lost military airspace volumes as defined by closed bases, renovated airfields, or no-longer-existing countries?

For that matter, what about the civilian airspace volumes of urban buildings that have since been torn down? How does real estate law account for property transactions based on air volumes for buildings that no longer exist?

How and where—and by what representational means—can these spaces be archived? Could there be an experiential museum of lost airspace volumes, and what atmospheric form might it take?

(Thanks to Nick Sowers for kicking off the idea for this post).

In the underground-themed issue of Rassegna, mentioned earlier, author Nicola Sinopoli offers a brief subterranean builders’ guide to bringing architecture underground. “There are now no technological limitations that could stop us from colonizing the underground,” he declares, providing a short catalog of useful construction materials in the process.

[Image: The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Sedrun, Switzerland; photo by Brian Fulcher, Walnut, CA, courtesy of Engineering News-Record‘s 2006 “Year in Construction” recap].

Sinopoli’s purpose is to point out “some of the new materials that chemistry and physics have offered this new world of construction.” And this goes beyond mere drilling equipment—which Sinopoli does not, in fact, cover—to encompass things like high-density buckled polyethylene membranes that are “impervious to organic bacteria and mildews that may be in the ground,” and that serve “as an effective barrier against radon, a radioactive gas sometimes found in the earth.”

We see flexible geocomposite mats, fiber-optic lighting technologies, a wide variety of grass turf for roofs, and self-ventilating, anti-humidity wall panels, all of which allow “colonizing the underground,” as Sinopoli puts it.

Cases, membranes and buckled plates protect the building from the infiltration of water and roots; woven and non-woven geotextiles, geocomposites, geomats and synthetic monofilaments stabilize and drain the land; and ultra high yield reflective films convey natural light inside the new underground spaces

He specifically focuses on issues of water and humidity, citing “an exciting array of innovative products in the field of green roofs and facades, where we now have an endless selection of materials for waterproofing and draining, water storage systems, draining sublayers, watering systems, hydrosowing systems and a panoply of plants modified in their deepest nature to adopt to any climate imaginable. The plants are often the fruit of an ingenious union of botany, genetics and new materials research. As if that weren’t enough, we have found that natural earth is an excellent insulator from heat and cold.”

The idea that “colonizing the underground” will be made possible at least partially through the use of genetically modified plants is pretty fascinating. This extends engineered biologies—future crops and oxygen gardens, perhaps even crypto-forestry—into the earth’s subsurface. Speleonauts living inside an architecture of growth chambers three miles underground, shining UV lights at specialty plantlife bred specifically to produce a breathable atmosphere, researching new anthropological directions in the deep.

It’s not much of an exaggeration here to say that gardening will be as important to the future of underground living as tunneling equipment.

[Images: Photos by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

Sinopoli suggests that building underground is, for all intents and purposes, a solved problem: “If anything,” he quips, “we should explore what effects living and working in underground or almost underground spaces might have on behavior and quality of life. Sociologists will give their answers to this.” This is what I have earlier called psychology at depth, or the unanticipated psychiatric implications of living underground.

[Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

I should note, however, that Sinopoli’s article is less about moving into scifi mega-cities inside the earth than it is about making things like underground shopping malls and even suburban basements more safe for everyday use. Nonetheless, over-ambitiously applying these same techniques in the outright construction of artificial caverns on a continental scale is, for me, simply too interesting to pass up.

Indeed, I’m reminded of Jeff Long’s scifi-horror novel The Descent, in which armed military units lead an invasion of the underworld, heading downward into the earth, Jules Verne-like, but with machine guns, hydroponic agriculture, UV klieg lights, and truckloads of instant concrete. They “approached the subplanet the way America approached manned landings on the moon forty years ago,” Long writes, “as a mission requiring life support systems, modes of transportation and access, and logistics.” The Army Corps of Engineers gets involved, “tasked to reinforce tunnels, devise new transport systems, drill shafts, build elevators, bore channels, and erect whole camps underground. They even paved parking lots—three thousand feet beneath the surface. Roadways were constructed through the mouths of caves.” It takes days at a time to get anywhere in Long’s underworld; there are outbreaks of “tropical cave disease,” we read, and claustrophobia.

[Image: Photo by BLDGBLOG of documents in the Underground Space Center Library archive at the Canadian Centre for Architecture].

In any case, at this point, Sinopoli suggests, questions of architectural style can re-enter the picture. Indeed, “there are questions about the consequences of underground building on architecture and its language. That’s a discussion still waiting to be had.”

We can assemble a subterranean builders’ guide, in other words, and solve the problem of constructibility; but when it comes to architectural form, if we hope someday to move beyond mere underground shopping malls—for instance, Montreal’s overwhelmingly anti-climactic “underground city“—then there is still an awful lot of work to do.

#CCA