INCHIOSTRO - The Second Life of Material and Buildings



Infiniski Manifesto House -

James & Mau (www.jamesandmau.com)



INCHIOSTRO

The second life of materials and buildings

Marco Atzori - Originally published in C3 n°317 1101

Environmental and economic crises, increasing gaps between developed and underdeveloped countries, challenges in the management of basic resources and pollution, and the worldwide impacts of the first phase of globalization.

This is the scenario into which the architecture of the second decade of the twenty-first century is moving: a state of crisis far from being exhausted, one which forces contemporary society to become aware of the finitude of its energy and environmental resources and the fragility of global economic systems.

But the economic crisis felt around the world was not just based on the current state of the "environmental crisis". Even today, some fields of science deny a direct relationship between climate change and the policies of Western industrial societies and some emerging countries. Governments themselves are struggling to build effective control protocols on global environmental and energy consumption.

Despite all this, forward-thinking researchers agree that the transition to an environment-based culture requires changes in the level and quality of public policy and in social behavior, and necessitates a renewed relationship with the environment, a move which requires balancing stock prices with the natural environment. Achieving these goals means acting on the variable energy component as the most important share in the transition process. Architecture that seeks sustainability assumes the energy factor as the dominant element meriting its research, and understands the architectural object as an artifact that captures and converts energy within a larger system, the natural system, within which it should move in equilibrium.

An environmentally conscious architecture, however, must confront the most extensive and complex relations with the environment, including impacts derived from the entire production process related to construction, the industrial production of materials used in the loop and their means of transportation, and their divestiture once the life of the buildings has ended.

When, in the late nineties, the unsustainability of building systems and building management became evident, as did the industry's collosal global consumption of primary energy, it became clear that it was necessary to make a change. Architects had to take various measures to ease the energy load of buildings, thinking about how to conceive their designs so as to improve energy efficiency in terms of manufacturing processes, the transformation of the built environment, and the recycling of materials, which would decrease the load of accessories in the construction process.

In recent years there has therefore been an interesting change in architecture characterized by the rise of an approach that works with technical improvements mixed with low impact technology to mitigate impacts arising from construction processes of buildings, their maintenance, and the energy consumption associated with them.

Abalos and Herreros argue that "this new technology model implies a shift from material aspects of organization   serial production, simplified installation, optimizing of time and costs   to the rational organization of the energy consumed in the production as well as the maintenance of buildings, a shift that allows one to create today's “systems” less for their coherence and unity of materials, and more for their consistency with the environment, thus opening field trials in which a coherent mix of heterogeneous material becomes a new characteristic and a visual treat.”¹

The possibilities offered by the use of mixed recovered materialsvand newly developed materials can profoundly transform the construction process because it increases the range of possible materials that respond to physical needs. And it is in this sense that one must understand the non-nostalgic aspect of the recovery of passive technologies, because they require an equal mix of advanced research and retrieval of sustainable practices derived from tradition.

The concept of recycling in current practice relates not only to materials but to the urban landscape and its primary components: the buildings. The awareness of sustainable development requires us as architects to think not so much expansively, as with the perceived need to transform the built environment, but to recover and recycle whenever possible, so as to find materials, having graduated from their first uses, which can find new life in other uses.

If it were possible to identify a project that demonstrates more than others the idea of reuse in the contemporary meaning of the term, it might be the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, recovered by the architects Lacaton Vassal. They acted only where necessary, employing minimal technical inputs to ensure correct levels of comfort, while limiting the evidence of architectural gestures and paying heed to the importance of spatial quality. The renovation of the Palais de Tokyo has had much lower costs than a traditional project, and outlines a way forward in modern architecture. Similar aspects can be found in the work of Aidlin Darling Design for the recovery of the Matarozzi/Pelsinger Building and of Olson Sundberg and Kundig Allen in their Wing Luke Asian Museum project.

Aidlin Darling Design raises the issue of the reuse of buildings as a reflection on the theme of recycling and the sustainability of interventions in the contemporary city. If the urban landscape is constantly changing, the issue of the obsolescence of buildings, and the disposal or processing thereof, becomes crucial, given that the demolition of a building produces pollution, and wastes resources and materials.

Aidlin Darling Design is thinking about why it is more justifiable to think of the recycling of a building rather than its demolition. The compatibility between the new use and the spatial conformation of the existing building, together with the will of the client, has pushed the firm to seize an opportunity: to show how industrial buildings normally found in urban landscapes can be adaptive to changing functions and the changing sense of the landscapes that surround them. Moreover, the study of San Francisco shows how improving the energy use of such buildings need not be a technologically advanced procedure, but can be achieved through simple passive devices, such as controlling the flow of air through perforated metal skins or controlling energy loss through a roof garden. The transformation is based on considering the building to be recycled as a support for an "open" system, one that is capable of dealing with the external environment, especially with regard to the aspect of energy. We observe this as a significant step. Environmental quality and energy sustainability become design elements that together with the spatial quality ensure the project's success. The definition of spatial sequences and the choices of materials combine to provide the optimal energy balance. New research in architectural sustainability has discovered a code that governs the functional and aesthetic quality of the project: an architecture that starts with a clever rethinking of the existing to define the quality of architecture in the future.

Olson Sundberg and Kundig Allen focus on the reuse of old building materials.The Wing Luke Asian Museum project was restored without replacing such internal parts as doors or windows, and by producing other parts of the building itself by making use of elements no longer functional. In brief, the architects have demonstrated that the reuse of materials need not limit the scope of a project, but can instead amplify it, and essentially reduce the negative components of a traditional approach.The building itself becomes a re-arranging of its internal components. With regard to sustainable architecture the design of Olson Sundberg and Kundig Allen is paradigmatic, clearly illustrating how a system can regenerate itself by keeping external inputs to a minimum. Sundberg and Allen do not build except where necessary. They re-assemble parts, with these parts perfectly adapted to their new uses, an approach that can open more avenues for reflection when applied on a larger scale – namely, a new building can be built using parts from other abandoned buildings when doing so is environmentally and economically viable.

The Manifesto House designed by James & Mau may exemplify this latter concept. In fact, the two architects radicalized the concept of recycling, creating the brand "Infiniski”, which designs and manufactures eco-friendly buildings through the recovery of such structures as containers or wood pallets. James & Mau's attention to environmental issues is based on a radical design that produces fascinating objects, one which is made effective by low development costs and low levels of pollution. In this position there is a strong political and social component. Their work forces us to reflect on the levels of consumption and waste in modern society. The slogan of Infiniski, in fact, is "It's Not Because of Global Warming, it's because I cannot leave food on my plate." This sentiment fully captures their philosophy. It is not just a fascination for low-tech architecture, which has already produced projects of great interest; in their thinking there is a critical attitude about the potential opportunities offered by the recovery of waste of the consumer society. Objects in disuse such as shipping containers and wooden pallets for transporting wares assume the value of primary elements for the creation of new architectural structures. These affect the production process because they mean that the construction of new buildings does not necessitate production of new materials, and that the assembly does not involve large secondary impacts based on what has been achieved with basic techniques and technologies.

The same sort of attention that James & Mau bring to the Manifesto House can also be found in the medical housing compound built by tamassociati in the midst of the heart surgery facility Salam in Khartoum, Sudan. Moreover, the architects worked in a particular place for a particular client, the non-governmental organization Emergency founded by Gino Strada, which provides health care to people involved in war scenarios. They have therefore turned the project into a small political manifesto. Providing basic infrastructure such as temporary housing for the medical professionals working in the hospital was an opportunity to make clear how objects and materials can be reconsidered at the end of their cycle of use. The containers used for transporting goods, abandoned near the hospital, were retrieved and processed into cells of structural housing for doctors. The construction system, in the manner of the way one may passively control sunburn, has made possible the materialization of an “existenz minimum”, constituing a primary support to the life of those working in the hospital.

The most obvious architectural appearance of the project, the extreme simplicity of the architecture, enhances the effectiveness of the intervention. In a world that is undergoing a deep economic crisis, the architecture can make contributions to the formation of a new way of thinking that moves away from the logic of the ever-expanding and demonstrates that quality is not synonymous with wealth.

Simón de Agüero takes to the extreme the idea of temporal limitations inherent in the projects of James & Mau and tamassociati. Trained at the School of Taliesin West, founded by Frank Lloyd Wright, de Agüero offers a contemporary interpretation of the thought of the great American architect. He builds a living space both minimal and temporary, which incorporates concepts that were the basis of the founding thoughts of the Taliesin West School. A textile cover provides shelter in the desert. The idea of domestic space is minimal, in line with the concepts of Wright, as represented in the fireplace, which becomes the symbolic center of the built space. Simón de Agüero has conceived a small space around the fire, as though for a traveler in the desert, a more or less temporary place of welcome. The effort represents an architecture designed to follow the cycles of nature and, if the latter so requires, to disappear, not permanently occupy the land on which it rests.

These projects of James&Mau, tamassociati, and Simón de Agüero also introduce a relationship with the ground and proceed from an idea of the permanence of architecture dramatically transformed from traditional thinking. These structures, whose existence is conceived as ephemeral, are themselves derived from the end of a cycle of use, suggesting a new mode of occupation of the territory.

Manuel Gausa noted that this new configuration will be "based on lightweight structures that comply with the basic configuration and that can be a repertoire of foreign objects, invitees only deposited in the country, with no desire to make geometric or volumetric changes in the characteristics of the countryside, where these are not welcome.”²

Gausa theorizes how the use of non-permanent architectural configurations, resulting from recycling processes and, in turn, recyclable, bring into crisis the concepts of land ownership and permanent construction, replacing them with an unstable situation of employment that may emphasize reversible use and being capable of chaging with the times. Wanting to make the concept more general one might say that the conception of objects derived from a cyclical process and therefore having a non-permanent (with the places themselves non-permanent, not simply in time) can change the constructs of traditional land ownership and the constant presence of architecture in the landscape. In short, the current way of life can lead to a new relationship between architecture and humanity.

Even in the project for the Cube Can by Archi Union Architects we find references to the theories of Manuel Gausa and Habalos and Herreros. There are technical and aesthetic possibilities for recycling materials that can profoundly transform the processes of the design and construction of contemporary architecture. The front of the cube shows the potential offered by the assembly of such unusual materials as aluminum cans in terms of their usefulness in climate control and their potential to contribute to graphic patterns of great interest. It remains to be seen what may be the real durability of such experiments and whether they will provide a positive relationship between costs and benefits.

One would do well to look very closely at the experiments conducted in low technology and the reuse of materials. Such assays evince awareness and boldness, courage, and an aptitude for abandoning roads easier to follow in a world of limited resources which are not always renewable. They necessitate taking a road that brings architecture to rediscover a social character that subsists, more than ever, in the creation of an environmentally conscious mind that is both active and effective.

1See “Una Nueva Naturalidad” - Abalos y Herreros, on 2G n.22, Gustavo Gili Editor, Barcelona 2002

2See “Reversibles (Paysages)” - Manuel Gausa on Quaderns de Arquitectura y Urbanisme n.224 Ed. Coac, Barcelona 1999