Nordica Africa

Curator Nina Berre, Director of Architecture at the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo, explored the role of émigré architects sent from Scandinavia to modernize independent sub-Saharan Africa in research disseminated for the first time in the Nordic Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale Venice. 

The liberation of Tanzania, Kenya and Zambia in the 1960s coincided with the founding of state development aid in the Nordic countries, where there was widespread belief that the social democratic model could be exported, translated and used for nation building, modernization and welfare in Africa. The leaders of the new African states wanted partners without a murky colonial past, and established solid bonds with the Nordic countries, built on a mutual belief in progress. During a few intense years in the 60s and 70s, Nordic architects contributed to the rapid process of modernization in this part of Africa.

These architects found themselves in the field between building freedom and finding freedom, one a valuable nation-building through city planning, infrastructure and industry the other emerged between Nordic aid and African nation building. Reminded of Jonathan Hill’s thesis on Sverre Fehn in which Hill argues, ‘Accommodating trees and rain, transforming Venetian light into Nordic light, the Nordic Pavilion expands the dialogue between architecture and nature’. There is a sense the Modern Scandinavians exported a sense of freedom and optimism in exporting Nordic light visible in many projects such as the Kenya Fisheries Department by architect Karl Henrik Nostvik.

Extending High-Rise

Federic Druot’s and Lacaton & Vassal’s exhibition at the Deutsches Architekturmuseum Zentrum (DAZ) in Berlin, is partly manifesto and partly ethnographic record of the effect in extending each apartment of the Tour Bois Le Pêtre, a typical 1950s high-rise. “Never Demolish, never remove or replace, always add, transform, and reuse” echoes the sentiment of the late great Theo Crosby, of Pentagram fame, on talking about the gentrification of 1980s Spitalfields Market, claiming all the buildings for the 21st Century had already been built, and this long before todays architects had considered limits exposed by the global economic crisis of 2008. 

Being a fan I have long admired Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal’s aesthetic. The work is always seemingly born of a roving ‘skip-hunters’ eye, inventing ways in which materials are ‘upcycled’ into a proletariat self-build high-tech architecture. Early work, celebrated agricultural prefabricated shed dwellings such as the Dordogne House (1997) that drew attention to the seemingly familiar, what Lacaton Vassal referred to as ‘Naive Architecture’. The house appearing to be a symbol of rural gentrification and reuse a result of depopulation from automated farms reliant on GPS guidance systems, but actually deceptively disguised new-builds the result of precise and detailed contextual studies.

In Lacaton Vassal’s Architekturzentrum Café (2001) project in Vienna, where a missing historic past is connected to an anticipated future evolution, a future memory, one finds a powerful vindication for what makes good architecture great. As master time travellers, doing what Fred Scott calls in ‘On Altering Architecture’ (2008), "the designers work with that of others who have preceded them, when working to alter a building, and also in precedence of those who will come after them”. Scott rightly argues for a rise in art-school-trained designers whose; "use of colour in particular, eclectic use of materials, and variety of finishes" is more suited than the architect for refurbishment work that now eclipses new buildings. Similarly Lacaton Vassal’s use of high-tech fabric curtains and layered celluloid polycarbonate translucency shows a sensitivity and awareness often lacking in many current architect oeuvres.

Walking around the exhibition one experiences the ‘space capsule’ qualities of high-rise living, what JG Ballard’s ‘High-Rise’ (1970) refers to as "a huge machine designed to serve, not the collective body of the tenants, but the individual resident in isolation. Its staff of air conditioning conduits, elevators, garbage-disposal chutes and electrical switching systems provided a never-failing supply of care and attention that a century earlier would have needed an army of tireless servants," The background city hum lost in digital prints of the cityscape below and replaced in the DAZ gallery by music courtesey of Berlin born, NYC based indiepop band Fenster’s album ‘Bones’ (2012).

The Tour Bois Le Pêtre and high-rises share the same social psychology as fellow ground crawling megastructures and for an ethnographic window, we need look no further than Clare Melhuish's, ‘The Life & Times of the Brunswick, Bloomsbury’ (2006) where,“For one source inside the building, the censorious attitude of neighbours towards local disturbances can be oppressive. She describes the Brunswick as "a very isolating building, the most unfriendly place I have ever lived in". Nobody ever throws a party here, she says, because the noise generated by objectors is likely to be greater than that of the party itself. She believes that much of the problem stems from the design of the building, which doesn't provide workable social spaces for people to meet and interact.".

In focusing on extending the living spaces Lacaton Vassal inevitably neglect the shared social spaces in Tour Bois Le Pêtre, the Ballardian extension of "his one-thousandth share of the cliff face," is the most we get without the social cohesion demand by those who care for future city living. This makes the debate about the success of Tour Bois Le Pêtre very much a developer market led justification where comparisons are made between the costs to extend Tour Bois Le Pêtre, €112,000.00 per flat, to build new, whilst untested, was estimated at €167,000.00 per flat.

Yet possibly the failing of high rise IS the socially constructed brief and the belief, pre-housing boom, that sharing capital unites members who join, contradictory to the current market values of ‘flats’ became ‘apartments’ that typically higher up have greater views and price-tags to match.

Each high-rise is an ethnographic graphic with the upper classes migrating to the upper floors subsidised by the lower floors paying identical maintaince costs in the belief of equality, a belief not shared, that is why the 1950s social housing failed. In the UK the mass revolut in Ballardian high-rise was  dissolved under ‘Right-to-Buy’ selling 20% of state funded mass housing, mostly those on top sold out to those that could afford the increased prices for sky-living. Instead sitting on a reclaimed sofa in the DAZ gallery clutching Ballard’s novel one feels, “A new social type was being created by the apartment building, a cool, unemotional personality impervious to the psychological pressures of high rise life, with minimal needs for privacy, who thrived like an advanced species of machine in the neutral atmosphere. This was the sort of resident who was content to do nothing but sit in his over-priced apartment, watch television with the sound turned down and wait for his neighbours to make a mistake”.

Antarctopia

Walking into the first Antarctica Pavilion in the 14th International Architecture Biennale Venice, waterproof flight cases display models of visionary Antarctic projects many considering the challenge of designing for an environment that is still so new and uninhabited. For a Curator Nadim Samman writing about towards the Antarctica Biennale says, ‘no ring for it on the Olympic flag and no pavilion in the Giardini. The only continent without a biennale. Has its art history been written? It is only a matter of time’[1]. Writer Gabrielle Walker calls Antarctica, ‘the living metaphor’ where, ‘the continent lacks most of the normal ways that we interact in human societies. There is no need for money; everyone wears the same clothes and has the same kind of lodging’[2]. So Samman’s question about the role of art practice and by association the role of the architect is relevant, as concepts of home are not obvious, yet each of the exhibits are some type of dwelling, where as Shane McCorristine states, ‘homeliness was performed through winter rituals of comfort-eating and snugness. It was by these means that physical spaces of inhabitation were transformed into homes – that is filled with narratives, memories.’ For McCorristine, Cape Evans site of the last Christmas Feast of Robert F Scott in 1911 on his fateful last expedition is, ‘by virtue of Scott’s uncanny absence / presence, has become the primal Antarctic home’, as the, ‘signs of absent inhabitants have been preserved and this has transformed the hut into a site of pilgrimage and commemoration – becoming a symbol of Antarctic homeliness, but not somewhere one can live’[3]

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[1] Samman, N. “Antarctopia” (Ocean Fund Projects AVC Charity Foundation 2014)

[2] Walker, G. “Antarctica An Intimate Portrait of the World’s Most Mysterious Continent” (Bloomsbury 2012)

[3] McCorristine, S. “What Shall We Call it?: Performing Home in Antarctica” (Ocean Fund Projects AVC Charity Foundation 2014)

Empowerment of Aesthetics

The contribution of landscape culture to art and science is writ large in the Danish Pavilion at the 14th International Architecture Biennale Venice, where a blend of artificial natures – bark on walls, pine needle floors aesthetics contrast with technocratic papers covering Danish Building Law, Housing Law, Planning Law and the Danish Environmental act. The Danish Pavilion charged with both Koolhaas’s ‘Absorbing Modernity’ and Denmark in the year 2050 both looks at Modernist legacies for overwhelming factual information, legislation and scientific data and the need for a more complimentary future vision that curator Stig Andersson, ‘can open up yet again the missing dimension of aesthetics as an important aspect when we make our decisions’. For Andersson , Director of Landscape Practice SLA based in Copenhagen, ‘aesthetics and rationality are actually two radically different paths to knowledge and recognition. One way, the aesthetic, is empirical knowledge and experience through sensory experiences. The other way is common sense, the deductive practice in which conclusions are logically obtained,’ citing the Golden Age (1800 -1850) where the two views were interwoven in one culture. In this way they mimic the United Kingdom where the term ‘culture’ also referred to farmland, where cultivation of the land enabled a person to become cultured and the eighteenth century estate was also understood as a key moment when nature and culture were interdependent in meanings of the term ‘landscape’.

Fundamentals of Rem Koolhaas

Francis Fukuyama’s thesis on ‘The End of History’ is widely credited with sealing the fate of the ‘historical thinking’, stripping the veneer off of any ideological alternative to liberal capitalism and crashing the meta-narratives of the 20^th century into self-reflective panic. When Rem Koolhaas, the doyen of ‘S,M,L and XL’, was appointed curator of the 14^th International Architecture Exhibition, in his 70^th year, one sensed a similar wave rising in ‘architectural thinking’. Presented as a choral research on architecture, ‘Fundamentals’ the title of this year’s Biennale by Koolhaas, Professor, Harvard University Graduate School of Design, looked at architectures past, present and future. Firstly asking the national pavilions to explore the historic impact of the last 100 years of modernism in ‘Absorbing Modernity’. The present day is canonised in fifteen booklets on ‘Elements of Architecture’ that dominate the Central Pavilion as well, charting the impact of 20^th century industrialisation on the built environment, where now escalators, lifts and toilets dictate the way architecture is programmed.
Architectural futures is tackled in the Monditalia where Italy is the empathetic host for testing and consuming culture, witnessed in 82 films and 41 architectural projects with space for first time participations from the world of  Dance, Music, Theatre and Cinema. For this Biennale the image of the architect and products of their sole endeavours – the ‘masterpiece’, is secondary, in place shared collaborations dominate, either technical, social or ideological such as neo advent-garde groups Superstudio, founded in Florence in 1966 whose ‘The Secret Life of the Continuous Movement’, shown at the 1978 Biennale, advanced towards symbolic representations of architecture where, “Architecture exists in time as salt exists in water”, where the only possible architecture, then is our own life.

It seems that to popularise architecture Koolhaas feels the need for the architect to disappear which has been a reoccurring theme in his oeuvre. As Bart Verschaffel states in, ‘The Survival Ethics of Rem Koolhaas’ on receiving the Rotterdam-Maaskant Prize in 1986, ‘it is a remarkable feeling, but I am not an I. Throughout my career I have only written the word ‘I’ once, and that was in the sentence “I am a ghost writer”. A ghostwriter is someone who does not appear on stage himself, but remains in the background and speaks in the name of someone else’. This statement is unexpected and perhaps even sounds suspect from someone who has grown into on the most famous and mediagenic architecture stars. Yet in that same 1986 speech, he heralded this ‘stardom’ as ‘a strategy’: ‘The mythology of the architect begs a reconstruction plan.’[1]
In the opening Biennale week debating, ‘5000 years of architecture and technology, what next?’, with CEO and inventor Tony Fidall of Nest Thermostats, Koolhaas, reflected on digital technologies desire to commodify architecture as well as predict and better human behavior. “I drive an old car and it frequently breaks down. Then I am asked to rent a new car that predicts my new speed and makes me behave better and be a better driver, almost all the aspirational words we use now include ‘better ‘ ‘more responsible’. what about transgression?” By referring to ‘In praise of shadows’ by Junichirō Tanizaki comparing Japanese homes to those in Europe, where in “household implements: we prefer colours compounded by darkness, they prefer the colours of sunlight”[2] Koolhaas asks, “why deny these challenging qualities that also hold beauty?” and are now needed to break the current global homogeneity perpetrated by digital technology.

Reflecting on the merits of the Nest Thermostat, Koolhaas posits ‘Well I have mixed feelings, I admire the intelligence and the use as a tool to be frugal and responsible but also a fundamental reluctance on my part to see architecture turned into products, and the relentless commercialization of architectural elements”. In response to Fidall’s assumpation that, “what you do will last for centuries – what I do ages quicker within the year”, Koolhaas reveals, “the exhibition on the one hand shows the huge decrease in flexibility of materials, but in terms of appearance we are in the same world of accelerated ageing” where, “confidence has crumbled, the permanence of architecture is a pathetic fiction now, even if buildings last 25 or 30 years it is a miracle”.

For Koolhaas, the Biennale is a mirror on his thinking and desire to challenge the popular myths, perpetrated by the modernist narrative of the architect maestro, the sole author of a permanent architecture, fortified by manifestos and classical references to ancien regime. Koolhaas shows us that what was a ‘gift’ for one generation is now a ‘given’ for another – a set change, no more than part of a performance. Famously credited with stating, ‘it’s not me, it’s made by OMA’ Koolhaas’s design approach, recently unpacked by Albena Yaneva in ‘An Ethnography of Design’ states, ‘Just as it is impossible to understand Rembrandt’s work without understanding the aspects of his studio practice along with his specific handling of paint, the theoretical treatment of his models and his relationship with the market, it is impossible to understand Koolhaas’s work without considering his design practice.’[3] Yaneva uncannily describes the Koolhaas contribution where architecture lies; ‘The entire OMA design work revolves around life as it is staged in the office; in model making, in the travels of the model, in studio events and situations of reuse. There, the architects are performers and spectators and architecture becomes part of the performance that we view’.[4]

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[1] Verschaffel, B. The Survival Ethics of Rem Koolhaas: The First Houses by OMA. (NAi Publishers 2003)
[2] Tanizaki, J. In Praise of Shadows. p.46 (Japan Quarterly 1954)
[3] Yaneva, A. Made by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture: An Ethnography of Design. (010 Rotterdam 2009)
[4] ibid p. 102