Thoughts on architecture by designer and vernacular architecture

A "Plantation Cottage" style building on the island of Kauai, Hawaii. This is a vernacular architecture style developed in Hawaii in the epoch of sugar cane plantations.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vernacular_architecture

One of the most common assumptions is that ¨architecture articulates intent,¨ that is, each building consists of attributes shaped by the designer´s will and the technical features dictated by universal laws of physics and economy. General categories or architectural knowledge or criteria determining value in a building are rooted in this belief. Thus, for example, a famous contemporary or historical monument of architecture is expected to be one in which the intellectual work of its creators has perfectly synthesized ideological issues of its place and time. It is supposedly the brilliance of the designers -architects and enlightened patrons- that produces an emblematic expression of high culture. Their ability to bring together abstract issues and solve technical problems results in a unique conceptual integrity, which symbolizes, they say, a superior understanding of that cultural reality.

Opposing that perspective is vernacular architecture, which is supposedly determined by climate, local materials, and available techniques, its consistency resulting from the refinement of unavoidable solutions. People who create such buildings do not aspire to self-conscious understanding of their culture but rather approach constructed environments as an integral part of life. They do not need formally trained designers or theories of architecture, yet their knowledge is cumulative, refined through generations and broadly shared. While technical experimentation informs the construction of vernacular buildings, their meaning tacitly belong to common symbolic practices, customs, and spatial rituals. In this way the concept of vernacular architecture complements the notion of high culture and affirms the duality of will and necessity as primary components of architectural solutions. Together, monuments of architecture and vernacular buildings determine how technical knowledge and artistic creativity suffice to define what architecture is or is not. In this epistemological model, buildings lacking this kind of clarity are inferior and deserve less attention.

REFERENCE

PIOTROWSKI, Andrzej. Architecture of Thought. University of Minnesota Press. 2011 Excerpt from the introduction

The Sustainable Ark. Urban design by architect Luis R. Makianich

 The inhospitable world that lies ahead is caused by the indiscriminate exploitation of natural resources, which leads us to a change in attitude towards the use of the land. Natural disasters we have been experiencing in recent years, tell us that we must not only stop the environmental aggression, but defend ourselves from the nature’s contra-reaction. As in the Middle Ages, the walled city could be our last resource and the ocean, our next habitat.

The proposed city has a shell of reinforced concrete, of inverted bell-shape open to the sky; the slight tilt allows the entry of sunlight and prevents the prevailing winds, providing an ideal habitat for farming and people.

Clusters of micro communities are located inside, attached to the vertical circulation. They consist of 15-story buildings with self-contained residential units, offices and daily commerce; all this is surrounded by a living structure that provides the residents of the required green space to oxygenate and create a microclimate that is needed at the highest levels. These structures will be used as farms and community gardens.

Each dwelling unit has its own fully-connection to the outside world by worldwide network, leading to an urban decentralization and energy saving mass transit.

Economic and cultural exchange occurs on the bridges that connect the central vertical circulations with the peripheral ones, placed at various levels in a cross shape, serving as inter-neighborhood connection with schools, supermarkets, entertainment facilities and communal agencies inside as well as outdoor plazas on their roofs.

These bridges, also serve to transfer the dynamic loads from the towers to the perimeter, also separating each tower to reduce the size of the support columns.

The base of the concrete perimeter wall is submerged in the sea that contains the treatment plants which turn the waste into gas for the complex. There is also a water treatment plant to reuse water for irrigation of croplands.

The roof of each tower and the perimetral houses’ blinds are equipped with photovoltaic panels for heating, cooling and electricity.

An interior lagoon is located at sea level connected by dikes levelers, acting as a harbor, protecting the city from waves and tides, and is used as a fire reserve tank, as well as a photovoltaic’s battery.

PROPOSED technologies:

We propose growing vegetable gardens suspend from a living basket created from a bundle of logs and branches through the use of synthetic biology, creating an organism programmed to behave like a computer, by prunes placed around the vertical circulation ducts, fed and fertilized by hydroponic system.

These products also play the role of exchanging and recycling of waste located in the submerged levels of the building.

Artificial photosynthesis will be used through various procedures to achieve efficient and cheap power. Under the artificial lake located at sea level, there is a laboratory that develops the separation of hydrogen and oxygen during light phase photosynthesis to replace oil as an energy source to get water efficiently.

Dark phase of photosynthesis seeks artificial catalysts that produce fuel from the carbon dioxide or its derivatives.

Domotics will be used in energy saving, comfort, security, communications and accessibility.

Mixed architecture allows individual market devices and provides a centralized structure that promotes energy saving, furthermore, it is flexible for future technological changes.

Finally, the shape of the wall, which ascends in a spiral, is proposed to support the growth of population, expanding its foundation towards the Earth's core, like an underwater living tissue using synthetic biology.

Design, text and panels by architect Luis R. Makianich. Reproduced with his permission.

All rights reserved.

Thoughts about preservation

Courtesy of the National Trust for Historic Preservation. From http://www.planetizen.com/node/36253

The passion for preservation arises out of the need for tangible objects that can support a sense of identity. This theme has already been explored. If we turn to preservationist´s reasons for wanting to maintain  aspects of the past, they appear to be of three kinds: aesthetic, moral, and morale-boosting. An old edifice, it is argued, should be saved for posterity because it has architectural merit and because it is an achievement of one forebears. The reason is based on aesthetics, tinged with piety. An old house ought to be preserved because it was once the home of a famous statesman or inventor. Here the appeal is to piety and to the end of building a people´s morale, their sense of pride. An old run-down neighborhood should be saved from urban renewal because it seems to satisfy the needs of the local residents, or because, despite a decaying physical environment, it promotes certain human virtues and a colorful style of life. The appeal is to qualities inherent in established ways and to the people´s moral right to maintain their distinctive customs against the forces of change.

REFERENCE:

Yi Fu Tuan. Time and Place. P. 197

The tower of Babel in Metropolis film

 Having conceived Babel, yet unable to build it themselves, they hired thousands to build it for them.

But those who toiled knew nothing of the dreams of  those who planned it.

And the minds that planned the Tower of Babel cared nothing for the workers that built it.

The hymns of pray of the few became the curses of the many.

-Fritz Lang. Metropolis. 1926-

The imagery of the tower of Babel (the machine center of Metropolis is actually called the New Tower of Babel) relates technology to myth and legend. The biblical myth is used to construct the ideological message about the division of labor into the hands that build and the brains that plan and conceive, a division which, as the film suggests, must be overcome.

Andreas Huyssen. Fritz Lang´s Metropolis. P. 223

http://astro.temple.edu/~dmg33/Maker_files/huyssen.pdf 

Shots from Metropolis´ film by Myriam B. Mahiques

Guinness Storehouse, a green building.

My congratulations in St Patrick´s day:

“Sustainability and enhancing the environment of the Dublin communities has been a core philosophy of the Guinness Company since it was founded,” said Paul Carty, Managing Director at the Guinness Storehouse, the brewery’s large and historic facility at St. James’s Gate in the Irish capital. Last year the Storehouse, now a major tourist attraction hosting a million visitors annually, received a three-star accreditation from Sustainable Travel International for its environmental commitment. (The actual brewing was moved from the old facility in 1988.)

Among the highlights recognized by the award are these:

Adoption of environmental performance indicators

Measures to reduce waste, chemical use, and energy consumption

Use of paper products derived from sustainably managed forests

Advanced lighting technology

Local food sourcing

Locally sourced construction materials

Sustainability training for staff

RERENCE: excerpt and picture from

http://switchboard.nrdc.org/blogs/kbenfield/the_greening_of_guinness.html 

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream (MoMA, NY)

STUDIO GANG ARCHITECTS' PROPOSAL INCLUDES CONVERTING A FACTORY TO HOUSING IN CICERO, ILLINOIS.JAMES EWING

Foreclosed: Rehousing the American Dream is an ambitious and significant attempt to rethink the design of American suburbs. Positing that academic and intellectual leaders in architecture have played a too-small role in the recent production of suburbia, the show’s curators, Barry Bergdoll, the Philip Johnson Chief Curator of Architecture and Design, and Reinhold Martin, Director of the Temple Hoyne Buell Center for the Study of American Architecture at Columbia University, offer a high-profile forum for the architectural practices MOS, Visible Weather, Studio Gang, WORKac, and Zago Architecture to demonstrate their capacity to imagine another future in five economically-challenged American suburbs.

Read more

http://www.archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5931 

http://www.moma.org/interactives/exhibitions/2012/foreclosed/ 

The identity of Kronenberg Castle. In the words of Niels Bohr

Kronenberg Castle. Google Images

Kronenberg Castle. From members.virtualtourist.com

What is a place? What gives a place its identity, its aura? These questions occurred to the physicists Niel Bohrs and Werner Heisenberg when they visited Kronenberg Castle in Denmark. Bohr said to Heisenberg:

Isn't it strange how this castle changes as soon as one imagines that Hamlet lived here? As scientists we believe that a castle consists only of stones, and admire the way the architect put them together. The stones, the green roof with its patina, the wood carvings in the church, constitute the whole castle. None of this should be changed by the fact that Hamlet lived here, and yet it is changed completely. Suddenly the walls and the ramparts speak a quite different language. The courtyard becomes an entire world, a dark corner reminds us of the darkness in the human soul, we hear Hamlet's " To be or not to be." Yet all we really know about Hamlet is that his name appears in a thirteenth-century chronicle. No one can prove that he really lived, let alone that he lived here. But everyone knows the questions Shakespeare had him ask, the human depth he was made to reveal, and so he, too, had to be fund a place on earth, here in Kronenberg. And once we know that, Kronenberg becomes quite a different castle for us.

Yi Fu Tuan. Space and Place. P. 4. University of Minnesota Press. 2007

New Spring Street Park. Los Angeles

New Spring Street Park. Lehrer archs. From Bureau of Engineering.

Concept for Spring Street Park, Los Angeles. From theloftexchange.com

I hope more parks would be developed in Los Angeles, the city for automobiles, the city where walking between high buildings without human scale is not nice. Pershing Square designed by Legorreta, so boring and empty, specially in Summer, except for a few ones who want some tanning.

From the loftexchange.com:

The city continues to fine-tune its design and plans for a 0.7-acre park set to replace a parking lot in the Historic Core.

The latest conceptual designs for the Spring Street Park, which will be located between the Rowan and El Dorado Lofts, were unveiled at a recent community workshop hosted by Council District 9 office and the Downtown Neighborhood Council, and led by the Bureau of Engineering’s Architectural Division, and Michael Lehrer Architects, who are in the process of preparing the final park design plans.

Attendees of the meeting got a peek at the park's proposed walking paths, seating furniture, water features, art work and security fences. As planned, the park would feature eco-permeable pavers and stormwater runoff mitigation which is designed to capture and treat all the water runoff from the park site before entering the underground storm drain system.

http://www.theloftexchange.com/downtownspringstreetpark.html

New Spring Street Park, Los Angeles. From http://archpaper.com/news/articles.asp?id=5906