Experimental Architecture

Designing the Unknown

Rachel Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781138575240
• eBook ISBN: 9781351272469
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture General

In this ground-breaking book, the first to provide an overview of the theory and practice of experimental architecture, Rachel Armstrong explores how interdisciplinary, design-led research practices are beginning to redefine the possibilities of architecture as a profession. Drawing on experts from disciplines as varied as information technology, mathematics, poetry, graphic design, scenography, bacteriology, marine applied science and robotics, Professor Armstrong delineates original, cutting-edge architectural experiments through essays, quotes, poetry, equations and stories.

Written by an acknowledged pioneer of architectural experiment, this visionary book is ideal for students and researchers wishing to engage in experimental, practice-based architectural and artistic research. It introduces radical new ideas about architecture and provides ideas and inspiration which students and researchers can apply in their own work and proposals, while practitioners can draw on it to transform their creative assumptions and develop thereby a distinctive "edge" to stand out in a highly competitive profession.

1

ARCHITECTURE AND RESEARCH

Rachel Armstrong

This chapter outlines architectural research applied to academia and professional practice by contextualising ongoing research conversations and drawing attention to the influences of the neoliberal framing of research practice.

1.1 Experimental architecture reader

The crises that characterise this millennium have far-reaching effects across a spectrum of human activities, ranging from political systems to social development, economic growth and environmental health. Despite many of us living longer, healthier and wealthier lives than ever before, some of these predicaments are symptoms of the dark side of our industrial development, which is shaped by our fossil-fuel dependency and voracious consumption of natural resources. Such activities are most concentrated within our expanding cities, where the buildings in which we live and work are apparatuses for everyday living that help us live better modern lifestyles (Le Corbusier, 2007, p.95) and contribute to the negative impacts of industrialisation. Underpinned by the conceptual framework of modern architecture, they are responsible for half of all global energy use, half of all greenhouse gas emissions, consume one-sixth of all fresh water, one-quarter of world wood harvests and two-fifths of all other raw materials, while the construction and demolition cycles of buildings generate two-fifths of all our waste (Initiafy, 2017).

While our building practices and technologies were perfected to deal with the opportunities and needs of the Industrial Revolution, millennial society faces qualitatively different sets of concerns – where ecology, global development, artificial intelligence (AI), increasing inequalities, ecocide, energy, rapidly swelling urban populations, dramatic loss of biodiversity, environmental pollution, global warming, multiple mass extinction events (MME), fit-for-purpose political systems, advanced communications and inhabitation – are inadequately dealt with by our present approaches. Since the infrastructures needed for the formal governance, development and inhabitation of our planet are no longer fit for purpose, alternative frameworks for the conception and evaluation of architectural programmes are needed. To enable a necessary shift in perspective and practice from upholding the principles of an industrial age and to take steps towards an ecologically engaged era of human development, this book acknowledges the “wicked” nature of this century’s fundamental challenges. Such characteristics are difficult or impossible to resolve into simpler units for interrogation, since they present partial, variable and even conflicting aspects of design. Spilling into territories that are not traditionally addressed by architectural agendas, they suggest that alternative modes of inhabitation are possible that may be challenging to recognise or fully describe. Since we are poorly equipped with the kinds of tools that unleash or engage its native potential, this book calls upon the “wicked” character of architectural research, specifically through the practice of experimental architecture. Its aim is to generate an expanded toolset for the choreography of space, as well as its material flows and entanglements, so that the process of human inhabitation produces a qualitatively different impact on planetary infrastructure than our present detrimental effects.

The book itself embodies an experimental approach to the “wicked” challenges it proposes to address and is divided into four sections.

Chapter 1 offers a contemporary overview of research in architecture, with a particular UK focus, both within academia and the profession, drawing attention to their often-divergent and sometimes contradictory goals. Acknowledging the influence of the market-driven research framework that shapes formal inquiry, this book is in search of alternative architectural approaches that generate outcomes that augment rather than damage the living world. Highlighting the fundamentally “wicked”, transdisciplinary nature of architecture that embraces disciplines beyond architecture in its practice, this section establishes an overview and snapshot of contemporary research practice that frames our ability to address “wicked” challenges.

Chapter 2 explores the transdisciplinary role of experimental architecture, which provides a platform with access to many different kinds of materials, apparatuses, methods and laboratories. Emerging during the late industrial age during a period of techno-optimism, it is steeped in the application of cutting-edge industrial developments to increase people’s freedoms (Pickering, 2006). The work of the Experimental Architecture Group (EAG) is introduced as a twenty-first-century practice of experimental architecture with a core ecological agenda, which exceeds the logic of the industrial era by developing a practice of worlding. Straying into terrains not usually addressed by formal architectural practices, yet sharing their material, spatial, cultural, technological and choreographic concerns, its ethical, diverse and inclusive interpretation of experimental architecture generates a platform through which ecological narratives can be constructed and prototyped, without de-problematising the difficulties of our present situation.

Chapter 3 builds towards a platform for architectural experiment through a series of short and long architectural experiments by invited contributors, which offer a spectrum of “wicked” subjects for architectural exploration. While these approaches do not necessarily propose to be derivatives of experimental architecture, through multi- and transdisciplinary approaches they generate an ambitious snapshot of possible modes of experiment that are conducive to architectural agendas. Authors were selected from a spectrum of research environments for their outstanding originality and investigational approaches, which adopt an exploratory engagement with architectural ideas. Not all participants are architects by training, yet in keeping with the transdisciplinary ambitions of this book, each work intersects with and so potentially contributes to the pursuit of architectural experiment. Such provocations are the bedrock of experimental architecture and when considered collectively, generate a portfolio of possibilities that depict overlapping aspects of an emerging ecological era. The synthesis of these exemplars provides a toolset of approaches for architectural experiment that invites connections to be continually made between the various contributors’ works.

Chapter 4 is a short summary of experimental architecture’s ambitions and observations related to the invited experiments. A succinct overview of observations is offered that is distilled into a set of alternative architectural approaches on which the basis of the book’s manifesto was derived. This framework proposes a set of principles for decision-making in architectural and design contexts that may help the reader develop alternative ways of addressing “wicked” challenges.

1.2 Architecture as discipline

“At once concept, percept, and affect – ‘conceived, perceived, experienced.’ Architecture is not only about what a building looks like but also about what a building does in intellectual, perceptual, and social space” (Tschumi, 2012, p.7).

The discipline of architecture is weakly defined (Maher, Nelson and Burry, 2006). It is said to be a form of knowledge (Woods, 2011) and an expression of change in the world that is concerned with the choreography of matter in spacetime.¹ Using the creative artistry of building construction and its enabling technologies, architecture invents concepts that, through design, are then turned into physical spaces that are realised by engineering practices. Incorporating the latest materials, technologies and infrastructures in its portfolio, it creates an “immense” body of knowledge that is shared informally and rarely codified into organisational or industry memory (Buday, 2017). Resourceful and innovative, architecture embodies the cultural imagination. It is invariably political, asking questions about the character of the polis – such as problems of inhabitation, social activity and place – with the capacity to alter the way we make sense of and value the world.

While building practices such as making shelters and buildings are as old as humankind, the formal origins of the architectural profession are recent. The discovery of Vitruvius’ architectural treatise, De Architectura, during the early Renaissance, resulted in its republication as a series of ten books in 1556 by Gian Francesco Poggio Bracciolini. Andrea Palladio canonised their application as the building blocks of architectural design in the palaces and country estates that he built for Vicenzan and Venetian nobility. Concerned with Vitruvian principles of symmetry, harmony and proportion, as well as the ancients’ methods, materials and aesthetics, Palladio’s work was imitated for 400 years all over the Western world (Vitruvius, 1998) and profoundly influenced the development of architecture as a modern practice. In the seventeenth century, Claude Perrault’s use of scientific rationalism challenged these classical pillars by suggesting that proportion could be simplified and standardised without depreciating its aesthetic value. This opened the door for technological advances in architecture such as the use of mechanics, structural analysis, descriptive and projective geometries.

Architecture acquired a professional status during the building expansion that accompanied the first industrial era, and marked its modernisation during the mid-eighteenth century through to the late twentieth century. The earliest forms of industrial construction were concerned with pioneering uses of spaces to house machinery and associated forms of social organisation in manufacturing, transportation and housing. More ambitious developments became possible where novel building materials like cast iron, steel and sheet glass enabled new building typologies such as factories, warehouses, offices, educational establishments, hospitals, housing, places of recreation and entertainment. Effective supervision and coordination were essential during the construction process to maintain building quality and safety, in some cases establishing schemes for urban growth and redevelopment. Indeed, prefabrication, transportation and mass production techniques deployed in the realisation of buildings like Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace also helped propagate industrial development (Careaga, 2014). During this expansion, architects became key negotiators between clients and building contractors, where ongoing industrial development led to the rise of new great cities and widespread urbanisation. This offered new economic opportunities for huge numbers of migrants who left their rural communities and moved into metropolitan areas (Samiei, 2013). By the late nineteenth century, these industrial landscapes were flourishing, provoking much controversy through their unnatural appearances and inhumane conditions. Architects were employed to provide a cultural veneer for the unsightly developments of technological progress like roads, tunnels, bridges and railway stations.

With economic growth came an increased demand for architects, and formal education and training became necessary to standardise the growth of the construction industry. The Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) was established in 1834 to set examination standards for the title “architect”. In Britain, architectural training was based on an apprenticeship model of education, which was a modified version of the medieval system whereby an articled pupil paid cash to be taught by a master over a course of five or six years. This pupillage included attendance at a local arts academy and sometimes foreign travel. However, the first curriculum for architecture was established at the Académie Royale d’Architecture² founded in 1671, which was based on government patronage and a rational theory of design. In 1857, this model of education influenced the American Institute of Architects to “promote the scientific and practical perfection of its members” and “elevate the standing of the profession” (AIA, 2008). Across Europe, architectural education took place through different degrees of emphasis and between combinations of university education and professional practice. Despite differences in approach, modern architectural educational agendas aim to prepare self-employed architects for the profession. This involves a period of apprenticeship integrated within a formal study programme, before professional apprentices graduate from an approved university-level course (Neuckermans, 2005-1/2). From 1929, British architects were expected to have a broad, non-technical education that would be in keeping with a fine arts university-based education and scholarship in civilised society. By 1931, the Architects Registration Council of the United Kingdom (ARCUK) became the regulator of the profession, determining which practising members of RIBA or other chartered bodies of architects, societies or associations, could properly use the term “architect”. While some of the world’s most distinguished architects (e.g. Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Sullivan, Le Corbusier, Mies van der Rohe, Carlo Scarpa, Tadao Ando, Luis Barragán, Peter Zumthor) did not complete a degree in architecture, most architects begin their education in a university setting before transitioning into professional placements after graduation and eventually becoming independently established within commercial practice.

Advanced construction portfolios developed throughout the twentieth century used the new products typical of the modern industrial age such as metals of high purity, alloys with a range of properties and reinforced concrete. The mid-twentieth century saw the rise of the motor car in cities that accelerated the importance of urban design, where city layouts had to accommodate not only growing populations but also parking and the regulation of traffic. Around the 1970s, pioneering structures introduced high-performance materials like plastics into the architectural portfolio that could offer a broad range of form-giving and finishing processes for complex geometries (Engelsmann, Spalding and Peters, 2010). With advancing modernisation, the values of the market place and the privileging of the individual (Anstey, Grillner and Hughes, 2007) underpinned the production of architecture, which struggled to find a new language and purpose. Such developments inspired experimental architecture as a means of escaping the tyranny of centralised urban design programmes, in ways that would empower citizens. Withdrawing from the pressures of commercial (industrial) practice, it revelled in paper architecture,³ discovering the possibilities of constructing spatial configurations and generating designs that were never meant to be built. Indeed, Archigram members aligned themselves against the conventions of modern architecture and the role of the architect as designer of fixed forms for buildings and cities. Instead, adaptive architecture was proposed that could better accommodate the emergent desires and needs of its inhabitants (Pickering, 2006). As architects increasingly began to reject modernism, they developed the notion of autonomy (Kaminer, 2011, p.74) that aspired “. . . towards autonomous forms and techniques to create and measure the distance between a resistant, critical practice and the degraded languages and ideologies of consumer culture that surround it” (Hays, 2001). Explorations such as Ant Farm’s Dolphin Embassy, Coop Himmelblau’s use of inflatable structures and Superstudio’s “anti-architecture” like Supersurface – a network of energy that would replace objects and buildings with a grid – not only connected with other change-seeking professionals but also the public imagination.

Earning reputations as innovators and visionaries, these pioneers convinced their clients they were involved in exciting projects, and some of these practices were transformed into “brands”. At a certain point, the speculative aspects of these experiments, which suggested ways of transforming society by, for example, providing housing for workers, increasing public freedoms and fostering social solidarity, became tangible and returned the new ideas to the realm of practice (Kaminer, 2011).

By the 1980s, the newly found freedom of the profession faced a new challenge with the rise of neoliberalism, where changes in the political, economic and social milieu jeopardised fundamental aspects of architectural practice. This economy was no longer limited to the production of material goods and labour (as in earlier forms of capitalism) but also extended into immaterial realms such as services, ideas and data. For example, housing was reconceptualised as an investment rather than a means of shelter and attractive architectural “brands” were transformed into landmarks associated with global economic power. Rather than being revitalised by this economic flourishing, cities were instantly globalised and transformed into tourist destinations, heralding the advent of starchitects with celebrity status, such as Frank Gehry, Norman Foster, Rem Koolhaas, Santiago Calatrava, Zaha Hadid and Richard Rogers, who specialised in megaprojects for the global elite such as corporations and the super-rich. Aggrandising neoliberalism’s wor...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Architecture and Research Chel Armstrong
• 2 Experimental Architecture
• 3 Architectural Experiments
• 4 Afterword
• Bibliography
• Index