The most interesting ideas in architecture right nowby TED Guest Author |
Architecture expos are often futurist fantasias of design -- but this year's Venice Biennale explores how humanity's first art can house (and treat) us all better.
So-called
"starchitecture," flashy buildings designed by high-profile architects,
has been the face of the industry for decades now. But at this year's
Venice Biennale of Architecture, an expo celebrating the very best
architecture participating countries have to offer, some more
interesting ideas emerged. This Biennale is more about building a better
world than a better building, with participants (who include not just
countries but universities, NGOs and private firms) addressing issues
such as poverty, disease, segregation, access to sanitation and
pollution. Take a look.
Let architects bear witness
On May 15, 2014, 17-year-old Nadeem Nawara was shot dead in the Palestinian village of Beitunia. Researchers at London-based Forensic Architecture performed
complex audio and video analyses to help determine which of two
soldiers was responsible. Among its techniques: using geographic data,
surveys, and photographs to produce a three-dimensional model of the
relevant section of Beitunia. Using the model, principal investigator
Eyal Weizman reports, “we drew the line of sights for both soldiers, and
found that only one had a clear view to the position of Nawara when he
was shot.”
Use drones to deliver necessities to remote villages
Miracles
can come by air. Jonathan Ledgard, a former journalist, envisions
drones bringing necessities, including medicine and tools, to the vast
number of African villages that don’t have reliable road access (the
same way towns that never had wired phones now have cell service). His
organization, the pioneering Red Line cargo
drone network, has organized a demonstration project (call it a
pilotless pilot program) in Rwanda. Norman Foster, through his
foundation, has designed the project’s droneports, arched buildings
where the craft will land, and where their cargo can be unloaded and
stored safely. As Foster said, “Drones could go from killing machines to
living machines.” Photo courtesy of Nigel Young and the Norman Foster Foundation.
Let communities tell you -- or even show you -- what kinds of buildings they need
Caracas
architect Alejandro Haiek has helped build a number of recreational and
arts facilities in Venezuela. He writes: “When we began occupying the
abandoned parking lot in Caracas that would become Tiuna El Fuerte
Cultural Park, residents knew they wanted a cultural center, but didn’t
know what it should look like. Instead of proposing a design, we invited
local performers -- dancers, skaters, musicians -- to start using the
space as it was. This led to the creation of instant infrastructures
that evolved in real-time.” The building Haiek designed made those
temporary infrastructures permanent. That approach, he says, “guaranteed
the continued use of the center by the community.” Photo by Francesco Galli.
Use abandoned buildings as sources of new materials
At the U.S. pavilion, 12 architecture firms presented ideas for sections of Detroit in need of reinvention. One of those firms, T+E+A+M,
reimagined the city's vast, abandoned Packard Plant as a rich stockpile
of resources. “Broken bricks, concrete chunks, fragments of glass and
other materials are collected, sorted and granulated. Off-site waste
materials from consumer, industrial and agricultural streams are also
processed and mixed with those materials," write the architects,
explaining how they create a kind of aggregate that can be formed into
building blocks. “Detroit doesn’t have a materials problem; its
materials have an image problem.”
Let people tell their own story
Manuel Herz,
a Basel-based architect who maintains a private practice while also
doing human rights work, has devoted a decade of his life to telling the
story of the Sahrawi people, who were forced to flee their homes in
Morocco in 1975 and now live in camps in Algeria. Yes, he brought in a
western photographer, Iwan Baan, to photograph the camps. But he also
had 30 Sahrawi women weave rugs depicting the camps, sometimes as
architectural renderings and other times as maps. Seeing the settlements
depicted in such a labor-intensive and personal way makes the Sahrawi
plight palpable. Here, the medium truly is the message. Photo copyright Manuel Herz Architects.
Listen to the people who build your buildings
For
society to be more fair, the workers who erect condos and office
buildings have to come out of the shadows. In Poland’s pavilion, videos
of construction workers, complete with heart-rending narrations, began
that process. One ditchdigger recalls hearing a passing mother tell her
toddler son, “Do well in school or you’ll end up like him.” The
argument: In a world of fair trade coffee, why not fair trade housing --
where developers promise to pay workers a living wage and take their
safety seriously? Says curator Dominika Janicka, “By presenting the
stories of persons directly involved in the building process, we ask
whether ‘fair trade’ is achievable in the field and, if so, what would
it be?” Photo by Andrea Avezzù.
Use bees to help determine the biological makeup of a city
Kevin Slavin (TED Talk: How algorithms shape our world), together with his Playful Systems
group at the MIT Media Lab, and various collaborators including the
Mori Building Company, have taken on a not-so-playful task: producing a
microbiological map of Venice. Their fieldwork is performed by
honeybees, who live in the Palazzo Mora, in a hive modified to capture
“bee debris.” The bees fly around the island city, and while gathering
pollen also collect microbes, which they drop into the trash heap at the
bottom of the hive. The microbes are sent to labs for metagenomic
sequencing. One goal is to learn about differences in microbial
communities in different cities, and how this might affect ways of
protecting and improving human health. But more broadly, Slavin writes,
"my collaborators and I are interested in building a cultural
imagination for the vast and invisible world that surrounds us." Photo courtesy of Kevin Slavin.
If you’re going to welcome immigrants, design cities to accommodate them
The
German pavilion was physically altered to invite people in; doors were
turned into large portals that can’t be locked. The message of the
pavilion, curated by a team from the Deutsches Architekturmuseum,
is that a country receiving immigrants (Germany took in about 1 million
in 2015) should build or retrofit “arrival cities,” municipalities
designed around newcomers’ needs. Arrival cities should provide cheap
rents, access to ethnic networks that facilitate adjustment and easy
transportation to jobs. Many of the ideas were derived from the 2010
book Arrival City: How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World,
by Canadian journalist Doug Saunders who wrote, “Successful arrival
cities create prosperous middle classes; failed arrival cities create
poverty and social problems.” Photo by Felix Torkar.
Don’t just redesign houses — redesign ways of paying for them
Alejandro Aravena (TED Talk: My architectural process? Bring the community into the process),
the director of this year’s Biennale and the winner of the 2016
Pritzker prize, has pioneered the idea of “incremental housing” --
residential units that are half-finished by contractors, making them
affordable, then completed by homeowners when they have the time and
money. The UK pavilion, dubbed Home Economics, provided a variant on
Aravena’s concept. One part of the pavilion, curated by
British-Venezuelan designer Julia King, proposes building houses without
non-essential finishes or features, allowing banks to provide mortgages
that working class people can afford. Homeowners would then provide the
non-essentials over time.
Hack natural processes for architecture
Life
Object, the Israeli pavilion, was packed with ideas for ways
architecture can borrow from biology. One project investigates ways of
heating, cooling and ventilating buildings based on the “natural air
conditioning system” of the mammalian nose. Another manipulates bacteria
to “light up” in the presence of pollutants, acting as microscopic
sentinels. One group investigated whether bryozoa -- colonial aquatic
invertebrates -- could be used to create building skeletons the way they
create their own skeletons. Another looked at males of the sapphirinid copepods,
small marine crustaceans that have the ability to change color in
response to light conditions, suggesting possible use in paints and
building materials. Photo by Francesco Galli.
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