The architects who want to build housing for the millions
The world’s premier architecture fair throws its weight at a global problem
McClean's
Alex Ulam
June 2, 2016
The neighborhoods of Jalousie (L), Philippeaux (C) and
Desermites (R) in the commune of Petion Ville, Port au-Prince are
pictured on October 26, 2015. (HECTOR RETAMAL/AFP/Getty Images)
The image chosen to represent Reporting from the Front, the 15th Venice Architecture Biennale,
is a photograph of an elderly archaeologist named Maria Reiche in a
housedress standing atop a steel ladder. She is looking out over a
desert for traces of a culture that disappeared long ago. Reiche could
not afford an airplane to do her job, so she improvised. The photograph
is a fitting symbol for a show that to a large extent is devoted to
celebrating activist architects working in the trenches on some of the
world’s most formidable challenges.
Asked to climb Reiche’s ladder and describe what he saw, the
Biennale’s curator, Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena, erupted with a
passion that’s all too often missing from his profession. “We need to
build a one-million-person city per week over the next 15 years for
$10,000 per family,” he said. If we don’t respond adequately to this
global challenge by 2030, he added, the world’s slums and favelas will swell with more than a billion residents living in deplorable conditions.
Other issues in Aravena’s brief for this year’s Biennale, which
opened last week, include sustainability, pollution, waste and quality
of life. At the same time, he wants architecture to do something about
the metastasizing “mediocrity” infecting the built environment today:
the thickets of uninspired towers and soulless developments transforming
cities such as Toronto and Vancouver.
We are informed that this is not intended to be a “Biennale of
the poor.” However, readers of design magazines and newspaper real
estate sections undoubtedly will be unfamiliar with many of the types of
structures on display. The world’s most important architecture show
includes work from a host of little-known architects, a great many of
whom work south of the equator. This is not a Biennale for the next
Bilbao Museum, but one devoted to “humanitarian architecture.” There are
examples of an unsuccessful social housing project in France that was
renovated to be made more livable, and a model for a multi-level
development in China that can accommodate large numbers of people within
a relatively small footprint, yet also provide a great deal of open
space. Some of the striking revelations here are the ways in which
contemporary technologies and techniques are being used to unlock latent
possibilities in preindustrial building materials such as bamboo,
rammed earth and bricks.
The new faces and ideas are intended to serve as a corrective.
Heeding the cries of Occupy Wall Street and other cultural cues, the
profession has been in mea culpa mode for the past few years. The
curator of the 2014 Biennale, Rem Koolhaas, who designs high- end
fashion stores and corporate headquarters, complained about the market
economy eroding the moral status of architecture, but failed to provide a
roadmap out of the morass. Aravena, who won this year’s Pritzker
Architecture Prize and is best known for his innovative housing designs
for victims of disaster, is better positioned to berate the troops.
Director of the Venice Biennale of Architecture Alejandro
Aravena, from Chile, poses with St. Mark’s bell tower in the background,
on the occasion of the presentation of the 15th International
Architecture Exhibition, in Venice, Italy, Monday, Feb. 22, 2106. (Luigi
Costantini/AP)
Dressed in a wrinkled white shirt
with spiked graying hair, Aravena, 48, looked like a rebel and spoke
like one too when he showed up at the Biennale’s opening in Venice’s
cavernous Arsenale building. “Corporate architects are the real bad
guys,” he said, “these offices with thousands of architects who are
there just to help private capital to make profit, rather than
contributing to the public good.”
One of the first exhibits in the
show, by the Chinese architects Wang Shu and Lu Wenyu perfectly
exemplifies his agenda. It includes large pallets of recycled bricks and
latticed wood neatly displayed, and videos telling the story of the two
architects’ campaign to save China’s imperilled architectural heritage.
In 2012, Wang, who had just won a Pritzker prize, was approached by the
municipal government of Fuyang to design the city’s museum. Instead of
immediately accepting the job, he wielded his newly won prestige and
made demands. Fuyang had to commit to saving the remaining traditional
villages in the area from the juggernaut of suburban tract development
that was consuming much of China’s countryside. The two architects
incorporated traditional materials and hand construction techniques into
their design for the new museum.
“Structure is about forces that you
had better agree with: gravity, common sense,” Aravena told his
audience at the Biennale. “This should be at the core of what
architecture is trying to give form to.”
An aerial shot of the Monterrey Housing project built in
Monterrey, Mexico in 2010. “Half of a good house” development financed
with public money. (Ramiro Ramirez)
A visitor to this year’s Biennale
can’t help but think of those words as he passes under a giant vaulted
structure comprised of slabs of limestone that would violate most
building codes. Although it is only an eggshell thick in places, the
soaring unreinforced structure designed by the Block Research Group at
ETH Zurich and MIT professor John Ochsendorf is not dangerous. Inspired
by the Mediterranean arch, it relies on compression for stability.
Nearby are two prototypes of
concrete floor slabs, each with a series of embedded arches, which the
team designed with digital fabrication and architectural form-finding
technology. Thanks to the arch supports, these slabs require very little
steel reinforcement and use 70 per cent less concrete than a typical
concrete slab. “We are trying to change the construction industry,” says
MIT’s Ochsendorf. “The challenge for the 21st century is how do we make
architecture that celebrates creativity while reducing the global
carbon footprint.”
That idea is echoed by the award of
a Golden Lion, the festival’s top honour, to Paraguayan architect
Solano Benítez. His enormous parabola of brick panels, which is so
slender that you might have doubts about walking under it, dominates a
large room in the Biennale’s Central Pavilion. Thanks to these types of
prefabricated panels, unskilled labourers without a mason’s training can
work in Paraguay’s construction industry. In his essay on Benítez’s
work, Aravena notes that because bricks are one of the most abundant and
inexpensive resources in the world, these types of panel systems could
be used to help build cost-effective housing for the great mass of
migrants moving to cities.
The interior of a house after residents have moved in to
the Quinta Monroy Housing project, in Iquique, Chile in 2004. (Tadeuz
Jalocha)
Aravena’s own trailblazing work
designing what’s known in the business as “incremental housing” would
fit nicely into this year’s Biennale. To stretch limited resources and
to ensure expeditious construction for victims of a 2010 earthquake in
Chile, he designed half-finished houses with the basic requirements for
shelter. The other half of the structure was left as a shell that the
earthquake victims could eventually build out once they got established.
One of the largest architectural
models in the Biennale displays multi-storey low-cost housing, public
open spaces and industrial facilities that could be built to accommodate
some of the more than a million immigrants who have come across
Germany’s borders in just the last year. The model, from the German firm
BeL Architects, illustrates a strategy for rapid and inexpensive
construction under which migrants would be presented with a basic
framework of columns, slabs and beams and then given the opportunity to
customize and complete their dwellings under supervision from German
construction professionals. Jörg Leeser, a principal in BeL Architects,
refers to his plan as the “second stage of incremental housing.” The
plan replicates a strategy realized in an actual building in Hamburg
that BeL Architects designed called Grundbau und Siedler. However,
Leeser says because of the proposed building heights and mix of
residential and industrial uses, German zoning codes would have to be
revamped in order for it to get built.
A picture shows a mud house built in Bangladesh by
architect Anna Heringer, during the opening of the 15th International
Architecture Exhibition in Venice on May 26, 2016. The Biennale,
entitled “Reporting from the front”, curated by Chilean Alejandro
Aravena will be open to the public from May 28 through November 27,
2016, in The Arsenal gardens. (VINCENZO PINTO/AFP/Getty Images)
Building codes in most Western
countries also generally ban the use of mud as a building material, but
Anna Heringer, an architect who uses new technologies to enhance the
performance of this most historic of building materials, is waging a
campaign to change the rules. Her cozy mud “nugget,” in the Biennale’s
Central Pavilion, is a nice place to recover from the barrage of
information. In addition to serving as excellent insulation, the
generally no-cost 100 per cent recyclable material is easily maintained
and repaired. “What is very important for us is that this is not
something that just works for Bangladesh or Africa or developing
countries,” Heringer says. “It is also something that works well for
Switzerland. I really believe that it is a global strategy for
sustainability.”
To be sure, for some of the most
promising examples of the humanitarian architecture in this show to be
realized on a large scale will require the co-operation of the people
who wield real power: politicians and developers. Still, after you are
finished here, the world’s most pressing problems no longer seem so
overwhelming. The main obstacle to progress, as much as inflexible
building and zoning codes, is a myopic way of looking at our
surroundings.
Taking inspiration from the
photograph he chose to represent his show, Aravena says that he hopes
that visitors will “expand their horizon the same way that Maria Reiche
was going up a ladder and understanding that things could be different.”
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