Wood, Paper, Pulp
page 02
page 03
Wood, Paper, Pulp
page 04 - 19
The construction of timber tastes
page 20
page 21 - 29
The hidden presence of timber in the American home
page 30
page 31 - 42
Alexander Brodsky recasts traditional Russian materials
page 43
page 44 - 49
Charles Holland
page 50 - 51
page 52
V. Cloud Encounters of the 911th Kind
page 53
Charles Correa
Uncube's editors are Elvia Wilk, Florian Heilmeyer, Jessica Bridger, and Rob Wilson. Uncube is based in Berlin and is published by BauNetz, Germany's most-read online magazine covering architecture in a thoughtful way since 1996.
Welcome to a pretty knotty issue. There’s some really nice wooden stuff to gnaw on, a paper architect to draw you in and we’ve mixed it all up with that touch of pulpy graphics you’ve come to expect from us at uncube.
Come celebrate cellulose in all its forms!
Behind what we see as products we desire, interiors we live in, housing developments we grew up in, and architecture we appreciate, are organizations that drive their circulation in the social imagination. What we think of hardwood flooring or how we consume paper towels is often a result of a careful construction of new products for new markets, in the process of which new consumers are being created.
This is not a simple marketing scheme; the constant reformation of popular demand is backed up in regional and national politics and supported by a multi-channel assault on the public opinion. This is also a process that takes time. And indeed, some of the organizations that were most successful in defining our relationship to our physical environments have existed for many decades, changing with the times, as well as relentlessly shaping them.
In the United States, where more than fifty percent of all forestlands are private, forestry organizations are, accordingly, private companies. And while a disillusioned reader, versed in poststructuralist parlance, can argue that our lives are anyway preconditioned by the structures of capital, forest corporations are still exceptional. That is due to their history, which makes them the largest private landowners in the country. The simple fact that these few companies have in their possession more than ten percent of the total US land area, holding eighty to ninety percent of certain states, makes their direct and indirect influence on the design of environments greater than any single administration or public agency.
Weyerhaeuser is one such forestry company; in existence since 1900, it developed to be one of the world largest forest corporations. Its history and contemporary operations provide a striking illustration of the lines that connect remote forestlands, engineered subjectivities and individual homes.
Chapter 1
The most important moment in the creation of American forest corporations was when “Land Grants” were given to railroad companies. The government handed immense areas following the 1862 Land Grant in order to subsidize the realization of railway systems. In detail, these lands were given in alternating one-mile sections, in order to maintain federal control and profit from future rise in land values.
In forested areas such as the Pacific Northwest, this pattern was translated into “checkerboard forests,” as the railroad companies clear-cut their lands in order to sponsor operations. What followed was the translation of this abstract system into a fractured landscape, still visible today.
As railroad companies struggled, a new era for the lumber industry was opening: in 1900, Frederick Weyerhaeuser purchased, in what was the largest land transaction in American history, 900,000 acres of forestland from the Northern Pacific. What began as a collection of early logging camps with rough conditions gradually developed into a nationwide map of strategic control of production and distribution, constantly changing according to the formation and development of new markets.
Chapter 2
New markets did not just emerge. They were consciously defined and articulated in tune with a specific geographical and social context. The wood-based construction industry was one such market, and its cultivation demanded an elaborate production of home catalogues, designed through collaborations with architects. The houses in these catalogues often referred to cultural ideals and regional identity, going as far as proposing Frank Lloyd Wright inspired prairie style homes, made entirely out of wood.
The distribution of catalogues to individual consumers was complemented by campaigns that were meant to structure a public opinion. In these, architects again played a role, associating “education in good design” with the use of wood and, even more, in promoting the way in which the company managed its forestlands, always with a genuine concern to the public good.
Eventually, beyond the public good, it was the business diagram that determined the dynamic of market development. This diagram, produced c. 1970, demonstrates a moment of abstraction, in which land can be converted into multiple products, based on their sales. This moment also signaled the transformation of Weyerhaeuser into an international corporation, with international headquarters.
While early facilities were simple industrial plants, at times joined by generic structures that housed office functions, the evolution of the company, with its growing emphasis on logistics, coordination, and capital operations, demanded a different approach and managerial vision. This materialized in its headquarters building, designed by SOM Sasaki, Walker and Associates and completed in 1971 near Tacoma, Washington.
The design of the building was of major importance to the company’s president, made clear by his decision to take responsibility from Gordon Bunshaft in the SOM New York office and hand it to Edward C. Bassett of the San Francisco branch, declaring that a Western architect was deemed “more compatible” with the task. The result was indeed a unique terraced, vegetated structure, strikingly different from the previous line of headquarters buildings that SOM had become known for. In its positioning on the site, as well as in its surprisingly “bubbly” section, the project well-captured an ambivalence inherent to the forest industry regarding the boundaries between artificial and ecological systems.
This was further enhanced with the design of the interiors, which masterfully blended organizational functions with naturalistic settings, mixing executives, secretaries, plants, desks, and tapestries in a total and constantly changing organic environment. With that, the corporation carefully calibrated the everyday settings of its consumers turned inwards to do the same for its employees.
Dan Handel is an architect and the inaugural Young Curator at the Canadian Centre for Architecture, for which he developed the exhibition First, the Forests. His writing has appeared in Thresholds, Bracket, Frame, San Rocco, and Cabinet. He is the editor of Aircraft Carrier (Hajte Cantz, 2012), and of Manifest, an upcoming journal of American architecture and urbanism.
www.manifestproject.org/
The veil of corporate strategizing, of invisible reorganizations on a massive scale and of constructed tastes fed to individuals, mask the real sites from which the forest corporations still draw their power. It is there where one encounters environments that manifest an inherent ambivalence that can be described as follows: when designing a completely artificial forest, nature is somehow introduced into the picture. Strangely enough, it is these processed, industrialized, manipulated forests, which are geared towards putting products into circulation that enable us to insist, once again, on an elusive and complex understanding of “nature.”
According to Canadian architect Michael Green, three billion people will need new places to live in the next 20 years. So we must build in urban areas at sufficient density and dramatically rethink the materials we use: good old wood is the most technologically advanced material that we can build with, also for tall buildings. Watch his inspiring talk from TED Vancouver to learn more about the potential of: wooden skyscrapers! (rgw)
»Unfinished stud walls offer a fleeting reminder of the fact that suburban architecture originates in the forest. In the brief period between its assembly and its concealment beneath layers of paneling and siding, this structural framework evokes its own material origins. Standing at the centre of the impossible knot of timber that constitutes these part-built suburban houses is like being at the heart of a densely woven thicket. …The effect is of a phantom suburbia that flickers in and out of view, a ghostly home summoned and then extinguished by the light filtering down through the machine-engineered forest.«
-- Manifest Destiny, p. 38
The first time I became aware of the idea of “revenge appreciation” it was applied to the work of the photographer Jeff Wall. Wall constructs photographs based on classical paintings, and some critics – most prominently the writer Thierry de Duve
– perceive an element of revenge in the way he uses the historical depiction of social issues to question modernism. This type of revenge is not spiteful but instead appreciative of the way references can avenge history through reinterpretation. Coming across the term, I wondered how a similar “positive” or productive type of appreciation of the past might likewise be perceived in contemporary architectural forms.
The architecture historian Vincent Scully uses the term “revenge” in a similar way. In his book The Shingle Style Today: Or The Historian's Revenge, Scully describes two classic New England architecture styles, Shingle and Stick, which ran parallel during the 1860s. Stick Style in particular foregrounds the materiality of wood in its construction. Then and now, both Shingle and Stick styles symbolize an unpretentious lifestyle: something quintessentially American and wholesome, reminiscent of a bygone time when
“Washington never told a lie.” For Scully, wood-frame construction does this by reinforcing the associations between the architecture of the 1860s and the Colonial or “Struggle” Period of the earliest American houses. Such appropriation of past styles could be seen, like Wall’s work, as a type of historical revenge.
In the US, perhaps more than anywhere else, architecture is inextricably bound to the forest. Wooden construction holds a symbolic connection with the virtue of hard work and therefore to an American idea of humility. In wooden architecture, “we feel that the soul of the workman streams through us,” as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it.
Mark Twain’s house is a classic example of the link between labor, humility, and wood. Built by the architect Edward T. Potter in the 1860s, the house epitomizes the Stick Style that Scully writes about. Potter combined vernacular styles to
»This type of revenge
is not spiteful but
instead appreciative.«
provide summer homes that offered an escape from urbanism to a rural landscape. This architecture expresses an appreciation for humble country life, also a major theme in Twain’s writing. His house is replete with trussed gables (no two the same), diagonal curving porch support braces, overhanging eaves, and exposed rafter ends. These exposed wooden elements are rhetorical statements about the virtue of work.
The value of work expressed in wooden architecture surfaced again in images of the post-war deskilled construction of the first mass-produced suburban houses, most notably in Levittown (1947-1951). A romantic affection for suburbia’s quasi-industrial yet “natural” wooden aesthetic was captured in mid-century depictions by American photographers like William Garnett (Lakewood) and Robert Adams (Colorado), who helped re-mythologize the wholesomeness of this material.
How is “the soul of the workman” expressed in architecture today, and how does nostalgia for the worker find new form? In my travelogue book about American suburbia titled Manifest Destiny, a chapter called “Stud Forests” focuses on semi-complete stud construction in today’s sprawling suburban housing complexes. It would be impossible to imagine suburbia without the timber stud, which has become an icon of de-skilled construction practice in the US. The 2x4-inch stud provides the ubiquitous clotheshorse for the majority of suburban houses. In exploring these half-built stud frames I find a nascent form of wood’s historical connotation of humility beneath the surface of nearly all suburban US homes, i.e. in the “phantomized” architecture of the empty silhouettes of 4x2-inch framing.
There is little in contemporary architecture I find so unwittingly
»How is ‘the soul of the
workman’ expressed in architecture
today, and how does nostalgia for
the worker find new form?«
Jason Griffiths is an architect and writer. He is Assistant Professor at the Herberger Institute, Arizona State University, Pheonix, Arizona. His work investigates the relationship between popular culture and architecture. Both his teaching and creative work explore digital fabrication techniques, investigating contemporary vernacular forms of building.
Jason has exhibited and published widely including in the AA Files, Architecture, JA, JAE and the Sunday Times. His book Manifest Destiny: A Guide to the Essential Indifference of American Suburban Housing was published in 2011 by AA Publications. It provides a visual anthropology of the North American suburbs and won the Deutsches Architekturmuseum (DAM) book award (Typology) at the Frankfurt Book Fair.
symptomatic of the Stick Style sentiment than today’s half-finished suburban homes – of wood “phantomized across surfaces,” as Scully writes. These homes, left unfinished in the wake of the housing crisis of the last five years, are frozen in a state of humble impermance, a reverie for something on the point of being irrecoverably lost. Despite the financial crisis, people are still unwilling to relinquish the fantasy of the suburban house, and instead seek to redress societal excess with the perceived humility of a bygone age. When something is at a point of frailty it is also at the most potent moment to re-mythologize it. There is nothing like scaring people into thinking that they'll lose something if they don't hurry up and preserve it.
The designers and the teams of construction workers that create suburban houses today have no explicit intention to instill this loaded meaning in the architecture. However, like many architects, my historical narrative is drawn from visual associations rather than assumed intentions. Stud frames in the raw have the potential to remind US architects of the inexorable link between the forest and the home – a contemporary narrative of the “revenge appreciation” of wood in American architecture.
Sometimes you want to live on the edge, live like there’s no tomorrow, like your furniture is disposable. Helsinki-based agency Showroom Finland is made from recycled sandwich cardboard and water-based adhesive. There are no screws, no nuts and no bolts as you fold it together. In fact, it is so easy that small children can move it, decorate it and spill stuff on it and there are no worries. In a world of recycle-friendly objects, why not buy some of this cardboard and put it back in the system when you’re done. Hey, you never know, someone might even upcycle it! (jb)
Alexander Brodsky’s multifaceted body of work seems to search for the hidden identity of his Russian homeland, crossing the boundaries between architecture and art – and paper and wood. His broad oeuvre ranges from a pavilion made of industrial windows, designed solely for drinking Russian vodka, to scale models of cities drenched in crude oil (whether vodka or oil – for Brodsky it seems the Russian soul is clearly reflected now in highly-flammable liquids!)
But he was firstly famous for being the leader in the 1970s and 80s, with Ilya Utkin, of a movement known as the “paper architects” – a group of young graduates of the Moscow Architectural Institute, frustrated by the state-run building industry, who fled into the imaginative worlds they created with drafting pencils.
Their inspirations were Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s architectural fantasies, as well as the visions of Le Corbusier. Collage-like utopias emerged, critiquing the inhospitable aspects of the Soviet-era Russian state, sometimes melancholy, sometimes humorous.
“For 30 years, I worked along the boundaries between art and architecture, on paper, installations, and sculptures. Only in the past few years have I begun to actually build something,” he says. Born in 1955, Brodsky decided on architecture very early, but working life out of school was initially a problem: “It was very difficult for me to work with a lot of other people on huge projects. I wanted to make small personal things instead,” Socialist group-think wasn’t his thing.
Brodsky working in tandem with Utkin, developed artist’s projects through drawings, etchings, and installations, and participated in conceptual competitions and exhibitions abroad. One of their best-known works was the Crystal Palace, a design which won the Japanese Central Glass Competition in 1982. Columbarium Architecture, from 1984, is also a typical example of Brodsky’s works on paper: a series of etchings showing a huge, almost unfathomable concrete mausoleum, in which houses slated for demolition are stacked on shelves like a kind of cabinet of curiosities.
This was an early critique of something he still laments today: the disastrous urban planning of his home city of Moscow. “It’s painful to see how the atmosphere in the city is being lost,” he says. “The many, many demolitions are Moscow’s main problem. The urban landscape is changing for the worse, because so many old buildings are disappearing.”
»Brodsky’s most astonishing designs
are in wood or water.«
His installation Coma (2000), for a Moscow gallery, presented viewers with a city model sinking into oil. The black gold dripped from transfusion bags onto a landscape of buildings made of unfired clay and then oozed away. He says of this work: “I wanted to show the city as if it was laying in a hospital on the operating table.” The message behind his oil-smeared city was crystal clear. Moscow was being flooded with petrodollars, with which anyone could buy up, rip down, or build anything.
Whilst the skylines of the world’s cities slowly become increasingly homogenous, Brodsky follows his own impulses – doing his own, small-scale things, which have a high level of complexity, a thoughtful melancholy.
Yet he finds it difficult to put his design principles into words. “I do things that I won’t find terrible afterwards, or think of as a torture for me. Things that won’t burden or bother me for the rest of my life.”
»I do things that I won’t find terrible afterwards, or think of as a torture for me. Things that won’t burden or bother me for the rest of my life.«
Brodsky’s most astonishing designs are in wood or water, like the off-kilter timber construction on stilts 95° Restaurant at the Pirogowo Resort near Moscow in 2000; the temporary pavilion made of ice, which he built in winter 2003 on a frozen lake, and the pavilion dedicated exclusively to drinking vodka. This latter, designed for an arts festival at the Klyazma Reservoir near Moscow in 2004, was a small, elevated structure, cobbled together from wooden supports and the window frames of a former textile factory. Inside its white-painted interior, there was a small table, set with two tin cups attached to a container filled with vodka. “You drank until you couldn’t drink anymore,” explains Brodsky.
Alexander Brodsky, born in Moscow in 1955, is an architect and artist. He studied at the Moscow Art School attached to the Academy of Arts from 1968-1969 and the Moscow Architectural Institute under M. A. Turkus, M. O. Barshch and B. G. Barkhin from 1972-1978. Between 1978 and 1993 he worked with Ilya Utkin on numerous interiors, projects, and installations for competitions and exhibitions in Russia and internationally. From 1993 to 2000 he worked on graphics, sculpture, and installations, before in 2000, founding his architectural practice, Bureau Alexander Brodsky. He represented Russia at the Venice Architecture Biennale in 2006. Currently he lives in Moscow running his practice.
Within this intense, temporary ritual, vaguely reminiscent of a traditional Japanese tea ceremony, surrounded by repurposed, recycled building material and a pinch of nostalgia, Brodsky created a piece of authentic Russia. Images from the project, like his drawings, remain long in the mind.
Of course we could not do an issue on wood and paper without mentioning Shigeru Ban. The “papier papillon” is his contribution to Architecture for Dogs, where starchitects like Sejima, Ito, Kuma, or MVRDV design doghouses: “With just two wires, the paper tube found inside the ubiquitous cylinder of plastic wrap changes shape, making a space for dogs. You can make a bed, a swing, a maze-like environment, even a chair or table for yourself.” Bow-wow-wow!
Good to see you in Berlin. You worked here for a bit once didn’t you?
Yes, a long time ago in 1993. It was a recession in the UK, not as bad as this one, but worse for architects I think. There was basically no work at all. So I came to Berlin and worked for an architect called Stefan Sterf. We did a lot of competitions and I was an expert in colouring in presentation drawings!
Initially I lived on Frankfurter Allee. It was the worst flat I’ve ever lived in: the houses next door collapsed just after I’d left. I then moved to Prenzlauerberg, which was beautifully shabby back then.
That 90s recession also gave rise to your own office, FAT. Can you describe the background to the practice – and the origins of the name?
FAT is an accidental architectural practice. It started with some loosely affiliated people from different disciplines carrying out projects in various constellations, not necessarily doing architecture. The recession forced a sort of do-it-yourself ethos: what projects can we do if we’re not going to work in architecture offices, if no one’s going to hire us? Let's make some exhibitions of our own work in cheap spaces – stuff like that.
FAT means Fashion Architecture Taste. The idea was to link architecture to fashion and taste, two things which are still quite controversial for it to be associated with, and deliberately provocative of the idea that architecture is about timelessness and authenticity, you know, the love of stone under the Italian sun. That it’s now actually part of a much faster-moving cultural world.
An interest in postmodernism seems key to the practice: both as it relates to your work, which has often been seen as a critique or a reinvestigation of some of its ideas, but also in your theoretical engagement with it.
Originally we were interested in looking back to it – given this idea of fashion in architecture – as being the most toxic, unfashionable thing in recent architectural history that you could be interested in. You know: whatever you do, don’t press the button marked postmodernism!
But that led to a more genuine interest in some of the things that were going on in postmodernism. In the 90s, Venturi & Scott Brown were being written off as crassly commercial, yet their work was actually far more critical than their critics would allow. It engaged with popular culture, which opened up a whole load of possibilities to us including an interest in taste and popular culture, the American suburb, signs and symbols in the home.
Charles Holland is an architect, and director, with Sean Griffiths and Sam Jacob, of FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste), based in London. He has taught and lectured widely, both in the UK and abroad and is currently a Visiting Professor at Yale University and a design tutor at the Canterbury School of Architecture. He writes about architecture and design for a number of magazines and edits Fantastic Journal, a blog about Architecture, Design and Other Things Too.
FAT (Fashion Architecture Taste) was originally founded in the 1990s as a cross-disciplinary practice, working on architecture and art projects. Recent built work includes Islington Square Housing (2006), Thornton Heath Library (2010) and CIAC Apartment Block in Middlesborough (2012). Currently on-site is the project “A House for Essex”, in which FAT is working with artist Grayson Perry, commissioned by Living Architecture. Past exhibition and installation work has include “Interior with Landscape No.1” at the ICA (1999), “In A Lonely Place” at RIBA (2006) and “The Museum of Copying” at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale (2012).
And FAT recently co-authored a book with Charles Jencks called Radical Postmodernism.
Yes. Architectural Design (AD) had asked Charles Jencks to do a special on postmodernism, because of course he wrote all those AD’s in the 70s, which had effectively defined it. He invited us to do it with him and we came up with the title, because no one associates postmodernism with being radical – yet we think there was radical content in it. Charles liked the title because the word “radical” reminded him of the 60s. For him, postmodernism was about the counter-culture of the 1960s: the whole series of reactions to early 20th century modernism.
In some ways doing this book felt like the end of a process. After finishing the book, we were like: I never want to look at any postmodernism ever again!
Building Stories
Chris Ware
Pantheon Books 2012
English
Hardcover, 29.7 x 4.9 x 42.2 cm, 260 pages
ISBN 978-0375424335
http://knopfdoubleday.com/book/185702/building-stories/
A thinking building thinks in italics. At least according to Chris Ware. This box set is a collection of what he calls “Building Stories”. It features 14 individual printed works with one thing binding all of them together: the use of architecture as something more akin to a character than a setting. The buildings in the book breathe a kind of omniscience into the mix of internal narrative, memory and dialogue. Ware uses a drawing style which will be familiar to architects: beautifully super-flat and stubbornly plain, with colors that can get downright muddy though not unpleasant. Ware’s work tends toward the melancholic at times: the brown haired protagonist of many of the stories worries about dying alone more often than most of us would admit. The sadness is poignant and often reflective, though at times it can all seem a bit hopeless. Building Stories is best enjoyed in small pieces, giving enough time for its impact to develop: to spend an afternoon immersed in it might prove challenging. Like the best architecture, lived in over time, these stories tell us something vital about ourselves through the characters that dwell in them. (jb)
Junk Jet Issue No. 06: “Here and Where”
Paperback, 144 pages
14.8 x 10.5 x 0.8 cm
(with a sticker and a digital mixtape “Terrorismo Mexicano”)
ISBN-10: 3981474821
www.junkjet.net
It seems like there’s a hidden algorithm at work behind the publication Junk Jet. Since 2007, issues have been appearing at random-seeming intervals, each time with a different size, number of pages, and layout, and editions of, say, 222 or 888 copies. Edited and published by Asli Serbest and Mona Mahall of m-a-u-s-e-r studio, Junk Jet is sporadic but somehow always spot-on.
If you’re one of the 999 people lucky enough to own the most recent issue, “Here and Where,” you’ll find that Junk Jet’s tiniest format so far (14 cm.) manages to carry an extremely dense amount of information – on a topic no less expansive than “local spaces within global culture.” Global/local has no simple breakdown in the internet age, and Junk Jet doesn’t try to break it down for you; it packs a lot of ideas together. With contributors from across the map, including JODI, Jon Rafman, Nicholas O’Brien, Sofia Al-Maria, AIDS3D, Metahaven, Superpool, and Olia Lialina, this pocket-sized magazine is bigger than the sum of its parts. The algorithm is working. (ew)
India's Greatest Architect« is how Charles Correa is being heralded by the RIBA in London, in the title of a major exhibition of his work that has just opened.
On the occasion of this exhibition, uncube took the opportunity to meet him, and we dedicate our next issue to him and his impressive body of work.
Issue No. 10:
June 20th, 2013
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