Paul Andersen

Paul Andersen, Practice +, 9 de agosto de 2013. Fotografía: Anna Font. Archivo EAEU.

Practice + Paul Andersen

En su mejor expresión, la arquitectura es un campo de descontento productivo. Es un arte de la diversificación, más que del refinamiento. En Indie Architecture, la práctica de arquitectura es un proceso continuo de retoques en vistas a nuevas formas de construcción, nuevas visiones de la vida urbana, y nuevos roles para el arquitecto. Los proyectos combinan un conocimiento instrumental de la historia con una curiosidad promiscua respecto de otros campos. Proponen configuraciones alternativas de la arquitectura popular y la vida suburbana. La oficina se encuentra tanto fuera de la arquitectura convencional como fuera de la vanguardia. En muchos aspectos, su objetivo es ampliar las condiciones y el contenido del diseño arquitectónico.

Rules and Types

In the office we try to look for situations where there is something in the field, some rule, maybe an unwritten one, that can be broken, and allow for a new kind of work. But then, we also identify where certain rules are becoming limiting and holding the field back. Often times in architecture, when at its best, it is about making connections between things that do not otherwise seem to be related. In our case, typology is a big issue. We look at a certain type of project, a type of building, a type of form, and look for how we can see it from a different angle, and how the definition of the type can be changed.

Patterns

We realized that the last important book written about patterns was A Pattern Language, by Christopher Alexander, from 1975, which describes a formula for good architecture, morally good architecture. A lot of architects, understandably, were against the formula. It made them upset that it was a formula. but we discovered a gap in the discourse between that discussion about patterns and the ways architecture is using patterns now. We looked at patterns from a number of different perspectives. It turns out that, in some fields, patterns are fixed and stable devices that control change or produce entropy, and in others they are open and flexible, changing all the time.

Suburbs

In the United States, suburbs are a problem everywhere. And yet, suburbs persist, no matter how much people get angry about them, or think that it is bad to build them. We have done a series of projects in the office to imagine an alternative of how suburbs might be.

Opaque Frontyard

Invisible Garage is a design for a court-based block with an open center, done for a publication. The houses are all different, but they all have the same language. They are tightly packed around their perimeter. Each house is pushed against the street, which for the American suburb is unusual. There is always a front yard. Since here they are in front of the street, the space the front yard creates, which normally gives a sense of privacy, is replaced by the opacity of the project. There are virtually no windows to the street, just a handful of doors. But by taking over the front yards and packing the houses together, there is the possibility of having an open space in the center of the block. Each house has an upper-level courtyard, private and just for that house. By turning the diagram of the block inside out, there are two kinds of landscapes within it.

Hydrogen Infill We started looking at alternative fuel sources, as means of organizing a new infill suburb. The car is the cripple of the economy of the suburb, and one of the most interesting technologies to work with was hydrogen fuel, partially because it can be used to power the home and the car. It can be generated by renewable sources and by burning natural gas, but the sustainability agenda was not the primary focus of the project. We were rather looking at it as an economic model. What is interesting about hydrogen fuel is that it can be generated at home and in small quantities. For the design, the house is off the ground and separated from the street to allow for the car and the equipment inside. The intention is that these fuel stations can be used by the house and by other people in the neighborhood. Besides, the byproduct of hydrogen fuel is primarily water, which can then be used to irrigate the lawn and fill the pools, which could also be a shared resource.

Suburb Courtyard

We did a project for the courtyard at PS1. We did not win the competition, but we regularly come back to the project in the office. It combines a few of our interests. We proposed a suburb made of a bunch of different wood frame enclosures that have open access, closed to the perimeter, but open to the sky. Paths of synthetic earth and swimming pools full of water were part of the ground-based scheme, something unusual for PS1. We thought the enclosures would create an unusual diagram for private and public spaces. We changed the order of the basic components of existing suburbs. The most figural spaces, the swimming pools and the enclosures, were drawn first. The road is not the guiding figure, and instead becomes the major circulation for the plaza, which is a left over.

Tube Playground

In yellow, a track runs around the perimeter of the project, and in blue a continuous steel tube folds, bends, and inflates, to create climbing structures, picnic shelters, climbing nets, and water features. The tube started off like a subtle and pure form, and was progressively split through bends and folds to create playground equipment. The bends and the folds are clustered in different areas of the loop and form different spaces, which are geared for activities of people of different ages. The more abstract the form is, the more it can be used in other ways than the traditional playground.

Podium Tower

They are two towers merged on a podium. We thus took the loop of the park into the vertical organization. In this way, on the various levels of the tower different connections can be made, or different groups can be drawn. It works as a circulation diagram for the programmatic elements, and creates a situation where, if you follow one of the walls, you encounter a bunch of different areas. The base is a mall, and inside it there are atriums articulating the spaces.

Visible Plan

Having a gradient or a split between the tower and the base was important. Usually, we put a lot of emphasis on the design of the plan, but typically you do not see the plan in a built project. Here, instead, we had the roof of the lower level to work with, and the plan could be expressed, as from the office towers you see the podium in plan. So, we started designing the plans for that. It was the opportunity to generate different exterior spaces, and it worked well. Some are cafes and restaurants, bookstores, and the connection between the tower and the mall.

Spiral Dorm

The project is organized as a spiral: a courtyard organization for the dormitories to create an outdoor classroom in the center of the building. It was then laid on to the site, which has a slope, and it was stepped. The spiral then overlaps with itself to create enough rooms to respond to the program.

The spiral thus fits into the existing slope. It is usually difficult to have ramps sloped in the massing, because you need either ramps or steps, but, in this case, the dorm program subdivides the interior and takes the module to the scale of the room. The rooms step the interior as the mass slopes, and the access to the rooms are direct from the central area, with no continuous corridor. There is no real continuous space running through the spiral. The building becomes a combination of the sloped geometry of the site, the spiral form as a way of creating the class room of the interior, the circulation around the building, and the program of the dorms thus integrated. One of the benefits of stepping it up was that the upper level rooms have views to the surrounding mountains.

Dandelion Mall

The project started out of another project done in Basel, in view to create little environments inside a mall that Diener & Diener had built in 2009. It was a brand-new mall but it was not working. There was no reason for people to sit in the corridors and spend time there, so they needed something to attract people. We designed a whole bunch of installations meant to create environments inside the mall, including a forest of giant dandelions. We worked with an experienced design company that works with interactive technology. These big lamps had lights embedded that are responsive to the people moving through.

Environment of Giant Objects

We developed an interest in making large scale objects and, for the exhibition, we designed this Bubble Gum Project. We looked at the history of giants objects, starting with the Caryatids at the Erectheion, and at how they are proportionally out of scale, since they are one and a half times the size of a human. Our gum was 144 times the actual size. The idea was to similarly introduce the giant object in an environment. But, rather than thinking the giant object as something that people look at as a sculpture, we thought of the building as an environment made out of giant things, introducing a new sensibility for landscapes.

Immediate Feedback

After we have done the projects, we go back and understand them in a different way, thinking that it might allow us to, in the future, move forward the same concepts. Even if this appears to be a quite simple operation, there is actually a lot to understand, maybe more than what you may think at first. Sometimes it is good to take a step back and enjoy your work. And do it in a way where you get the feedback that you need immediately.

Extractos de la conferencia de Paul Andersen, con introducción de Ciro Najle, organizada por el Centro de Estudios de Arquitectura Contemporánea, el 9 de agosto de 2013.