2015
Re-forming Milan WS.01 Carlos Arroyo
Productive Landscapes
Poetic pragmatism in an urban context Ex Borletti
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WS.01 Carlos Arroyo*
host: Marco Bovati
Participants Fosca Bacciolo Pietro Ballabio Bedri Cem Etik Rita Giannetti Hamid Mamdouh Stefano Minocchi Michela Modena Margherita Pascucci Antonello Prezioso Luca Sala Cris Skenderi Tutors: Elena Fontanella Alisia Tognon Gerardo Semprebon
*Carlos Arroyo is a Linguist, Architect, Urban Planner, and Researcher. He has a Madrid
based office for Architecture and Urbanism, with international commissions in Spain, France, Belgium, Rwanda, Colombia and Argentina. His work ranges from institutional projects (OostCampus, Belgium) to large scale planning (Toledo Eco-neighborhood, Spain). He has developed protocols for innovation on all scales, from building technology to landscape management, developing new types of public building, or researching into new forms of housing. His projects, described by critics as “sustainable exuberance”, set the frame for a new architectural culture, language and aesthetics, through the ethics, technology and parameters of sustainability. His projects have been exhibited in international venues like the Venice Biennale or the Institut Français d’Architecture, and featured in hundreds of international publications in Europe, Asia, Australia and the Americas, including an extensive dossier in El Croquis. He has taught and lectured in over 50 international institutions, including Tokyo University, AIA NYC, Princeton SOA, Boston MIT, Berlin TU, Vienna IKA, Paris ES, ENSAPlV, Bogotá PUJ, Santiago PUC, Sao Paulo and Buenos Aires FADU
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Contents
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Contacts Productive Landscapes Method Timeline Context | Ex Borletti Cycles Implementation References
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Contacts
info@carlosarroyo.net fosca.bacciolo@mail.polimi.it pietro.ballabio@mail.polimi.it bedricem.etik@mail.polimi.it rita.giannetti@mail.polimi.it hamid.mamdouh@mail.polimi.it stefano.minocchi@mail.polimi.it michela.modena@mail.polimi.it margherita.pascucci@mail.polimi.it antonello.prezioso@mail.polimi.it luca10.sala@mail.polimi.it cris.skenderi@mail.polimi.it elena.fontanella@polimi.it gerardo.semprebon@gmail.com alisia.tognon@gmail.com
MIAW 2015 Blog http://www.miaw.polimi.it/
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Productive Landscapes Poetic pragmatism in an urban context In post-industrial Europe, a political and cultural debate over landscape had developed by the eighties, prompted by agents with interests as diverging as those of the environmental movement at one end, and the artists and theorists of Land Art at the other. The crisis that put an end to that decade changed the political agenda, leaving the debate unresolved; but the consciousness of an altered landscape had emerged, as well as the possibility to actively participate in its transformation as a cultural object. At present, an equally diverse set of factors urge us to adopt an innovative strategy to make sense of altered landscapes (whether they are rural, urban, industrial or post-industrial landscapes), which in the current economic cycle are undergoing one of the biggest transformations in its history. The current triple crisis forces us to rethink our relationship with production. The environmental crisis enforces the introduction of new elements into everyday landscape: energy producing devices using renewable sources, proximity production in order to reduce the ecological footprint of transport, renovation and integration of water processing protocols and wastewater treatment. The looming oil crisis also affects the increasing presence of renewable energy in the landscape and the transformation of the criteria for transport. The global financial crisis and the synchronous bursting of several real estate bubbles results in a large number of broken processes of transformation of the inhabited territory. These factors define a significant change in environmental, political and economic agendas, but it is important to add that we detected equally
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important changes in the sociocultural agenda, intimately related to the former. In Society in general, and also among the various branches of the creative professions, there is a growing commitment towards a culture of sustainability. Productive Landscapes, proposes a theory of landscape undoing the separation between “pragmatic and poeticâ€?. Alain Roger (Court traitĂŠ du paysage 1997) coined the expressions artialisation in visu and artialisation in situ to describe the mechanism behind the construction of the idea of landscape as we understand it today. In the first stage, Art offers a reading of the territory, creating a cultural construction and an ideal to pursue. In a second stage, the cultural construction subsequently guides interventions on the territory itself. This is in line with the philosophical position of antimimesis: Life imitates art far more that art imitates life (O. Wilde, The decay of Lying, 1889). The challenge of sustainability begins with, in a first stage, carefully listening to natural cycles. If we then want such strive to become a driving force in architectural culture we need to offer a substantial enough reading of this territory to redefine our collective imaginary.
Carlos Arroyo / Nobelia, the Gateway to the Kigali Business District: a 32.000 m2 mixed-use complex with a positive output of electricity, clean water, and passion fruit. (project: 2013 - construction: 2014-2016)
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Method
In this workshop we have: - identified ready-made in visu artealizations of productive urban landscapes; that is, art pieces that can transform our understanding of sustainable production in the urban landscape; - studied the evolution of such existing artealizations, assessing their capacity for cultural transformation. That is, what media coverage they had and to what extent were they able to achieve a transformation of the public vision of their subject; - produced further examples of in visu artealizations that may fit the study area, our own reading of the subject; - described implemented cases of in situ artealization; that is, interventions on reality derived from the aesthetic and cultural apparatus constructed by the above processes; - designed our own in situ interventions, as made possible by the above process; In all steps we have produced drawings, diagrams, timelines and interpretations intended to transform the way we understand reality: a redescription (vid. Rorty 1989). This has been made visible as a multilayered instalation, and edited on three formats (booklet, video, presentation) for other people to use and refer to in the future, trying to determine the necessary interventions in the corresponding network of practices (vid. Latour, 1993). We have worked in group, where each member was in charge of a specific role (the historian, the artist, the architect, the engineer, the experience designer, the communicator, the politician, the user).
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WS. 01 Carlos Arroyo / work in progress
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WS. 01 Carlos Arroyo / adjusting the visualisation model
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Dandelion / Bobby moor (2000)
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Timeline
One of the outputs of the workshop ia a timaline showing the evolution of four aspects of the current crisis: water (cyan), energy (magenta), food (yelloy), and bees (black). All four aspects overlap and intertwine, but separating the CMYK lines allows for a clearer reading. For each element we have identified key moments in its evolution. Items in the timeline include physical manifestations of the crisis, as well as legal, political, technical and social reactions. We have chosen to highlight the moment when a cover of Time magazine acknowledges the global nature of the crisis. As the timeline develops, a separate line branches out, marking the emergence of a strong will to produce desirable responses. Art pieces announce beautiful responses, actions that can transform a desperate reaction into a cultural artifact that may lead to possible desirable future.
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Ex Borletti / View from p. Irnerio / Photo by Davide Ferrari
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Context Ex Borletti The Borletti Factory originally founded in the last years of XIX Century to produce clocks, was converted into a military factory during the First World War. After the war, it specialized in the production of precision mechanic instruments: in particular mechanical components, car’s tachometers, sewing machines and measuring tools. The building, located in Carlo Irnerio square, was built in art deco style. Now abandoned, it used to be part of a wider industrial complex composed of a series of buildings located near Washington Street. For a long time these buildings were one of the production sites of Milan. From the Seventies the business declined leading quickly to the closure of the factory. The building could be seen, in a way, as a symbol of the elapsed time from that moment, as if its abandonment and its degradation were communicating us a need for a new reuse. In the last decades, some of the other buildings of the Washington Street industrial complex have been transformed into a hotel, a department store and offices. Today, the last fragment of the Borletti Factory is bordered on one side by piazza Carlo Irnerio and on the other sides by the following streets: via Constanza, via Gessi and via Cecchi. The Factory is composed of several parts and shows the stratification of time: a Liberty style building with towers -probably from the early Twenties-, a building with a shed roof and a third building from the Thirties. The open space in between these buildings is saturated by a series of roofing, partially visible from via Cecchi.
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Ex Borletti / View from p. Irnerio / Photo by Bedri Cem Etik
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Ex Borletti / Interior space / Photo by Marco Cerri
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Mapeta / energy, water, plants, bees
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Cycles
The aim of our workshop was to retrain the Borletti factory in order to build a urban productive space responding to the four (CMYK) aspect of the crisis. To get to this target we chose to design a closed cycle restaurant, self sufficient in terms of energy, raw materals, water harvesting and with no waste. In order to design a building that would satisfy all the set points we studied the activities that characterize the context and that may have influenced the building. Trough this study we identified two main flows, the one of people, that recognizes the possible customers of the building, and the one of the possible products trade with the nearest businesses. Inside the building we can check the way bees, energy and vegetables interact: through the use of windmills and solar panels we make the building energy productive; regarding the vegetables we have a fertile building, that may also sell what it grows, the green rooftop makes the building interesting and attractive to the nearby children and starts a social and educational program; the bees, on the other hand, supply honey for both the restaurant and pharmacies, and provide wax in order to produce objects to be sold and used in the restaurant.
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Implementation
The main aspect of our project is the recycling of the existing building, without massive demolition. This is conceived to avoid a high carbon footprint that would have followed if the factory had been destroyed and a new building put in its place. For the designing part we referenced to the artist Gordon Matta-Clark, who gives a surplus value to construction that were to be demolished. The criteria that has been used to cut the building comes from the intention of using the hole to let the sunlight in and to spread it to the whole envelope. Two pieces by Olafur Eliasson serve as guideline for this purpose. The light, in fact, is reflected by the mirrors that cover the surface; this shell is made out of a network of hexagons, which is referenced to the perfect form of the bee hives. This structure also allows enough air circulation for the ventilation of the vegetation that would be located indoors. Thanks to the inclination of the tunnel the winter light is allowed to reach the ground level, while during the summer, the light is reflected by the mirrors for natural illumination. For the initial stage of the project a self-sustainable restaurant was to be designed. For this reason at the vicinity of the restaurant and the kitchen had to be an area where the fresh produce could be gathered. The terrace floor, which is located over the kitchen area, was the result. The garden also has the hives for the production of the honey and wax.
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Carlos Arroyo/ OostCampus, City Hall and Civic Center, upcycling a former factory
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References
In order of relevance: Alain Roger, Court traitĂŠ du paysage, 1997 [it. Breve trattato sul paesaggio, Sellerio 2009] Oscar Wilde, The Decay of Lying, 1891 [it. La decadenza del mentire, Mimesis 2013] Timothy Morton, Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics, 2007 Richard Rorty, Contingency irony and solidarity, 1989 [it. Contingenza, ironia e solidarietĂ , Laterza, 1989] Michel Houellebecq, La Carte et le Territoire, 2010 [it. La carta e il territorio, Bompiani 2010]