Unit 20
Porosity: A Material Shift Towards an Architecture of Permeability Marcos Cruz, Marjan Colletti, Richard Beckett
The Bartlett School of Architecture 2013
Architecture has long been determined by its prime necessity of protection and permanence, which has in turn led to a sense of hardness, closure and inertia that still affects our buildings and cities today. In the early periods of the Modern Movement, architects proclaimed the liberation from heavy and massive constructions by turning to a much more open and free-flowing architecture. The Miesian fluidity of transparent space and Le Corbusian Plan Libre prophesised a new era in which society seemed to have gotten rid of its constraining mass. But the crisis of the Modern Movement and the emergence of Postmodernity exposed the fallacies of previous beliefs. Architecture went back to its former closure and inherently opaque dimension. Designers rediscovered their love of the physical presence of materiality and colour, indulging with the embedded nature of architecture in historic form and style.
spaces, mixed internal-external areas, transitional enclosed-open voids, multi-layered façades etc.
Contemporary architecture overcame such dialectic positions (of either/or logics) by advocating more hybrid conditions that explore both threedimensional depth and mass, as well as the ever-permeable condition of space, environment and matter. Profound transformations in our current society, new postdigital paradigms, and the emergence of an unprecedented environmental awareness are pushing architecture forward to discover a new understanding of social porosity and a new sense of materiality.
Students in Unit 20 explored new material conditions through a broad range of material studies. These included for example the experimentation with concrete, rubber, Polyfloss, ‘sillycone’, wax, ‘foament’ (foam and cement), nylon composites, milled stone and ‘audio-bricks’ (acoustic responsive bricks). By combining both analogue and digital processes, students embraced a variety of material/tectonic experiments, which created the underpinning conceptual structure of their projects. The implementation of new 3D rapid prototyping techniques and innovative CNC milling technologies also reflected (on) the advent of Neo-materiality.
Social Porosity The precincts of our information era have made our domestic environments in particular extremely exposed (even vulnerable?), pushing us to reflect on a new sense of intimacy and perception of space. The employment of new geometric, structural and material complexities is also allowing our cities to become physically, environmentally and technologically more sensitive and surely more pervious to cultural multilayering. The potential porosity of contemporary buildings is shifting towards an open architecture of ultimate permeability, including hybrid private-public 246
Neo-materiality It could be argued that the history of architecture is also a history of materials, material innovation, material assembly and fabrication and how they have drastically changed the discipline. In a contemporary debate, materiality as a driving force of innovation is reflected in a postdigital paradigm shift towards a new sense of materiality. Neomateriality marks the ambition to escape from the virtual and cyber architectural visions of the early days of digital architecture, as well as from the standardised, off-the-shelf and environmentally and financially unsustainable architectural production methods of the past, towards innovative applied theories, techniques and technologies.
Unit 20 investigated these conditions in the cultural context of Hong Kong and Macau; two places with a strong hybrid identity resulting from merging Chinese and Western cultures. Whilst analysing the extreme topographic, urban and social diversity of the river Delta, students researched new modes of private/public life in this part of the world, which is undergoing arguably one of the most rapid, fascinating yet problematic transformation processes occuring in human civilisation. Extreme urban sprawl is leading to an unprecedented form