Robust

Robust

REFLECTIONS ON RESILIENT ARCHITECTURE

Robust - Reflections on Resilient Architecture

© 2017 Albert Algreen-Petersen, Christoffer Harlang, Morten

Birk Jørgensen, Nicolai Bo Andersen, Søren Bak-Andersen, Søren Vadstrup, Thomas Kampmann and Trine Hjort Skovbo

GEKKO Publishing

Digital edition 2025, first published in print in 2017

Editors-in-chief

Albert Algreen-Petersen, Søren Bak-Andersen and Christoffer Harlang

Art direction and Design

Albert Algreen-Petersen, Søren Bak-Andersen and Christoffer Harlang

Translation and proof reading Regitze Hess

Peer review

Héctor Fernández Elorza, Professor PhD

Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid.

Typeset in Helvetica and AkzidenzGrotesk

Cover photo: © Troels Trier, thesis project, Transformation Photo on page 9: © Keld Helmer-Petersen

ISBN 978-87-7830-913-6

All rights reserved. Reproduction in whole or part is strictly prohibited.

Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders and to ensure that all the information presented is correct. If proper copyright acknowledgment has not been made, or for clarifications and corrections, please contact the publishers.

GEKKO Publishing

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DK-1117 Copenhagen K

Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering

6 Introduction

Text: Albert Algreen-Petersen & Søren Bak-Andersen

8 Absolutely Robust

Reflections on robustness in architecture and design

as both physical, mental and cultural strenght.

Text: Christoffer Harlang

20 Peripheral Resistance

An architectural critique and study of Gion Caminada’s works on rural development in the Swiss village of Vrin.

Text: Morten Birk Jørgensen

34 Ageing with Beauty

All buildings transform under the influence of time, weather, wear and tear. Some for better, some for worse.

Text: Albert Algreen-Petersen

42 The Necessary, the Appropiate and the Beautiful Sustainability is not only a question of energy consumption, but rather a question of endurance, resilience and aestetics.

Text: Nicolai Bo Andersen

60 Church Change

A study of Danish rural churches. The significance of the most extensive Danish, architectural heritage.

Text: Trine Hjorth Skovbo

66 What Matters

Historical materials, building techniques and craftsmanship

inform the traditions of our local building culture.

Text: Søren Bak-Andersen

74 Never waste a good Crisis

Sustainability in the wake of an energy crisis: Historical re search on the energy crises of the 18th century and the 1970s.

Text: Søren Vadstrup

80 Making

Tectonic studies investigated through two pavillions constructed in Copenhagen.

Text: Nicolai Bo Andersen

88 Stuff so carefully put together

Christoffer Harlang talks with Stephen Bates

on architecture.

Interview by Christoffer Harlang

92 Through the Looking-Glass

Why current building code employs double standards

when relating to existing windows.

Text: Thomas Kampmann

100 About looking after things as well as making new things

Christoffer Harlang talks with Tom Emmerson

on architecture.

Interview by Christoffer Harlang

110 The authors

INTRODUCTION

Buildings should be built to last. What is still typical today, despite all the new technology, is after all that architecture is a genuinely unwieldy, slow medium that requires major resources for its creation. For this reason the robust is important if architecture is to be taken seriously and contribute to the development of a sustainable community. The robust is an alternative to the architecture that is mainly based on visual features. The really significant qualities of a building are complex and not always visually accessible. They quite simply demand a different commitment, or even presence, if they are to be judged. Johan Celsing, ‘The Robust, the Sincere’ 2008

‘Robust – Reflections on Resilient Architecture’, is a scientific publication following the conference of the same name in November of 2017. Researches and PhD-Fellows, associated with the Masters programme: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration (Transformation), at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, School of Architecture, are presenting their latest research in this publication encompassing an approach to architecture consistent with the field of research at the programme. This research characterizes how an architecture of Resistance, Resilience and Robustness is at the core of the heritage discourse.

Peer review has taken place prior to publication by reviewer Héctor Fernández Elorza, Professor PhD at Escuela Técnica Superior de Arquitectura de Madrid. The peer review has taken place in an open review, in which the reviewer knew the identity of the authors, and

the editors of the publication knew the identity of the reviewer. The reviewer is not affiliated with the authors or KADK as an institution, and has no monetary gain as a result of the review.

All articles in ‘Robust – Reflections on Resilient Architecture’ are original works by the authors and are not previously published. The peer review process is conducted to guarantee, that all research published in the publication, is presented with transparency, honesty, and in an accurate way, consistent with correct research ethics.

The realization of this publication has only been possible thanks to Realdania. In 2014 Realdania generously founded the research project ‘Bæredygtig Bygningsarv’ [Sustainable Building Heritage]. The research conducted within this project is presented in this publication. During these last three years, other research projects has been started up at Transformation, and the research unit has expanded in regard of both people and projects. These newer projects are also included in this publication with articles presenting their current status and direction.

In this sense, ‘Robust – Reflections on Resilient Architecture’ summarises the outcome and marks the finalisation of the research project ‘Bæredygtig Bygningsarv’. It is at the same time a possibility to present the ongoing research at Transformation and an opportunity for the researchers to point out directions for further investigation.

ABSOLUTELY ROBUST

TEXT & PHOTO: CHRISTOFFER HARLANG

ROBUST IS A GOOD WORD. ITS RHYTHM AND TERSENESS MAKES US INSTINCTIVELY RECALL THAT SPECIAL QUALITY WE KNOW FROM OURSELVES, FROM EACH OTHER OR FROM THOSE OF OUR BELONGINGS AND SURROUNDINGS THAT ARE RESISTANT TO WEAR AND TEAR, CHANGING TIMES, STRAIN OR DIFFICULT CONDITIONS. THINGS THAT ARE ROBUST RARELY BREAK DOWN OR DISINTEGRATE AND CAN SUSTAIN EXTERNAL PRESSURE AND CHANGES OVER TIME WITHOUT FALLING TO PIECES, WITHOUT LOSING THEIR DEFINING QUALITIES. IT IS A CONCEPT WE FIND IN EVERY SITUATION OF LIFE, IN THE WAY WE INHABIT OUR CITIES, IN THE WAY WE INTERACT WITH EACH OTHER OR IN OUR DAILY MEALS.

The term robust has its origin in the Latin word robus, robur that means strength but, according to some perceptions of the term, this physical or spiritual strength also has a connotation of hardiness, crudeness as in primitive force, sturdiness or soundness. A robust wine is thus a heavy, rustic wine with ‘angular’ tannin acids that often mellow with age.

In the field of pedagogy, Per Schultz Jørgensen has used the term ‘robust children’ to describe children that thrive and are able to handle difficult situations and overcome defeats and failures in a positive way. According to Schultz Jørgensen, we all have our own way of being robust, as each of us defines, practices or chooses a robust strategy based on our living conditions, culture, social opportunities and orientation.

In the fiercely competitive car industry, Generic Design (from Latin genus (plural genera) = stock, race) is used strategically as part of a gradual design process where every innovation or adjustment of the formal design is carefully balanced and calibrated to retain its recognizability. The so-called design DNA is now safeguarded and cultivated in almost all new car models, partly inspired by the success of the world’s most common car model, VW Golf, introduced in 1974 and now in its 7th version, and the legendary Porsche 911, which is still being produced based on the iconic design from 1963. Generic Design thus includes those qualities in a design that can undergo change without jeopardizing the product’s overall appearance. The point is therefore, prior to the development of any new forms, to identify the inherent qualities – a basic substance or core, so to say – and use this as a prerequisite for any new versions of the product. These basic features must be so essential that they can sustain even major changes and yet remain themselves. The 1992-version of Porsche’s model 911 – the so-called 991/993 – only contained 20% of the components from the previous model but was nevertheless unmistakably a Porsche 911 since the identifiable features remained sufficiently intact. The concept of being oneself is also known from Søren Kierkegaard, who writes that, “the great thing is not to be this or that but to be oneself, and everyone can be this if he so wills it.”

In 1928, the British designer Eric Gill developed a new all-purpose typeface named Gill Sans which, with inspiration from classic serif fonts and Roman inscriptions, balances a modern look with classical ideals. This typeface is very robust, both aesthetically and functionally, and has been widely used over the years for posters and advertisements, where it provides readability to both brief and more elaborate messages on book covers, railway carriages, schedules, price lists etc. Even in its slim variants, the typeface, which is closely related to Erbar, Helvetica and Futura, remains very powerful and simple. The font’s enduring value is borne out by the fact that it is still used by both British Railways, Penquin Books and Microsoft. In 1947, the Danish furniture designer Børge Mogensen conceived his so-called ‘People’s Chair’ [Folkestolen, ed.], which is a reinterpretation of a traditional Shaker chair with wooden rungs and a paper-cord seat. Mogensen’s chair is robust in the sense that it is technically strong, being made from cords and beech-wood rods, suitable for a wide variety of functional and spatial situations and visually inexhaustible. A textbook example of robustness, if ever there was one.

If we borrow a few terms from the world of semiotics, we may characterize Mogensen’s chair via different levels of meaning – respectively the regular level, the similar level and the singular level. While the regular level describes the chair’s physical configuration, the similar level deals with those aesthetic features that identify the chair as belonging to an existing series or family of chairs which share some external characteristics. If we compare the chair’s stylistic features with those of the Shaker chairs we find that there are obvious similarities – most of which are also found in Kaare Klint’s ‘Church Chair’ – and we may therefore talk of a type or a style, which in Mogensen’s interpretation is handled with the same artistic finesse as its predecessors. In other words, the chair has some generic properties that classifies it as belonging to a specific ‘species’ or ‘genus’ with which it bears comparison. However, there are also features that make the chair special, that distinguish it from others and make us able to identify this as being Mogensen’s chair. This is what we here call the singu-

lar level – the unique qualities which are only found in this specific chair. Mogensen’s chair qualifies as robust on all three levels, as it is both regularly robust by being wear-resistant, similarly robust by measuring up to its predecessors and singularly robust by having its own distinctive and consistent expression. And here we approach an understanding of the robust in architecture, which is able to carry its design through all three levels at the same time.

The Swedish architect Johan Celsing (b. 1952) devotes an article from 2008 to discuss different observations on robustness in architecture and how this may be cultivated in the architectural practice:

The robust is an alternative to the architecture that is mainly based on visual features. The really significant qualities of a building are complex and not always visually accessible. They quite simply demand a different commitment, or even presence, if they are to be judged. ...

The robust should not be interpreted to mean something crudely hewn and therefore sturdy through its brute strength. Instead it is intended to engender durable and multifaceted architecture. (Johan Celsing, 2008)

Celsing’s underlining of the durable and multifaceted aspects of a building is interesting and points to factors in the architectural work that are not primarily associated with external form, material strength or hardiness, but instead with other qualities that preserve the work’s fundamental expression in a changeable world.

Our traditional building culture is loaded with such examples. It offers a wide assortment of solutions in space and material that have proved their effectiveness and adaptability through the ages – from the simple ‘longhouse’ and its basic way of addressing wind and weather conditions, organizational demands and constructional challenges to the sophisticated structural optimization associated with brickwork and timber-framing.

If we take a closer look at these examples, we will see that they are informed by an inherited knowledge culture and its unspoken insight into the specific strengths and weaknesses of various building materials. By cutting the timber carefully, by sorting it and knowing which way to orientate a piece of wood before it becomes a drip or a sill, the life span of a timber house can be extended to several centuries, and if the house is correctly situated on the plot this will add both functional and perceptional dimensions to its identity-creating qualities. Are its eaves and base moreover informed by terrain, abrasion and climate, a rich narrative will unfold about joining, stacking and casting and about the regional interpretations of these tectonic cultures and their qualities.

It goes without saying that any intervention, renovation or transformation of our buildings must be based on an exact knowledge about their architectural history and, just as importantly, on an understanding of the role of these buildings as carriers of a constructional knowledge and know-how that often dates back several thousand years. And at the same time, these are the insights that can increase our ability to shape the new houses we are about to build.

Every time we design a house, our efforts should be based on a tripartition of the notion of architecture as a work that is motivated in a use, defined by a material and linked to a place. And if we are looking for an architecture that is not only robust but also wear-resistant, embedded in its history and individualized, the creative process will have to engage all three levels. The problem with using the building’s application as our point of departure is that though the building’s function is often its raison d’être, it is also the level in the building that is least durable. Indeed, it is more an exception than the rule if a building does not change function at some point during its life time. One of these exceptions is Thomas Hardy’s medieval barn from his novel Far from the Madding Crowd, which unaffected continues to embody its function century after century, as opposed to other buildings with which it is typologically related:

This page: J39 ‘Folkestolen’, Børge Mogensen

Next spread: Jacob Langebæk, workshop in Skovshoved

One could say about this barn, what could hardly be said of either the church or the castle, akin to it in age and style, that the purpose which has dictated its original erection was the same (with that) to which it was still applied. Unlike and superior to either of those two typical remnants of medievalism, the old barn embodied practices which had suffered no mutilation at the hands of time (Thomas Hardy, 1874).

As Thomas Hardy indicates with the words the “mutilation at the hands of time”, we find new ways of using the buildings with the result that some functions disappear and are replaced by entirely new ones. The Austrian architect Dietmar Eberle (b. 1952) has studied the life expectancy of various buildings and discovered that the programme that describes the building’s application is the least durable while the building’s ability to establish a cultural identity within its context, on the other hand, is the most durable. At Eberle’s own practice, Baumschlager Eberle, this has resulted in various designs for buildings that in their constructions, service cores and facade systems are responsive towards very different programmatic requirements and therefore, with a few adjustments, generally applicable as offices, housing etc. In our own part of the world, the Copenhagen inner city areas, the so-called ‘brokvarterer’, offer a good example of this kind of versatility. Here, the durability is due to the robust overall structure of the buildings, the rhythmic subdivision of the facades and the flexible layout of the flats. These buildings, which are a common type that was built in large numbers in the mid- and late 1800s, have been able to accommodate very different lifestyles and habitation patterns, exemplified by the vast number of flats that have been joined and the numerous new kitchens and bathrooms that have been added in recent years. These houses also create strong, identity-carrying urban spaces that serve as good and attractive settings for a multitude of life forms. So, when it comes to the functional content of a building, it is not only a prerequisite that it at the time of completion is able to fulfil the expectation of a specific utility content, but also that it as a robust building is designed in a way so that it, over time and with a few structural adjustments, will be able to accommodate other, entirely new functions.

The most obvious aspect of this concept of robust buildings and building cultures probably concerns the question of building materials, their life spans and their long-term durability. Although building materials like natural stone, bricks and steel generally have long life spans that are measured in centuries, the way that these materials are processed, fashioned, arranged and detailed has a great bearing on their actual utility value. The extensive use of plastic and other artificial materials in today’s building industry is a reminder that, when it comes to building houses, it is important to distinguish between a material’s general life span and its effective utility value. Plastic normally endures for centuries, but when used in buildings as sheeting or membranes or for actual building parts like windows, flashing etc., plastic has an effective life that is only measured in decades. Add to this that plastics materials generally are unsuitable for repairs and partial replacements. This means that even if a material or a building part is only slightly damaged, the entire building part will have to be replaced. Plastic sheeting in the form of building membranes are a serious problem that not only reduces but effectively spoils a building’s long-term durability.

These products are marketed as ‘maintenance-free’, which de facto means that they cannot be maintained as it is not possible to repair them. The extensive replacement of windows that has taken place in recent years, subsidized by the State, is an example of how perfectly good windows that might easily have been repaired instead are ‘priced out’ by inferior products which are less durable. And all this to avoid the burden of maintenance. If made correctly of high-quality wood, plank floors can, just like windows and doors, be very robust and enjoy a life span of hundreds of years. Their robustness is partly

References

• Adam Caruso (2001) ‘The Emotional City’, Quaderns 228, Barcelona, p. 8-13.

• Bernard Rudofsky (1982): lecture, Tokyo, n.d., p. 4.

due to their being repairable; a Dutchman in a plank floor, a door or a window frame not only increases its durability, it also contributes, together with other traces of wear, to a richer narrative about the life that has unfolded in the building through the years. From Adolf Loos and others we know the analogy between architecture and dress, and we do not need to go back many decades in our part of the world to find a time where it was common practice to darn and patch one’s own clothes. None of us do that anymore – instead we buy new clothes which we, with serious consequences for the environment, use and then throw away. And we do much the same with our buildings. We turn a blind eye to the environmental impact and other unpleasant implications of the fact that the new houses we build no longer can be repaired, but will have to be replaced!

But how can we describe the robust architecture when it comes to a building’s physical interrelation with urban space or the spaces of the landscape? When a building forges a link with its location and creates an identity in the form of a mental content in the mind of the beholder, the location becomes a place; and, as Eberle points out, it is this cultural, place-defining quality that is the most enduring part of a building. Heidegger refers to this quality in how a bulding meets its surroundings as a quality that derives from the architect’s ability to listen to the utterance of a place which transforms the architect into a ‘respondent’:

Where man built his home near a spring on a southern hillside, which gave protection against the harsh wind, it was the site which indicated how the house should be built, and man – by being open-minded towards the challenges of the site – was merely a respondent. When he gave the roof eaves and a pitch he took into account the stormy winter clouds and the possibility of snow. Thus, it was the weather, or rather the sky that decided how the house should be built. A corner of the room was for praying, for God, and the place reserved for the cradle and the coffin reflected the mortality of man. (Heidegger, 1951)

This notion of the architect as someone who responds to already exciting qualities and amplifies them can also be found in the writings of Adam Caruso who talks about how architecture should be sensitive to those emotional qualities that already define our surroundings:

If one accepts that architecture is about altering and extending what is already there, one can engage the powerful presence of the real so that the aura of urbanity is amplified and extended in the place that one is working. (Adam Caruso, 2001)

In this understanding it is easy to see that the robust place quality has to do with the ability of the building to adapt to change without forfeiting the qualities of its ‘placeness’. And that this only happens when the architect sees himself as a responder.

Bernard Rudofsky (1905-1988) puts it like this:

The house has to become what it was in the past: an instrument for living. This would make all the difference in our conduct of life – like the difference between playing a violin and playing a jukebox. (Bernard Rudofsky, 1982)

It seems, therefore, that it is in the basic understanding of architecture’s role and essence that we shall find the key to the definition of robust architecture. There is important inspiration to be drawn from Rudofsky’s notion of the architect as someone who involves himself emotionally and personally in the framing of a statement; and, with this insight, we can define the robust architecture as an architecture that is a condensation of both material and emotional aspects and, importantly, which is able to adapt without disappearing.

• Johan Celsing (2008): ‘The Robust, the Sincere’, in Nordic Architects Write – A Documentary Anthology, ed. Michael Asgaard Andersen, Routledge, Abingdon Oxon.

• Martin Heidegger (1951): Building, Dwelling, Thinking.

• Thomas Hardy (1874): Far from the Madding Crowd (Chapter 22: ‘The Great Barn and the Sheep-Shearers’), London 1874, p. 152.

PERIPHERAL RESISTANCE

TEXT: MORTEN BIRK JØRGENSEN

IN THE SWISS VILLAGE OF VRIN, ARCHITECT GION A. CAMINADA ENGAGED HIS EFFORTS IN DEVELOPING THE LOCAL COMMUNITY. HIS ARCHITECTURE HAS DECIDEDLY CLOSE RELATIONS TO THE TRADITIONAL BUILDING CULTURE AND OFFERS A CONTRIBUTION TO A CONTINUOUS DISCUSSION ON ARCHITECTURE AND TRADITION. THE WORKS HAVE DRAWN THE ATTENTION FROM THE INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE COMMUNITY AND HAVE BEEN WIDELY PUBLISHED. IN THIS ARCHITECTURAL CRITIQUE, I TAKE A LOOK AT THE WORKS OF CAMINADA AND THE IDEAS THAT THEY CONVEY.

Introduction

In the Swiss Alps of Graubünden, the indigenous architect Gion A. Caminada has engaged his architectural efforts in a careful formation of his home village Vrin. While societal development of the late decades has caused abrupt changes to the way of life and the physical appearance of most peripheral small-towns, in Vrin they have pursued a gentler transformation: An insistence on basic qualities and characteristics of the local rural life. Architecturally, Caminada has facilitated this process with an approach deeply rooted in the local vernacular building culture. A consistent loyalty to the periphery as a viable alternative to the urbanized life-form and the quality of built works have attracted the attention from prominent architectural media worldwide. Uncustomary for small-town architecture, this one is grown from a local within. With this architectural critique, I visit the village of Vrin and a range of projects by the acclaimed architect. I discuss the local development and critically reflect on its potential to contribute to a wider discussion on architecture as an instrument for regional development.

My first excursion to Vrin was in the summer 2015. Working with village research I had repeatedly come across references to the Swiss mountain village and the local architect Gion Caminada. For accommodation, I chose to stay at the Caminada-refurbished Hotel Alpina, however not in Vrin but in the neighboring village of Vals, famous for the thermal baths by Peter Zumthor. From the map, I considered the two villages adjacent, but here I learned my first critical lesson. The decision for accommodation resulted in two daily strenuous onehour drives on hairpin bend roads.

The fact, that every trip through the valleys of this region, is quite a journey, is central to the cultural development of the place, and also to grasp the problems and opposition that the communities are presently dealing with. Not until the last decade of the 19th century were roads built connecting Vrin and Vals down through the Lumnezia valley to the town of Ilanz, that with a population of about 2500 constitutes the nearest urban center (Rieder, 2006, p. 80). Prior to this, the primary route of travel and trade from Vrin went south, over the mountains and into Northern Italy, which has prompted some characteristic Italian influence on the townscape, like the free-standing tower of the bizarrely large and imperious St. Mariae Geburt und Johannes Baptis church (Rieder, 2006, p. 16).1 Today the trip down the valley from Vrin takes a good half an hour of concentrated driving, and go further one hour, Chur, the capital of the Canton Graubünden, with a good 30,000 inhabitants, is reached. Though well connected by excellent Swiss road-infrastructure, the distance still induces a considerable physical separation and a mental dissolution of the modern urban logics.

Vrin and Vals are the last uppermost communities of their respective parts of the valley, divided by the 3000 m Piz Azul. This topographical division have kept the two communities so separate, that they have maintained two different languages. While the spoken word in Vals is German, the ‘Vriner’ speak a local variant of the Swiss language Reato-Romanic called Vrinerromontch (Schmid, 2008, p. 34; Rieder, 2008, p. 101). The initiatives the two communities have taken to counter several decades of depopulation are likewise fundamentally different. In Vals they have strengthened the external relations by attracting tourists and export local resources such as mineral water, local stone and electricity from the Zervreila-dam uppermost in the valley. In Vrin they have consequently looked inwards to find the qualities of the particular place and culture they value and retain and develop these. Thereby Vrin today – unlike Vals – is still basically a farmer community and the steady and continuous physical and cultural development has over time become a decisive local resource (Schlorhaufer, 2008b).

ARCHITECT AND ARCHITECTURE

Assessing the entire life’s work of Gion Caminada may seem a bit undue. What I wish to examine here is the overall approach to village development that Caminada and the community of Vrin has adopted in order to evolve into the present position as a stronghold for village development and opposition to an all-encompassing urbanized future.

However, I wish to study this with departure in the built works, in order to clarify how an architectural approach can support such development. Luckily, the two seem rather interlaced in this specific context.

Gion Caminada

Apart from the main village structure of Vrin, the community used to entail twelve ‘hofsiedlungen’ which were small hamlets in the surrounding landscape. In one of these, called Cons, Gion Antoni Caminada was born in 1957. The farmer family had ancestors in the community many generations back and Gion Antoni is thereby just one among many ‘Caminadas’ one comes across on letter boxes in the village and in literature on the place. He grew up in a period of cultural change where being a farmer was no longer a matter of course. He took apprenticeship as a carpenter; continued education at the school for arts and crafts in Zürich and finally finished a post graduate degree in architecture at the prominent technical university ETH in Zürich. The choice to become an architect is a coincidence, he asserts, and so is the fact, that the works he has been carrying out from his studio in Vrin since graduating, is today considered good (Schmid, 2006, p. 86).

The first many years of his career Gion Caminada lived a rather quiet existence, struggling with small projects in the village. Only those specifically interested in alpine architecture paid particular attention. However, this changed with a range of prominent awards for alpine architecture and community development around the turn of the millennium (Schlorhaufer, 2008b). In continuation hereof, a solo exhibition in 2005 and the appertaining monograph unveiled the peculiar projects through essays and images(Schlorhaufer et al., 2005). Since then, architecture media have followed the production of Caminada, and architecture-tourists travelling around this the region so rich in world-class architecture, have begun frequenting the valley all the way up to Vrin.

The majority of Caminadas projects are located in a rather small area around his hometown and only recently have his endeavors spread to more distant locations. Characteristic to the works is the persistent turn towards the local block house construction technique. Locally the technique is called ‘strickbau’, which literally can be translated into ‘knit-building’. The wooden beams are ‘knitted’ together in the joints and with Caminada’s research and testing of the opportunities of the technique, the wooden knitting have advanced into complex configurations.

Building culture in Vrin

Notions of specific regional architectures generally give rise to debate. It is evident that many want such a regionalism to exist and several national and regional architectures have erroneously been constructed on behalf of this interest.2 It is thereby relevant to dwell a moment on the regional particularities of the strickbau and its use by Caminada.

The block house tradition is not a local tradition exclusive to Vrin, Graubünden, Switzerland or even the Alps. Similar construction techniques exist in many regions rich in wood. However, some characteristics distinguish this one. The ones found in the area around Vrin are taller and slimmer than usual. Residential buildings, as a rule, consist of a small ground plan with a basement of masonry built into an incline to keep the cellar cool, with two full storeys and an attic in wooden block house construction on top. Here the logs are generally cut to rectangular shapes giving a smooth facade. Barns, are regularly left with round logs and the joints leave open a gap between each to ventilate the hay. Roofs have a considerable overhang, protecting the facades from direct downpour, which create a characteristic weathering on many facades. Several older residential buildings are further protected by shingles which makes the variated weathering especially clear. Windows are generally rather small and horizontal with posts, sash bars and equipped with shutters. The detailing on most of the buildings are sparse, but carvings occur in the fascia, heart-shaped peek-holes ornament some shutters and flower boxes embellish a window here and there (Oliver, 1997, p. 1239ff). 3

Title page: Totenstube, Vrin, Gion Caminada

Photo: Victor Julebäk

Previous spread:

View of Vrin from above looking down the valley towards Ilanz. Right of the church is the historical village core; to the left the 20th century extensions.

Photo: Morten Birk Jørgensen

This page:

The schoolhouse in Duvin by Gion Caminada

Photo: Morten Birk Jørgensen

Taming the tradition

Working within the field of architecture can be perceived as a continuous search for the definition and bounderies of the ceoncept itself. Popular understandings of the concepts are however defined by dictionaries such as Merriam Webster, who attaches a range of meanings to the concept. Relevant ones covers two rather different perceptions. One, the totality of everything built, the physical organisation of human settlement. The other, a confined artistic task of cultivating built practice.4 Some works can easily be placed within one of those categories. The architecture of Gion Caminada however plays somewhere in the gap between the two.

The loyalty of Caminada’s approach to the above outlined characteristics are remarkable and uncommon among contemporary architects appreciated by professional discourse. Holding Caminada against Peter Zumthor from the same region, a subtle urge to distinguish from the vernacular appear in Zumthor’s architecture. In a small settlement called Leis on the slopes above Vals, Zumthor built two summer residencies in the block house technique. However, by adding some great panorama windows, he reveals that these houses are modern constructions and move them a couple of degrees towards the artistic end of the scale between vernacular building and academic architecture.5 Though the construction is somewhat different in the famous Bearth-Candinas house by Bearth and Deplazes in Sumvitg, a similar distancing from the history seems present in the rounded corners and the unaccustomarily consequent window-positioning (Deplazes, 2013).6 This desire for distance seems less pressing in the residential buildings by Caminada. Without questioning the qualities of the aforementioned buildings, I find that Caminada’s approach offers some tranquil straightforwardness that suits the block house tradition quite well. Not least his many residential buildings are a lesson on how subtle the transformations of a strong building culture can be made and yet balance delicately between tradition and modernity.

Residential buildings

For yes, Caminada too adds some particular properties that distinguish his buildings from the old ones. While assuredly distinct from standardized houses, a good part of the residential buildings follows a quite consistent scheme. The same low one-directional gable roofs. All with undressed logs as facades, on a masonry or a casted concrete foundation. Most of them maintaining the traditional vertical posture. Travelling up the valley, it is evident that this vertical arrangement of the houses is elsewhere consequently substituted by more horizontal configurations in new erections.

An attribute that most of them have in common concerns the windows. They are generally rather modest in size, considering modern standards. However, they are frequently fitted with a brim of shading perpendicular to the façade, surrounding the windows on one or more sides. It seems like some kind of modern interpretation of the traditional shutters that accentuate the penetration of these robust facades.

Construction-wise the houses can be divided in two categories. One continues the traditional doughty one-layer block house facades with no or minimal internal insulation. The other category doubles the façade leaving a gap for insulation between the two. In the latter, the perpendicular framing of the windows has the structural effect of joining together the separated walls. However, doubling the walls are not for the sake of static requirements, but solely for hiding the insulation offering the opportunity of visible wooden surfaces both inside and outside.

Stables and community buildings

The contributions by Caminada however don’t only concern residential buildings. In a building system developed by Caminada in 1995, prefabricated beams and girders are included in a strickbau-like structure that adjust the appearance of contemporary stable-constructions to fit in the cultural landscape. Considerable dissemination of this contribution has had substantial influence on the development of modern agricultural facilities in the region (Schlorhaufer, 2008a).

Caminada’s most published of work is the mortuary building or ‘Stiva da morts’ next to the church in Vrin. In contrast to tradition, the building has been given a white treatment in order to adapt to the white church (Tschanz, 2008b). Though interesting in several ways, I will leave this specific building for now in order to focus on some more general aspects of the architecture of Caminada.

The strickbau is a local tradition and Caminada’s engagement in this building culture is decisive for the consistency of built structures in Vrin. With small variations and alterations of the tradition, he has managed to balance the expression between tradition and contemporary aesthetics and modern technologies. In some examples however, the attachment to this tradition is in my opinion exaggerated. When it trangresses into trying to design small structures such as a phone booth and a bus stop, it becomes a silly dogmatism. Here, the contribution of strickbau seems more like a kind of Disneyficaiton of the village that serves a conceptualization in the interest of commodification.

Schoolhouse Duvin

With some restricted shame, I have to admit that my own favorite Caminada-project is probably the community school in the village of Duvin further down the valley. It was won in a competition and erected in 1995. The cause for my sense of guilt stems from the fact, that this school is actually somewhat untypical of the production of Caminada and aspects of the architecture has even been questioned by Caminada himself (Tschanz, 2003, p. 37).7 I will come back to this in a moment.

As an urban addition, the school is erected unusually close to an existing post office and together with the neighboring Roman church, it carefully encloses a small schoolyard in which the view of the stunning landscape becomes bearable. As an example of strickbau, the school is unusual in several ways. First of all, the size is oddly large, compared to the dwelling structures and historic barns which are more well-known for this type of construction. In cooperation with the engineer Jürg Conzett, it has been possible to overcome the usual limitation of building proportions limited by the length of the trunks. The simplicity of the outer volume recurs on the inside, where three almost similar floors above ground contain the necessary school-functions. The wooden volume rest on a concrete plinth holding a basement with secondary functions. The traditional deck of the strickbau has, in the case of the schoolhouse, been re-designed by Caminada and Conzett into a combination of wood and concrete, allowing for spans significantly longer than usual. Even though appearing utterly simple, the school is an example of thorough research that opens for new potentials of the traditional construction technique (Tschanz, 2008a; Schlorhaufer, 2008c; Conzett, 2008).

As characteristic of the projects of Caminada, the windows of the schoolhouse in Duvin play a particular role in the mediation between tradition and renewal. The structural logic of the strickbau only allowed one single window in a wall-section, as each trunk had to meet with a perpendicular wall at one end. Consequently, the window size is expanded into the horizontal shapes that is so characteristic for the school building. It obviously diverts the tradition of small vertical windows divided into sections. The large continuous horizontal panes clearly lift the building out of the tradition and into a more contemporary aesthetic domain. This however holds an ambiguity, that the architectural theorist Martin Tschanz reflects upon in a monograph on the Stiva da Morts, and this is where I become insecure about my own preferences. The traditional division of the window with a post in the casing and sash bars in the frames doesn’t only separate the inside from the outside, but also holds a mediating or even unifying effect. The outside or the ‘landscape’ is due to the limited size of the traditional window conceived as something that is simply just there. Conversely, the large horizontal pane has a tendency to reduce the surroundings into solely an object of human admiration. The ‘landscape’ becomes framed like a picture hanging on the wall, which has an alienating effect on the spectator. Instead of a bodily experience of the richness of the mountain, it is reduced to visual joy typical of the urban frame of mind, but alien to rural culture (Tschanz, 2003). The admiration of this particular project thereby might almost function as a test of whom is actually the real ‘bergler’ here.

SITUATING CAMINADA

As it might already be clear from the architectural considerations above, the architecture of Caminada is in many ways inseparable from the Alpine rural lifestyle and mentality and from the specific village of Vrin. Therefore, I will dwell a moment on the context of Caminada’s architectural production and his engagement in the community.

Vrin

Vrin is situated 1500 meters above sea level on a steep hillside sloping down towards a stream at the bottom of a narrow gorge. The opposite side rises even steeper, and somewhat importunate when glancing over the valley. Vrin lies on the sunlit south-east facing side, cultivated with its mellow curved and sloping pastures. The opposite shady north-west facing side is un-cultivated, covered with wild pine forest and scattered bear crags.

The village has a population of roughly 270 residents. It appears as a dense unit on the hillside, but the community furthermore encompass twelve little ‘hofsiedlungen’ consisting of a few farms each, but only four of them are today inhabited all-year (Schmid, 2008, p. 35).

The spatial focal point in Vrin is the somewhat oversized St. Mariae Geburt und Johannes Baptis church, built between 1689-94, and the oldest building in the village. With an Italian-style free-standing tower, the church conveys the story of a considerable southern influence in the valley up until the northern connection was established. The church building is fringed by a hefty cornice decorated with approximately 300 skulls (Rieder, 2006, p. 16).

South of the church, the historic village core is situated around a little square. Surprisingly, the church doesn’t face this square. Instead, one has to squeeze into a void between two of the vernacular houses to reach the imposing sanctuary building.

The vernacular houses and barns surrounding the square are indeed lovable. Persistently dark brown weathered wooden facades of the ‘strickbau’ tradition. Some of them are covered with wood chips shingles as cladding for the main construction. All buildings appear appropriately well-kept without over-restoration. Accurately positioned flower boxes completed the picture of what I saw on my first summer visit.

The village core on the little square and the surrounding streets were constructed during the second part of the 18th century and appear practically untouched. North of the church a newer part of the village was constructed in the second half of the 20th century, generally in the same traditional strickbau technique as the older part, however in a less densified configuration(Schmid, 2008, pp. 34-35). To the south a functioning school with a Caminada-designed multipurpose hall marks the end of the village with a view further up the valley. Throughout the village the visitor encounters new constructions and one can generally anticipate that they were constructed by the same famous village-architect. And certainly this proves its worth, as even a critical architect rarely meets an eyesore.

That physical intervention in such an authentic historic village structure is a troublesome affair became obvious in what seemed like a new pavement of the aforementioned square in the historic village core. It is covered with small paving stones neatly tailored to the foundations of the surrounding buildings. However, conducted with a care that seems alien to the frank practices of vernacular village configuration, and instead belongs in the domain of cuddly romanticized village treatment. It doesn’t inflict a severe loss of authenticity, but it shows how careful one must act in order to balance the preservation initiatives.

Architectural attention

During the 1970’s, Vrin attracted the attention of architects from ETH Zürich. Here, they found a unique example of an unspoiled historic village structure. The wretched background for this was a dramatic decline in farming employment, leading to rural exodus from the 1950’s and onwards. Neither the need for further accommodation nor economic surplus had spurred considerable changes to the urban fabric. With the new external interest, support for restoration of buildings in the village core was organized, in order to preserve the unique

historic structure. In 1979 the organization Pro Vrin was established with the aim of “Preserving the historic culture and architectural substance and improve the conditions for settlement and business.” (Rieder, 2006, p. 19) 8 Over time this event proved to have a great influence on the further development.

In the mid 1980’s as the most urgent restoration was well working, what has been called the second phase of Pro Vrin was launched. After having solely focused on restoration, the initiative now further engaged actively with the overall physical development of the village. Central to this change was the involvement of the young architect Gion Caminada and an agrarian economist from Vals called Peter Rieder. Together they developed analysis and theories on how a small mountain village could survive in an urbanizing society (Rieder, 2006, p. 21).

Modelling Vrin

Today, through more than three decades, Vrin has been a laboratory for testing interventions and developing theories for sustainable development of alpine villages. Analysis conducted by the agrarian economist Peter Rieder and Gion Caminada showed that in order to maintain a sustainable community with the basic daily needs like grocery store, school etc., the minimum number of inhabitants ought to be 500. This was more or less the size of Vrin before the decline took off in the 1950’s, the population since having fallen to its present 270 (Rieder, 2008, pp. 101, 102). Hence, the future would have to encompass a considerable increase of settlement. A mere preservation of status quo would thereby be impossible and the village would have to transform both economically and physically to endure.

The economic development of a farming community was the primary professional competency of Peter Rieder. He developed a number of guidelines for the development. First of all, the farming was to maintain the primary role in the local economy and export of local products showed necessary. For products to be competitive on external markets, they would have to be niche products of high quality. Good telecommunication is important and can provide the village with jobs in other sectors. Tourism can contribute to the local economy, but is unable to uphold a primary means of income (Rieder, 2008, pp. 103-104).

For the physical transformation, a set of guidelines was developed. Close engagement with farmers and economic incentives through heritage institutions secured a gentle transformation of the cultural landscape allowing necessary change with maintenance of traditional characteristics. New stables, an abattoir, a sawmill and other functions new to the village was facilitated by Caminada and the labor for construction was kept local, further assisting to stabilize the economy of the village (Rieder, 2008, pp. 103-104).

Manifest of the periphery

Caminada’s contemplation of the nature of rural spirit in contrast to the urban one, enters some of the philosophical considerations that indubitably shrouds his production. Almost as a manifest for rural settlement, Caminada has developed ‘Nine Theses on how to strengthen Peripheral Regions’ (Caminada, 2008). In these, a central point is the alienation from the landscape, that has emerged since the late 18th century, when romantic poets and painters started treating the alps as ‘temples of nature’. Another development stressing the perception of nature, was the industrialization of agricultural production, that subjected the land to technical developments. Thereby, today nature is squeezed between these two reductive perceptions of either aesthetic pleasure leading to national parks or technical subjugation leading to exhaustion of the land. In both cases, subsidy policies determine the expression of the landscape. The farmer is today part of this popular picturesque image. According to Caminada, the peripheral agriculture should learn to mediate between the present perceptions of nature and the effort of maintaining the cultural landscape, without turning it into a conservation project. For the agriculture, this nature perception naturally leads to a focus on high quality products in contrast to mass production with attention to low prices. Such a production is capable of being run in the mountain regions where neither the topographical conditions of fields or the instratructural connectivity allows for competitions according to mass or speed (Caminada, 2004).9

Previous spread: Timber construction, Vrin Dado, Schwitzerland

Photo: Morten Birk Jørgensen

This page: Extension of a barn in Vrin Dado by use of the building system developed by Gion Caminada.

Photo. Morten Birk Jørgensen

The theses futher regards the national strategies to preserve settlement in the peripheral regions which Caminada finds abortive. An overfocus on the infrastructural opportunities to commute suggests the idea of pursueing the same urbanized life-form as offered by the cities. Instead of this pursuit to secure the same opportunities for life in the periphery as the one of towns and cities, the strategy ought to focus on the particular qualities of the rural life-form. Particularities of the rural should be increased rather than evened out (Caminada, 2004).10

Spatially the particularities that relates to the rural conditions of planning must be increased and an ongoing equalization with the towns opposed. The periphery must develop alternatives to the partitioning of the suburbian areas in order not to appear the same. This alternative cannot stunt growth, however, it cannot be defined by market forces alone. The increased demand for partitioning to vacation homes does not secure long-term development of the periphery. Concepts that unite a public interst with the local particularities and needs contrarily strengthen the autonomy of the periphery (Caminada, 2004).11

According to the physical appearance, the particularities should be represented in the built practice. Buildings should be considered of great value and they should be constructed to last long. By investing uncompromising work in the processing of local material, the costs for construction is increased. The material cost is however correspondingly minimal. Such a strategy has a double benefit, as the local economy is backed and local building traditions maintained while at the same time the environment is spared. Such a strategy aligns the physical particularities with those of the life-form discrived above (Caminada, 2004).12 Here questions of regional identity, the vernacular and the high culture emerges. The progress of the culture has always developed in a relation between tradition and innovation and between local practice and foreign impulses. Regionalist ideologies are here quite uncompromisingly rejected. Such thought was never present with the peasants. Here, the constants of climate, topography, ressources and history define the tradition (Caminada, 2004).13

Reducing the periphery to a rural setting for an urban life will marginalize them as outskirts. The periphery must focus on its own qualities. If the peripheral villages manage to follow these thesis, they will appear as real alternatives to the regional centers, offering a stability and security that appeal to a considerable part of the population (Caminada, 2004, 2008).

BETWEEN INTEGRITY AND FUNDAMENTALISM

The publications of Gion Caminada’s works are rarely just presentations of the built projects. They generally include aspects of his disciplinary approach and deep engagement in the village. Monographs include essays, articles and interviews with profound revelations of thoughts and theories. However, they still primarily serve as celebrations and it is hard to find actual critical evaluation.

A book about the development of Vrin, published by Pro Vrin, includes honest reflections on the opportunities and challenges for the peripheral society. These outline an uncertain future for the specific village. However, when the village is considered not only an isolated case, but a model for potential dissemination, then more basic questions emerge. The disciplinary approach involves rather profound ideological implications. What are the drawbacks to this village ideology? What interests are promoted and who is neglected? Is this even an ideology worth disseminating?

Critique of Caminada

Among the publications I have found, a couple of them include a launch pad for such criticism. An article in the influential German magazine Die Zeit adopts a rather subtle irony in the description of the case. Caminada is here called a “missionary for good taste”, who “preach beauty” for the locals. It asserts that the building regulations forbid “alpenkitch” and that it is prohibited to build without an architect, which “…till now was always called Caminada.” (Thimm, 2005)14

The ironic description is likely to refer to a social cohesion in the community that makes such comprehensive aesthetic regulations possible.

A similar trace is outlined by the acknowledged architectural critic, Mohsen Mostafavi who at a seminar on ‘Ruralism’ describes Caminadas projects, as follows.

Gion Caminada, that Swiss architect, he has built 18 or 19 (…) buildings in one village. One architect! He is the architect of the village; (…) so that’s a very particular kind of situation in terms of how you preserve. (…) it’s a little bit of fundamentalism in a way, so, that thing has interesting benefits, but it also gets scary, after a while. (…) I think that this discussion about comparative methods or comparison is interesting, because if (…) Caminada is able to do something very specific in a location, I don’t see why we can’t do it in New Hampshire, in a way it sort of require a different type of discipline. (Harvard GSD, 2015)15

So, why all these references to religious concepts like missionizing, preaching and fundamentalism? There must be something in the discourse provoking these. A look at the concept of ‘fundamentalism’ help reveal what is so ‘scary’ about it. The anthropologist Judith Nagata has studied the historicity of fundamentalism and has shown that the use has emerged during the latest decades and only recently broken out of its original strictly religious domain (Nagata, 2001). The ‘original’ fundamentalists were Christian American groups that considered themselves ‘defenders’ of a cultural ‘authenticity’. They opposed the uncertainties and alienation being introduced by multiculturalism and modernity and considered a religious revival a fence towards these tendencies (Nagata, 2001, p. 482). Later, the Protestant fundamentalism emerged into a more external political project and became related to nationalism and “… a mind-set immune to dialogue or alternatives, a denial of relativism.” (Nagata, 2001, p. 483). Fundamentalism has arisen parallel to a “global (dis)order” and an “… obsessive concern with identity, authenticity and ultimate values – the fundamentals of existence.” (Nagata, 2001, p. 482). The concept is further characterized as ‘anti-modern’ (Nagata, 2001, p. 485).

Idealization of the past in Vrin

Considering the approach to development in Vrin and the writings by Caminada, there are several aspects that connect these with the characterizations of fundamentalism. First of all, the past is idealized and almost all cultural changes described with a latent skepticism. When Gion Caminada grew up, the traditional career as farmer had become ‘insufficient’ leading to his present specialized architectural profession. The need for a mortuary building emerged as dying at home got less usual. While the bodies were usually inspected at home during the days after demise, even in Vrin “…the tendencies of our modern society transpire, as the periphery of life – age, dying, death – was physically isolated.” (Cabalzar, 2006). Modernity brings an ‘alienation of death’ one understands.

Caminada describes the authentic mountain resident as materialized by Stefan, an 80-year-old man who spent his entire life in the village. He has become one with the landscape and knows a name for each wind gust that appear – names that were handed down from previous generations. There is a love-hate relation between Stefan and the landscape, one free from any idealization. A relation that Caminada wishes to adopt in his architecture. In sharp contrast to Stefan stand the tourists. They are cake-eating and coffee drinking wastrels, alienated from nature and can thereby only handle the mountains during ‘good’ weather in the high season. Even though they contribute with some economy, they are basically un-reliable as economic base (Caminada, 2006). The possible qualities of the curious tourist, who travel the world to explore and expand their horizon is eluded. It outlines an ideology of staying in one’s place, engaging with one’s own matters. The idealization of the historic traditions and the clear delineation of the authentic resident probably constrain the range of possible identities to adopt when being part of the village-community.

I had an experience in relation to the cultural homogeneity of the mountain village. After having stayed in the mountains for my visit, the trip back home involved a stay in Chur. As the only larger town in the region and an infrastructural nerve center located at the meeting point of the surrounding valleys, Chur constitutes the main urban reference for a rather large mountain region. The entrance to the town

by car is from the Kasernenstrasse, which after leading through a dispersed business district, meets the historic town in a condensed streetscape. Here, it was striking to see the cultural diversity in a town of only 30.000 people. People with all colours from around the world, gays, drug dealers and addicts, punks and considerable prostitution. Having spent the previous week in the small mountain villages this diversity accentuated the cultural homogeneity that characterized the villages. Chur suddenly appeared as the refuge for the identities diverging from the authentic ‘bergler’.

Questioning the critique

The critique that small peripheral communities are characterized by cultural homogeneity and informal means of social control is however also somewhat a cliché. Probably a prejudice that both Mostafavi and I are stimulating with our observations and suspicions. Instead of pinpointing the cliché, maybe we should rather ask ourselves what we find so intimidating about it!?

When Mostafavi at the aforementioned seminar suggested the fundamentalist aspects of Caminada’s architecture, the French architect Frédéric Bonnet, added that there is an ‘ambiguity’ between something ‘scary’ and something ‘fantastic’ in the work of Caminada. This ambiguity comes close the Nagata’s point, that the concept of fundamentalism has gained relevance with globalization and increased migration of people and ideas. Here, the fundamentalist architecture of Caminada, that is solidly grounded in a specific region with a continuous tradition offers a clear alternative. That is likely to contribute to the idea of the architecture as ‘fantastic’. So, where does the ‘scary’ part come in? Again, Nagata offers an explanation. She suggests, that using the concept of fundamentalism is itself an act of exclusion. The exact same accusation charged against the ones labelled fundamentalist. In this way, the concept is especially used by western liberals with the ambitions to protect their own ideas against alternatives and elevate them to absolute global dominance. With such a logic, the ‘scary’ part then refers to an ideology that questions the hegemony of a western idea of modernity. We might then, to a larger extent, acknowledge ‘fundamentally’ different forms of settlement and societies that offer different frames with different qualities. Does Caminada’s architecture offer a view into another societal order and scares us by – for once – qualifying it physically through architecture? Anyway, some of the basic constituencies of modernity might exactly be the ones Caminada opposes. Again, the considerations of ‘modern’ alienation from nature emerges as a conspicuous critique, but also longing for a society with less division of labor and the promotion of a self-sufficient settlement unit with relative autonomy seems to bear a rather comprehensive resistance to tendencies that are generally related to the idea of modernity.

Nagata touches upon the same preoccupation with “… indigenous and other “authentic” local traditions…” arguing that it is probably “… more productive to see these as alternative forms of modernity rather than as anti-modern…” (Nagata, 2001, p. 485). The potential of the periphery as described by Caminada might again be understood as an oppositional cultural movement that questions the urban modernity as the only reasonable way of life. In this understanding, the basic values such as traditionalism versus progressive potentials recurs. One could rightfully argue that in the case of Vrin, the local engagement in the production of food, the insistence on manual craft and local manufacturing in the building culture are not to be perceived as a backward-looking maintenance of a previous lifeform, but rather as a criticism of present western culture and offering actual solutions to some of our present societal problems. It is this continuous dialectic between the global mindset, learning to navigate within a fragmented and to a large extent abstract relation to nature and the driving forces of society and then a simpler one, anticipating a human need for a focused and manageable life sphere. Even though the connotations related to the concept of fundamentalism reveal possibly problematic aspects of the approach to village development in Vrin, the label of fundamentalism itself is a problematic exclusion of the ideological aspects that seek to respond to widespread cultural frustrations of fragmentation and alienation. In transcending fundamentalism as a religious concept, Nagata argues that this reading of cultures labelled ‘fundamentalist’ are likely to offer such qualities.

“An excess of openness and choice may generate its antithesis and result in closure. Per contra, out of the bonds of closed communities burst freer spirits seeking wider horizons and opportunities.” (Nagata, 2001, p. 494).

Communalizing the ‘age of Authenticity’

The architectural efforts to manage a spatial development of Vrin have payed out in the sense that the village appears distinctly cohesive with a development convincingly related to a steady and continuous societal change. Travelling through small-towns it is evident that this is not an easy task, as many appear fragmented in the urban fabric, and marked by rapid interventions that oftentimes haven’t taken root in the place. A typical feature is partitioning of lots for standard single family houses and vacation homes in the village edges that have a tendency to strip historical village centres of vitality. Other features often seen are economic ventures with the intention of imposing new dynamism but all too often fail and leaves empty structures revealing the aborted ambitions. In Vrin it is different. The careful considerations of sustainable development presents itself in a subtle but indubitable physical wholeness. The pavement on the roads, the roadsides, hedges and fences, the in-between spaces, actually all the public space is appropriately well kept without undue. Ongoing modifications and additions in the urban morphology sustain the traditional density as alternative to sprawl. All these efforts including the architectural quality of the additions have managed to elevate a new potential to the village; one that derives in the very fabric itself. Vrin appears with a distinct character and clear identity. The concept of ‘authenticity’ continuously reemerge in the literature on Vrin and Gion Caminada. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy present a thorough description of the present meaning of this concept 16 Presently there is an intense cultural attention to the concept which have made the Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor designate contemporary culture as the ‘age of authenticity’ (Taylor, 2007)17 The present idea of authenticity concerns the individual task of realizing ones own true self and opposing whatever self any external actor may want us to realize. It is a plain rejection of conformity, of any cultural practice in order to turn the search of realization inwards. Authenticity have been critiziced for leading to aethetization and self-indulgance, which remain key discussions surrounding the concept. And is it not here, whintin these discussions that the projects of Caminada and the approaches to Vrin belong? As contributions that transcends mere philosophical questions and help materialize them, making them a matter of relevance to architectural discourse? I believe it is. And it is within this questioning that problems such as the strichbau-constructed bus stop is pivotal as a matter of aestheticizing. Self-indulgence, however, is in the case of Vrin somewhat refuted. Here, the true realization of the self is contratily not to be found within one self, but in a direct and maybe even overdue relation with the the traditional culture of the village. This defence for such collective potentials within the ‘age of authenticity’ have been stated by aforementioned Taylor. In Vrin this position is carved in wood.

Will

Vrin endure?

Whether the efforts in Vrin will manage to develop the community into a sustainable autonomous settlement is unsure. According to the aforementioned studies by Caminada and Rieder, this will demand a population of at least 500, which is almost a doubling of the present number. The answer to the above question is dubious. On one side, the Caminada have attracted the eyes of an international society of architects, who finds aesthetical inspiration to inform complex matters such as a balancing between tradition and innovation. Futher, the community of Vrin have inspired with ideas to develop peripheral small-towns in the region and abroad. But what about the actual attractiveness as a concrete framework for an alternative life-form? Here, the dubiety emerges. Does the strategy of looking inwards for inherent qualities somehow counteract the intention of attracting new inhabitants? And even more critical, which new dwellers would the Vriner themselves actually wish to attract? What are the limits of difference from the local traditional life-form that new dwellers are allowed to represent? These questions seem interegated in the philosophical bedrock to the strategies of development in Vrin and furthermore largely un-addressed. What it already managed to achieve however is a village with a distinct self-image and local pride. It is in-

teresting that such rather quiet approach to village development has managed to attract international attention and recognition. Pertinent is the question to what extent the approach from Vrin is applicable to other contexts. What aspects can be generalized and which consequences it has. The wholeness and cohesiveness that is celebrated as a quality in the physical presence of Vrin evidently involve formal restrictions in use of materials and choice of style. A limitation to the individual freedom of the inhabitants to choose the expression of their homes. However, this notion is addressed by Caminada when

he argues for the right of the village to be an actual alternative to the urban lifestyle. That the rural life and small settlements allows other cultural formations to exist and emerge. Also structures that assign larger domains of decision-making away from the individual. Again, this concerns how we wish to use our learning from Vrin. In the concrete example such political structures could be considered alright. Considered as a model that we possibly wish to actively disseminate calls for a distinct clarification of such issues.

Notes:

1. The Italian reference of the free-standing tower is stated by Rieder, 2006, p. 16

2. This notion has been made by the American architect John Yeon on the American Northwest Regional Style, that he himself is considered a founder of. I read the statement in an article by Keith Eggener. [https://placesjournal.org/article/a-fortuitous-shadow/?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Newsletter%20 09-19-2017#footnote_1] Accessed Septemper 20 2017.

3. The description of characteristics is based on personal observations in the village and the area. Many of the observations appear in Oliver, 1997, p.1239ff

4. Merriam Webster, Architecture, see [https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/architecture] Accessed September 26 2017.

5. Zumthor himself rents out these vacation houses through a website where the qualities of the buildings are tenderly described. [https://zumthorferienhaeuser.ch/en/home. php] accessed September 21.

6. Described among many other places in Deplazes, 2013

7. Caminadas questioning of the horizontal windows is stated by Tschanz, 2003, p.37

8. Rieder, 2006, p. 19, my translation from German.

9. Thesis 4 and 5 in Caminada, 2004

10. Thesis 2 and 3 in Caminada, 2004

11. Thesis 3 in Caminada, 2004

12. Thesis 8 in Caminada, 2004

13. Thesis 7 in Caminada, 2004

14. Thimm, 2005, in my translation from German 15. The seminar was recorded on video and is available on youtube.com, see Harvard GSD, 2015 16. See [https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/authenticity/] Accessed October 24 2017.

17. The concept is introduced in his book A Secular Age, see Taylor, 2007

References

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• Caminada, G. A. (2004). Für eine starke Peripherie der Schweiz: Neun Thesen zur Getaltung der Kulturlandschaft. Werk, Bauen + Wohnen., 91(10).

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• Conzett, J. (2008). A Commentary on Structural Aspects of the Community Halls in Duvin and Vrin. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Deplazes, A. (2013). Constructing Architecture: Materials, processes, structures - a handbook Basel: Birkhäuser.

• Harvard GSD. (2015). The Counstryside I: Ruralism. Videorecording Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1uRyZfzqIhY

• Nagata, J. (2001). Beyond Theology: Toward an Anthropology of “Fundamentalism”. American Anthropologist, 103(2), 17.

• Oliver, P. (1997). Encyclopedia of Vernacular Architecture of the World (Vol. 2). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

• Rieder, P. (2006). Vrin - am Ende oder nur zuhinterst? Neuenhof, Switzerland: Stiftung Pro Vrin.

• Rieder, P. (2008). Economics and Architecture: A Joint Venture. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Schlorhaufer, B. (2008a). Agricultural and Commercial Buildings in Vrin and its Vicinity, 1990-2004. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Schlorhaufer, B. (2008b). Cul zuffel e l’aura dado - Architecture with the Winds. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Schlorhaufer, B. (2008c). Schoolhouse Duvin. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Schlorhaufer, B., Schmid, P., Tschanz, M., Conzett, J., Rieder, P., Caminada, G. A., & Zschokke, W. (2005). Cul zuffel e l’aura dado - Gion A. Caminada (B. Schlorhaufer Ed. 2. edition 2006 ed.). Luzern, Schwitzerland: Quart Verlag GmbH.

• Schmid, P. (2006). Gion Antoni Caminada. In P. Rieder (Ed.), Vrin - am Ende oder nur Zuhinterst? Neuendorf, Switzerland: Stiftung Pro Vrin.

• Schmid, P. (2008). Vrin. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Taylor, C. (2007). A secular age Cambridge (Mass.): Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

• Thimm, K. (2005, 15th of August). Das Wunder von Vrin. Der Spiegel, p. 2.

• Tschanz, M. (2003). Ein Ort dazwischen. In I. f. G. u. T. d. Architectur (Ed.), Stiva da morts: Gion A. Caminada, vom Nutzen der Architectur Zürich Switzerland: GTA Verlag.

• Tschanz, M. (2008a). Patient Research into ‘Strickbau’ and Typology: Private Residences. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

• Tschanz, M. (2008b). Stiva da morts - A Community Mortuary building, Vrin. In B. Schlorhaufer (Ed.), Cul zuffel e l’aura dado: Gion A. Caminada Luzern, Switzerland: Querz Verlag.

AGEING WITH BEAUTY

TEXT: ALBERT ALGREEN-PETERSEN

WEATHERING IS A TERM, WHICH DESCRIBES THE DESTRUCTION AND PATINA OF A BUILDING: THE GRADUAL CHANGES OVER TIME. IT ALSO DESCRIBES THE BUILDING DETAILS – CORNICE, PLINTH, EAVES, SILL ETC. – ELEMENTS THAT PROTECT THE BUILDING FROM RAIN AND THEREBY CONTROLS THE PROCESSES OF DESTRUCTION AND PATINA. THROUGH A WELL-CONSIDERED USE OF MATERIALS AND DETAILS, ARCHITECTS MAY EVEN BE ABLE TO MAKE THE BUILDING PROFIT FROM THE WEATHERING PROCESSES AND ENHANCE OVER TIME WHEN EXPOSED TO WEATHER.

Introduction

This article investigates the term ‘weathering’ and discusses its use(s) and meaning(s) in relation to architectural surfaces. The term weathering describes the gradual deterioration of buildings in time caused by weather (and wear and tear). In this sense, weathering describes both the process and the result, though the result is of ever changing character; from picturesque and desired patina to ruin and complete decomposition. Furthermore, the term weathering describes the weatherings, the building elements or details, which are created to protect the surface from the actions of the weather. Elements such as plinth, sill, corniche, eave etc. are examples of weatherings, which protect the façade from rainwater.

Through a well-considered use and detailing of the weatherings, along with a careful use of building materials, finishing, constructions etc., architects are able to delay the weathering processes a building undergoes in time (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, pp. 32-36). Further, a conscious and careful detailing and processing of architectural surfaces, material jointing and construction modes, such as the profiling of pilasters, the recesses in brickwork and the setbacks and protrusions of the façade, can be used to control the weathering and the patina and even to make the building enhance over time (Harlang & Jerl Jensen, 2013, pp. 31-32). The whitewashing of certain protruding parts of a façade and the sedimentation of dirt in recesses can in this light be seen as enhancement through weathering, as the intended play of shadow and light of the surface are accentuated and “permanently embedded within its fabric” (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, p. 39).

The idea of weathering as enhancement is closely connected to the notion of age as value, as, in particular, put forward by Austrian art historian Aloïs Riegl (1858-1905) in his essay The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its essence and Its Development (Riegl, 1903)1 Also, the notion of age as enhancement has been a significant subject of discussion within restauration and conservation with John Ruskin (1819-1900) as an early and significant figure.2 “For, indeed, the greatest glory of a building is not in its stones, or its gold. Its glory is in its Age (…) it is in that golden stain of time, that we are to look for real light, and colour, and preciousness of architecture” (Ruskin, 1984), as Ruskin puts it.

With this article, I investigate the term weathering in regard of architecture. I investigate the aspects it beholds as a parameter when building robust buildings; the processes, the results (from light patina to ruin and complete decomposition) and the weatherings with their architectural motifs and possibilities.

It is the aim with the article to bring forward the possibilities that lies within weathering when striving for a robust architecture through a thorough investigation of the term weathering. Also, I will look into the notion of age as enhancement as an argument for working intentionally with weathering. Weathering is in this regard not necessarily to be avoided but rather to be thought of as an inherent and unavoidable parameter when making architecture.

With this article it is the hope, to contribute to a productive literacy on weathering as both architectural informant and motif.

A History of Weathering

Weathering derives from the noun weather, which originates from from the Old English word weder, cognate with Dutch, Old Frisian, Middle Dutch weder, Old High German wetar and German wetter (storm, wind, weather) and Old Norse veðr or vethr.3 It is of course not only in an etymological understanding that the term weathering is closely connected to the noun weather. Building houses has always been closely connected to weather, even dictated by it.

In the history of human life on earth, settling and providing shelter have been crucial for the survival of the species. The regional context with its natural resources and materials were the fundamental basis, from which man settled and sought protection from weather (and animals and other dangers). The first settlements were primitive; carved into rocks or raised as huts in a timber construction covered

with weaved textiles or pelts. All with the main purpose to protect man from weather: to protect against the burning sun, the strong wind and heavy sandstorms, to provide as a shelter small enough to heat with a central fireplace and to give shelter for rain and snow etc. A central parameter when settling was to secure the settlement from not disintegrating in (short) time under the influence of the weather on site (Harlang, 2013, p. 45).

Through time, constructions and building methods were refined, and materials for construction were worked and processed to improve their abilities and properties to fit with the regional context. In other words, regional building cultures arose informed by weather and natural resources available on site. The aim was to provide long lasting shelter with as little effort and costs as possible, to keep man protected from the weather. Later, providing shelter was replaced with building houses. Which was again replaced with making architecture. Though, ever since housebuilders and architects have dealt with the same considerations as our ancestors, that weather, wear and tear have tremendous influence on our buildings in time, and the weathering and ageing processes are inevitable.

Weathering as Architectural Informant and Motif

The term ‘weathering’ was, in fact, originally defined as that part of a building that projected beyond the surface of any external wall and served as a ‘drip’, in order to throw off rainwater. Weathering also referred to a sloped ‘setoff’ of a wall or buttress, or the inclination of any surface, designed to prevent the lodgment of water. (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, p. 36)

Throughout history, weatherings have been used as means to protect buildings from water and thereby to delay the deterioration. The increased knowledge on weathering, building materials and techniques throughout history even made it possible for architects and craftsmen, in some degree, to control the processes of ageing and weathering and thereby control the patina of a building (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, p. 36). The weatherings, or details, appear as architectural answers to technical demands in a specific context.

… we recognise that many of the architectural features of pre-modern buildings were a result of lived experiences around daily use, wear and normal degradation. Thus, building designs featuring a pitched roof, cornices, window sills and plinths are not just for historical homage but include culturally derived solutions created from knowledge of how buildings can withstand climate, use and time.

(Harlang & Jensen, 2013, p. 195)

The lived experience referred to, takes its starting point in a regional, geographical context, which the buildings are adapted to. In pre-modern architectural history, regional building cultures were cultivated and different weatherings were invented along with a specialization of material selection and processing (Harlang & Jensen, 2013, p. 195).

Throughout pre-modern architectural history, Antiquity, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque and Classicism, the weatherings appropriated the style of the era.4 Thus, the considerations taken were the same: leading water away from the building to protect the construction, and the means were also largely the same, as man’s early lived experience had taught him: a plinth to keep the construction and the façade elevated from the terrain, window sills, corniches and eaves constructed to lead rain away.

Title page: Hands

Photo: Albert Algreen-Petersen

Opposite page: Signal Box Zürich by Gigon / Guyer Architects Photo: Albert Alreen-Petersen

Weathering, Industrialization and Modernism

In the wake of the industrialization in the late half of the 19th century, a revolution followed within the building sector regarding technology, engineering and new materials. The invention of the new and in many ways groundbreaking building materials – in particular plate glass, reinforced concrete and steel – became decisive for the future of architecture in the creation of completely new structures and typologies but also in regard to the (ongoing) specialization within the building sector (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, pp. 16-32). Provided with new building technologies and materials, modernism’s ideologies and architectural principles developed in the early 20th century with the Bauhaus School and le Corbusier as central figures.5

Early modernist architects regarded largely historical architectonical principles as style and ornament with no functional meaning. Le Corbusier’s fascination of the “whiteness” and the “new” in the architecture he saw in pre-war New York City exemplifies this. And the skyscrapers here regarded as the “cathedrals of our own time” symbolizing the “newness” and “whiteness” he pursued in his own purist version6 of modernism (Corbusier, 1947, p. 4). These “cathedrals of our own time” were in opposition to old Europe’s medieval cathedrals, with culture-bound architectural principles to “cultivate dust and filth” and “preserve the cracks in the walls, the patina” (Corbusier, 1947, p. 46). (Cairns & Jacobs, 2014, pp. 70-71).

Modernist architects’ desire to free themself from these traditional principles and start over with a “tabula rasa”7 , often also resulted in a rejection of building elements and details – weatherings – which protect the building from rain, wear and tear.8 Though, the use of weatherings was acknowledged by modernist architects as well: Le Corbusier refers to a conversation he had around 1908-09 with his colleague Auguste Perret, in which Perret states that “L’ornement (…) cache toujours une faute de construction” (Stonorov & W. Boesiger et O. Stonorov, 1937, p. 37). Corbusier agreed and to him, the solution was to eliminate all faults (!), which might work theoretically but in the case of modernist buildings it often did not work out well.

Early and most radical modernist’s idea that buildings should be made for a specific use – “form follows function”9 – led to the introduction of a new time horizon in architecture, in which the idea of “building for eternity” was replaced with “building for present moment”. Many buildings from this period were built for a very specific use and some are even built to be used for only a limited amount of time. This was an ideal situation for experimenting with material use and new construction methods, hence many buildings from this period were very vulnerable right from their construction and suffer today from poor or difficult managed maintenance (Welling, 1999, pp. 82-83).

Weathering today

In the aftermath of Modern Movement, the introduction of new materials, construction methods etc. has increased and making architecture has become an ever more specialized industry. Also, the mechanization as it took place in the building industry with

The increasing utilization of both electricity and plumbing exemplifies the tendency towards specialization and the carrying out of building projects according to the manufacturer’s specifications as well as the previously established standards of production (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, p. 21).

Increasing numbers of building materials and techniques and the following hyper-specialization of the building sector in combination with the legacy of Modernism’s desire for “the always new” has largely left architects today with little or no knowledge on weathering and ageing. One could then ask, why this is a problem? To this question,

there are several answers. One answer is, that weathering and ageing are unavoidable parameters and that a building will be effected hereby. The long-term economic costs from maintaining buildings and replace damaged parts can be lowered, if a building is built from long-lasting materials in well-proved constellations. In addition, it is worth mentioning, that the prices on natural resources are increasing (OECD, 2015), and that the costs for materials in a building project most likely will take a larger percentage of the entire budget. The focus today on design for assembly, cradle-to-cradle thinking and reuse of materials to produce new materials can all be seen as dealing with this challenge. Another take on the problem is, to build robust buildings, build out of materials proper for the specific place in the building and in close relation to the weather of the regional context or even with a consideration of intentional weathering.

When talking about weathering and ageing as inevitable processes, which architects and architecture even can benefit from, there is a question that goes beyond the mentioned considerations of economical (both construction and maintenance) and environmental sustainability, that is a question of the value of age. The question to ask could be: if weathering is not to be avoided and we know that ageing is unstoppable can we then approximate ourself to an understanding of the value of age?

Age Value

In Old Greek, there was no generic word for weather. Instead, aitheria or eudia were used to describe ‘good weather’ and similar words for ‘winter’, storm’ etc. were used. During Byzantine time, the word kairos, which literally means ‘time’, began to be used for ‘weather’, this etymological connection between ‘weather’ and ‘time’ is also present in Latin with the word for ‘weather’ tempestas, which originally meant ‘time’ and words for ‘time’ also came to mean ‘weather’ in Irish (aimsir) and Polish (czas).10

The etymological inquiry is interesting, as it suggests, that weather and time is not only closely connected, but also that that you need one to understand the other. The gradual deterioration is understood (as it happens) in time. And on the other hand, the time passed, is understood and recollected through the visible weathering of architecture surrounding us.

In his publication The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Essence and Its Development (Riegl, 1903)11 Riegl defines three types of monuments; the Intentional Monuments, the Unintentional Monuments and the Age-Value Monuments. Riegl’s understanding of Age-Value,

can be identified with the notion of age as enhancement and the idea that the various markings and layers of a surface record and allow one to recollect earlier stages in the history of a building and of the human life associated with it [and of the surroundings/context of a building, one could add] (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, p. 84).

Riegl defines age-value as a commemorative accumulation, and a building with the attribute of the value of age gives the spectator an immediate emotional effect. The experience of age-value does in this sense not depend on the spectator’s background, scholarly/historical education etc., instead what gives the monument it’s status are the visible traces and marks left on it, revealing “the passage of a considerable period of time” (Riegl, 1903). Modern interest in the age-value monument is often “rooted in its value as memory”. However, its value as memory does not interfere with the work as such,

… but springs from our appreciation of the time which has elapsed since it was made and which has burned it with traces of age. (…). The general validity, which it shares with religious feelings, gives this new commemorative (monument) value a significance whose ultimate consequences cannot yet be assessed. We will henceforth call this the age-value (Riegl, 1903).

Previous spread: Mehrzweckhalle, Vrin by Gion Caminada

Photo: Søren Bak-Andersen

The adoration of the effects of age and weathering left on the surface of a building is an architectural tradition often associated with eighteenth-century romantic picturesque (Frascari, Hale, & Starkey, 2007), and the worship of ruins particularly in (Roman) renaissance and eighteenth-century – but also as a recurring theme in history –takes part of a romantic adoration of time and the idea of the genius loci, the idea of a special and ‘distinguished’ spirit of a certain place (Algreen-Petersen, 2017, p. 9).

The idea of the Genius Loci12 is often associated with an attributed value of the age of place, and working attentive and even intentional with weathering as a parameter in dealing with the age-value as taking part of the Genius Loci when building in a historical place, might be considered as a way to approximate oneself to a place and its history, without copying, but rather through a thorough reading of the place.13

Final Remarks

Seeing weathering as an architectural informant reveals the opportunity to being precise in the detailing of a building without copying historical styles or designing pure ornamentation. An approach

Notes

to weatherings as architectural solutions too technical demands, as suggested, is an approach towards a dialectical understanding of weathering and architecture. The notion of age as enhancement might then be an approach when dealing with the Genius Loci. The challenges related to working more attentive or even intentionally with weathering in architecture relates primarily to the task of predicting the future. This points at some interesting topics for further investigations: material behaviour within both pre- and post-modern architecture but also within contemporary and future materials (and methods of processing, finishing, jointing and constructing); methods of representation when working intentionally with weathering, as the building is planned to weather, age and thereby change over time; historical studies on the development and coherence between detail and material in the architectural surface et al.

The processes of weathering and ageing are inevitable as buildings are left outside for an amount of time. As architects, a concern about these inevitable processes as both informants and motifs when making architecture, may be a path to follow if searching for a robust architecture.

1. It is worth mentioning, that Riegl published ‘Moderne Denkmalkultus : sein Wesen und seine Entstehung’ in 1903 to accompany the draft for a law on conservation. It was republished in Riegl’s collected essays Gesammelte Aufsätze, ed. K.M. Swoboda (Augsburg, 1929) 144-93. Translated by Kurt W. Forster and Diane Ghirardo to: ‘The Modern Cult of Monuments: Its Character and Its Origin’ in: Oppositions 25 (Fall 1982), 21-51.

2. In his publication The Seven Lamps of Architecture from 1849 Ruskin (Ruskin, 1984) put the idea of age forward as central. Ruskin argues that the decay of a building always should be remained to present its history accumulated in it and that restoration in this regard is to be seen as destruction. Ruskin takes here an extreme standing point in regard of conservation theory. In opposition to his arguments is French architect and theorist Eugène Emmanuele Viollet-le-Duc (1814-1879) generally placed with his idea of “l’unité de style” as put forward in his publication Restoration from 1854 (cite) and his own “interpretive restorations” of medieval buildings in France. For a further read on Viollet-le-Duc and Ruskin’s positions see e.g. (Arrhenius, 2003), (Andersen, 2015).

3. The etymological investigation of weather(ing) has been carried out through use of www.thesaurus.com/browse/weather accessed June 26th 2017 and www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/weather accessed July 4th 2017.

4. For thorough reading on architectural history see e.g. (Fletcher & Cruickshank, 1996).

5. For thorough reading on the development of modern architecture see e.g. (Frampton, 1992).

6. Throughout his career, le Corbusier explored and developed architectural visions of Modernism in many nuances. The purist, white-washed villas etc. was one entry, yet not the only and final ‘solution’ to le Corbusier.

7. The British philosopher John Locke argues in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding from 1690, that people acquire knowledge about the objects in the world through the experiences our senses bring, and he rejects the possibility innate ideas. He introduces the Latin term Tabula Rasa (erased slate/white paper), which becomes a mantra of Modern Movement’s architects.

8. In Nordic Modernism, also called Functionalism, the closeness to the regional context was in general more often considered. Architects such as Alvar Aalto, Vilhelm Lauritzen, Gunnar Asplund and Arne Jacobsen demonstrate in several of their projects an interpretation of the so-called International Modernism in the contexts of a locally founded building culture, see e.g. (Harlang, 2001). Yet, the influence of international modernism and the industrialization of the building sector, has been crucial for the post-modern development of architecture, also in a Nordic context (Mostafavi & Leatherbarrow, 1993, pp. 16-32).

9. The American architect Louis Sullivan wrote in his essay ’The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered’ (Sullivan, 1896) that, “It is the pervading law of all things organic and inorganic, of all things physical and metaphysical, of all things human and all things superhuman, of all true manifestations of the head , of the heart, of the soul, that the life is recognizable in its expression, that form ever follows function. This is the law”, which was to become a central mantra for Modern Movement’s architects.

10. www.thesaurus.com/browse/weather accessed June 21st 2017

11. See note no. 1.

12. The idea of the genius of place or the Genius Loci, meaning ‘the spirit of place’ arises in particular from gardening and landscaping, especially since the publication of the Epistle IV, to Richard Boyle, Earl of Burlington from 1732 by English poet Alexander Pope (Pope, 1732). Pope’s idea of the Genius Loci is closely connected to a careful adaption to a regional context and weather, and seems appropriate to bring forward when dealing with weathering and architecture.

13. For further reading on patina and weathering in relation to the idea of the Genius Loci, see e.g. (Cairns & Jacobs, 2014, pp. 68-100), (Pallasmaa, 2009), (Algreen-Petersen, 2017) et al.

References

• Algreen-Petersen, A. (2017). The art of Faking your age: Intentional weathering as co-architect in Gigon / Guyer’s Museum am Römerholz Extension. Paper presented at the NAF 2017: Reflecting Histories and Directing Futures, Oslo, Norway.

• Andersen, N. B. (2015). Transformation og restaurering. In C. H. A. Algreen-Petersen (Ed.), Om bygningskulturens transformation (pp. 30-39). Copenhagen: Gekko Publishing.

• Arrhenius, T. (2003). The Fragile Monument. On Conservation and Modernity. (Doctoral Dissertation), School of

• Architecture KTH, Stockholm.

• Cairns, S., & Jacobs, J. M. (2014). Buildings must die, A perverse view of architecture. Cambridge, Mass: Cambridge, Mass. : MIT Press.

• Corbusier, L. (1947). When the cathedrals were white, A journey to the country of timid people. London: Routledge.

• Fletcher, B., & Cruickshank, D. (1996). Banister Fletcher’s A History of Architecture (20. ed. ed.). London: Architectural Press.

• Frampton, K. (1992). Modern architecture: a critical history (3. ed. ed.). London: London : Thames and Hudson.

• Frascari, M., Hale, J., & Starkey, B. (2007). From models to drawings, Imagination and representation in architecture (Vol. 2). New York: New York : Toutledge.

• Harlang, C. (2001). Nordic Spaces, Redigeret udgave af phd - afhandling Kunstakademiets Arkitektskole 1995: Nordisk modernisme. Rum og form, Espacios nordicos. Barcelona: Barcelona : Elisava Edicions.

• Harlang, C. (2013). The Origins of Architecture. In C. Harlang (Ed.), Lost and Found, Architectural Transformations (pp. 44-49). København: The Royal Danish School Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture Design and Conservation, The Department for Cultural Heritage, Transformation & Conservation.

• Harlang, C., & Jensen, M. J. (2013). Weathering as an Informant. In C. Harlang (Ed.), Lost and Found, Architectural Transformations. København: The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture Design and Conservation, The Department for Cultural Heritage, Transformation & Conservation.

• Harlang, C., & Jerl Jensen, M. (2013). Weathering/patinering/fortælling! Tegl, 2.

• Mostafavi, M., & Leatherbarrow, D. (1993). On weathering : the life of buildings in time. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

• OECD. (2015). Material Resources, Productivity and the Environment. Green Growth Studiesview. Retrieved from http://www.keepeek.com/Digital-Asset-Management/oecd/ environment/material-resources-productivity-and-the-environment_9789264190504-en - page1

• Pallasmaa, J. (2009). The thinking hand, Existential and embodied wisdom in architecture. Hoboken, N.J: Hoboken, N.J. : Wiley.

• Pope, A. (1732). Epistel IV. An Epistle to the Right Honourable Earl of Burlington. Of the Use of Riches. In Epistles to several persons. A miscellany on taste. London: Printed and sold by G. Lawton, in Fleet-street; T. Osborn, below bridge; and J. Hughes in High-Holborn.

• Riegl, A. (1903). Moderne Denkmalkultus: sein Wesen und seine Entstehung. K.K. Zentral-Kommission für Kunst- und Historische Denkmale.

• Ruskin, J. (1984). The Seven Lamps of Architecture. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

• Stonorov, O., & W. Boesiger et O. Stonorov, P. p. (1937). Le Corbusier et Pierre Jeanneret. Oeuvre complete. Vol.1 : 1910-1929. Zürich: Zürich : Éditions d Architecture.

• Sullivan, L. H. (1896). The Tall Office Building Artistically Considered. Lippincott’s Magazine, 57, 403-409.

• Welling, H. G. (1999). Modernismens bygninger: idegrundlag og bevaringssynspunkter. [Denmark]: Miljø- og energiministeriet: Skov- og naturstyrelsen.

THE NECESSARY THE APPROPRIATE & THE BEAUTIFUL

TEXT: NICOLAI BO ANDERSEN

AT THE MOMENT, THERE IS MAYOR FOCUS ON THE CONCEPT OF CIRCULAR ECONOMICS. THIS ARTICLE ASKS WHAT THIS MEANS IN REGARD TO BUILDING CULTURE. FOCUSING ONLY ON ENERGY CONSUMPTION AND RESOURCES, THERE IS A RISK OF DESTROYING HERITAGE VALUES. IN CONTINUATION OF VITRUV, IT IS ARGUED THAT SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE IS ABOUT TECHNICAL MATTERS, PROGRAMMATIC CONDITIONS AND ARCHITECTONIC VALUES. IT IS ARGUED THAT SUSTAINABLE ARCHITECTURE MUST BE NECESSARY, APPROPRIATE AND BEAUTIFUL.

Introduction

Sustainability is defined in the Brundtland Report as: “Development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN 1987). In the widest sense of the word, sustainability is to “promote harmony among human beings and between humanity and nature (UN 1987). The report describes sustainable development as a balancing of three aspects: the environmental, the social and the economic. In continuation of this, the government report ‘Bæredygtigt byggeri’, from 2016, describes how environmental, social and economic dimensions must be balanced from a lifecycle perspective and from the building as a whole (Trafik- og Byggestyrelsen 2016: 4). Sustainability is here understood as founded on two paradigms, aiming at creating sustainability in the building sector: long term thinking including not only the building process but the entire lifecycle of the building, and thinking the building as part of a larger context not just as an individual entity.

The environmental quality is in this perspective about optimizing the use of energy, reducing the use of (scarce) resources, limiting the environmental impact and use of poisonous materials, optimizing the use of space and the potential of disassembling, reusing or recycling the building and its parts. The social quality is about indoor climate, creating healthy and attractive spaces, making sure the building fits with the surroundings, accessibility, work environment and responsible production. The economic quality is about total economy, good quality, flexibility and optimal use of space.

At the moment, there is major focus on the concept of ‘circular economics’. The concept is defined as “keeping materials and products in the economic circuit with the highest value the longest time” (Miljøog Fødevareministeriet 2017). It is about reducing the use of limited resources, optimizing the use of resources and reducing pollution and waste, i.a. through circular design and using healthy materials (Advisory Board for cirkulær økonomi 2017). But what does that mean in regard to building culture? When focusing only on energy consumption there is a risk of destroying the heritage values of the building (which ironically might reduce the life of the building making it less sustainable in the long run). Focusing only on materials and resources there is similarly a risk of overlooking other sustainable aspects in the old – and the new – buildings.

The Austrian architects Baumschlager Eberle points out, that not only technical and material properties, but also aesthetic values are decisive in terms of the administration of the world’s resources (Baumschlager Eberle, Schweigkofler & Walden 2007). And more than 2000 years ago Vitruv underlined that architecture “should possess durability, convenience and beauty”, in Latin firmitas, utilitas and venustas (Vitruvius 1914: 17). Even though the concept of sustainability was not a part of the vocabulary at the time, one might argue that it is exactly what he describes. Sustainable architecture is about organizing the world for human inhabitation, using the available resources in the best way, with regard to the given technical possibilities.

The Swedish architect Johan Celsing argues, in a similar manner, that sustainable buildings have to be durable. He underlines that architecture is a slow media that “requires major resources for its creation” and that “the robust is important if architecture is to be taken seriously and contribute to the development of a sustainable community” (Celsing 2008: 391). One might thus argue that sustainability is not just a question of optimizing the use of energy and minimizing the use of resources, but in a broader perspective a question of the building being robust. In continuation of Andersen (2015a), sustainable building culture is thus assumed to be about technical matters: that the building has a long life; programmatic conditions: that the building can be used in accordance with changing needs and architectonic values: that the building has aesthetic quality. The question is what parameters are contributing to make a building last long? Which properties characterize sustainable transformation in a holistic perspective? How can building culture contribute to a sustainable future? In the following, selected student projects made at the Master’s Program in Architectural Heritage, Transformation and Conservation (KTR) at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, School of Architecture (KADK) are

described and discussed using different theoretical lenses. The projects made during the past three years represent five different modes of transformation: inside, outside, around, on top of and next to.

Inside, outside around, on top of and next to

The project for a hostel on the Faroe Islands (fig. 1) proposes to restore the existing boulder boathouses and to add a woollen lining inside the space, suspended like a cocoon. A wooden floor makes a space for living and sleeping well protected from flooding. The intervention introduces vibrant tension into the existing structure with this new texturally rich element.

The project for youth housing in Malmö (fig. 2) proposes to transform a shipyard factory building, that has lost its function, by adding new steel structures inside the large space. Partial insulation allows the massive concrete construction, built to carry a large crane, to remain visible. The project gives new life to a worn-out building, under the threat of demolition, by continuing the distinctive tectonic articulation in a refined interpretation.

The project for resting spaces along a bicycle route on Funen (fig. 3) proposes new additions outside of the transformer towers, which used to exist all over Denmark. The proposal calls for new functions not in need of insulation to be located in the existing brick structures, and new functions with higher comfort demands be placed in new building volumes. The additions continue the architectural language in a subtle contemporary understanding.

The project for a stonemason workshop at Frederiksborg Castle (fig. 4) proposes an extension outside the existing brick building located at an unfinished corner of a listed site. The volume is a direct continuation of the existing wing, but built in new materials. The new space is just like the old generally usable and functionally flexible. The project is a new interpretation of the existing heritage values on the terms of modern materials.

The project for transformation of the Viking Ship Museum in Roskilde (fig. 5) proposes a new layer around the existing listed building. A new bay extends the existing concrete structure, which has major problems with deteriorated concrete, thermal bridges and flooding. The project secures the physical structure and reinforces the rich spatial experience of the landscape and the ships with respect for the heritage values.

The project for energy renovation of youth housing on Vesterbro (fig. 6) proposes an entirely new architectural expression around a worn concrete building with low preservation value. The new façade made of timber and glass protects and insulates the existing structure and allows the balconies to be used all year round. The project prolongs the life of a worn building and adds a new character in dialogue with the existing structure.

The project for at brewery on Østerbro (fig. 7) proposes a new floor on top of an existing transformer building located as part of an ensemble with high preservation value. The new structure uses the existing concrete walls as base for a lighter, filigree structure made of timber clad with polycarbonate. The addition makes it possible to re-use the existing building by adding a new light space supplementing the existing interior.

The project for a hostel on the Camino in France (fig. 8) proposes to restore a building ensemble with high preservation value threatened by demolition. The project adds new brick reinforcements on top of the existing structure to stop the decay. The interior is organised by large wooden furniture making space for new functions. The project gives the ruined buildings a second life by adding a new character resurrecting the old.

The project to extend the arboretum in Hørsholm (fig. 9) proposes a series of new buildings next to the systematically planted trees from all over the world. The proposed buildings for the caretaker, the scientist and the visitor are constructed in timber and clad with wood and printed textile. The project adds a built interpretation to the organically grown structure of the landscape.

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Fig. 6: Benjamin Egebak, Thesis project

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Fig. 5: Jesper Skovby, The Viking Ship Museum, transformation. © Keld Helmer-Petersen, The Danish National Art Library

The project for an elderly home on Østerbro (fig. 10) proposes a new unit directly next to a former monastery built in red brick. The addition continues the existing spatial composition of courtyards and corridors, but instead of bricks, the new buildings are constructed with insulated clay blocks clad with wood. The project is a new interpretation of the significant spatial structure and the strong material character of the existing building.

The necessary

As pointed out, energy optimisation and reduction of the use of resources seem to the most important questions when discussing sustainable architecture. Since a building can be considered a spatial organisation of resources, it may be argued that the longer they can stay on their location, the better. But which conditions are of special significance when working with existing buildings? The investigated projects relate to the question of energy and insulation in different ways. In order not to compromise existing heritage values and to save resources, some projects propose just a partial, internal insulation, minimizing the use of material and optimizing the use of space (fig. 1, 2, 8). Other projects propose an entirely new, external building envelope, in order to meet contemporary energy demands (fig. 5, 6, 7). Several projects propose moving functions with high comfort demands away from the existing, uninsulated building, to a new structure that complies with contemporary demands with regard to energy and materials (fig. 3, 4, 9, 10).

All the projects aim at optimising the use of resources by reusing buildings, structures and materials. All the projects reuse the building parts described as having high preservation value, and only few projects remove building materials. Only one project removes an entire existing building to make room for a new intervention (fig. 10). Some projects propose adding a new structure using the same, heavy materials as the existing buildings (fig. 3, 5, 8). The heavy materials are generally characterized by being able to last long and to weather with beauty and grace. If used in the right way, they can be repaired, reused or recycled if necessary. Other projects add lighter materials not present in the existing building (fig. 1, 4, 6, 7). Materials with a shorter lifespan are proposed built into the structure allowing them to be disassembled and replaced if they are broken, reused in another situation or recycled. A single project adds a material not often used in buildings. It is easy to produce locally without the use of much energy, it is non-toxic, easy to repair and it can be reused or even composted when it can no longer be used (fig. 1). As suggested above, sustainability is not about stopping time. Sustainable development is rather a “process of change” (UN 1987) optimizing the resources in relation to the given technical and social possibilities – in strong consideration of future generations being able to meet their needs. It includes the idea that

sustainable development requires meeting the basic needs of all and extending to all the opportunity to satisfy their aspirations for a better life” (and that) “living standards that go beyond the basic minimum are sustainable only if consumption standards everywhere have regard for long-term sustainability (UN 1987).

It may be argued that to escape our non-sustainable throw-away culture, one must reduce the use of resources, reuse the building elements and recycle the materials, in other words: ”Reduce. Reuse. Recycle. Rethink.” (Advisory Board for cirkulær økonomi 2017: 5). In this perspective, sustainable building culture is about necessity in two different manners: On must create the development that is needed to be done and one must limit the intervention to the basic requirements. In continuation of this, sustainable building culture may be defined on the technical level as reducing the use of energy by strategic insulation and by optimizing the use of space and minimizing the use of resources by ensuring the future existence of the building and preventing degradation and decay. The added elements must be made of non-toxic, quality materials produced under sustainable conditions and they must work well with the existing structure. And it must be possible to repair or disassemble the building in order to maintain, reuse or recycle the materials. Sustainable building culture is about doing neither too much nor too little, but just the necessary.

The appropriate

It may be argued that the reason a building has been preserved in the first place is that it is possible to use it according to changing functional needs. It demands a certain adaptability to reach a high age, or as Steward Brand puts it: “Age plus adaptivity is what makes a building come to be loved” (Brand 1994: 23). At the same time it only makes sense to preserve an existing building if it can be used, or as the Agency for Culture and Palaces put it: “Protection goes through function” (Kulturarvsstyrelsen 2016: 3). But what properties determine whether a building is adaptable to changing functional needs? The investigated projects propose, to a greater or lesser degree, functional changes to the existing buildings. Some projects propose an entirely new function in the existing structure (fig. 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 9) while others propose just a smaller adjustment of the use (fig. 4, 5, 6, 10). It is likely that the changes in function are possible because the buildings to begin with are adaptable.

The American writer Steward Brand describes how an existing building must be understood as a series of systems, each with its own individual lifetime. According to Brand, the six S’s constitute the ”shearing layers of change”: the site, which has the longest life since the context has an influence through generations; the primary structure, which has a time perspective of 30 to 300 years; the exterior skin, which undergoes changes approximately every 20 years; services (installations), which must be replaced every 7-15 years; the space plan, which will be reorganized every 3-30 years; and finally the stuff (furniture), which has the shortest time perspective, as it is moved all the time (Brand 1994). In transformation projects the architect has no influence on the location and orientation of the building. On the other hand it could be argued that the quality of the site has been confirmed during the lifetime of the building. According to Brand it is important to respect the structural hierarchy and to allow a “slippage between the differently-paced systems of the Site, Structure, Skin, Services, Space plan and Stuff” to prevent that “the slow systems block the flow of the quick ones, and the quick ones tear up the old ones with their constant changes” (Brand 1994).

All the investigated projects respect the structural hierarchy of the existing building. To ensure the future life of the existing building the projects avoid tearing down primary structures or making large penetrations in loadbearing walls. And they restrain from limiting the flexibility of the interior by designing temporary elements that can’t easily be changed or moved. To prevent systems with different paces to tear up each other all the projects respect the tectonic articulation: building basis, primary structure, complementing elements, surfaces and furniture. A building is like a living organism. The parts of the system are constantly changing, some slow and others fast. It is impossible to predict the future use since the functions, according to Brand, are constantly changing. For this reason Brand is calling for “scenario planning” able to take future change in program into consideration, or in other words: ”A good strategy ensures that, no matter what happens, you always have manoeuvring room” (Brand 1994: 92).

Some of the investigated projects propose a very specific new functional element to the building (fig. 1, 3, 9), others suggest a more general plan (fig. 4, 5, 7, 8) while some propose a combination (fig. 2, 6, 10). The generally usable plan allows a future flexibility of the building and by ensuring that interventions are not compromising the hierarchy of the existing structure also very functionally specific programs avoid limiting the future adaptivity. The Danish architect Vilhelm Wohlert describes very precisely how an “integration of a new function must not represent a threat to the existence of the building” and that the intervention

must be loyal to the properties of the building, i.e. the construction, the structure, the volume, the proportions, the materials and valuable decorations, the basic properties like the building envelope, and possible additions must not change the main balance and proportion (Wohlert 1976: 276).

The adaptability of a building may thus be a question of the building being functionally future-proof. A long life must be ensured by making sure the building can be used now – and in the future. It is about

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Kvadrat 1403

respecting the structural and tectonic hierarchy, planning for general usability and allowing interior flexibility. In other words: A sustainable architectural intervention must be appropriate.

The beautiful

It may be argued that listed buildings in themselves are sustainable because they have already had a long life. When a building is preserved the resources built into the structure are secured. But why are some buildings worth preserving at all? The German philosopher Gadamer argues that some buildings have become classic because they are able to re-actualize themselves to our attention. To Gadamer a work of art “is ontologically defined as an emanation of the original” (Gadamer 2004: 135). The work of art adds something new to the world by representing the original in an “event of being” which is “repeated each time in the mind of the viewer” (Gadamer 2004: 152). In this perspective the transformation of existing structures may be a question of making the essence of the building available to a contemporary attention. The question is, how can this be done?

All investigated projects depart from a thorough description of the buildings’ heritage values. The existing buildings have all been surveyed, analysed and assessed following the principles of Vadstrup (2015) in an attempt not to jeopardize the technical, historical and architectural values. In addition the interventions are based on a phenomenological survey as described by Andersen (2015b) aiming at specifying the experiential qualities of the building. Some of the buildings are listed or located on a site with high preservation value (fig. 1, 4, 5, 9, 10) while other buildings are in risk of being demolished (fig. 2, 3, 6, 7, 8). All projects respect the assessed heritage values of the existing building by not making interventions that would reduce them. On the contrary, every project adds a new technical, functional and aesthetic layer aimed at re-actualizing the building to a contemporary attention. In some cases, the intervention is done in contrast to the existing structure (fig. 1, 4, 6, 7, 10) in others as a subtle accent (fig. 3, 5, 8). Common for the investigated projects is that they express a new, overall character in close relation to the old.

The Swiss architect Peter Zumthor argues that: “if the intervention is to find its place, it must make us see what already exists in a new light” (Zumthor 2015: 18). Similarly, Vilhelm Wohlert argues how an intervention “just like the baroque epitaph implemented in a gothic church only adds something valuable to the existing if it is of artistic quality”. To make sense

only changes and additions caused by the transformation are valuable to the whole if they themselves are characterized by quality, i.e. if they are designed by a qualified architect (Wohlert 1976: 276).

Acknowledgement

Sustainable building culture may thus be understood as a question of architectural quality. To the German philosopher Martin Heidegger art is aesthetic knowledge, but on its own premise: “Art then is a becoming and happening of truth” (Heidegger 1978: 127). Art is about beauty, not in the banal understanding of the word, but as a question of letting appear, or in Heidegger’s words “Beauty is one way in which truth essentially occurs as unconcealment” (Heidegger 1978: 116). Thus, it could be argued that sustainable building culture is about re-interpreting the heritage values and experiential qualities. To secure the building a long life, the intervention must unconceal the essence of the existing building and re-actualize the architectural character to a contemporary attention. Sustainable building culture must address us on an intellectual level as well as touch us on an emotional level. In other words: sustainable architecture must be beautiful.

Sustainable building culture

On the question of what parameters contribute to make a building last long we may thus answer: because it is well built, because it can be used and because it talks to us. Sustainable building culture is in other words based on long-term technical, functional and aesthetic solutions that are far from becoming obsolete. It is characterized by technical aspects: the structural and tectonic hierarchy, energy reduction, optimization of space, the properties of the materials and the potential to repair, reuse or recycle; programmatic needs: the adaptability of the building, the generality of the plan and the flexibility of the interior and finally aesthetic properties: the heritage values, the experiential qualities and the general architectural quality of the intervention. In this perspective, the role of the architect is threefold: The architect is manager of resources, organizer of space and creator of architectural character. As mentioned in the introduction, the Brundtland Report defines sustainability as “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN 1987). This definition is according to Staniforth as referenced by Muñoz Viñas the whole meaning with preserving cultural heritage, that similarly may be defined as a way to ”pass on maximum significance to future generations” (Muñoz Viñas 2005: 195). This understanding underlines that building culture is not just a question of preserving the past for historic reasons, neither is it a matter of just solving practical needs for the present but it is also an ambition to pass on meaning to future generations. In continuation of this it could be argued that sustainable building culture is “a way of maintaining and reinforcing the meanings in an object” (Muñoz Viñas 2005: 213). This may be done securing technical durability, programmatic usability and aesthetic quality. In other words: Sustainable building culture is characterized by the necessary, the appropriate and the beautiful.

The article is based on the conference proceeding Andersen, NB 2015, ‘Sustainable transformation: building heritage, transformation and sustainability in a holistic perspective’, Proceedings of the 7. Passivhus Norden | Sustainable Cities and Buildings. Available from: http://passivhus.dk/wp-content/uploads/7PHN_proceedings/014.pdf. [22 June 2017].

References

• Advisory Board for cirkulær økonomi 2017, Anbefalinger til regeringen. Available from: http://mfvm.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/MFVM/Miljoe/Cirkulaer_oekonomi/Advisory_ Board_for_cirkulaer_oekonomi_Rapport.pdf. [10 June 2017].

• Andersen, NB 2015a, ‘Sustainable transformation: building heritage, transformation and sustainability in a holistic perspective’, Proceedings of the 7. Passivhus Norden | Sustainable Cities and Buildings. Available from: http://passivhus.dk/wp-content/uploads/7PHN_proceedings/014.pdf. [22 June 2017].

• Andersen, NB 2015b, ‘Fænomenbunden registrering’, in C Harlang & A Algreen-Petersen (eds), Om Bygningskulturens Transformation, pp. 144-149. Gekko Publishing, København.

• Baumschlager Eberle, Schweigkofler, G & Walden, G 2007, Ressourcen und Architektur. Resources and Architecture, Eigenverlag Architectural Devices AG, St. Gallen.

• Brand, S 1994, How buildings learn: What happens after they’re built, Penguin Books, New York.

• Celsing, J 2008, ‘The Robust, the Sincere’ in Andersen MA (ed), Nordic Architects Write – A documentary anthology, pp. 391-399. Routledge, New York.

• Gadamer, HG 2004, Truth and Method, Continuum, London.

• Heidegger, M 2011, ‘The Origin of the Work of Art’, in M Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 83-140. Routledge, London.

• Kulturarvsstyrelsen 2016, Vejledning vurdering af fredningsværdier. Available from: http://slks.dk/fileadmin/user_upload/kulturarv/bygninger/dokumenter/Vejledning_til_ vurdering_af_fredningsvaerdier.pdf. [22 June 2016].

• Miljø- og Fødevareministeriet 2017, Om en cirkulær økonomi. Available from: http://mst.dk/virksomhed-myndighed/groen-strategi/cirkulaer-oekonomi-og-ressourceeffektivitet/om-en-cirkulaer-oekonomi/. [10 June 2017].

• Muñoz Viñas, S 2005, Contemporary theory of conservation, Elsevier, Amsterdam.

• Trafik- og Byggestyrelsen 2016, Bæredygtigt byggeri. Available from: http://www.trafikstyrelsen.dk/~/media/Dokumenter/09%20Byggeri/Baredygtigt%20byggeri/ TBST-2016-02-Introduktion_Bæredygtigt_Byggeri.pdf. [22 June 2017].

• UN 1987, Our Common Future, Chapter 2: Towards Sustainable Development. Available from: http://www.un-documents.net/ocf-02.htm#I. [13 june 2017].

• Vadstrup, S 2015, ‘Analyse og værdisætning’, in C Harlang & A Algreen-Petersen (eds), Om Bygningskulturens Transformation, pp. 150-157. Gekko Publishing, København.

• Vitruvius 1914, The Ten Books on Architecture, Harvard University Press, Cambridge.

• Wohlert, V 1976, ‘Restaurering - genbrug’, Arkitekten 13 1976, p. 276.

• Zumthor, P 2015, Thinking Architecture, Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel.

CHURCH CHANGE

TEXT: TRINE HJORTH SKOVBO

THIS STUDY INVESTIGATES HOW THE CHURCH OF DENMARK, WHOSE MEMBERSHIP IS IN RAPID DECLINE, SELECTS CHURCHES FOR CLOSING. IT INVESTIGATES THE PARAMETERS AND GENERAL CONDITIONS BEHIND THE SELECTION, AND THE CONSEQUENCES OF THESE ON BOTH SMALL RURAL VILLAGES AND URBAN COMMUNITIES. AS NATIONAL LANDMARKS, THE CHURCHES TOWER THROUGHOUT THE LANDSCAPE, AND THROUGH THEM, WE COME TO UNDERSTAND THE HISTORY OF OUR LANDSCAPE. THE CHURCHES OF DENMARK OFFER BOTH ARCHITECTURAL AND CULTURAL INSIGHT INTO A LONG PERIOD OF OUR HISTORY.

INTRODUCTION

Our rural churches give both architectural and cultural insights into a long period in the history of Denmark. As a national landmark, the churches rise throughout the landscape, giving it perspective and character. Through these constructions, we come to understand the landscape’s history. Churches, church towers, churchyards and their surrounding walls, are all simple structures that constitute a both unifying and descriptive contribution to our understanding of the past and how we have reached the present. And hereby an insight into how we can move forward. However, today these constructions are challenged with respect to their functionality, their cultural significance, and their economic sustainability.

The Danish National Church is challenged along multiple parameters, setting the context of the present debate around permanent church closures. The future for rural churches in modern society is a complex and hitherto largely unaddressed matter. A thousand years of history is on the table. Issues and challenges pertaining to church closures and transformations become further complicated when concerning churches in the smallest parishes of Denmark.

Research questions covered by the article:

• What are the potentials for new or alternative uses of the church buildings in villages where assembly facilities, parsonages and schools also increasingly sit empty and unused?

• On what grounds should we single out churches for closure, cultural heritage, preservation status, geographical location, or sheer membership?

The transformation theoretical questions apply:

• How can the future and transformation of these structures, constructions, and environments be qualified?

• How can rural churches be developed further as a central meaningful factor in the spatial organization of society?

• How can the building heritage be secured in order to make its values instrumental in accommodating new needs without sacrifice?

• Can this meaningful cultural heritage with changed functional content still preserve its most important value content - and hereby continue to figure as the nation’s primary cultural heritage throughout the landscape?

These questions are the basis of this article, which presents the investigation, research result, and discussion of a research project ”Fremtiden for Danmarks landsbykirker” conducted in 2016 by Trine Hjorth Skovbo and Christoffer Harlang.

BACKGROUND

A basic problem when it comes to church closures and transformations in Denmark is that we have no firmly defined parameters to govern process and decision. The lone political announcement regarding selection parameters for church closures suggested membership in individual parishes as the only one (Damløv, 2013). The selection basis for which churches to close in Denmark today remains more or less unresolved. Were selection to take place solely based on membership below 200, the nation’s 205 smallest parishes would face closure.

Churches before 1536

As the only buildings in Denmark, the churches of the Danish National Church are not covered by the Listed Buildings and Preservation of Buildings and Urban Environments Act. The preservation question is raised only when a church is taken out of National Church use. All medieval churches, i.e. those constructed before 1536, the year of Reformation in Denmark, that are taken out of National Church use will automatically be covered by the building Preservation Act. Any future transformation of these churches must be based on an understanding of the buildings’ societal, cultural historical and architectural qualities. This requires us to take a sharpened position on churches’ future function and transformation ability.

Churches after 1536

Churches constructed after 1536 and/or cemeteries are also preserved only if conservation value is determined to be especially sig-

nificant. None of the recently closed churches in Copenhagen are listed, but the situation is very different when it comes to rural churches in Denmark’s smallest parishes.

Urban or Rural

The majority of churches in Denmark’s 205 smallest parishes are constructed before 1536, and the vast majority of these are situated in sparsely populated areas threatened by vacation and decay (Skovbo and Harlang, 2016). Church closures in Copenhagen started with selection of 17 churches and ended in reality with divestment of six churches. These are churches not listed, located in densely populated areas with a good potential for new usage, and with societal forces to purchase and operate the churches.

The situation in rural village areas is often a different one. A community and/or cultural centre requires more inhabitants that what the majority of these villages have. Moreover, the smallest parishes are often closely located, which limits the potential for new usage further, church by church. Thisted municipality in the northern part of Jutland is a good illustration of this with 19 churches each counting less than 200 members (Skovbo and Harlang, 2016).

An International Plight

Looking beyond Denmark’s national borders, one finds several countries with a well-established practice around church closures and transformation of churches to serve new purposes. Germany, Holland, England and Spain among others have all over past decades closed and re-purposed church buildings as a response to decreasing membership and significant demographic change. The same underlying dynamics we see in Denmark.

In Scandinavia, the biggest change is taking place in Sweden. Churches are being repurposed for museums, religious rooms for other communities, and private housing. Also, demolitions have occurred; for example the otherwise listed Maglarps Nya Kyrka in 2007. The number of unprotected churches closed down and sold between 2000 and 2009 total 26 (Gröhn, 2010). As the only country, Norway goes against the secularization trend we see in Sweden, Finland, Iceland – and now also Denmark.

Church Closings Historically

Church closures have traditionally gone hand in hand with construction of new churches. Agricultural crises, epidemics, religious change and demographic development have left vast areas desolate and churches superfluous. But here closure has equalled demolition. Transformation of churches, on the other hand, is something we have not seen in Denmark historically on any significant scale. If we look into the past, beyond the recently closed and divested churches in Copenhagen, over the last 200 years only 12 churches in the entire country have been closed and transformed. On this basis alone, the complexity of what awaits becomes clear (Andersen, 2012).

DATA

Looking at a map of Denmark’s 205 smallest parishes, one observes a very uneven geographical spread. The parishes are primarily located along the shoreline in outlying areas and predominantly in Northern Jutland and on Lolland-Falster, and are thus closely impacted by the general tendency of migration from rural to urban areas. Also, a large number of island churches are represented on the list of Denmark’s smallest parishes. (Skovbo and Harlang, 2016).

87% of churches threatened with closure are from before 1536 and thus automatically listed if taken out of ecclesial use. The remaining 13% churches are from after 1536 and conservation status is subject to individual assessment. In other words, 87% of the churches in

Title page: Rural churches in Northern Jutland

Photo: Mie Burchardi & Trine Hjorth Skovbo

Opposite page: Heldagerlille Kirke

Photo: Mie Burchardi

question are protected via the Conservation act, but are thus also limited when it comes to options for alternative future use. Conversely, the remaining 13% will face fewer restrictions on new use and transformation, depending on whether they are listed or deemed worthy of preservation. (Skovbo and Harlang, 2016).

63% of the churches are located in or near a village (41% and 22%, respectively), while 15% of churches lay solitary in the landscape and 22% in connection with other settlements (e.g. a manor or other industry) or special locations / landmarks. In addition, it can be noted that a total of 21 churches (10%) are situated on islands with no fixed mainland connection (Skovbo and Harlang, 2016). Overall, this uneven geographic spread in is itself, clearly illustrates the challenges of selecting churches for closure based solely on membership.

DISCUSSION

The village has since early medieval time developed from an agriculture community, to a community with different small craft- and artisanship business, and to the present, predominantly as residential area. The Danish demographical development with widespread urbanization only aggravates the challenge of finding new use for rural churches.

Danish churches and their parish structure is a collective is without comparison. By closing all churches with a membership number under 200, meaning 205 churches in total, corresponding to 8.7% the collective work will be impaired. The degree to which the holistic experience of this collective masterpiece would be affected, if at all affected, is debatable. Could church closings of this relatively small magnitude (8.7%) be considered dispensable? Denmark’s churches are laid out in a fine-meshed pattern, connecting Denmark from the north to the south. Distances between the churches are as low as to 5 km, so no one should ever walk more than 30 minutes to get to church on Sundays. Surely, church closings would cause this pattern to weaken. However, it would hardly dissolve if in fact churches were to close based on a balanced set of parameters, rather than mere membership count.

Structure of the Danish National Church

A parish is a geographically defined area, where the members of the church have a common church. The parish structure is hundreds of years old, but gradually as new churches were built throughout the country’s growth areas, new parishes came to be. The parish structure has been one of continuous development. The deanery is an administrative group of several parishes. In the deanery, the parishes share a Grant and a Dean. The Danish National Church is divided in to 117 deaneries, each with its own Dean and Deanery Committee. The average number of parishes in a deanery is 20, but it does vary from 5-6 in the cities to 20 on the countryside. Denmark’s 2.201 parishes are divided in pastorates. A pastorate is an area that shares one priest, can count several parishes, and thus several churches (Folkekirken, 2015).

The pastorate structure makes it financially possible to run three churches in the same area, but it is also causing reduced use of the pastorates’ different churches, because most of the activity is held in the main church. There are many good reasons for this structure, but at the same time it illustrates the challenges of the rural churches. By dividing parishes into pastorates and only maintaining the Sunday worship once a month in each church, the use of the churches is reduced ‘automatically’, and several parishes are left with an unused, lockedup church. This is not a critique of the pastorate dividing, but it does help explain the generally declining use of the Danish rural churches.

Financial Sustainability

What is a “sustainable church” and can a church be thought of in an holistically sustainable perspective? Considerations concerrning financial sustainability are hard to avoid in this context since many churches sit underused (or not used at all) all the while maintenance, utility and staff cost etc. remain. Consider for example a deanery with an annual budget of 30m Danish kroner having to operate and maintain 33 churches. Finances are a substantial part of the equation. So sustainability could also entail offering fewer Sunday worships around the country (i.e. fewer churches), hereby ensuring a reasona-

ble level of participation in the active churches. Churchgoers would of course have to accept having to travel longer distances, maybe to the next village (Nielsen, 2015).

There are no restrictions on what new function a former church building can assume upon closing, whether listed or not. Today many listed buildings take on new functions with approval from the Agency for Culture & Palaces. There is however a certain practice to heed when the listed building is a former church because of the “feelings” often involved when dealing with churches. This is reinforced when in rural churches, because these often include a cemetery.

The obvious question is then, what is best for these churches? Is it acceptable for many churches to sit unused, or would it better to close and reopen churches for new use by the community?

Heritage Criteria

Another relevant consideration is the default demarcation year of 1536. Is the year of construction in fact the right parameter viewed in broader (and perhaps more practical) perspective? There is no doubt that the Conservation Act and its restrictions in most instances is a positive, but could it in this particular situation be argued that the large number of this building typology calls for a slight departure from standard legislation? Are 50 pre-reformatory churches in Thisted municipality really all worthy of listed status? Or does the listed actually diminished the larger the number of a given edifice within a small geographical area?

Arguments against the above point would be that exactly the sheer amount is what makes Danish churches so collectively manifesting and unique. Seen from a formalistic perspective, there are no superfluous churches and little argument that the amount of a building typology decreases its preservation value. But it is a discussion worth having, and the issue should be illuminated ahead of any decision concerning the future of the Danish rural churches

CONCLUSION

One could say that architecture is a spacious expression of a community’s knowledge and ability, its dreams and ambitions, both for the buildings, the spatial expression and organization, and textual processing. The same goes for the life between houses in small villages and in cities. When the building, as in this case small village churches, also has symbolic value and is an artefact of much of the history and tradition our society rests on, the relation between church and settlement is especially important. Many small villages are characterized by relocation and decay; here it is not only churches that sit under- or unused, but buildings at large in the community.

The purpose of this article is to underline how important it is that the potential for village churches be qualified based on balanced criteria, sound analytics, and through a respectful approach that takes a basic premise that buildings can (and maybe even should) live on even after their original function expires. The development history of churches is long, and most churches have undergone change in the form of increase or decrease in building volume since initial construction. In other words, the general changes in society have always influenced and contributed to the continuous development of the church buildings that we know to day.

It is essential for church closings in Denmark that the decision parameters are properly qualified, and does not rest solely on an easily measurable parameter (such as membership count). Rather, a number of different parameters must be considered; e.g. level of activity in the church, the value of the church’s cultural and architectural heritage, the transformation ability relative to others churches in the parish. And of course membership count.

Within the individual pastorates, there might be scenarios where it is found sensible to close down a particular church with a higher membership count versus other churches because it carries lower cultural-historical and architectural value, and thus has better transformation potential. There could be exceptions for churches located on the small Danish islands. The smallest Danish islands, which

aren’t connected to the mainland by bridge, can rarely live up to the parishes on the main land. By applying a set of well-defined parameters, the basis upon which decisions around the future of Danish rural churches are made is sharpened. While at the same time illuminating the potential and real options for new use of the individual church.

In view of several recent church closings and a presumed further increase going forward, one must be realistic when suggesting alternative use for the churches. Not all rural churches in immediate risk of potential closure can be transformed into museums, libraries, cultural houses and the like. Therefore, it is important to raise the bar, and take a proactive stance on church transformations in Denmark. We must establish a culture and process by which we qualify all future church transformations. With the right mindset and a thoughtful approach, Denmark can pioneer good and respectful church transformations. The holistic perspective must not be lost; new solutions must consider not only individual cases, but collectives ones because many churches in small villages are located within close distances. Therefore, variation together with adaption to local environments and circumstances becomes important.

The ideas for new uses of churches are many, some obvious and straightforward, others more innovative even testing the art of the possible. It is important not to start from a point of restriction. No two churches are identical, and hence there is no one size fits all solution. The main task is first to decide which churches to close (based on a set of balanced parameters, as argued above), and thereafter to qualify the actual transformation based on an understanding of the conservation values and the location specific to each church. The new use will set new requirements for church buildings’ thermal insulation, energy consumption, accessibility, escape routes, daylight amount to name just some. Requirements that for most church buildings would be hard to live up to when there are also conservation values to protect. Often the geographical location is a limiting factor for an alternative use of the building. Village churches often sit in areas of Denmark where the population is small and hence it is uncertain whether the required number of users can be attracted – and be sustained.

References

• Andersen, P. B. (2012, 23.4.2012). Københavnske kirkeplaner overgår 200 års lukninger. Politiken. Retrieved from http://politiken.dk/indland/ECE1604615/koebenhavnske-kirkeplaner-overgaar-200-aars-lukninger/

• Damløv, L. (2013). Manu Sareen åbner for yderligere 200 kirkelukninger. Retrieved from http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/politik/manu-sareen-aabner-yderlige- re-200-kirkelukninger

• Folkekirken (2015). Retrieved from http://www.folkekirken.dk/om-folkekirken/ organisation.

• Gröhn, S. (2010). Kulturarv för evigheten? : studie av kyrkans utveckling och framtid med exemplet Skallsjö kyrka. Göteborg: Institutionen för kulturvård, Göteborgs universitet.

• Nielsen, H. B. (2015, 25.3.2015). Kommentar: Kirke i byen. Retrieved from http://www.kirkefondet.dk/index.php?id=68&tx_tt-news%5Btt_news%5D=349&cHash=b65b8f3cd16ac33d08c0b8de36856a9e

• Skovbo, T. H. & Harlang, C. 2016. Fremtiden for Danmarks landsbykirker, Analyse og anbefaling, København, Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering.

WHAT MATTERS

TEXT & PHOTO: SØREN BAK-ANDERSEN

HOW DO WE CREATE AN ARCHITECTURE INSPIRED BY THE CONFIDENCE OF THE PAST, WITHOUT REVERTING TO REGRESSIVE TRADITIONALISM? RE-THINKING VERNACULAR MEANS UNDERSTANDING ORIGIN AND REASONS, NOT REINTERPRETING STYLE. IT IS ABOUT KNOWLEDGE, NOT STYLE. IS IT TIME TO REVISIT THE TERM LOCAL? IN MUCH THE SAME WAY THAT THE NEW NORDIC KITCHEN HAS REDISCOVERED ITS MEANING, IN AN OTHERWISE TASTELESS SOUP OF MEDIOCRITY, ARCHITECTURE IN OUR REGION MAY FIND ITSELF STRENGTHENED BY CONDENSING ITS STATEMENT ACCORDING TO OUR REGIONAL SPECIFICITY - THE NEW LOCAL.

INTRODUCTION

This is an investigation of how craft, craftsmanship and knowledge of historical building materials can inform contemporary architecture.

The academic essay follows two stated hypotheses by means of historical research and discussion. First, that there is a tendency in contemporary architecture to be less observant of tactile qualities of material, and more focused on visual perception. And secondly, that contemporary architects have less connection to traditions and customs than previous generations.

These hypotheses are explored through the lens of the craftsman. It is assumed as an overall frame of discussion, that the answer to the above statements is to be found, not so much in prevailing architectural style, but in the industrialisation following in the footsteps of modernism throughout the 20th century, resulting in a disempowerment of the craftsman as such.

First, a cross disciplinary experiment into the production of materials opens a broader discourse on aesthetics. Secondly, historical research is conducted into the backgrounds of architecture students at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, opening a gateway to discussing how prior education of either craft or academia, has influence on how the students connect to material studies and craftsmanship. By reflecting this, in the words of a number of academics, theorists and practitioners within the architecture field, the scope of these small investigations is widened to a broader discourse.

The timeframe covered in this essay is the 20th and first part of the 21th century, discussing the evolution of the industrialisation of the building industry that took place during this period, and how this has impacted the position of craft within the contemporary building industry.

BACKGROUND

Universalisation

The impoverishment of the term “a machine to live in” (Corbusier, 1963) describes the very essence of universalisation, reducing “living” to a mere functional need. In this reduction to universalism, there is, a cultural and human dimension which is not accounted for.

According to Paul Ricoeur (Ricoeur, 1965), the phenomenon of universalisation is both an advancement of mankind, whilst at the same time constituting a subtle destruction of traditional cultures. Such a duality is more easily understood, if one does not think of traditional cultures as static concepts, any civilisation is on one hand universal, and all must take part, or at least confront modern civilisation, yet at the same time civilisations are defined by regional identity. Reynar Banham describes how tradition was lost during the modern movement. Understanding tradition as being an inherent part of the continuity of building culture, is not extended through the modern movement and into the 20th century.

The human chain of pioneers of the Modern Movement that extends back from Gropius to William Morris, and beyond him to Ruskin, Pugin and William Blake, does not extend forward from Gropius. The Precious vessel of handicraft aesthetics that has been passed from hand to hand, was dropped and broken, and no one has bothered to pick up the pieces.

(Banham, 1967)

Banham points out, that handicraft aesthetics is the vessel, or medium, by which building tradition is passed on, and that this act of continuity has been broken after the era of the modern movement.

Cultural homogenisation and the loss of regional identity has been the result of mass internationalisation and global industrialisation. Resulting in architecture students today facing a variety of complex and often contradictory observations concerning materiality.

In the era since the first industrial revolution and in particular during the 20th century, the availability of building materials has grown ex-

ponentially (Gravesen, 1980). This vast availability of materials, and hence following construction techniques, clouds the essentials of studying architecture.

Kenneth Frampton writes of how our contemporary building culture is nothing more than a scenography to provide us with the illusion of the tactility of the past. “…[T]he provision of a ‘compensatory façade’ to cover up the harsh realities of this universal system.” (Frampton, 1983)

In an effort to improve efficiency, we have failed to understand the continuity of our building culture. This discontinuity is nowhere more evident, than in the material we use and the details and techniques we employ when building.

HYPOTHESIS ONE

The first hypothesis is explored through an investigation into what happens when industry attempts to imitate the inherent workings of the hand.

Imitations of craft

It has of late become the new standard of the domestic building industry to use brick with more character and more colour nuances than that of string pressed brick, so called soft moulded brick. This character, or imperfection, is the result of a process in which a machine imitates the work of a man forming a brick, and is also due to the introduction of coal or minerals in the kiln during the firing process, resulting in variation within the production run. The method has been a great commercial success, and was most welcome by the architect profession also.

It is, however, paradoxical to let a machine imitate how a man works instead of forming the production around the inherent workings of the machine. This mechanical reproduction often leads to tactile properties of the finished product, that are very similar, but not identical to that of the authentic craftsmanship. These subtle differences can lead to the slight unease of the observer, as he or she is unable to escape the elusive feeling that something is not right. This feeling can be described as The uncanny valley, a term from robotics science and computer animation first used by Masahiro Mori in 1970, describing the emotional response real humans have when looking at non humans with varying degree of human likeness (Mori, 2012). Before the term was coined, the word uncanny was used in the English translation of Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay, Das Unheimliche, to describe something which one could find frightening, but being unable to clearly specify why (Freud, 1919). The German word Unheimliche is the opposite of Heimliche meaning homelike, that which is familiar. From that leading that Unheimliche is that which is unfamiliar. In the English translation, uncanny may more readily be associated with the word Eerie, defined by Merriam-Webster as: So mysterious, strange, or unexpected as to send a chill up the spine.

The second part of the term, Valley, comes from the diagram depicted as Fig. I, which appears in the original article by Mori. By drawing a graph of the relation between human likeness and the onlookers comfort levels, one sees a drop in the curve before reaching perfect human likeness. This drop, in the form of a steep valley, represents the attempt at making something mechanically produced look authentic.

Title page:

KTR Workshop. Students studying Danish vernacular timber frame constructions.

Opposite page: The Gymnasium of the Nuuk College of Education. The boards are cut using a circular saw from either side of the log, resulting in an unintended pattern and surface refinement of the boards as a direct result of the machining.

Industrial Robot +

Toy Robot

Uncanny Valley

Af finity ( Shinwakan )

Human likeness 50% 100%

Healthy Person

Bunraku Puppet Prosthetic Hand

Clay Blocks Broomed Machine Brick +

Af finity ( Shinwakan )

Machine brick

Uncanny Valley

Authentic Handcraft

Hand-molded Gasfired brick

Soft-molded brick

Soft-molded, mineral covered and blended

Handcraft Likeness 50% 100%

Pattern embossed machine brick

Fig. II. The theory of the uncanny valley applied to the manufacturing of brick. The same experiment can be made for the production of glass, where glass manufactures deliberately cause ripples in the panes of glass to make it look like it was handmade by the cylinder method. Or to the products of the wood industry i.e. embossed panelboards with patterns of 17th century planks.

In this essay the attempt will be made to apply this approach to other branches of aesthetics than that of humanoids, namely on the tactility of buildings and materials.

The uncanny valley of brick production

From the time of the Indus Valley Civilization (Khan and Lemmen, 2013) up until the invention of industrial extruders, brick was produced by ramming clay mixed with sand into a wet wooden mold. This way of production meant each brick had creases along the sides adding to the tactile character of the final wall. These imperfections were unintentional, and was a direct result of the state-of-the-art production technique at the time1.The essence is, that every effort was put into producing the best possible brick with the technology at hand, never the less resulting in bricks with characteristic cosmetic defects.

..the technique of reproduction detaches the reproduced object from the domain of tradition. (Benjamin, 1935)

With the introduction of extruders and string presses at the brickyards, the stride of the second industrial revolution to remove workers from industrial processes came nearer. Now automated factories produce near perfect bricks with little or no variation, known as machine bricks. This development could be seen as a logical next step, in the ways of earlier manufactures, to produce the best brick possible.

However something happened, not expected by the rationality and logic in the calculated performance specifications of the string pressed brick. Clients and architects preferred the more rustic look of the old brick, a less superior product, when looking solely at the quantitative data. These sought after imperfections could be seen as response to the inhumane of the industry.

In a small thought experiment, which can be repeated by the reader, different types of brick are compared using the graph of the uncanny valley. By looking at different samples of brickwork, one can begin to evaluate these according to the curve depicted in Fig. II. For instance, does a sample of non-presumptuous machine brick rank higher in affinity than that of a soft-molded and blended one, despite the obvious attempt at making the latter look more handcrafted?

According to Walter Benjamin, any unique work of art in history had an aura, a magical or supernatural depth originating from the uniqueness. The aura has disappeared, following the ability to reproduce art mechanically becoming possible. The concept of aura is connected to authenticity and a reproduced work of art is never fully present. The history of manufacturing, bears resemblance to that of the history of art and the media it is presented through. “That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art”. (Benjamin, 1935)

Benjamin sees the aura or authenticity of art works, or in this case handcrafted building materials, as fundamentally connected to tradition. Mechanical reproduction is completely detached from the tradition of the craft, thereby losing its presence and affinity.

HYPOTHESIS TWO

The second hypothesis is explored through a study of statistical data on the backgrounds of architecture students at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Linking these findings to the concepts of tradition and custom.

Architects as craftsmen

At the School of Architecture in Copenhagen, the tradition of enrolling students has changed over the course of the 20th century. Prior to the year 1900, students were all craftsmen, from various trades, who aimed to improve their artistic skills. By the beginning of the century, students with academic background in mathematics were also admitted, on the condition that they participate in a two-year technical course followed by 8 months of practical work as a hodman or other unskilled labourer.

Throughout the century, more and more students with academic background were admitted to the school, and Rector of the Academy Tobias Faber 2 noted in 1966, that one third of the students were of academic background, and that this number was increasing (Faber, 1966).

In the year 2016, the number of students who applied to the school with a background of BA in Architectural Technology and Construction Management, or with an EUX3 exam was 1 out of 200 enrolled students (Forskningsministeriet, 2016).

Thus, students graduating from the school today do not have the same background as craftsmen, which once was a given for architects. Thereby, architects today separate themselves from the craftsmen who are constructing the buildings, because the architects when graduating from Architecture School no longer possess the same practical skills, but mostly theoretical and artistic knowledge.

Traditions, now and in the future

It can be argued, that our building culture is coupled to continuity of knowledge and the skills of the craftsmen. Our building culture is the overall defining understanding of our physical surroundings, the defining scheme of regional understanding in buildings and environments. It is a set of traditions, which are not static, but constantly challenged, redeveloped and re-presented, forming our modern un-

Opposite page: The participants of this carving workshop at KEA, studied the importance of obtaining knowledge of a material by handling it, and not just by reading about it, thereby gaining an understanding of how an idea, the material, the tool and the hand wielding it, all influences the outcome of the product.

Fig. I. The uncanny valley, a term from robotics science and computer animation first used by Masahiro Mori in 1970. Recreation of the original illustration by Mori.

derstanding of our past. It is also the legacy which we pass on and present to the next generations for them to develop, making it an ongoing discussion.

When T.S. Eliot in 1919 wrote one of his more renowned essays on the concept of tradition named “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, he was writing of poets and their works, but he might as well have been writing of any art form, including architecture.

Yet if the only form of tradition, of handing down, consisted in following the ways of the immediate generation before us in a blind or timid adherence to its successes, ‘tradition’ should positively be discouraged. We have seen many such simple currents soon lost in the sand; and novelty is better than repetition. Tradition is a matter of much wider significance. It cannot be inherited, and if you want it you must obtain it by great labour. It involves, in the first place, the historical sense… and the historical sense involves a perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence;...(Eliot, 1982)

Tradition is not following the customs of yesteryear with blind adherence. Tradition is making historical sense of the past, but also of the present. Understanding that which is temporal and that which is timeless together. The reintroduction of that which is already known, with a new freshness.

DISCUSSION - IDENTITY

Traditions leads to identity

Identity is what defines us in connection to our experiences and origin. It can surround large groups of people or only one self. It is a fleeting concept, that may stretch or slacken, including or excluding individuals. Whichever way it is, you know when you are able to identify yourself with a place, and when you are not. “…searching for identity, without being identical.”(Joy, 2012)’

The definition of this elusive identity must be neither to tight, as it becomes the instigator of unrest, xenophobia and conflict, nor must it be too loose, as people then no longer feel the connection to place and history (Brislin, 2012). With little doubt, being able to identify yourself with place and history is a key element to being in this world.

The way we exist in space and the way this space inhabits us, intertwined with body and mind, is what constitutes identity. As Churchill is quoted: “We shape our buildings and afterwards our buildings shape us”. Referring to this, that the layout of the Common Chambers is in part responsible for the two-party system, which is the foundation of British parliamentary democracy.

A generator of design

Building tradition has gone from being based on the inherent values of materials to being grand scale expressionism, focused only on visual sensory perception. When architecture students approach a problem, it is seldom studied from the material perspective, but more often from a visual perspective. This difference of working with the actual material, learning about it by handling it, like the craftsman would. And working with a visual reference to a material, makes all the difference. Understanding material from lived experiences connects the sensory experiences of our past life and childhood to the sensory input of today. We simply could not understand what, i.e., a piece of wood is, simply by looking at it, but only by connecting to past experiences of what it feels like, its mass, roughness, dampness, smell etc.

Walter Benjamin recognizes the difference between touch and sight as similar to the tourist contemplating a building by visual perception mostly, whereas the user appropriates it in a tactile way, because the user is living with the building. ”Buildings are appropriated in a twofold manner: by use and by perception – or rather, by touch and sight” (Benjamin, 1935).

In a workshop hosted at the Master Program KTR4 , the evolution of different timber constructions primarily in the Scandinavian context was studied in order to understand the taxonomy into which these can be grouped but also sorted by their evolutionary state and regional affiliation.

The students were each given a particular type of timber construction and asked to build the complete structure of the building in a model of scale 1:100, and a larger section of the construction in scale 1:20.

The workshop is not purely a technical and constructional workshop, it also leads to the understanding of ethical issues concerning choice of materials, and the consequences the construction has on the architecture. But most of all, it gives the student the opportunity to study the tactile character of a material, which is lost otherwise on he who is without such prior experiences.

This workshop not only connects to the material, but also to the tradition of how it is used. The importance of understanding the sequence of erecting a building, the hierarchy of the building, an understanding which comes natural to the carpenter, but is lost, if learning about wooden constructions through Google Sketchup.

Re-vernacularisation and The danger of regressive traditionalism

How to become modern and return to sources.

(Ricoeur, 1965)

Vernacular buildings are not about particular architectural style. Instead they are about research through lived experiment. Re-thinking vernacular means understanding origin and reasons, not reinterpreting style. It is about knowledge, not style.

We all know of course that you cannot begin by inventing anew, but by attending distinctly to the necessities of the time... (Morris, 1891)

If architecture only expresses the man who did it, and not the world it is in, it can hardly be said to give something back to the world. On the other hand, the anonymous building, which carries none of this subjective background has a far more universal appeal. “The ordinary architecture must be anonymous and timeless.” (Fisker, 1964)

Unselfconscious attributes are associated with traditional cultures and the more self-conscious with modern cultures.

Some of the qualities we find in the anonymous building or in the vernacular buildings, are not the result of one individual striving for them. They are either achieved intuitively, or passed on as part of the continuous handing down of experience through generations. It leads to a far more complex understanding of architecture and the underlying experiences connected to it, than those narrowly described at the basis of modernity. “those buildings, […] actually grew up simply without any intermediary between the mind and the hands of the people who actually built them.” (Morris, 1891)

Re-vernacularisation is not about bringing back that which has been abandoned, for reasons of nostalgia, but rather because hidden knowledge lay beneath the surface of that which may otherwise seem ordinary. There is no intention to falsify history. It is a search of emersion in history and place and by taking this in, recreating it by adding yourself and our contemporary beliefs, hereby being modern whilst returning to the sources.

CONCLUSION AND RECOMMENDATIONS

As for the architecture schools, no impending future prospect of craftsmen attending seems imminent. How then do we teach the academic students about material integrated culture? If the case is, as suggested in this essay, that quality of architecture is closely linked to understanding the material based and technical side to our profes-

sion, and the salvation lies within understanding the position of the craftsman, the solution would then be to include this in architect student curriculum. One learns the nature about a brick, not by reading about it, but by physically studying it. Joyce Carol Oates writes in The Faith of a Writer, “for without an immersion in the history of the craft, one is doomed to remain an amateur...”

Are we creating modern works of history today when producing buildings that have hardly even seen the touch of a hand? It can be argued that this is the case of many of the buildings of the 1960s, which today are listed and being considered national heritage, but for which architects and historians are still struggling to formulate a modern heritage scheme, that responds, not only to age value, as we are accustomed, but also to the modern production methods by

which these buildings were constructed. Considering these buildings were erected using industrial methods, it would be paradoxical to start restoring them using handcraft.

Further studies into this field of architecture before architects are called for; of how to create an architecture inspired by the confidence of the past, an architecture of: Resistance, Resilience and Robustness.

Is it time to revisit the term local? In much the same way that the New Nordic Kitchen has rediscovered its meaning, in an otherwise tasteless soup of mediocrity, architecture in our region may find itself strengthened by condensing its statement according to our regional specificity - The new local.

Notes

1. After the drying process the bricks were fired in a coal fueled stack. The stacking order had influence on the temperature of the brick in the kiln as fuel was generally added from above. Different positions in the stack resulted in brick with different properties and different looks. This was part of the vernacular knowledge of this region, in which brick was used in connection with timber frame. The harder fired bricks were used at the bottom of the wall, where rain water risked splashing back after hitting the ground and generally being more exposed. The softer fired bricks, or even green bricks, were used at the top of the wall, protected by the long eaves from exposure to rain.

2. Tobias Faber, Dean of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts and the School of Architecture 1965-1985

3. Combined craftsman and academic upper secondary diploma.

4. Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation , School of Architecture, Institute: Architecture and Culture, Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration, hence forth named KTR

References

• BANHAM, R. 1967. Theory and design in the first machine age, London, London : The Architectural Press.

• BENJAMIN, W. 1935. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, New York, Schocken Books.

• BRISLIN, P. 2012. Identity, Place and Human Experience. Architectural Design, AD, 82, 144.

• CORBUSIER, L. 1963. Towards a new architecture, London/New York, London/New York : The Architectural Press/Dover Publications.

• ELIOT, T. S. 1982. Tradition and the Individual Talent. Perspecta, 19, 36-42.

• FABER, T. 1966. Arkitekt-uddannelsen. In: HELTOFT, A. (ed.) Moderne dansk arkitektur. København: Schæffergården.

• FISKER, K. 1964. Persondyrkelse eller anonymitet. Arkitekten, 26.

• FORSKNINGSMINISTERIET, U.-O. 2016. Tal og fakta om søgning og optag på de videregående uddannelser 2016 [Online]. UFM. Available: http://ufm.dk/uddannelse-og-institutioner/statistik-og-analyser/sogning-og-optag-pa-videregaende-uddannelser [Accessed May 6th 2017].

• FRAMPTON, K. 1983. Towards a Critical Regionalism: Six Points for an Architecture of Resistance. In: FOSTER, H. (ed.) Postmodern Culture. London: Pluto Press.

• FREUD, S. 1919. Das Unheimliche, The Uncanny. In: STRACHEY, J. (ed.) The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Workds of Sigmund Freud. London: The Hogarth Press.

• GRAVESEN, F. 1980. træk af byggeriets udvikling 1920-77. IFH-rapport nr.148.

• HARLANG, C., THULE KRISTENSEN, P. & MÜLLER, A. 2009. Arkitektursyn, Danske arkitekturmanifester 1901-2008, København, København : Kunstakademiets Arkitektsskole, Institut 1.

• JOY, R. 2012. Identity through the grounding of experience in place. Architectural Design, AD, 82, 144.

• KHAN, A. & LEMMEN, C. 2013. Bricks and urbanism in the Indus valley rise and decline. arXiv preprint arXiv:1303.1426.

• MORI, M. 2012. The Uncanny Valley. Robotics & Automation Magazine. IEEE.

• MORRIS, W. 1891. The Influence of Building Materials on Architecture. Art Workers’ Guild.

• RICOEUR, P. 1965. History and Truth, Northwestern University Press.

NEVER WASTE A GOOD CRISIS

TEXT & PHOTO: SØREN VADSTRUP

THROUGHOUT HISTORY, ENERGY- AND CLIMATIC CRISES HAVE LED MANKIND TO TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS AND IMPROVED DEVELOPMENT IN ORDER TO PROSPER, AS IT HAPPENED IN DENMARK IN THE 1770s. ONE EXAMPLE OF THIS IS THE USE OF PANE GLASS FOR WINDOWS AND THE RESULTING ENERGY SAVINGS. ON MANY ACCOUNTS, INCLUDING MANAGEMENT OF BUILT HERITAGE, THIS PERIOD BEARS RESEMBLANCE TO THE OIL CRISIS OF THE 1970s. THIS STUDY CORRELATES THESE PERIODS AND PERSPECTIVES TO THE ECONOMIC RECESSION OF LATER YEARS.

INTRODUCTION

The title of this paper is a quote attributed to British politician Winston Churchill. In world history as well as in Danish history, numerous examples are found of crises leading to sound development and positive improvements.

Denmark has gone through two serious energy crises. The first energy crisis began in the 1750s and lasted for 50 years. The second began in the 1970s, and is not over yet.

The first energy crisis was important for the sound development of the country, while the latter, in many ways, have had the opposite effect, and actually been a ‘lost’ opportunity due to wrong and unqualified decisions.

This article represents a study on how the management of build heritage has been affected during these energy crisis, with regard to building culture and energy optimisation of existing historical building.

BACKGROUND

The heating of buildings, in both 1750s and today, is a significant factor of total energy consumption. Today heating constitutes approximately 1/3 of the total energy consumption of Denmark. In the 1750s firewood consumption for house heating represented nearly ¾ of Denmark’s (excluding Norway) wood consumption. This consumption was hard on the forests, which also had the important function of providing timber for marine purposes, including the naval fleet, and national defence.

COMPARISON STUDY BETWEEN THE 1770 s AND THE 1970s

1970s - The oil crisis

On October 6, 1973, war erupted in the Middle East. Israel on one side, Egypt and Syria on the other. The oil producing countries of the world did not neglect the opportunity of this crisis to obtain huge economic and political benefits from this local war.

Previously, in 1960, the oil producing countries in the Middle East and Venezuela had formed the organization OPEC. On the 17th October 1973 OPEC decided to reduce the oil production and at the same time raise the prices. From October 1973 to December 1973, the price of a barrel of crude oil rose from 3 dollars to 11.65 dollars. Most of these earnings went to the oil exporting countries. Thus, Saudi Arabia’s annual oil revenues rose from $ 2.7 billion in 1972 to $ 22.6 billion in 1974.

Energy saving initiatives

For supply reasons, and not least for financial reasons, the Danish Government had to respond to the increased oil prices. To reduce electricity consumption, all street lights were turned off at night and all unnecessary car traffic was prohibited on Sundays. Fuel efficient cars became more popular, and access to public transport was increased. Alternative energy sources such as wind, straw and hydropower were boosted, as well as the extraction of oil from the Danish part of the North Sea. And in an effort to reduce hot water consumption, in true spirit of the 1970s, the motto ‘shower with a friend’ was coined.

Apart from windmills and fuel-efficient cars, virtually all these initiatives were shortly after abandoned once again. Private motoring increased, whilst at the same time collective transportation decreased. Street lights were lit at night, and electricity consumption rose once more. And once again we showered alone.

Subsidies of the homeowner

One of the many energy saving initiatives was government subsidies for homeowners. This included subsidies for replacing of old single glazed windows with new double-glazed windows, and subsidies for add more insulation, usually mineral wool, to the roof construction and the cavity walls of brick houses.

For Danish building culture this was a real disaster, historically, technically and architecturally. Particularly when the old, original and tra-

ditional wooden framed windows were replaced with new windows of lesser aesthetic- and technical quality.

Refitting as a result of subsidies

Virtually no homeowners, craftsmen or architects, applied for these government subsidies in order to refit existing windows to obtain more energy efficiency. This, despite new windows, produced by the industry, were not adapted to the architecture or style of older buildings. The conservation interests were not accounted for in any way.

Today these replacement windows, known in real-estate terms as “housewife windows”, which was installed in hundreds of thousands of old building, destroying the architecture and aesthetics, are overdue for replacement. This is due to the quality of the replacement windows being poor in terms of technical construction, wood quality and surface finish. The replacement of these replacement windows will result in great economic, environmental and energy expenditure.

Instead of replacing the old original windows, had the windows been refurbished and improved the existing original windows, with as little as an indoor second layer, they would have offered a better energy solution, larger heat savings, longer remaining lifespan, less maintenance and a more pleasing architectural and aesthetic adaptation to the old buildings. Even today, this same mistake is repeated over and over again.

Another example is the refitting of historical buildings with additional roof insulation using mineral wool during the 1970’s energy crisis. When subjected to a minimal leakage or moisture exposure, the mineral wool becomes wet or moist, whereby the wood it touches becomes moist and rotten. It has cost billions of dollars to remedy these rot- and fungal damage subsequently.

1770s - The energy crisis

Denmark had, since the mid 18th century, been in a latent heat, energy and food producing crisis. The country’s forests were almost depleted of wood because of a massive firewood consumption for domestic heating. The Danish forests could hardly deliver firewood enough to the capital and its forestless hinterland. At the same time, food production stagnated due to inefficient farming practices, partly because the estates could demand the peasants work for free.

National reforms

In order to resolve this crisis, a series comprehensive initiatives was discussed and initiated.

The problems, studies and solutions were discussed and presented in The Rural Household Society1, which was a gathering of the most educated and prominent men in the country. Among other initiatives, they went out and measured the farmhouses’ firewood consumption, in different types of houses and in different places of the country. Interestingly enough this was 100 years before the concept of ‘ecology’ was introduced by German biologist Ernst Haeckel based on Greek words ‘oikos’ (meaning household) and ‘logos’ (meaning ‘knowledge about’) - and defined as the mutual influence between living creatures and the environment.

The Agriculture-Reforms were also aided, by the introduction of a number of new crops, including potatoes, clover and rapeseed, the latter for cattle feed, and also the invention of new production tools such as the swing plough. The introduction of compulsory education for the children in 1814 and the development of the village schools was also an important step in this process.

Agriculture Reforms2

The massive redistribution and reorganization of the agricultural landscape and the production methods in the second half of the 18th century is well-known, although it took half a century before the reforms were implemented throughout the country.

The so-called ‘hometown tie’3 was abandoned, whereby peasants no longer were tied to the land, and became, so to say, free again. The farmland and especially the fields, were divided in a new way,

so each farm got a cohesive piece of land. It was possible for the peasants themselves to buy their farms for their families, and finally the State made a lot of effort to improve the building construction of the farms, with the purpose that they should use less firewood for heating during the winter.

Changes in building culture as a result of agriculture reforms

The reforms lead to changes in the way we build, as glass windows played an important role, and the agriculture- and ownership- reforms, energy reforms and the improvement of the building standard complemented each other, and gave a significant synergy effect (Christensen, 1996).

The combined effects included:

1. A thorough regulation, replanting and operational improvement of the Danish forests, introduced by the two brothers von Langen from Germany. This meant, that the firewood situation was improved, indeed resolved, by organizing the forests according to German models with efficient operation and replanting. A very long-term strategy that we benefit from today.

2. Improvement of the transport systems for lumber and firewood from the still deliverable forests in North Zealand and Central Denmark, through the construction of the Esrum Canal and Suså Canal.

3. The State intensified the pursuit of alternative energy sources: Peat, coal (Bornholm) and hydropower in Frederiksværk, Mølleåen and Næstved m.fl.

4. Consistently, the most energy-intensive industry production was moved to Norway: Glass, cast iron and porcelain, etc.

5. During the agricultural reforms, the Government also granted a subsidy to the village farms to carry out a number of energy saving measures, often in connection with the removal of the timber frame farm from the village to a new location at the new fields.

This last was by far the most effective and fast-acting of the 5 energy saving measures, as the majority of energy consumption, as earlier mentioned, was of firewood used for heating the thousands of farmhouses in the country side (Lerche, 1987).

The farmhouse of the late 1700s

In the early 1700s, many of the farm dwellings were only divided into three rooms: A large central room, called the hall, with two smaller rooms at both ends of the house, respectively the kitchen and scullery at one end and a guest room, called the hostelry 4 , in the other. The hall was often provided with an open, central hearth and a high, open roof space resulting in 90% or more of the heat from the fire, disappeared up in the air. The house had few and very small windows and often provided with ‘panes’ made from pig bladders (Vadstrup, 2014).

The agriculture-reforms in the villages in the 1780s were a prerequisite to achieving significantly lower energy costs in rural areas, amongst the initiatives were:

1. The abandonment of the open roof space and the introduction of a wooden ceiling, just above the beams. This ceiling was also used for drying the crops, and worked also as a good heat isolating of the rooms.

2. Heating of the room by a rear fired stove, a so called five-plate jamb stoves5 , made of cast iron, placed at one end of the room. The ‘hall’ was now called the ‘living room’, as it was here you lived, worked, ate and slept.

3. A new element, the chimney, built in bricks.

4. The chimney itself developed into an advanced multifunctional device, with 4-5 different functions: An open fireplace for making food (kitchen). The above mentioned five-plate jamb stove for heating the

nearby living room. A large kettle of copper used for washing and brewing. A baking oven, containing of a large vault, made of fired brigs. And in the attic a so-called ‘malt club’ for drying and smoking of malt for beer brewing (Stoklund, 1972).

5. The farmhouses were divided into several smaller rooms, among other things a smaller living room and small sleeping chambers.

New inventions

A prerequisite for these technological and thermal improvements of the farmhouses was the introduction of glass windows, so the rooms could be provided with daylight, views and venting possibilities.

Glass panes, fired brigs, cast iron stoves, copper kettles were expensive items, so the changes occurred very slowly in some part of the country, although the state provided financial support for the improvement and relocation of the buildings.

The brick chimney pipes presented a possible hazard, because burning firewood, that is not quite dry, especially beech wood, results in soot depositing in the pipe, when the smoke is cooled. This soot may smoulder and then burn often after the fire at the bottom of the pipe is extinguished and the family has gone to bed. In other words, the occupants of the house must first learn to use the newly invented chimney properly, and it must be maintained and cleaned of soot on a regular basis. Part of the already expensive price for a chimney was therefore a regular and organized chimney sweeping, where the dangerous soot is swept down into the bottom and removed. And if you don’t do this, it could very often cost lives, houses and homes, and in the city the resulting in fire spreading to neighbouring houses.

National inquiry

In 1789-90, the Danish Treasure Trove, which was the state office that paid the building aid or subsidies, conducted a nationwide survey of the building construction in the rural areas of Denmark, to gauge the effect of these actions and grants. This was done by sending all the county officials a questionnaire and, in addition, asking for a wide range of further information, including financial estimates, drawings, etc., especially for the timber frame farmhouse which had been moved. Although glass and windows are not specifically mentioned in the questionnaire, because it was mostly aimed at constructions, material consumption, fire conditions, distances between the houses, surface materials, etc., window frames, glass, lead sharpeners, carpentry and glaze work were included in most of the economic indices. In one case, where the windows were not included in the calculations, it is mentioned, that the windows had been reused from the old farm and therefore had no costs.

We can therefore see, that there were glass panes with lead jars in the relocated farms in Zealand, Funen and Jutland around the big cities. But these areas are probably also the avant-garde in Denmark. From other sources, we know that pig bladders, smoothed horns or fetal membranes were used as windows in the rural areas (Christensen, 1996). On a farm in Nyborg County it is mentioned, for example in the report of the County of 1790, that, in order to save money, it was found that ‘a window was placed between the living room and the threshold, by which necessary and needy daylight is provided both for those who are spinning in the living room, and those who are threshing in the threshold’ (Lerche, 1987).

The introduction of the chimney pipe, the external fired stove, glass windows, room divisions and the horizontal wooden ceiling in the country’s farms, caused a reduction in heat energy consumption of at least 75%, so it was something that really had an effect. At this time, four-fifths, approximately 750,000 people, of Denmark’s population, lived in a rural context, not in an urban setting.

Rafter-Beam Construction

Around 1800, a new, more high-ceilinged and more constructive stable timber frame construction was introduced in the farmhouses, which were now were now being located in the farmer’s own fields, outside of the villages, sometimes several hundred meters from the village. It is called the ‘rafter-beam-construction’, and could also allow higher and

larger windows, and thus more daylight in the rooms (Vadstrup, 2004). At the time local priests played a major role in the villages, as advisors in agricultural questions. Some of them, also made drawings for new farms and homesteads in the ‘new’ improved ‘rafter-beam-construction’.

This construction was already known, and had been used for many years, in Southern Jutland, and was also the preferred timber frame construction in the cities, but now it became widespread throughout the country for all new houses in timber frame construction - and also many existing ones.

The new improved buildings, however, also lead to a strong rise in the peasant culture, not only in terms of building construction, but also in housing and schooling. Reading books was now possible thanks to the glass panes. Hygiene improved, as there was less smoke and soot in the living spaces. As a symbol of the new and more civilized situation, it became customary to display the finest porcelain plates and cups of the household in the living room, without the risk of becoming dingy with soot.

Clay Houses

One of the improvements and trials, which was launched during the Agricultural Reforms, was farmhouses made of clay and earth. Because, if you could build farmhouses, etc., of clay and earth’, these houses would use less timber and would thus be cheaper in materials, cheaper to heat up and, more importantly, more fireproof than the usual timber-framed houses.

On the initiative of the king and local landowners, and the peasants themselves, approximately 750 clay farms were built in North Zealand and west of Copenhagen in the years 1796-1860. Most were built in a German technology, known as ‘wellerwände’, that is to say: with ‘wavy walls’, as the clay earth is shoveled up on the spot, and chopped into shape with spades, without wooden boxes, unlike the French’ pisé technique. On Lolland-Falster, a number of similar clay houses were also built, but to a lesser extent. Only about 100 of these clay houses can be found today, as a reminder of the 17th and 19th century energy conservation efforts (Risom, 1952).

As mentioned above, great saving could be made in limiting the amount of timber used in building walls of the dwelling structures. Beams and rafters etc. had to be of wood, however, in an effort to completely avoid wood, in 1810, Frederik de Conninck, at Dronninggård in Holte, unsuccessfully tried to build clay houses with clay vault ceilings.

Danish glass

After the “loss” of Norway in 1812, Denmark was without a domestic glass production and, as mentioned, it was considered impossible to establish such an energy consuming production in the rural areas of Denmark. At the same time glass windows were an important part of the important energy savings.

On Holmegård estate in central Zealand however, there was a large 800 sq.m area of peat moss, which, in conjunction with a well-organized recycling project, formed the foundation for the establishment of Holmegård Glassworks in 1828. Sand and chalk were plentiful in the area, and as a result, the glassworks collected and recycled ash and glass shards from most of Zealand.

At the start, the glassworks could not produce window glass, as the sulphur content of the peat made the glass greenish. Instead, they focused on making beer bottles. The brewers soon discovered that they could sell much more beer when bottled, versus in the old barrels or clay pots. It did not bother either the breweries or they thirsty, that the beer bottles were dark green or greenish brown. The bottles were also included in a systematic recycling process, where they were cleaned and refilled at the breweries, or sent back to the glassworks as glass slices (Christensen, 1996).

In 1848, Holmegård Glassworks acquired a steam engine for crushing flint, etc., which was driven by the waste heat from the glass furnaces. In the same year, Kastrup Glassworks was established as a branch of Holmegård, following the same recycling concept, but with coal, imported from England, as the source of energy. At Kastrup Glassworks, glass panes or window glass became part of the production.

CONCLUSION

It can be ascertained, that the agricultural reforms in the latter half of the 1700’s and the first half of the 1800’s, together with the relocation of the farmhouses and the improvement of the building constructions, had major energy benefits for Denmark. Thanks to, inter alia, the introduction of ceilings in the rooms, the cast iron stove in the living room, connected to a multi-functional chimney and not least glass windows in the southern sides of the country houses.

We know from sources that all 10 energy initiatives were coordinated and also planned by the so-called reform movement, and they were followed up by evaluations and ongoing improvements and trials (Christensen, 1996). Because of this crisis, the country came out richer and better prepared for the future.

Whether the same can be said of the ongoing energy crisis that began in the 1970s had yet to be ascertained. Have the changes in building culture during this period resulted in a strengthened statement of local building culture, or has it merely resulted in technically flawed retrofitting solutions? And have the potential possibilities of prospering from the energy crisis at hand been wasted?

Notes

1. DK: Landhusholdingsselskabet

2. DK: Landboreformerne

3. DK: Stavnsbånd, Abandoned 1788

4. DK: Herberg

5. DK: Bilægger

References

• Christensen, D 1996. Det Moderne projekt. Teknik & Kultur i Danmark-Norge 1750-1850, Gyldendal

• Douglas, R.W. & Frank, S 1972. A History of Glassmaking, G T Foulis & Co Ltd

• Lerche, G 1987. Bøndergårde i Danmark 1789-90, Landbohistorisk Selskab

• Rison, S 1952. Nordiske Lerhuse, Nyt Nordisk Forlag

• Stoklund, B 1972. Bondegård og Byggeskik før 1850, D.H.F.s Håndbøger

• Vadstrup, S 2004. Huse med sjæl, Gyldendal

• Vadstrup, S 2014. Byhuset, Lindhardt & Ringhof

MAKING

TEXT: NICOLAI BO ANDERSEN

IT MAY BE ARGUED THAT THE EXISTENTIAL DISCOMFORT OF MODERN MAN COMES FROM BEING REDUCED TO JUST A CONSUMER LED BY THE FLUX OF IMAGES. USING THE MAKING OF THE BARCA AND THE STACKS PAVILIONS AS CASES, THIS ARTICLE ASKS HOW WE CAN GET A MORE AUTHENTIC RELATION TO THE WORLD THROUGH THE MAKING OF ARCHITECTURE. IT IS ARGUED THAT BARCA AND STACKS BRINGS AN ARCHITECTURAL CONTENT TO PRESENCE THROUGH MAKING – CONNECTING BUILDING HERITAGE, PHYSICAL MATTER AND THE HUMAN BODY IN AN AUTHENTIC WAY.

Title page & this spread: Barca, Nicolai Bo Andersen & Christoffer Harlang,

Photo: Lars Rolfsted Mortensen

Introduction

One of modern society’s greatest problems might be disconnection. Alienation to nature. Distance to the body. The Finnish architect Juhani Pallasmaa argues that architecture has been reduced to images without contact to the language of the body (Pallasmaa 2000). One might argue that the existential discomfort of modern man comes from being reduced to just a consumer led by the flux of images. More than ever, we need to reclaim elemental experiential qualities in architecture. Building should not just be a question of looking good, it should talk to all the senses, the whole human body. The question is, how can we get a more authentic relation to the world through the making of architecture?

Barca and Stacks are attempts to connect to the deeper qualities of architecture. To physically understand the qualities tectonics and to feel the properties of materials. The design of the two pavilions are based on traditional building techniques. They are inspired by historic references. And they re-present experienced architectural phenomena.

Barca

The Barca pavilion is designed by Nicolai Bo Andersen and Christoffer Harlang. It was built in the summer 2016 by students at the Master’s Program in Architectural Heritage, Transformation and Conservation (KTR) at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, School of Architecture (KADK) under the supervision of Morten Gehl.

Barca means boat and is inspired by a technique: A light structure, tied together with rope and wrapped by a thin fabric was traditionally used to construct simple, lightweight boats. In the Barca the boat-like structure is turned upside down and placed on top of the building as roof. The pavilion gives the impression of an object floating on the pier. The wall structure is made of timber columns carrying an elliptical beam to which the roof have been secured. The outside is clad with metal sheet panels making a dynamic play of light and shadow as the sinus geometry of the cladding meets the curving geometry of the pavilion. The thin fabric of the roof allows the light to be filtered through the structure and light up the interior.

Stacks

The Stacks pavilion is designed by Nicolai Bo Andersen based on the artistic research project “Stabel” (Andersen 2017). It was built in the summer 2017 by students at the Master’s Program in Architectural Heritage, Transformation and Conservation (KTR) at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, School of Architecture (KADK) under the supervision of Morten Gehl.

The project is inspired by a historical reference: the material, the geometry and the experiential effect of timber stacked for drying as photographed by the Danish architect Ole Meyer (2000: 6-7). The structurally stable but visually dynamic form and the play of light and shadow in the façade are motifs that has informed the design of the pavilion. Furthermore, works by contemporary architects Peter Zumthor (Durisch 2014) and Gion Caminada (Caminada 2008) have served as inspiration. The pavilion is a re-interpretation of a traditional building technique: The timber logs have been joined in the corners by a technique called “lafting”, more specifically the joint called “sinknov” (Drange, Aanensen and Brænne 1992: 113), or what in English is known as a dovetail The stacked timber logs create a space with a specific strong experiential quality when the light gets filtered through the structure.

Making

The content of a work of art comes to presence through a specific technique. Heidegger points out that to the Greek, the word tikto means “to bring forth or to produce”. According to Heidegger the word for technique, techne, does neither mean art or handicraft, but rather: “to make something appear, within what is present, as this or that, in this way or that way” (Heidegger 1978: 253). Making is letting appear, it brings the intrinsic content of the work to presence among the other things in the world. The two pavilions are a synthesis of a technical, a historic and a phenomenological approach. They combine practical, theoretical and artistic dimensions. They also address questions we are normally not closely connected to in the studio: working environment, production conditions and resources. One might say the pavilions are models of how to work architecturally with sustainable building heritage, robust structures and environmentally friendly materials reflecting the sustainable development goals of UN (2016).

Eduard Sekler argues that it is all about “the tectonic statement: the noble gesture which makes visible a play of forces, of load and support in column and entablature, calling forth our empathetic participation in the experience” (Sekler 1965: 92). The understanding of a building is not just a matter of visible form, but rather a bodily experience of space making us understand gravity and feel the quality of materials. We are never just spectators but rather participants in the experience, connecting us to the physical forces of nature. Barca and Stacks can in this sense be seen as models of how traditional building techniques, historic references and experienced architectural phenomena can be the starting point of a progressive architectural design. The architect re-presents an experienced architectural phenomena through a concrete, physical material. The building re-actualizes a historic motif to a contemporary attention.

In this way Barca and Stacks brings the intrinsic content to presence through making – connecting building heritage, physical matter and the human body in an authentic way.

Acknowledgement

This article is a part of the research project ”Sustainable transformation – transformation models, strategies and methods”, which is about the transformation of existing buildings, historical knowledge and technical mastery into a contemporary architectural practice. Stacks is based on the artistic research project “Stabel” (Andersen 2017).

References

• Andersen, NB 2017, ‘Stabel’, in A Abraham, P Bertram, C Capetillo & CP Pedersen, WORKS+WORDS 2017. Biennale for kunstnerisk udviklingsvirksomhed i arkitektur, p. 21. Det Kongelige Danske Kunstakademis Skoler for Arkitektur, Design og Konservering, København.

• Caminada, GA 2008. Cul zuffel e l’aura dado. Quart, Luzern.

• Drange, T, Aanensen HO and Brænne J 1992. Gamle trehus, historikk, reparasjon, vedlikehold. Universitetsforlaget, Oslo.

• Durisch, Thomas. 2014. Peter Zumthor 2002-2007, Buildings and Projects, Volume 2. Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess AG, Zürich.

• Heidegger, M 1978, ‘Building Dwelling Thinking’, in M Heidegger, Basic Writings, pp. 239-256. Routledge, London.

• Meyer, O 2000. De tavse bygninger. Aristo, København.

• Pallasmaa, J 2000, ‘Begrebslig viden, indlevelse og tavs visdom i arkitekturen’, in K Dirckinck-Holmfeld et al., At fortælle arkitektur, pp. 84-99. Arkitektens Forlag, København.

• Sekler, EF 1965, ‘Structure, Construction, Tectonics’, in G Kepes (ed.), Structure in Art and in Science, pp. 89-95. Studio Vista, London.

• UN 2016, 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Available from: http://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/sustainable-development-goals/. [29 june 2017].

Previous spread & opposite page: Stabel, Nicolai Bo Andersen Photo: Lars Rolfsted Maortensen

STUFF SO CAREFULLY PUT TOGETHER

CHRISTOFFER HARLANG TALKS WITH STEPHEN BATES ON ARCHITECTURE

Christoffer Harlang (CH) talks with Stephen Bates (SB) on architecture.

CH:

My first question is maybe a question that I think we could spend all night talking about. I am very interested in the situation that this quotation sets up, but we will see how you feel about it. It’s a quotation by Bernard Rudofsky, in a lecture he gave in Tokyo in 1982, where he says the following: “The house has to become again what it was in the past. An instrument for living, instead of a machine for living. This will make all the difference in our conduct of life. Like the difference between playing a violin and playing a jukebox”. End of quotation. In that mind, could you tell us a little bit about how you see this difference between architecture as a machine and architecture as an musical instrument. Obviously the violin as suppose to the jukebox, involves an emotional content and participation. And participation of the user who becomes more than just somebody who slips a coin into the machine. But instead someone who becomes an engaged in the output as a magician, as a performer, as a person.

SB:

Last week I was in Barcelona, and I had a bit of spare time from what I was doing, and I jumped in the car and I drove to Cadeques, and I’m lucky that I have a little house there. And I went to this house, opened the door, pulled the shutter because the creeper had almost collapsed over the door, and I walked into this house, a house that I designed in collaboration with some great friends of mine. And no one had been there for 5 months I think, and it was like sad. It was like a sad house. And there was stuff on the floors, a bit like someone had just left a long time ago, and just run out the door, locked the door. And I passed through the house and I was a bit miserable. Because it’s a very beautiful house, I like it anyway, and it felt like more than empty. And I called home that night, and I explained this to my wife. And she said but that’s like that every time we leave our London house. That we come back and it smells different and it smells sad, it feels like there is this layer of like dead and stuff. But in a day, it’s absolutely fine once we’re in it, and we’re living in it and feeling it. And I introduced the answer to you, or the opening discussion, with this story, because machine and use. I mean it’s less interesting to me than the kind of, ultimately the emotional aspects of living in the house. However beautiful you might make a house, without living in it and without it being lived in, it’s just dead. It’s just stuff. But the thing is, it’s stuff so carefully put together to support a way of life, without the way of life, it’s worse than nothing. And I’m interested in how our emotions or how we just interconnect with how we live, our environment and our making it. And that’s why I nearly came today with a lecture that was about dwelling. I wanted to talk about dwelling, the idea, the notion, the art of living in a way, the artistic aspects of living. And next time I’ll do that. But the thing is Christoffer, the machine for living thing, I’ve got such a problem. I had a modernist education and I read Corbusier like everyone else, and in a way got exited by Giedion “Space, time and architecture”, in which architecture seem to start in 1920. And I left education, needing then to start to be educated, and to understand what much more architecture was. The idea of function leading or rather being ever used as the primary reason for something. I just find it incredible limiting and limited, conceptually as well as ethically. I like the promise of function, the idea that you can make a space that inclines one to do something. But the sort of functionalist approach to how things are really disturbs me. There was this amazing, German philosopher I think, that was promoting the idea of functionalist architecture. And he showed a plan of a 19th century apartment, which had a middle room, and he showed and dotted lines how people move through the room, and demonstrated how often they bump into each other. And he said, if you have the modernist plan, where everything is decided where it goes, and there are no corridors and everything, no one ever bumps into each other. And that is a frictionless life. It’s like unbelievable. I use it as a reference in an essay that I was writing to, off course, promote the former rather than the latter. But this idea that a few things could happen in a room. I mean this isn’t just about concept, it’s really about thinking about now and about what happens in dwelling these days where, you know. I’m finding it more and more interesting to work with the idea of evenness that there’s a collection of wonderfully proportioned

rooms, which are not so obviously assigned to use, could create a really useful background for life. Where the bedroom and the living room are not necessarily so prioritized in hierarchy. And I think to myself in my own family life, my three teenage children their bedroom is like their flat, I mean it is just as important as anything else. And that is the way of the world that is what’s happening. So I fell, now I’m rambling trying to answer your question, but I’m sort of hopefully saying something interesting too. But this notion of atmosphere the usefulness of something is good, important. But machine for living in an outdated, it was always only a silly idea, it was used to sell modernism, wasn’t it?

CH:

But still 98 % of all housing are made from the idea of houses as machine, isn’t it?

SB:

What’s specific about dwelling and particularly, certainly from the country I come from but also I sense also Denmark and most of Europe, the home has become a commodity. Not just a place to bring a family up and live, it’s a commodity and it’s often the thing, the most valuable thing that people have, and they trade it and it becomes tradable. And the consequence of that is that it becomes an industry and an industry brings it along people who need to sell things and you sell things that you know you can sell. And what happens is that evolution and development there in happen. Because there is a sort of status quo, and an estate agent isn’t going to enjoy the house that we just presented, I just presented there. If it was organized with big living rooms and bedrooms and with a corridor leading to it, perfect, I can sell that tomorrow. And I think that’s a problem with housing, and I think that certainly as a teacher I am promoting a thinking beyond the convention. If I see a plan that’s stock up on the wall that looks like a plan like that, I just don’t want to talk about it, because why are you doing that.

CH:

But the whole notion of architecture or houses as instruments could also be in connection with how a house connects to its surroundings. How it sets up a resonance with what’s already there. You can read Bernard Rudofsky on different levels and on different scales really. And it seems to me at least, that your strategy is very much understanding architecture as an instrument, that has to set up a relationship with the performer or the user of the instrument or the space that the sound that comes from the instrument resonances in.

SB:

What’s fundamental, is understanding or interpreting the word instrument, isn’t it. Because an instrument is finally made, that allows something to be used or allows a third certain activity to be made artfully. But I find architecture is artful as well, the instrument we’re making. You walk into a room and the light is amazing, carefully considered, is that an instrument? I’m struggling with this instrument.

CH:

I think in Rudofskys understanding it’s an instrument for a good life. It changes your life. What happens to you when you come into a nice space or into a nice building. That it changes you. You start to resonate in a different way. I think that’s how he sees it.

SB:

Of course I agree with all that, it’s just I wouldn’t immediately think of it as instrumentation.

CH:

In this autumn we have in preparation at the Royal Academy, a small conference, about what we call robust architecture. Where the term robust refers to the capacities of buildings to withstand wear, to accept changes in style or past changes in style and changes in use. And we see this capacity of the robust as a resilience overlooked in the debate of climate change and sustainability. And we’re curious about how contemporary architecture can be designed with these robust qualities. Do you have any comments or thoughts on that?

SB:

I am certainly interested in this notion of robustness and you could say ambiguity within architectural objects. I’m drawn to the kind of strength of, let’s say sort of utilitarian building, that is finally proportioned, has good interiors, that could be lot’s of things. It could become many things. I mean historically we can see, that certain building types have evolved in being transformed in many ways. I find that interesting, but in the end character is fundamental in my mind. And when you say changing styles, I mean in my mind a building still has a responsibility, say to its setting and to its city context. I don’t think, by being ambiguous doesn’t mean it doesn’t have identity, if you see

what I mean. It may have a facade that is noble, that is either decorated or not, but is powerful in its materiality and wholes its place, and at the same time could be transformed in terms of how people interpret it. It will stay as it is, but it will be interpreted through how it’s used and the motions people attach to it. But the debate about ecological debate, as you know we are very interested in building with weight and building in a passive way that the inherent sustainability is in the construction. And the idea of the fixed parts, it doesn’t rely on moving parts that over the years of explored breathing wall construction and heavy weight construction, to in a way find our own answers to this sustainability debate through the fabric of the building itself.

Title page: Tower house, Nutley, Hampshire, UK, 2017

Photo: Sergison Bates Architects

THROUGH THE LOOKINGGLASS

TEXT: THOMAS KAMPMANN

ENERGY LOSS THROUGH WINDOWS REPRESENTS A SIGNIFICANT PART OF THE TOTAL ENERGY LOSS FROM BUILDINGS, AND IS THEREFORE DEALT WITH IN THE CURRENT BUILDING CODE, BR 2015. HOWEVER, AS THIS ARTICLE LAYS OUT, THE RULES ARE COMPLICATED AND DISCRIMINATORY AGAINST SECONDARY GLAZING WINDOWS COMPARED TO WINDOWS PROVIDED WITH ENERGY PANES. THIS ARTICLE STUDIES HOW TRADITIONAL WINDOWS, USED IN HISTORICAL BUILDINGS, COMPARES TO MODERN WINDOWS ON A NUMBER OF PARAMETERS, AND HOW THESE PARAMETERS CORRELATE TO CURRENT LEGISLATION.

PREFACE

This arcticle presents an examination into the application of energy loss calculations in the Danish Building Regulation, BR 2015, regarding windows. Further the article offers an investigation of traditional windows, built with several frames and secondary glazing, and whether these are unfairly evaluated compared with similar energy-pane windows.

The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Schools of Architecture, Design and Conservation, Master´s Programme of Architectural Heritage, Transformation and Conservation (KTR), has previously examined the proposal for the Danish Building Regulation 2015 (BR 2015) and made a consultation response. (Trafik-, Bolig- og Byggestyrelsen, 2015) This was done in response to former regulation, BR 2010, as this regulation was highly problematic with regard to small and/or multi framed windows. The consultation response, which was done as a proposal for the BR 2015, was based on the rules of BR 2010, except for a simple reduction of the limits for energy loss and there was a risk that the problems would be even bigger in the final version.

The goal with this examination was to give building advisors and authorities, manufacturers and students a tool to understand the pitfalls and the rather complex field regarding BR2015, specifically in relationship to energy consumption around small and/or multi framed windows.

Traditional windows are usually designed with several frames and often with glazing bars, but the problems concerning multi framed windows are the same for new windows, if they are divided into several frames. The hope it is that this article will also aid in the design of windows in new buildings. Therefore it was obvious to make a careful investigation of the final edition of BR 2015 , which was the original purpose of this article.

During the investigation on the subject, it became clear that this work was already outdated by the fact that consultation on new BR 2018 was held during the summer of 2017. The hearing period is now over and the objections are being processed. It is said that BR2018 is structured in a completely different way, therefore thorough investigation of BR2015 in its entirety is not deemed relevant. As a result of these conditions, this paper explain the conditions for how windows are constructed in Denmark, explaining general definitions concerning energy loss through windows and give a brief introduction to the problems concerning regulation of energy loss through windows in the BR 2015, and probably also in the following regulations.

INTRODUCTION

In modern time, up until the energy crises in 1970s, Denmark’s energy supply was mainly based upon imported oil. As a consequence of that, Denmark at that time, had nearly no oil or natural gas production and no hydro- nor nuclear power. The energy crises therefore amplified the need for necessitated energy savings in order to achieve certainty for maximum energy supply security. Approximate 40% of all energy consumption in Denmark is used in buildings. About one third of that energy consumption is lost through windows, and as such a topic of great importance in terms of total energy consumption.

Until and including The Building Regulations of 1995, all windows were treated equally using the very simple rule, that the U-value for the whole actual window being used should be lower than 1,8 kWh/m2. In subsequent Building Regulations the rules are much more complicated. There is now a division between new windows with sealed units, and secondary glazing windows, where the secondary glazing windows, mostly used in traditional housing, which has been subject to stricter regulation, than the insulating glass unit (IG-unit) windows. A reason for the introduction of this new regulation could be that many new windows, used as replacements in traditional buildings, with more than one frame and possible glazing bars, did not fulfil the earlier simple legal requirements.(Kampmann, 2002)

BACKGROUND

Former building regulations

In BR 2010 windows with insulating glass IG-units are treated completely differently from traditional secondary glazing windows. Secondary glazing windows are rated in relation to the U-value of the whole window in its actual form, size and actual panes used, whereas windows with IG-units are rated according to the combined U-value and the added solar energy during the heating season, the so-called energy gain (E). Furthermore all windows with IG-units should be specified based on the energy gain of a reference window Eref, as though they were designed with only one single framed window in a standard size of 1.23 x 1.48 m. This is regardless of the actual size of the window being used, the number of frames, if it has mullions, transoms and glazing bars, and if it is fitted with noise reduction or solar control panes. The problem is that all the different parameters have a huge impact on the total energy performance, which makes it very hard or impossible to select the most energy efficient windows, both according to the rules of BR 2010 and the implemented BR 2015. This indicates that new windows provided with energy panes are favored. It is feared that BR 2018 will still be based on the same poor conditions.

Up to BR 2008, a minimum U-value regarding windows was in effect. But that requirement disappeared with BR 2010 – except for windows inside houses facing rooms heated to more than 5 Kelvin below the temperature in the room concerned. It is hard to see the logic in having rules for windows placed indoors, but not for exterior windows facing the outside.

Traditional windows

Traditional Danish windows are often designed with more than one framework. If so, it is normally necessary to divide the casement with a mullion if you need two frameworks and maybe a nogging if you need four frameworks. This can be extended to various combinations. Thus, mullion and noggings are at part of the casement/window jamb. If a window has more than one frame it is referred to as a multi framed windows in this article. If one needs to divide the glass in the framework, it is done by glazing bars. See Apendix IV

Secondary glazing windows

Traditional windows were normally only fitted with one layer of glass. In order to insulate against energy loss and noise, windows have been subsequently fitted with secondary glazing, , at least this has been the case in Denmark since the early 1700s. Whereas Danish windows nearly always open outwards, the secondary glazing opens inwards. Thus one has to remove the potted plants!

Around 1900 the linked frames became widespread, where the second pane is linked to the framework and opens together with it –with no need of removing the potted plants.

The description of the construction of a window, in short, specifies each pane in a window with secondary glazing, numbered from the outer and inwards. Thus a window with only one layer of glass is called (1) and secondary glazing windows (1 + 1).

The pane in the secondary glazing was traditionally just ordinary glass, but today is almost always an energy pane. An energy pane is referred to as one layer of glass with an hard energy coating. The coating will limit the long-wave radiation between the two layers of glass, and thus limit the heat loss by nearly half. The hard coating is stronger than the glass, and therefore can be treated as normal glass.

To improve insulation, the secondary glazing can be provided with a sealed unit, with e.g. two layers of glass. This is referred to as (1 + 2). One of the drawbacks of a window with secondary glazing is the cleaning of each surface, and that one has to open two frames in order to let in fresh air. On the other hand it is possible to clean all the surfaces contrary to sealed units, where one has to replace the whole unit if the sealing is broken. In addition, secondary glazing

windows provide far better soundproofing, especially if there is ample distance between the two glass panes(Kampmann, 2004).

Sealed units windows

Today almost all windows are provided with sealed units where two or three panes are joined together with a spacer. This is briefly called (2) or (3). Are one or more of the glass surfaces coated with an energy coating they are called insulating glass units (IG-units). The benefits of the sealed units are that there is no need of cleaning the glass surfaces facing the cavity, but on the other hand, when the sealing is broken and the insulating gas evaporated, it is impossible to fix and the whole unit has to be replaced. Another benefit with IG-units is that, because it is impossible to touch between the glasses, one can use a very sensitive coating, the so-called soft coating, which is very effective. On the other hand, this construction is not as soundproof, as one of the most important parameters is the distance between the glass panes, which is not very large.

Glazing bars in windows with IG-units can either be built up with a continuous glazing bar, which are very clumsy (due to the thick IG-units) and very ineffective with regard to insulation, or with a so-called fake glazing bar where the glass actually continues over the whole pane with several profiles glued or clipped to the class. The fake glazing bar is much more energy efficient but still has some problems. Of course they are much less visible than the through glazing bar, especially seen directly perpendicular to the window, but when seen obliquely, the fake construction is obvious. Another problem with the fake glazing bar, is that it can very easy simply fall off.

As many new buildings are well insulated, there is often a problem with overheating. In order to reduce this problem many windows with IG-unit are provided with solar control coatings in order to reduce overheating. As this is a permanent construction, it also prevents the energy gain from the sun when needed during the cold season, thus this solution is problematic in climates with a heating season.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The original purpose of this article was to investigate whether BR 2015 met the targets described in BR 2015 chapter 7. Energy consumption:

Buildings must be constructed so as to provide satisfactory conditions in terms of function, safety, sustainability and health. Buildings must be constructed in accordance with best practice, using materials which are appropriate for the purpose.

- 4.1 Provision, (Trafik-, Bolig og Byggestyrelsen, 2015)

The same applies to conversions and any other significant alterations to buildings covered by 7.4.

Proclaimer

The investigation only covers a specific field concerning energy consumption of windows, with special focus on multi framed windows. This article only examines section 7, energy consumption including BR 2015 appendix 6, concerning windows with focus on dwellings. As previously stated BR 2015 is already going to be replaced with a new BR 2018, which is still pending publication. This article, therefore focus on the description of the preconditions for understanding the design of different Danish windows and how the design influences energy consumption. The thesis is that BR2015 does not provide the necessary balance of tools to properly enable advisors, authorities, manufacturers and consumers to choose the most energy efficient solutions.

As such the competition parameter to be set aside for the spread of energy efficient windows in traditional buildings, as well as new buildings provided with multi framed windows. Part of this includes investigation into whether the requirements for secondary glazing windows and windows with IG-units are different. The study has been done by collecting data from window manufacturers and then comparing this data from different typical window designs to the provisions of BR 2015.

The study only deals with the energy consumption of windows in Denmark described in the Danish legislation, but should be extended for examination of possible legislation in the European Union.

WINDOW DATA

Data from window manufactures

As part of this investigation, an updated schedule of energy consumption for typical Danish windows, in different typical variants was prepared. Unfortunately, it has not been possible to find a single manufacturer of IG-unit window windows that have an energy calculator on their website. Only a few years ago it was custom for all manufacturers to disclose the values. All manufacturers claim that they will share the relevant data upon receiving an order. The Danish window manufacturer Velfac was so kind as to provide partial window data when asked, whereas Rationel referred to sourcing a local carpentar for the information.

Therefore, there has not been sufficient data to design a new energy scheme. In the cases where it has been possible to get window data, the manufacturers in question now produce windows with better energy performance than before.

Previously

collected data

The traditional wooden windows, fitted with secondary glazing (green curves), have almost the same energy performance regardless of the window design, see Appendix III. The curves are rather horizontal meaning that they are relatively poor for Eref, with only one frame, compared to windows with IG-units, but much better for divided windows with mullions, noggin and transom – and for noise reducing panes. The main reason why the numbers are slightly worse with mullions, is due to the shadows cast by the mullions, meaning less g-value. On the other hand the IG-unit windows have good energy performance for Eref, and with a three layer IG-unit even are excellent A-labelled positive energy windows (Eref > 0). However for the windows with two casements or more, the energy performances are poorer than windows with secondary glazing. It can be seen that the Rationel Aura + (3, three layers) is even poorer than a simple (1+1 layers) secondary glazing for multi paned windows. In fairness it should be mentioned that the producer of Aura + said that it was not possible to produce such a window. It seems that it might be a problem using three layer panes for small casements, especially if they are provided with mullions. The recently introduced A-labelled triple pane Velfac Classic (3, three) has 75 % greater energy loss than the (1+2 layers) secondary glazing with double coating (energy gain ÷32 compared to ÷18.2), and has only ÷25.7 kWh/m2 year better energy gain than the traditional secondary glazing with one hard coated energy pane ÷57,7 (1+1). The C-labelled Velfac Classic double paned (2) has an energy gain of only ÷61.

EXAMINATION OF BR 2015, CHAPTER 7

Chapter 7 deals with energy consumption in buildings, and therefore also energy consumption through windows. Windows, together with external doors, roof lights, skylight domes, glazed external walls, glazed roofs and hatches facing the outside are often treated in a different way, than the rest of the climate screen. That is presumably because these building components are the weak point, much lesser in thickness, than walls and roofs, and they contain thermal bridges. For building components containing glass, the extra challenge also being the energy gains from the sun itself.

It reads in the opening provision of BR2015, Chapter 7.1:

Building must be constructed so as to avoid unnecessary energy consumption for heating, hot water, cooling, ventilation and lighting while at the same time achieving healthy conditions. The same applies to conversions and any other significant alterations to buildings covered by 7.4

This first provision is very easy to understand and has a clear purpose. Unnecessary energy consumption, of course, should be reduced as must as possible. The lower the consumption, the lower the demand for energy. The regulations continues in Chapter 7.2:

Any Cold bridges in building elements which face the outside including windows and doors, must be insignificant. The energy implications of cold bridges must be factored into calculations of heat loss from each building element.

Note there is particular mention that cold bridges in e.g. windows are to be factored into the calculations of heat loss – but meanwhile most of them are ignored according to rules applying windows. Apparently, windows and doors are mentioned specifically, because presumably there are major problems with said bridges in windows.

BR2015, Chapter 7.2 also describes that when calculating the total energy performance frameworks for a building it is necessary to take into account the total requirements for energy supplied for heating, ventilation, cooling, domestic hot water and, where appropriate, lighting. It is describes what is included in the total energy performance for new buildings and how it should be calculated in order to prove that a given building satisfies the requirements of BR 2015.

Again, it is a clear and logical requirement, and it seems obvious that one should use the actual energy data from the windows in use, and not data from the reference window. You need to know the exact energy performance of a window to make a correct energy performance framework for a building. The problem is that this is a reference to BR 2015 Appendix 6. The rules concerning windows in new buildings are rather confusing. The total energy performance framework of the whole building should be calculated, and in guidance 7.2.1 (Trafik-, Bolig og Byggestyrelsen, 2015), it is specifically mentioned that the calculation must take into account the envelope of the building, the location and orientation of the building, including sunlight entry (which mainly appears through windows. These rather clear rules indicate that it is important to calculate as accurately as possible to get the right result, in order to design buildings with as little energy demand as possible where e.g. sunlight entry through windows should be taken into consideration.

On the other hand, section 2 in BR 2015 appendix 6(Trafik-, Bolig og Byggestyrelsen, 2015) states that calculations should be made for a reference window. There is a big difference in the energy performance of windows, depending on the size, shape, design and panes of windows. Since all window manufacturers are obliged share the actual energy data when they deliver the windows (and therefore ought to be able to make the calculations), there should be no problem in asking for the same for IG-unit windows as well.

Windows in existing buildings

Chapter 7.4.2 deals with energy consumption in connection with conversions and other building alterations. Thus also for renovation or replacement of windows. It appears that the requirements for windows designed as secondary glazing windows should apply the U-value of the actual window size. There is no explanation for the difference in this respect, incomprehensible discrimination. Furthermore it is clear that secondary windows should only be labelled according to their U-value, and not take into account the solar gain through the windows. As the gain of solar energy through a secondary glazing window tends be greater than through an IG-unit window, this seems to be discriminatory.

If one takes into account that the energy loss through secondary glazing windows will change relatively little from the reference window to at multi framed window with many frames and panes, this is even more amazing.

New secondary windows are defined as new (1 + 2, layers) windows, which means that the outer part of the window has one layer of glass, whereas the pane in the secondary glazing should be fitted with an energy pane. Otherwise it is not possible to reach a U-value less than 1.40. This type of window actually has a U value slightly less than 1.40. Worse though is that the energy gain for the actual window is less than a 1 + 1 solution, with only one energy pane in the secondary glazing.

The far most energy efficient window with secondary glazing, is achieved with a 1 + 2 solution with an energy pane with two coatings. This design is actually better than equivalent new three layer energy panes – except for the reference window!

Here it should be mentioned that some producers have experienced problems with thermal bridges using energy panes with two coatings. There are assigned requirements for a renovated secondary windows, but they are defined as windows (old secondary windows) dismantled, renovated and reinstalled in another building. This is very seldom or never done, and would be better labelled recycled windows. The provisions continue with specific mention that there are no requirements for secondary window frames, which are fitted on existing, permanent windows. This is really bizarre, as one of the most common and cost effective ways to reduce energy consumption, is to install an energy glass on the secondary frame. This solution reduces energy consumption by half, and is even allowed in protected buildings. The only case where it would be wrong to replace with energy glass is if there is original drawn glass panes in the secondary casements, but there could be a simple exception in these cases.

If one installs an energy pane with two coatings, the total energy consumption will fall to one sixth compared to ordinary glass in the secondary frames.

DISCUSSION

Windows with secondary glazing are much better at noise reduction, than IG unit windows, due to the greater distance between the glass layers(Kampmann, 2004). As the majority of existing buildings are provided with multi framed windows it seems far more important to make them as energy efficient as possible, and not, as the practice has been the last 35 years, to replace with new windows. This might have a big impact on the total energy consumption, and it is probably far more sustainable to improve energy efficiency of existing houses, than building new ones. Furthermore one could fear that the Danish way of using a reference window might be used as an inspiration for former EU legislation, and therefore be widespread in the whole region(Avasoo and Andersson, 2003), (Kragh et al., 2008). The lack of energy calculators on manufacturers websites, is a major problem. Today, manufactures are obliged to present data, but only when you ask for it in connection with an estimate or order. As it is so cumbersome to find the most energy efficient solution, it is feared that it does not happen in practice.

CONCLUSIONS

The BR 2015 can be of good use for choosing between different single light windows with IG-units which correspond to the reference windows, but if the windows have more than one frame it is not suitable. Therefore, the BR 2018 should be changed concerning windows, not in the least due to the fact that 50 % of the windows being used are multi framed. The use of Eref should stop while all windows, including windows with secondary glazing, should be rated from the energy gain of the actual window in the actual design. Furthermore energy labelling should follow the same rules, versus the current situation, where windows with secondary glazing cannot be labelled, and where they are using the Eref for labelling IG-unit windows. All window manufacturers should have a public energy calculator in order to achieve the energy label, so one can find the correct energy data before asking for an offer. There should be a minimum U-value limit of 1,80 W/m2K for exterior facing windows , and not as today where there are only limits for interior facing windows heated to 5 K less than the heated room - but with no limits in relation to the outside. All future analyses should include windows with secondary glazing. There needs to be an independent website regarding sustainability, maintenance, noise reduction, total economic and energy performance of windows in typical design and sizes.

References

• AVASOO, D. & ANDERSSON, A. 2003. European window energy rating system.

• EWERS. The future European-, national- or

• international standard? Halmstad: WSP Environmental.

• KAMPMANN, T. 2002. Vinduers varmetab. In: HÅNDVÆRK, R.-N. C. T. B. A. (ed.). RAADVAD - Nordisk Center til Bevarelse af Håndværk.

• KAMPMANN, T. 2004. Støjgener! : RAADVAD - Nordisk Center for Bevarelse af Håndværk.

• KRAGH, J., LAUSTSEN, J. B. & SVENDSEN, S. 2008. Energy Gaining Windows for Residental Buildings. Nordic Symposium on Building Physics, Copehagen Denmark.

• TRAFIK-, B.-O. B. 2015. Bygningsreglementet 2015 [Online]. Available: http://bygningsreglementet.dk/br15/0/42 [Accessed 20/10/2017 2017].

• TRAFIK- OG, B. 2015. Danish Building Regulations 2015. Trafik- og, Byggestyrelsen.

Title page: Assistant Professors of KTR measuring a window in Villa Garbald by Gottfried Semper, on a study trip to Castasegna, Switzerland.

Review of relevant window terms

1. Nogging

2. Mullion

3. Glazing bar/Muntins (US)

4. Pane

5. Framework/sash

6. Casement/window jamb

7. Secondary glazing

8. Linked frames

Sealed unit windows

1. Framework

2. Casement

3. Wood

4. Wood/Alu.

5. Framework.

6. Casement

7. Combined materials

8. Composite

Energy loss through windows

The U-value, thermal transmittance, is the rate of transfer of heat through a structure per temperature difference across the structure, and is measured in W/ m2 K. For windows the U-value (Uwindow or Uw) is divided into the energy loss through: the panes, the upper arrow, which depends on the area of the panes (U glass) the casement/ mullion/ noggin/ glazing bars, the lower arrow, which depends on the area of the casement/ mullion/ noggin/ glazing bars

The edges of the pane (only for IG-unit as windows with secondary glazing has no spacer) the middle arrow, which depends on the length of the edges of the panes (Y, the Greek letter psi) and thus is relatively much bigger for a multi framed window than for a big, approximately squared, window.

As the U-value of the IG-units today is lower than the U-value of the casement/ mullion/ noggin/ glazing bars, the ratio between the different “arrows” of course will change dramatically dependent of the design of the window. Hence a circular window with no glazing bars will have the highest share of the energy efficient panes and relatively shortest length of edges of the panes, being a little lower for a nearly square/rectangular windows, and much lower share for a window provided with mullions, noggins and glazing bars. The share of the area of the panes will typically fall from 75 % to 48 % from a single framed window 123 x 148 cm, to a window in the same size but with four frames and 20 panes.

Whereas it is rather simple to get the U-value of the panes (from the glass producers[manufacturers]) it is rather complicated to calculate the U-value of the casement/ mullion/ noggin/ glazing bars.

The two figures show a result of a calculation of respectively a IG-unit pane window with two layer of glass upper, and a secondary glazing window fitted with one layer of energy glass lower.

If the colours in the “gradient” are narrow, it indicates a thermal bridge and if the colour on the inside of the window, to the left, has dark colours there could be problems with internal condensation.

Up to BR 2006 windows where only rated for their ability for insulation, specified by the U-value, with no regards to the fact that windows also gathers energy as the sun´s rays get through the glass and into the rooms. As the amount of energy gathered through the windows during the heating season for well insulated windows can be higher than the energy lost, it is a very reasonable action to take this contribution into account. The rules are described in BR 2015 Appendix 6.2 and are the same as when they were first introduced in BR 2010.

The problem is that the calculations should be based on a so-called reference window using a single-light opening and not the actually window used in each case. This is probably due to the fact that the energy performance is changing very much according to the number of light openings, muntins, type of glass, special noise reducing and solar control glass.

Furthermore the rules only applies for windows designed with IG-units, for windows with secondary glazing the rules are completely different.

Energy gain through windows

As the sun shines a certain percentage of the energy from the sun will pass through the window. The quantity of energy passing through the casement/ mullion/ noggin/ glazing bars is negligible and is omitted in the calculation of the total energy balance.

The energy gained through the panes is referred to as the g-value, and is the percentage of the solar energy that hits the panes in an average reference year and is radiated into the interior, g glass.

If the g glass.is multiplied with the ratio of the area of the panes to the whole window (Ff) one gets the g window.

Total energy balance through windows

The total energy balance of a window is found by calculating the energy gained through the window during the heating season, minus the energy lost through the window in the same heating season, and is referred to as E window.

As the energy gained through the window, of course, changes a lot depending on the orientation of the window, it is normally specified as a weighted average of the distribution of areas of windows to the orientation to the south.

The unit is in kWh/m2 year, and it is very simple to calculate the yearly energy loss just by multiplying the energy balance with the total sum of the area of the windows. Calculating the annual costs is done by multiplying the total energy loss with the relevant energy price.

As the total energy balance depends very much on the design of the window, the Danish Energy Agency has chosen to use a reference window consisting of only one frame, E ref measuring 1230 x 1480 mm in size.

As the energy balance is highly dependent on the design of the window, E ref cannot be used for calculating the energy loss, as will be explained in this article.

Energy calculation

The Danish window manufacturer Bøjsø offers the following information: Energy Calculation of Bøjsø Windows - How It Works:

When you receive estimates and / or order confirmation from Bøjsø, we also specify the precise energy statistics for the specific window or door, where you also get a comprehensive calculation of the entire specification average u-value.

We can also send an energy fact sheet with the total energy calculation.

It has only been possible to find a single website with an energy calculator, namely that for manufacturers of secondary glazing windows: www.energiforsatsgruppen.dk

APPENDIX II - Energy loss defined in BR 2015

APPENDIX II - Energy performance of typical Danish windows

ABOUT LOOKING AFTER THINGS AS WELL AS MAKING NEW THINGS

Christoffer Harlang (CH) talks with Tom Emerson (TE) on architecture.

CH:

I’ll begin with a quotation from Brian Eno: My topic is the shift from ‘architect’ to ‘gardener’, where ‘architect’ stands for ‘someone who carries a full picture of the work before it is made’, to ‘gardener’ standing for ‘someone who plants seeds and waits to see exactly what will come up’. I will argue that today’s composer are more frequently ‘gardeners’ than ‘architects’ and, further, that the ‘composer as architect’ metaphor was a transitory historical blip.” Do you see yourself as a gardener or do you see yourself as an architect?

TE:

It´s a great quote. And it’s very nicely put actually. I am properly like many of us here, in the end an architect. But I really like gardening, I would like to be a gardener. In fact, I’m trying to be more of a gardener. In a literal sense, I’m more and more interested in gardens and in landscape culture. But also in the methodical sense about working as an architect in a way in which, it’s the beginning of something, it’s not the end of something. And I think that there is too much architecture, in particularly the more heroic part of modernism, that was really about the project ending the day it opened. And that anything that happens to it after that could only be bad. I mean one of the nicest things about the Juergen Tellers Studio, is that he is by nature completely rude and badly behaved. So, you know, the project was finished, and he moved in it and in that picture that I started with with Teller in the drainage bassins, I got from my obsessiveness. And it was just like, now I know what they are for, it was great, I’ve never thought of that. In fact all they are, they just catch the rainwater and then it goes in the bucket and he can water the garden, I mean there is nothing more technical about that. And then there is the spout, and when they go over certain levels, it goes into a gully and into the drains. So it just gives you water storage in each garden. But then he climbed into it and then started doing something else, and so I think that the idea that you do a project and then from then on it takes on a life, and it grows, it decays depending on how well it’s looked after. And that is maybe closer to the work of the gardener. I think this year is the 300th anniversary of the birth of Capability Brown, who was the greatest English landscape architect of the 18th century. The great gardens this victories gardens, like he worked on Stowe and Stourhead and all those. And he never lived to see any of these gardens mature. And I’ve always found that really interesting, the idea that he designed these things, I mean they are so constructive, they look completely natural, but they are entirely constructed. He would dam whole valleys to make the lake and stuff. In some respect they make no sense, and I don’t know whether it is the most amazing modesty on his part, that he could do all this work and never see it, or whether it’s the greatest belief in your own immortality. That you don’t need to see it, because you will be remembered forever. But either way, I think this idea that time, let’s say the three or five, seven years that it takes to make a project in architecture, which is more or less the timeframe that we work in, is a very very short period, and then it goes and have a life of its own. So in that sense I’m more interested in the way that the gardener comes, where they come and you plant stuff, you organize it and now you just wait.

CH:

But I also feel there’s another interesting analogy in the gardener/ architect metonymy. And that is that for the gardener, he works with materials or items or elements that are already there. And I think in a way that some of the things that you showed us today talks about an architect who understands architecture as something that has not so much to do with inventing things, or coming up with new bolt ideas, but very much more to do with reclaim things. Actually there is a quote in your book “Never Modern”, which has to do with one of our mutual heroes, Buster Keaton. It says that you’re fascinated by the gadgetry of Buster Keaton and his relentless ingenuity in finding new uses for old things.

TE:

Absolutely. It’s most literal level is reusing materials. It’s finding stuff that exists, it’s been used for one thing and using it for another, and that goes in the student-projects, the built-projects and stuff like that. The Churchill, the tree house, quite a bit of Raven Row, it’s much more mixed. But it also, I suppose, includes sites. So actually it’s not just reuse of material it’s also, more or less, every bit of land. In Europe it has been used for something, it has been inhabited in some way or exploited in some way, whether it’s agriculture or settlements. There are very few bits of land, which are truly original or pre human.

CH:

But certainly when you use this very old Japanese technique of burning the wood, “Shou Sugi Ban” in Raven Road, you use an old technique in a completely new context and and set-up?

TE:

Yes. I mean we liked its performance, the fact that it’s weatherproofed, it doesn’t need protecting and also it’s fireproofed, which is rather elegant. But I think it was more that it became like a silent monument to this fire, that is not visible in the building at all, but has fundamentally directed its story, the fire only happened because nobody cared. That fire would never happen now. So it’s a certain moment in history when London was really at its kind of lowest. It’s also a monument maybe to the event itself, the violence of the fire, the strength of the architecture to somehow resist it. And maybe it’s one of the elements within the project, which is pointing towards something without ever really declaring it. Nobody would know if you went to visit the next exhibition there, they’re black and they are charred and know they are quite mossy actually. There is moss growing over them. There is no plaque that says there was a fire here. But if you’re, particularly artists who are going to show there, who are very tuned to this space, where look is absolutely everything. And they’re the ones, who are the quickest to kind of go, okay this is history, it’s not consistently linear chain of events. Actually the history and events have almost looped back on themselves, and transformed preexisting things, so the layering doesn’t do that, it occasionally does that again and reintroducing at the wrong end. The complexity of that history was really interesting, so things like importing a bit of Japanese, almost dead trade, just was part of that sort of, maybe the strangeness of it, which we wanted to keep. We didn’t want it to somehow come out new and restored again, even though there was a lot of restoration. Quite a lot of it is really straight, relaying the proper floorboards, getting the right paint, taking out cement and putting back, all those sorts of things. Then there’s this other bit, which is maybe a bit more allegorical. There are not to many examples of the way that Buster Keaton particularly engages with architecture. That window is not a window, or window becomes the escape route for the love of courting, and he jumps out the window, lands on this guys shoulders, he runs away. This is off course the famous wall that falls with the window falling directly over him.

CH:

Which is made, I’m told, actually like that without any stand-ins.

TE:

Well, he did all his own stunts. He’s an incredible acrobat. There is this dinnerparty and then they, as they have dinner, they get towards the end and they transform every element back into a bedroom, and every thing kind of flips up and disappears, and things flip down, the piano becomes the bed and it’s completely wonderful. And the idea that everything can be anything is actually very nice.

CH:

Now, you are one of the few architects I know, that actually is capable of both running an office and building things and running a studio in one of the most prolific schools of architecture, the ETH, and at the same time publishing your ideas in your books and blog. And obviously I would guess that the secret recipe for that is that they are sort of mutually supportive of each other. And in that sense, maybe my

question is a bit irrelevant, but do you feel that it’s possible to teach architecture? I ask because there is this theory that you can’t teach art. That you can show your students the good examples, you can talk to them about methodology, but basically you can’t teach it. How do you find that?

TE:

I think you can teach elements. I think maybe what you can’t teach is skills, or certain skills. Like we spend a lot of time on drawings, I showed some of them today. We spend quite a lot of time making things, but I have no interest in turning people into craftsmen, that’s not at all my interest. One of the projects we’re doing at the moment, which is after all those constructions, we’re doing a garden. So we stopped doing all those things and we got a bit of land at ETH, they gave me a little budget, and it happened when I was doing a crit with an English artist called Richard Wentworth, a very close friend, very important to us, to our practice. And he’s a sculptor, but he also takes photographs and he takes photographs of the city. And in the crit he turned around and said, I think it may have been the Glasgow crit actually, he turned around to the room, there were 50 students, how many of you have dug a hole. And then there were like 2 hands on top, and then he said, you know and he is about 70, and he said everybody in my generation has dug a hole. You know, if there is one thing that is common to all architecture, it’s that it’s made in the ground. Whether it stands of it or whatever, that is its common course. And then I thought, okay why don’t we do a garden because that is if nothing else. I mean that’s one of the things I like about gardeners, that it’s kind of hands on. Earth is really heavy, and it is really hard and it is really complex. And in architecture we draw these lines of little profiles, a nice section, a bit of typography. And we don’t realize quite how much labor, how much mechanical power is involved in placing that thing in the ground so it stays there. And the garden is kind of an amazing way of learning about that. So I agree there are certain things that you can’t teach. If you say the students have a proposal to plant 60 trees, which they did last spring, then somebody’s got to dig the holes for those trees. And then you become quite knowledgeable about the weather, about the seasons, because you can’t plant the trees any time, so it has to be during these 2 weeks, we have to look out for when the groundwater has gone down enough. So all these things, you know, you’re learning about how things behave in the world, or how things respond in the world, which is just what architecture does. You can’t lay bricks and pass concrete when it’s minus 5. So all these elements end up being kind of connected up. So I agree you can’t teach architecture straight on, but you can teach it through encounters with examples, through speculation, through drawing, through making. And I think that this thing they call theory, which I’m always really cautious of, maybe it’s because I can’t teach it. I suppose I’m very interested in history and in politics and particularly anthropology and art practice and things like that, but without ever naming them directly. I think it’s more about how you rub up against something, and some bits of it rub off on you and then you end up sort of, anyone of us, put together our own knowledge based on values and that may contain more or less theory depending on the architect. I mean I think it will be, I mean it’s interesting that when Valerio Olgiati was here, he wouldn’t take questions from the audience. He has a much more, much tighter frame on his practice. I mean he’s a brilliant architect, but I just couldn’t do that. I would love to be able to do that, but I can’t, I’m too messy.

CH:

But you’re English and he’s Swiss.

TE:

Exactly. If I could be that pure, what an elegant life it would be great. But now it’s a messy one.

CH:

You’ve written somewhere, that you “neither anticipate the revolution like the moderns nor do you recaptulate the traditions like the postmoderns….”

Are you trying to find an equilibrium between the two?

TE:

I’m not sure if it’s an equilibrium, but maybe it’s more about trying to avoid the rhetoric of either. Essentially the modernity was a revolutionary project at a time where it was necessary to revolutionize everything. It was sort of the end of empire, after First World War, the world really needed to be started at fresh. They needed to be very radical and come up with very new solutions, I think now we are in a very different moment and I don’t think we need revolution. I think we need things, which are much in a sense, conservation is much closer. It’s about caring, it’s about evolution, it’s about looking after things as well as making new things. Making new things by looking after things, allowing things to grow, allowing things to decay. So it goes back to your first question about the gardener, so that’s why landscape is a good metaphor. And so to some extent basically, we’re all postmodern, get over it. But we don’t necessarily have to be so rhetorical about it. If postmodern means that you have to deal with the multiplicity of meanings that can be ascribed anything, then yes we are postmodern. If postmodern means that you need to refer to and quote with the history of architecture, but at its most diagrammatic, then I would reject that. So that’s why I think that the bricolage is a bit post-modern. It’s quite postmodern, it’s about pulling a bit from here and a bit from there. But I don’t think it carries the same rhetorical baggage, so you can be incredible free. I mean the ultimate bricolage, is often described as Robinson Crusoe. He was on the island and he had to exist only based on the things that he had with him on the island, which were from the ship, were very few. I think one amusing bit in the text is when he checks his gold coins, to see that they are still there. But every time he checks them, he has a little bit more realization how useless they are on the island. So maybe the money and the gold coins is a sort of metaphor for culture, you know he is a cultured man, he does come from a civilized urban thing, and suddenly he’s back in this kind of primitive state and he takes a long time not to worry about his silk stockings and his money.

CH:

What do you find in the legacy of modernism that is important to keep?

TE:

I mean modernism has left an extraordinary canon of buildings, so I’m not anti-modern in that sense. In fact when we were working at Churchill, which is one of the early pieces of brutalism, it’s absolutely exquisite. So set piece, it’s all built within 3-4 years of itself, so it’s that sort of whole campus. You know, with one hand tectonically nearly consistent, it’s with enough inconsistencies to kind of keep it sort of quite human in the end. I started university in Bath in 1989, the last year that the Smithsons were head of school. So although in first year I didn’t really understand the Smithsons, they cast a very very long shadow over our school. In fact the school is designed by them one of their last buildings. So things like the Smithsons, brutalism and I are akin. So a lot of the fruits of modernism, I appreciate as being part of our culture. But I don’t think that we can work anymore the way that they did, I think that the issues that we face are fundamentally different. So that’s why, I wouldn’t be anti-modern, but I don’t think we can work like them anymore.

CH:

You could maybe say, that one of the lessons that we can learn from modernism is the ability to be very selective in aestics of what they did. And what you can learn from the postmodernists is the inclusiveness of the agendas that you address or the solutions you put forward.

TE:

I think that would be a good way of describing it, because I think, I am interested in the sense, the work we do being used and misused and misused, that it finds its own way. Actually the program that we work to with a client, that was necessary to make it happen, is almost forgotten, when it’s done. And then the building can just do things, and as you say the kind of precision, either technical or conceptional precision, in modernism. In Juergen Studio it’s all concrete and some block work and it was like how far can you push one thing, which I guess is a legacy of the moderns, to try and sort of, kind of make a sort of thesis out of the situation or piece of work. So in that sense we can’t escape it. And then there are projects like Raven Row or South

London Gallery, which I didn’t show, which is just a right of a mess of stuff, historically, materially. And then it’s quite fun then to be more eclectic, a bit of this, a bit of that, and then you just try. With a project like that, I would say, it’s much less relied on a concept and much more relied on judgment. Because you don’t know what it’s going to be until it’s done. You just hope that it all comes together enough to be one project. What I do quite like I suppose, is when you do something that aims to be very pure, and then something outside the project contaminates it, and then you have to deal with it. And that’s almost the most interesting bit, that’s when you have to either stand and protect your concept or sort of recalibrate it to make the most of the occasion. And also that’s the jeopardy, that’s the risk moment. Are you going to kill your project or are you going to make it. And you don’t know really.

CH:

You are part of a new generation, or almost new wave or vogue of English architects. Some of the best architects in Europe are from your country. And you have a close connection to Switzerland, especially to Zürich. How come we have this situation?

TE:

It’s quite difficult, and I know that Adam Caruso is coming in a few weeks, and I’m sure that he will have a different story to mine, although we are close. We both work in London, we both teach in Zürich, in fact he taught my partner Steph, she was a student of theirs, of Adam and Peter. Tony Fretton who’s also part of that gang, taught us. So there’s a line there, and it all goes back to the Smithsons. You can’t choose your family, you know. So for better or for worse that’s the kind of family or tribe that we’re in. How it kind of connects up to Zürich, maybe I have a hypothesis. It really starts with when I was at college, in the late 80s early 90s. Herzog & de Meuron came into a lecture in Bath in 1990, years before Tate Modern, and they were this

rather obscure sort of slightly intense young Swiss architects, who Smithson had got in, you know, he had a good nose for where things were happening. And then there was a gallery at the time called 9H, which was setup by David Chipperfield and his colleges, Richard Burnett. And they were starting to show people like Alvaro Siza, Herzog & de Meuron. So a whole European continental practice that basically wasn’t visible. When I was at college it was high-tech, post-modernism, deconstruction. And then you go through the front door and you pick a cart, you know. In that sense architectural education wasn’t that sophisticated, you had to somehow join one of the forces. And then these two Swiss guys then showed this really intense, very very abstract, quite moody stuff. It was just about materials, and these boxes, everything was a box. This one was made of dry stone, this one was rapped in copper, and this one was, you know. So there was something incredible intense and totally exciting about it. And I think that would include Caruso St. John, Tony Fretton, somehow got much more interested in work that was coming out of Basel and Zurich, as a point of resistance towards the dominant troupes of postmodernism high-tech. And that they were ones that weren’t aligned with the market, they had kind of a political capacity that was exciting. And I think that in a sense then a certain, or several, generations of architects grew out that. And 25 years later when someone like ETH is looking around for who might join their party, they sought of see over there, that there is something they recognize, and that there is an interest in building culture, making things, materiality. There’s an interest in a certain type of abstraction, that maybe it’s also coming from our practice, craftsmanship, building culture and things like that. And I think that maybe they recognized themselves more when they looked at London than, let’s say, if they looked at Rotterdam, which was also really really productive, but very very different. So that’s the best I can do, is that they saw in the London scene something that they had been instrumental in making happen.

Previous spread: Cowan Court, 6a Architects, 2016 Photo: Johan Dehlin

Opposite page: Jurgen Teller Studio, 6a Architects, 2016

Photo: Johan Dehlin

Albert Algreen-Petersen (ed.)

Albert Algreen-Petersen, born 1986, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Albert Algreen-Petersen is a PhD-fellow specializing in: The weathering and ageing of buildings, and the uses of constructional detailing in architecture. Albert Algreen-Petersen is currently working on the PhD-project at KADK: Weathering as an architectural informant and motive, at the Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration.

Christoffer Harlang (ed.)

Christoffer Harlang, born 1958, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and the Architectural Association, London. Christoffer Harlang is Professor at KADK, at the Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration, as well as a practitioner of architecture and design. Besides being the author of several books and articles on Nordic architecture and design, Christoffer Harlang heads the research unit presented in this publication.

Morten Birk Jørgensen

Morten Birk Jørgensen, born 1985, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Morten Birk Jørgensen is currently completing his PhD-fellowship, specializing in building culture and rural development, at KADK, Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration. The title of Morten Birk Jørgensens PhD-project is: Small-Town Architecture.

Nicolai Bo Andersen

Nicolai Bo Andersen, born 1970, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Cooper Union, New York. Nicolai Bo Andersen is a senior researcher and associated professor at KADK specializing in: Transformation, heritage and listed buildings, and is associated with Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration.

Søren Bak-Andersen (ed.)

Søren Bak-Andersen, born 1982, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. Søren Bak-Andersen is a PhD-fellow at KADK specializing in: Building culture, historical building techniques and materials, and the application of these in contemporary modern architecture. Søren Bak-Andersen is working on the PhD-project entitled: Old Knowledge for New Buildings, at the Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration.

Søren Vadstrup

Søren Vadstrup, born 1949, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and Associated Professor at KADK specializing in historical building techniques and material studies. Søren Vadstrup is the author of several books on the topic of historical buildings as well as numerous public guidelines on restoration and conservation.

Thomas Kampmann

Thomas Kampmann, born 1954, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and The Technical University of Denmark. Thomas Kampmann is an Associated Professor at KADK, Master Program: Cultural Heritage, Transformation and Restoration, primarily teaching building surveying and restoration. Thomas Kampmann is doing research on energy optimization of historical buildings.

Trine Hjorth Skovbo

Trine Hjort Skovbo, born 1986, graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and has been employed by the Agency for Culture and Palaces iand has worked on the report on: The Future of Danish Rural Churches at KADK. Currently, Trine is working with management and application of the buildings of Copenhagen.

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SCHOOLS OF ARCHITECTURE, DESIGN AND CONSERVATION