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the fifth façade – beautiful affordable eco-roofs
Owen Rose www.ecosensual.net
The human body is largely composed of water and its intimate connection to the blue planet does not stop with the flush of a toilet.
Often a source of grief; too much or not enough, water is both a visible and invisible concern for cities. not only do we have to find a source, clean it up for potable use and then distribute it, but we also have to dispose of it. Black or grey, waste water treatment is a costly and difficult task. Think of cities such as Halifax and Victoria that dump their untreated wastewater directly into the ocean. Although Montréal has a large sewage treatment plant a the east end of the island, the city still averages about 22 discharges of untreated sewage directly into the Saint Lawrence River each year. When it rains too much the combined storm and sewer system cannot process all of the water from our houses, hospitals, factories, rooftops and polluted streets. Thus the problem is passed on to the fishes, whales and other cities downstream.
Now that we have started to face the growing threat of environmental problems such as urban heat islands, air, water and noise pollution as well changing weather patterns, ecological building criteria such as the LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) green building rating system have encouraged the construction and design of more ecologically sustainable buildings. In the six LEED categories, water management takes on several forms: one is a vegetated roof.
Instead of installing deserts of tar and gravel on our roofs, more and more institutions, businesses and homeowners are opting to grow fields, gardens and vegetable patches on them. Aside from their obvious beauty, green roofs offer natural cooling, a greater lifespan and better rain water management. They retain about 50% of fallen rain (returning water to the atmosphere bypassing the city's sewer system). The other 50% will still find its way to the drain, but the return of this water is delayed, which helps city infrastructure manage water levels during downpours and intense rainfall.
What about Leaks?
Modern green roof experience started in Germany fore than forty years ago, and the waterproof aspect of such roofs is no longer a major concern. In North America, quality waterproofing membranes are on the market, capable of withstanding the constant humid environment of green roofs. Also, earth cover protects the membranes from large day to night temperature fluctuations and the sun's ultraviolet rays, both of which break down conventional roofs over their 20-year lifespan, whereas green roofs should last about twice as long. The real challenge is in created the lightest technology possible so that plants are still able to survive summer droughts and, more importantly, cold Canadian winters.
Green roofs on New or Existing Buildings?
In the deluge of new interest in green roofs, some owners of existing flat-roofed structures have looked at retrofitting an extensive green roof on their buildings; however, not all existing flat roofs are able to support the weight of even the lightest green roof assemblies. To study residential green roof retrofit possibilities, the Montréal Urban Ecology Centre built a demonstration project on top of an existing 100-year old Montréal duplex in 2005. the project included the complete reconstruction of the roof structure followed by the installation of a 15cm thick extensive roof. Half of the project cost was related to the structural retrofit. Although successful, the project was expensive.
In the case of new construction, extensive green roofs are much more economical and usually cost two to three times the amount of normal roof standard roofing systems; however, these green roofs should also last twice as long. With the natural renewal of a city's building stock, the widespread installation of green roofs with new construction would transform a city's roofscape over time. In 2006, the City of Toronto adopted public policy to encourage green roofs through urban planning and financial subsidies [www.toronto.ca/greenroofs/index.htm].
More and more building professionals and contractors are learning about green roof construction. to facilitate the learning process the Urban Ecology Centre [www.urbanecology.net] published two green roof reports (in French) in 2005 and 2006. the first report, Toîtures vertes a la montréalaise, was a 100-page introduction to green roofs for the southern Québec climate with a survey of green roof experiences in Québec and around the world. The second report, Projet-pilote de toît vert, documents the demonstration project form its initial planning to ongoing plant maintenance. It includes many photos and illustrates the project's costs, materials, earth and plant choices, the role of each team member. the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC) has also published reports relating to green roofs [www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca].
Team Effort
The basic construction team for a green roof includes the client, architect, structural engineer, green roof supplier, general contractor and roofing subcontractor. Depending on the extent of the project, a landscape architect or a horticulturalist could also be part of the team. there are more and more green roof suppliers in Canada. Technically, the construction of a green roof is not that difficult; however, due to the additional weight, a structural engineer should always be consulted. Ultimately the success of a project is determined by the correct choice of plants and substrate thickness given the roof's particular microclimate and the client's desired aesthetic. the true test of a green roof is whether the plants are able to survive three consecutive winters; so, when a new green roof technology appears, it is always a good idea to ask if it has at least three years of proven success and/or a good warranty.
Green Roof Composition
The green roof system can be installed once the roof structure has been properly designed and the appropriate roofing membranes have been applied. the system varies from one supplier to another, but usually contains a number of items such as an anti-root membrane, water drainage panels, a geotextile and specially formulated green roof light earth substrate. The weight of the earth holds the system in place by gravity.
Now the gardening begins! The most appropriate categories of plants for extensive green roofs are wild grasses, wild meadow flowers and sedums (waxy plants). the ecological goal is to favour indigenous plants, but the final choice depends on the chosen green roof technology and the roof's planned use. A number of institutional extensive projects in Montréal have used clover for its low-cost and tenacious character. Each green roof supplier is capable of furnishing information about the appropriate choice of plants and their aesthetic impacts. The installation of an irrigation system also depends on the type of roof and choice of plants. The more ecologically-oriented the roof, the less likely that it will need an irrigation system. In cities, irrigation of green roofs and gardens uses municipal water. Rain and/or grey water recuperation and indigenous landscaping strategies can help reduce summertime demand for city water resources.
It's Alive!
Unlike a normal roof that most of us tend to forget,a green roof does require regular maintenance. For an extensive ecological roof, the maintenance is minimised to about six times a year from spring through to autumn. This requires inspection of the roof drains to make sure that they are clear of debris, trimming the plants in spring and periodic weeding. If the roof does not have a built-in irrigation system, even the hardiest of ecological roofs may need additional irrigation during intense summer heat waves. Much of the roof's maintenance will depend on how the roof is used, the plants that have been chosen and the owner's gardening habits. Residential green roofs can also be used for recreational gardening.
Loft owners in Montréal have also invoked the idea of an urban cottage where the roof may include an outdoor bedroom, shower, summer kitchen and patio surrounded by a roof-top meadow and views of the city. For the building owner, green roofs increase building value and create a personal urban oasis. For the larger community, green roofs reduce the load on a city's water infrastructure and help to moderate urban temperatures. Clearly, green roofs not only benefit individuals, but they also benefit our neighbourhoods and our cities. the fifth façade has never shown so much potential.
Rose, Owen. 'Blue Roofs' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Owen Rose and On Site review
worried about rising sea levels? Go to the Netherlands — they have lots of experience with these things
Paul Whelan, illustration: New New York by Hugo Arriojas
According to a pair of studies published in the journal Science, global warming has already committed our planet to rising sea-levels. Jonathan Overpeck, an earth scientist at the University of Arizona in Tucson who co-authored both studies, says that the sea level will rise at rates of up to a metre per one hundred years – and it could go faster.
Humans are vulnerable because we build most of our cities in low coastal areas. The recent example of New Orleans and the ongoing struggle between the Netherlands and the sea are reminders of our future reality. We know that the water is rising, so what can we do? The obvious answer is to reduce our dependence on carbon ... but humans are catastrophically bad at taking preventative actions. Inevitably we will have to adapt to global warming and all its consequences, including higher sea levels.
However, there is a continuum of available responses ranging from holding back the water, making or buildings float, or simply doing nothing.
Beavering Away
If we decide to fight the seas and hold the water back, the Netherlands offers planning, engineering and political lessons Their extensive systems of dykes, dams and drainage strategies are designed to keep land below sea level dry. Rising sea levels threaten the entire country.
Recently a Dutch landscape firm, H+N+S, have proposed a new response to the triple threat of rising sea levels, subsiding land and increasing rains. To dampen the impact of ever-increasing storm surges, H+N+S propose selectively channelling the water behind the defences. H+N+S advocate catchment systems for fresh and salt water and reservoirs for excess rainfall. This strategy will require relinquishing land so strenuously won from the sea. The landscape will change from traditional farmland with water channels and ditches to one of raised lakes and reservoirs – a kind of non-sensical contour map. However, it could be the only way the Netherlands can save its country.
Regardless of the engineering and planning, the Dutch rely on a highly centralised government to construct and maintain their sea defences. Their system of participatory and centralised democracy is a political anomaly and I fully expect that fighting the sea would more likely result in less-friendly autocratic government.
Floating
Happily, buildings can float. there are two models for floating foundations. the Canadian model is based on the diving raft with concrete poured around polystyrene. These structures are unsinkable, but tend to be less stable for non-square geometries. Not surprisingly, the Dutch have been experimenting with floating buildings. Based on the river barge, Dutch technology consists of a floating concrete container in which the lower level becomes an underwater basement. Waterstudio Architects of the Netherlands have designed floating houses and are currently developing a 25-storey floating office tower and courtyard housing prototypes.
To date, floating buildings depend on nearby dry land for services or are anchored with mooring poles that also provide an umbilical connection for services. Without sea defences, floating buildings will be extremely vulnerable to increasingly violent storms, except where large expanses of newly inundated lagoons could provide a storm-damping environment in flat low-lying areas. Floating buildings could be effective in marshy delta areas that are already threatened by rising waters.
Do Nothing Romanticism
Doing nothing may ultimately be the most romantically compelling response to rising sea levels. Venice, a city that accepts its regular inundations, may offer the most clues for the benign-neglect approach. As Venice slowly disappears, many other cities could take its place as a magical tourist destination. Imagine gondoliering through a New York transformed into a city of canals and skyscrapers. However, a deliriously wet New York will ultimately require serious design to ensure the right level of submersion. At the very least, infrastructure such as the subways, potable water, power and sewage would have to be re-engineered.
Saving our sinking sea-level cities will be an expensive undertaking. The capital needed to re-engineer an entire city will be scarce as businesses move away to drier and higher ground. Whole districts of the city will elegantly decay as the water laps at their second floor windows. We live in an era where financial markets dictate settlement form. As in Venice, it is quite likely that at some tipping point, the rich will abandon the coasts for safer inland settlements, leaving the poor to cope with their deteriorating coastal cities.
In any built response to rising sea levels, infrastructure and its maintenance will be a significant challenge. What we humans lack in intelligence we sometimes compensate for by cleverness. Perhaps we will be making floating cities anchored to the atlantan ruins of our submerged cities. Maybe our future will be a combination of Futurism fantasy and Disney picturesque.
Whelan, Paul. 'Soggy Bottom Architecture' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Paul Whelan, Hugo Arriojas and On Site review
the social construction of landscape
Elizabeth Shotton
North Atlantic Rim (NAR) Research Collaborative: University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. Dalhousie University in Halifax, Canada. University College in Dublin, Ireland. Academy of the Arts: Architecture and Design in Reykjavik, Iceland.
NAR's series of cross-cultural studies of coastal settlements on the north Atlantic started in 2004 with initial drawing and documentation studies of coastal landscapes and settlements in Norway and Ireland. It continued the following year in Iceland, and concluded the first phase in Nova Scotia in 2006.
The project has examined natural landscapes, altered landscapes, historic and contemporary building responses to these conditions, and the relationship between material resources and building form. North Atlantic coastal landscapes face significant development pressures and environmental threats to their fragile ecosystems, landforms and settlements. Conte drawings from the scale of landscape to building form and detail, scaled aerial drawings of each region and site photography have formed a basis for comparisons, identifying salient issues of culture and settlement patterns, landscape and its relevance to built form.
NAR's project parallels Richard Saul Wurman's work with design student at the University of North Carolina, later made into a small book called Cities: Comparisons of Form & Scale (1963). His representation of city form in sand castings insipred NAR's study of landscape and settlement in drawings. Wurman's thesis was that 'the healthy existence of cities is the degree to which the beginnings of a particular city is apparent'. NAR's focus reaches further back to the primacy of landscape to understand its critical relevance in shaping the form of human culture and settlement. While Wurman's work responded to the underlying pressures on city development during the mid- to late-twentieth century, environment is key to our present and future evolution, allied to current issues of sustainability.
Robert Thayer, in Gray World, Green Heart: Technology, Nature and the Sustainable Landscape, proposes that 'surface versus core' is one of the most fundamental ways to understand landscape. Describing the ever-widening dislocation between these two, he proposes that surface values are based on what is in front of us. As a visually-trained profession we see the surface condition of landscape, and work to reveal its poetic beauty through our remaking of its surface through building. Difficult to achieve and admirable when realised, it is the manner in which young architects are trained and old architects work. However, it does not engage the core.
Core values are those hidden conditions of the land, its ecological and material processes – the operative level of landscape. Re-linking those processes construed as natural and those construed as made, challenges the surface-core dichotomy with a more holistic picture of continuity and interdependence – landscape as the thing that hold us. Sustainability as a reading of core, of processes and interrelationships, was commonplace until technology and industry severed this understanding.
However, recent ecological consequences have reached a crisis, revealing once again our interdependence with the land. This critical immediacy between landscape and building is the subject of NAR's research — to understand how intimately architecture can be informed by its place by comparing four places of similar but unequal landscapes, with four similar but unequal legacies in building.
Ireland, Norway, Iceland and Atlantic Canada share some surprising landscape alliances. Although Norway has steep mountain ranges and deep fjords, its habitable coastal lands strongly resemble the others. Each place is dominated by coastline, Iceland and Ireland as islands and Nova Scotia and Norway as peninsulas. The Atlantic Ocean tempers the environment each, maintaining green landscapes of small valleys and hills interrupted by rock outcroppings and cliffs. It also inform the industry and culture of these regions.
Subtle distinctions in form, built or unbuilt, the relationship to resources, climate and culture become manifest when studied through the discipline of drawing. When various research interests are brought to bear on the drawing project, from the relationship between perception, representation and design, to environmentally-driven foci on material resource management and use in architectural practice, a diversity of cultural, material and formal readings emerge. excerpts from students' notes demonstrate this vividly.
Cultural and personal backgrounds of the participants have enriched these studies. Perceptual biases both influence the reading of the terrain under investigation, and recast one's own culture in comparison. Legacies of physical and cultural alteration to the landscape that come from inhabitation become not only explicit but also often poignant when coupled with the shared experiences of a cross-cultural research team.
If limited only to the yearly exchange of ideas among students and staff, the project has value enough as it gives new insights into architectural form, space making and cultural meanings.
The second phase of the NAR project will revisit the four countries, expanding its base of documentation and including built experiments.Shotton, Elizabeth. 'Form and Settlement' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Elizabeth Shotton and On Site review
Jamelie Hassan's garden of light questions the process of peace
Miriam Jordan and Julian Haladyn
The Lester B Pearson Garden for Peace and Understanding was designed by the landscape architect Paul Ehnes in the grounds of Victoria University in the University of Toronto. It commemorates the life of Pearson, who graduated from Victoria University in 1919 and served as Chancellor from 1952-1959. As the fourteenth Prime Minister of Canada and the 1957 recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize, Pearson was a fierce advocate for peace who, as the inscription on the railing overlooking the garden reads, 'established Canada's reputation in the 20th Century as one of the world's great peacekeeping nations and helped define Canada's modern foreign policy'.
A small waterfall flows from beneath this railing and cascades into a calm pool of water surrounded by a lush perennial garden that includes bugleweed, anemones, coneflowers, globe thistle and heuchera.1 Flat stones in the pool make a shallow, gradated water garden, punctuated by larger rocks similar to the space in a Japanese garden. The calm and peaceful atmosphere of this tribute to Pearson comes from Paul Ehnes' use of 'water in all of its states to illustrate the process of education which is essential for peace'. 2
The winner of the 2001 Governor-General's Award in Visual and Media Arts, Jamelie Hassan's practice as a Lebanese-Canadian artists, writer and curator often confronts issues of colonialism, patriarchy, militarism, censorship, sexuality and cultural identity. She explores personal and public histories often ignored in public discourse, such as the salient fact that peace is not a daily reality for all too many people throughout the world. She chose the Lester B Pearson Garden as the context for her installation Garden of Light, a site-specific artwork that was part of Nuit Blanche, an all-night art event that took place the night of September 30, 2006. This event featured more than 130 contemporary art projects that interacted with other sites throughout Toronto, including Maize Barbacoa, a corn roast in Yorkville Park by Hassan's partner Ron Benner.
For Garden of Light, Hassan added night-blooming lilies, plastic flowers that let of a soft glimmer of light when placed in the water and, also in the pool, a series of 10 letter-shaped ceramic pieces that spell the word 'eventually'. Through these elements, Hassan invited spectators to reconsider the concepts of peace and understanding specifically where Ehnes used water as a symbol for the process of peace.
The most interactive element of Hassan's installation was the glowing plastic flowers which could be seen floating throughout the space of the pool adding an intimate illumination to the garden. The flowers were transformed into an element of delight. When people realised that the flowers stopped glowing when removed from the water, they started to play with these flowers, picking them up and throwing them back into the water as through making wishes. This interactivity between the spectators and Garden of Light turned the calm, passive and meditative space of the Lester B Pearson Garden for Peace and Understanding into an arena of communal activity. By relating this participatory project to the conceptual construction of the garden itself (water as symbolic of peace and understanding), Hassan invited the spectators to become participants, actively working towards peace through the communality of play. The coming together of spectators from all walks of life during this one-night encounter illustrates the necessity for people to work together to forge real and enduring peace throughout the world.
This is heightened by the ceramic letters scattered throughout the pool. That these white letters might combine to form the word 'eventually' can easily be overlooked – a discreet reminder that peace has not been achieved in spite of our intentions, a reminder that we cannot sit passively by and hope that people will be achieved 'eventually'.
How easily this was overlooked can be seen in many responses published after the event, in which Garden of Light is discussed almost entirely in terms of the beauty of the glowing flowers. But anyone familiar with Hassan's work knows that her presentation of beauty is always accompanied by political commentary; in the case of this installation the commentary is very subtle and must be pieced together using the original intentions of the garden itself – a meditation on peace and understanding. The beauty of Garden of Light is that the peacefulness of the installation depends on a fragile moment in time when visitors come together and forget their differences in the play of the lights and water. The addition of the scattered letters adds to this participatory experience, in which the activity of piecing the word together required visitors to walk around the garden and, as was often the case, to talk to one another, communicating this little secret.
'Since that night', Ashley Gallaugher writes in her article on Nuit Blanche, 'when I look at the garden on my way home from class, it seems like something vital is missing. It was great seeing people interact with the garden'. 3 What is missing is the community that Hassan brought together for one evening with Garden of Light. The water in this garden symbolises the clarity, enlightenment and understanding that comes with peace. By situating her installation in this water Hassan planted a seed of doubt about whether we have truly reached this state of understanding. The fragmented letters drifted in the water, implying that if the currents come together in the right way, peace will follow – eventually.
1 For a list of the perennial plants in the garden, see http://www.vicu.utoronto.ca/Alumni/The_Lester_B_Pearson_Garden_for_Peace_and_Understanding/Perennial_Plant_List.htm
2 Victoria University website on The Lester B Pearson Garden for Peace and Understanding, http://www.vicu.utoronto.ca/Alumni/The_Lester_B_Pearson_Garden_for_Peace_and_Understanding.htm
3 Gallaugher, Ashley. "Nuit Blanch help us up all night, in a good way". The Strand, 15 October 2006: 11.
Jordan, Miriam and Jason Haladyn. 'Watering the Seeds of Doubt' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Miriam Jordan and Jason Haladyn and On Site review
plug us in, connect us to the earth and we might start to get it
Jonah Humphrey
We are altering the chemistry and biology of our world: human endeavours are not just limited to the local, but now operate at the scale of the globe itself.
The earth, spatially and temporally, is immense. We fear that our alteration of life-supporting processes will be irreversible and uncontrollable. However, when combatting environmental changes, we often react against natural transformations such as floods, earthquakes and hurricanes. Our fear and uncertainty wants a kind of permanence. We try to prevent 'natural processes' from changing and evolving.
We must reconcile our own personal spatial interactions with the new global connectivity that exists between technology, the material products of our cultures, and the natural environment. Global connectivity was a twentieth century concept —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, Marshall McLuhan and Buckminster Fuller each saw a coming hybridisation of technology and nature in new spheres of global interconnections.
Teilhard de Chardin believed that our capacity to generate complex systems and technologies of interaction mimics the evolutionary and biological development of consciousness. After the geosphere, and the biosphere, comes the nöosphere – a sphere of thought that now surrounds the earth. McLuhan saw this connectivity as driven by global media to the point that systems of sound and video will be so inter-linked as to form our environment entirely. Fuller demonstrated technological and biological interconnectivity in a geodesic dome, a geoscope, the interior of which was lined with aerial images simultaneously displaying flows of economic and natural resources: a control centre for the earth's cultural and ecological processes. Link the world wide web to contemporary theories of global ecology and we experience the earth as an enormous entity of organic, fluid and artificial system interwoven in a network of physical and virtual space.
Why then, with such powers of transformation, do we have a fundamental fear of altering the environment?
We need a better understanding of the inherent forms of feedback that already exist between the world and us. As we adapt to drastic environmental change, we can measure the perceptions and preconceptions we hold of ourselves compared to the environment's own character, state and nature.
Land|Scope, a theoretical project, addresses some of these things. It defines landscape as a combined realm of ecology and culture borrowing ideas from Fuller's Geoscope to find new applications for responsive technologies – systems embedded in structures that allow them to sense, think and act within the environment. Whereas Fuller's proposal was an enclosed, spatially separated global system of control, Land|Scope is an integrated landscape of interaction, offering a place for interpretation and reconciliation with the environment.
This project is sited at the Canada Centre for Inland Waters (CCIW), home of the National Water Research Institute (NWRI), which researches and tests natural and man-made water-based systems. CCIW sits on Hamilton Harbour beside the Skyway Bridge that connects Burlington to Hamilton – a site between suburban development, industrial lands, remediated wetlands and the open waters of Lake Ontario; a site quite literally at the centre of many of Canada's leading environmental concerns, including the state, the natural environment, industrial production and pollution, and fresh water reserves. The NWRI houses Canada's Global Environmental Monitoring System for freshwater (GEMS/WATER), part of the United Nations Environment Programme.
It is precisely this monitoring that Land|Scope aims to use as a basis for interpretation and response. the current monitoring done at the NWRI, as well as monitoring of new systems in a hybrid natural/industrial landscape surrounding the site, will be brought into the architectural component of the project – a monitoring centre where our interactions with the local ecology can be publicly accessed, showing the connectivity between the wetlands surrounding the facility, Hamilton Harbour and the biosphere.
Responsive architectures – whole environments of connection – have the potential to free us from the rigid ideas that we currently use to define our environment. Within new hybrid environments, we might better understand phenomena present in nature and technology alike, reacting and adapting accordingly as both the living creatures and the cultural beings we are.
I would like to extend my thanks to Michael Forbes, Science Liason Officer for Environment Canada, and the NWRI, for allowing me to tour the facilities, and providing me with the information to make my research and design work possible.
Humphrey, Jonah. 'We are the Environment' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Jonah Humphrey and On Site review
accidental urban typologies
Joey Giaimo
The perpetual buzz of building activity in downtown Vancouver — 46 residential complexes currently [2007] under construction — is contributing to the accumulation of a single building type. The exalted condominium tower on a podium has resulted in thousands of hastily injected living units in the downtown core. Planners have long recognised the shortcomings of this typological saturation, yet have had to accept the consequent exhaustion of downtown lots.
Besides a questionable density of inhabitants, with each concrete pour the end product is clear: another podium, another tower, another quasi-public space. Difference is presented in tweaks and gimmicks rather than forceful pushes towards less predictable, more challenging directions.
Fleeting Occurrences
Every new hole in the ground, the inevitable erection of the crane and its associated surface activities interrupt, disrupt and reorganise public space. In Vancouver the choreography of city building is well-rehearsed, as are the concessions made by those who walk, pace and wander through it. Downtown flâneurs have prudently unleashed those turtles that haven't already been crushed by the ten-ton trucks which jerk and chug from one site to the next.
There is always room for optimism — these transient disruptions provide an alternate way to negotiate city surfaces and form. But a different kind of construction activity is also taking place, one linked with two words, leaky and condo, always spoken under Vancouver's breath, and one that, catalysed not by construction fever but by its failure, inadvertently re-represents or even de-represents architecture in the cityscape.
Ghost Building
In the frenzy of building activity a number of scaffolds wrap previously completed structures. Scaffolds come in various guises buy typically are cloaked with an emerald green perforated fabric — a unique and detailed veiling. However, there are variations: several skids of brick in the lane behind one building signal cladding replacement. To maintain a consistent mortar temperature, the scaffolding has been wrapped in an opaque, silky white sheathing to hold tempered air between drape and façade.
A phantasmic presence, this wrapped building marks a striking difference to the stock of condo towers dotting the downtown core. It may look like just another leaky condo but it is also a spectacular and captivating phenomenon, a changeling in this ephemeral condition.
Mute Rendering
Formally, the Ghost Building presents itself like all the others, twenty to thirty-something storeys extruded vertically and placed the bylaw-eighty-feet from its neighbours. In its simple slip, it has masked itself from the city and bowed out of the point-tower posturing race. However, this new typology has inadvertently transformed the everyday into event.
Ghost Building grabs attention with an undeliberate ingenuity that other condos would like, but can't have. The draw of its pillowy skin is immediate. It undulates. It shakes and shivers. It billows and shimmers. At night it is a glowing collage with subtle punctuations of colour from the still-occupied units inside. Positioned in a field of static sameness, this wrapped building makes no overt claims for attention, but its silence commands attention anyway. Muffled and mute the building is inconclusive. Ghost Building's detached, new intensity contests the city's zealous efforts to provide the perfect mould for city living. The decorative nips, tucks, swirls and swooshes of the neighbours look insufficient and superfluous against its tremulous mass.
Androgenous, silkily clad and not its usual muscular brick self, the Ghost Building also obscures all those involved in its original presence: the planners, the advisory design panels, the city's council, local community groups, the architects, the engineers, the endless assortment of building consultants, the marketing team and ultimately even the building's own inhabitants, who register only when their lights are on at night.
Something of Difference
I don't wish to present Ghost Building as good architecture or as an urban success story. Its premise is based in failures that are a menace to its inhabitants; it is ethereal but an aberration. But by effectively shutting itself off, it questions both the external and internal uniformity of high-rise residential living throughout the peninsula.
While condo marketing and architecture collude to sell the ideal interior condition, Ghost Building has propelled this condition to its absurd apotheosis. Ghost Building's fabric has imprisoned the inhabitants in an interiority that has everything they paid for, except that all-important view. In a further irony, the fabric delights only those looking at if from the outside, turning he whole notion of privileged lifestyle on its head, and pointing out how transitory a thing lifestyle is.
Beyond Lifestyle
Processes of construction, decay and repair flag the shortcomings of unrelenting urbanistic production: Ghost Building's interruptive architecture displays all the urban and formal contradictions of Vancouver's insistent residential tower type.
Giaimo, Joey. 'Draping Vancouver' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Joey Giaimo and On Site review
redefining the power of São Paulo's infrastructure
Fernando de Mello Franco
On the verge of summer, when pluviometric rates in São Paulo are at their highest, the chronic problem of flooding resumes. With the intense process of disorderly urbanisation, the soil has become excessively impermeable. The transformation and occupation of São Paulo Basin riverbanks and fluvial plains, which used to control water flows, just worsen the problem.
The entire population is hit by the flooding. Underprivileged populations who live close to water flows in historically depreciated areas are directly affected in their own dwellings. The risk situation of these populations represents for every public administration a reason for concern, which might be either of lower or higher level, according to their social commitment. This issue has never been tackled in an effective manner, and suffers with continual government changes and discontinuity.
The population not affected in their own dwellings is affected by difficulties imposed by a lack of mobility when the main road system, situated on a tableland and strategically placed parallel to the water ways, floods. As water incapacitates traffic flow, the problem gains a metropolitan dimension, also reaching production sectors.
As flooding is a factor of urban diseconomy, harming the efficient flow of people and goods, it belongs to the city administration plan and political agenda, to which successive governments have allocated funds, although never enough. In this investment, there is an opportunity for action, pinpointing needy areas throughout the metropolis.
Articulating Systemic and Local Concerns: the network of piscinões
The issues involving water resources — urban drainage, sanitation and water supply — are complex and demand efforts at both macro and micro levels. Since 1990 it has been dealt with by the State Plan of Water Resources (PERH) and Macro-drainage Plan for the Upper Tiete Basin.
One of the solutions proposed for city flooding is the construction of a set of large reservoirs, piscinões, to retain and control rain water, holding it back from city rivers and streams, reducing any overflow. In short, the piscinão replaces the original regulating function of the fluvial plains, now occupied and fully impermeable.
Presently, there are about 319 built reservoirs out of a total estimate of 131, which will be sable to hold 15.5 million cubic metres of water. They are distributed throughout the micro-tributary basins of Tiete River, covering the entire São Paulo water system. Many are located in peripheral areas, close to informal sectors of city occupation. Thus, in order to face the metropolitan dimension of flooding problems, there must be some meaningful public investment in peripheral areas. Finding a fit between the metropolitan and local dimensions of this question is the starting point toward any solution.
The 'informal' sectors have the most need for public spaces. In São Paulo, where disputes over space are often mediated by violence, there are still some unoccupied areas: pieces of land usually devoted to football fields, and other community activities. In the informal sectors, samba, funk dance and football matches are important events for the construction of social and communal networks, highly necessary for the strengthening of relationships to resist the adversities present in a large metropolis. They are a spontaneous manifestation that shows the value of public space in these areas.
This collection of vacant urban spaces in São Paulo can be converted into an opportunity for a new network of public spaces. For example, the piscinão is only active about 3 to 4 months out of the year, during high-water periods. For the other months it is idle. New programs can be added to the piscinão, building on the future steps of the Macro-drainage Plan.
Piscinões unit both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. They can serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain.
Re-urbanisation of Água Branca, São Paulo, SP, 2004
Fernando de Mello Franco, Marta Moreira and Milton Braga, in association with Camila Toledo Fabrini, Guilherme Wisnik, Martin Corullon and Roberto Klein.
São Paulo will have to be consistent in managing its natural resources in a sustainable and rational manner. In this context, the effective urban reconfiguration of an area as large as the proposed new borough in Água Branca can only be achieved through the infrastructural planning of the region. However, an intervention on this scale essentially means defining the design of that urban infrastructure, giving legible form to a strategic action on behalf of the public authorities.
The association between transport and water-related issues in São Paulo surfaces here as a project theme, broached through a consequent critical deportment.
New train stations on existing lines are proposed to fulfill a strategic role as points of mediation between scales, and to serve as links between the metropolitan transport non-polluting railway system and the localities. In our project, these train stations are organised as agglomeration points for public facilities, special services and social housing.
Another matter is the definition of public spaces in this project: recreational and gathering spaces, which seek proximity with the circulation system and with the watercourses, arise out of precisely this conviction. the resulting water square holds both the system of the borough's public spaces and the technical system for the drainage, treatment and re-use of water resources. Fruit of a wellspring of non-contaminated groundwater, it will serve as a landmark and spatial reference on the cityscape of the borough, laying water's claim to the floodplain, at once technical and symbolic, rigorous and crystalline.
de Mello, Fernando. 'Water Ways' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Fernando de Mello Franco and On Site review
building civic narratives that read like novels
In the skin of a Lion in many ways parallels Roman Polanski's equally mythic film, Chinatown. Ondaatje's dream-like quality sets it apart from Polanski's harder-nosed struggle over water supply in the creation of modern Los Angeles. Certainly there is a comparative reading in the privatised and violent nature of American birth as opposed to the civil service Canadian approach. But in the end there are the respective stories and their artefacts.
Paul Whelan
Lacking any kind of magical foundation story, Toronto craves a mythology. It's often left up to artists to create the magical bedrock for a city's future mythology. In Toronto, poet bp Nichol developed an urban imagery through a creative re-reading of its geography and street names. And it was Michael Ondaatje's 1987 novel, In the Skin of a Lion, that widely disseminated a personal myth of the city's coming of age. The novel focusses on the Bloor Street viaduct and the Victoria Park Filtration Plant, both constructed in the 1920s and 30s through the bullheadedness of a remarkable civil servant, RC Harris, Toronto's Commissioner of Works.
Harris proposed that a 2-mile intake tunnel be built under Lake Ontario, terminating at a new filtration plant. In Ondaatje's novel the filtration plant is referred to as the Palace of Purification. The industrial processing of water may seem an odd choice for the basis of a new mythology, but as was well understood by all ancient cultures, the regulation of water underlies both the foundation of the city as well as its on-going well-being. Ondaatje portrays Harris as a mythic hero who provides the vision, ambition and political will while Thomas Pomphrey, the filtration plant's architect, provides the architectural expression to house Harris's project.
Early in the book, while talking with Pomphrey, Harris muses, 'before the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting'. Toronto's filtration plant is a testament to this kind of imagining, an architectural anomaly mysteriously beached on the shores of Lake Ontario. Contemplating this beaux arts composition with its grass terraces, palaces and commanding views, it is almost sacrilege to believe that its raison d'etre was simply to solve Toronto's water purity problems by processing millions of litres of lake water.
The architecture is modernist in the direct way that structures sand their placement reflect the inward flow of water and the industrial production of clean drinking water. In contrast, the architectural styling shares nothing with a reductive modernist sensibility. The materials alone – yellow brick, limestone, copper, bronze, terrazzo floors, black marble, herringbone tile work and fine plaster, coupled with inventive detailing and fine craftsmanship – create a sumptuous environment in which the mechanics of the pumps and controls are elevated to a shining, functional art.
The pump house, in an elegant ballroom, is at the lowest terrace, nearest the water – an aqueous anteroom to the purification project further up the terraces. The alum tower marks the nest step on the water's path to purification. Water passes under the tower and coagulant is dropped into it before the underground pipe turns 90 degrees to approach the filer building on axis, a simultaneous beaux-arts compositional rule and a modernist functional diagram. Small particulates in the water adhere to the alum, sinking to the bottom of settling tanks. Clean water is then piped to the city. The tower could easily have been a simple metal tank, but is instead a vertical punctuation mark on a horizontal process. The functionally unnecessary top floor belvedere exists only to offer powerful views of Lake Ontario.
The upper ground is dominated by the sprawling filter building, buttressed by administration towers that flank a monumental arched entry. An octagonal rotunda marks the crossing of the filtration building wings and the administration building. In the centre of the rotunda is a pylon providing data on filtration rates, water capacity and time of day. Like the entire plant, this device only needed to be a prosaic piece of equipment, but instead is celebrated and elevated in an elaborately detailed stone obelisk.
At every turn our expectations about water filtration are eclipsed by the exuberance of Pomphrey's architectural ambition for mere infrastructure, almost as if Nicola Salvi and Pope Clement XII had re-imagined a Trevi Fountain to celebrate the arrival of water in the modern city.
What of Ondaatje's fascination with the Palace of Purification? It is possible that the Harris Filtration Plant is just one site for inventing a Toronto mythology. Perhaps Ondaatje's novel is a single particle of alum dropped into raw lake water. With enough alum, maybe a movie or two, the ooze that settles from the raw water will become the material of rumours and tall stories. And while we wait for the stories to accrete, we celebrate the delivery of clean water.
Whelan, Paul. 'Water Mythologies' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Paul Whelan and On Site review
a laundry list for urban vibrancy: drip-dry urbanism
Aniket ShahaneIn the Laundromats of Bombay and New York, water and power go hand in hand. Not only do they comprise the infrastructure required for the Laundromats' operation (water for washing and electricity for drying), but their availability as resources determines both how and how much space is claimed by this banal activity. The architecture of the Bombay Dhobi Ghats — a generations-old Indian public Laundromat – and the New York City Laundromat unveils the impact of infrastructure on people, activity and architecture.
India's infrastructure can be characterised as fragile at best. Although improving, the supply of both water and electricity are unreliable. Power outages are not uncommon and water is often unsanitary, if running at all. Low levels of water and electricity instill in Indians a frugal mindset towards the consumption of these resources. Water needs to be carefully allocated. Electrical loads must be at a minimum. But what India lacks in resources, it more than makes up for with resourcefulness. In Bombay, a city of 18 million individuals, the human hand is the best means to monitor the quantity of water that flows from a tap. Reliance on manpower is critical and is most evident in the architecture of the Dhobi Ghat.
Like many other Laundromats, Bombay's Dhobi Ghat provides complete laundry services for its clientele including clothing pick-up/drop-off, washing, drying and ironing. However, in contrast to Laundromats that have a stronger infrastructure at their disposal, the Ghat survives on a spartan attitude towards water and energy consumption. It works like this. Upon request, a courier from the Ghat is dispatched to a client's home to pick up dirty laundry. The clothes are wrapped in a brightly coloured sack and swiftly delivered to the Ghat by the courier, usually on a bicycle or other man-powered vehicle (water and electricity are not the only resources that are hard to come by in Bombay). Upon arrival at the Ghat, the clothes are sorted, marked and handed over to the laundrymen. Unlike washing machines, which provide little flexibility in water usage, washing men can regulate the stream of water from a tap so as to use only the amount necessary for a given load of laundry, minimising wasteful water consumption. After the appropriate amount of water is released, soap is added and the washing man begins his job. Knee deep in sudsy water, he dunks a few articles of clothing at a time, pulls them out, smacks the garments on a flogging stone in order to beat out the dirt, and then wrings the clothes of excess water with his bare hands. The process is repeated until the washing man determines the load to be clean, at which point he carries the garments in his arms to one of many clotheslines strung from one side of the Ghat to another to begin the drying process. The clothes are hung to air-dry individually one article at a time; the occasional Bombay sea breeze is far more dependable than the Bombay electrical infrastructure. Finally, the dried, wrinkled clothes are hand-pressed using a heavy iron heated in a wood-burning oven. They are then folded, packed in another colourful sack, and returned by courier to their rightful owner. The Dhobi Ghat is a place of messy, physical work that engages the entire human body and demands much from its architecture.
Above all, the Dhobi Ghat needs to house men performing an arduous job. Unlike the washing machine, a washing man requires more space and maintenance. He needs to be able to bend down, stand up, scrub and flail wet clothes. It's necessary for him to be able to eat, drink and communicate with other washing men. He is far less predictable and productive than a machine. He can slip and fall, take ill, bear a bad mood, or demand better pay. Moreover, the washing man lacks the capacity to wash as many loads as one washing machine. Therefore, in order for the Dhobi Ghat to run as a legitimate business, it needs to house many washing me. With such a complicated program, it is not wonder the Ghats are designed the way they are: they are not enclosed at all. An open Laundromat – one with no walls – gives the washing men enough room to manoeuvre as required while allowing plenty of natural air circulation to mitigate the pervasive dampness. In this open format, rows of concrete pens on the ground are sized to allow one laundryman to wash. Bundles of pipes feed the fragile Bombay water into each one of these pens through a spigot. Overhead a web of clotheslines make an ad-hoc trellis. In Bombay, where the act of washing and drying clothes can't be trusted to resource-guzzling machines, a man inside a concrete pen and a clothesline suspended in open air are the best substitutes.
The architecture of the New York Laundromat, in contrast, is far more subdued. The city's robust infrastructure gives New Yorkers the licence to use as much water and energy as desired, even at a time when the word 'sustainability' is all the rage. This allows the demeanour of the New York City laundryman to be drastically different than his counterpart in Bombay. Like the Dhobi Ghat, the typical New York Laundromat also provides full laundry services for its clients. Once the clothes have been dropped off at the Laundromat, the laundryman empties the bag of clothes into a washing machine, usually separating whites from colours. A plastic dial is twisted to select water temperature, while seven quarters are thrust into a metal try in order to start the machine. After exactly twenty minutes, it stops, at which point the load is assumed to be clean. The clothes are then unloaded by the laundryman, transported in a cart a short distance to the drying machine, and tossed into a dryer. A fabric softener sheet is added, another dial is turned to select the desired level of heat (i.e. electricity) for the job, more coins are inserted to determine drying time (one quarter buys six minutes of hot air), and finally a button is pressed to begin the machine drying process. the only part of the New York City laundryman's job that doesn't involve the use of a machine is the folding of clothes, which has to be done by hand. If clothes are folded soon enough after drying, there is usually no ironing required. Because the laundry process in New York is not nearly as labour intensive as in Bombay, it enables many clients to come in and do their own laundry – an option not available at the Dhobi Ghat. Locals will arrive at all hours, unload a bag of clothes into a washer, return thirty minutes later to transfer the clothes to a dryer, then come back once again to take the clothes home. compared to the Ghat, the New York Laundromat is an easy, tidy operation.
The architecture of the NYC Laundromat is a direct reflection of its resource-abundant, labour-deficient process. It requires space to accommodate a certain number of machines with identical dimensions and predictable behaviours. A rehabbed ground floor of a row house will do just fine. The Laundromat on Smith Street in Brooklyn is a typical example. Besides the overflow of glaring fluorescent lighting from the large storefront window, there is very little that gives away the activities that occur inside. The interior contains two rows of machines with a centre aisle. Washing machines are towards the streetfront, while dryers occupy the back of the space. The floors, walls and ceiling are a ragtag composition of vinyl and acoustic tiles, in order to provide an economical and acoustically sound enclosure. The architecture of the New York Laundromat is, for the most part, fairly discreet.
In both the Dhobi Ghat and the Smith Street Laundromat, space is generated not only by the physical form, dimensions, and organisations of men and machines; it is also a direct result of varying degrees of access to water and energy. Because the Dhobi Ghat has to be a physically open space in order to function, it is possible for the average passer-by to peer down on the space and witness the chaotic collection of people and clothes, wet and dry. The sound of laundrymen bellowing to each other and the smell of dirty cloth and caustic soda contribute to the public assault of one's sense. The Ghat's location next to the train line allows the activity of clothes-washing to be a landmark passed on the commute to and from work. In more ways than one, the Dhobi Ghat asserts itself onto its city. In fact, this kind of emphatic claim of urban space is typical of Bombay locals. When given scarce resources, countless Bombay residents take matters into their own hands. They claim the space of their city as their own, not just for washing and drying, but also for cooking, eating, sleeping, bathing, entertaining, defecating, urinating and cremating. Bombay is a city of perpetual urban aggression – each individual carrying out in public what they cannot do in private.
In New York, on the other hand, the introverted nature of the Smith Street Laundromat betrays its city's tendency toward privatisation. The abundance of resources in New York affords a city that is luxurious enough to individualise almost everything, including access to a washer and dryer. Everyday mundane chores such as washing and drying clothes don't require the effort they do in Bombay and are mostly kept out of the public realm. Why air dry outside when there is plenty of electricity to machine dry inside? In fact, it is so uncommon to see clothes hung out to dry in New York that on the rare occasion when it actually happens, it often induces outcries from neighbours. Hanging laundry in New York today is seen as a sign of a neighbourhood in decline. It devalues adjacent property. So even if New Yorkers are tempted to air dry (to save on electric bills, for example), they will most likely opt to be good neighbours and use a drying machine instead. Alas, the price of living in a city with seemingly endless reserves of water and electricity is the burden of propriety: please use a clothes dryer rather than a clothesline to dry your clothes so my property does not depreciate; please grill in your own backyard rather than on the sidewalk so I don't smell your cooking; please play your music in your living room rather than on the street so my quiet evening at home isn't disturbed. The affluence of New York infrastructure has instilled in New Yorkers something that currently does not and cannot exist in Bombay: a common sense of civic etiquette. It is a reminder that commodities as basic as water and electricity have the power to affect people, behaviour and ultimately, space.
Considering the impact of architectural spaces such as laundromats on cities like Bombay and New York begins to shed light on the possibility that seemingly naive everyday acts such as cleaning clothes, washing dishes, or taking baths do much more than tap our collective infrastructure. They promote or sometimes impede urban vibrancy. A vibrant city is an arena for both celebration and conflict, a place that readily counteracts order and predictability with unanticipated spontaneity. Now is a time when New York, despite – or perhaps because of – all its resources, is in danger of becoming so bound by civic etiquette that there is less room left for New Yorkers to improvise on their streets. Conversely, if Bombay's infrastructure doesn't catch up to India's charging global economy it stands to marginalise millions of Bombayites, which could exacerbate, among other things, the city's serious problem of shanty towns (a most extreme kind of urban improvisation). Sustainability and globalisation gurus have drilled into us the notion that we are one global village, inter-connected and networked; consuming resources in New York equates to depleting them elsewhere. But what if New Yorkers relied less on water and energy not only to slow down global warming, but also as an excuse to bring to New York some of Bombay's penchant for spontaneous street intensity? what if the clothesline poles that stand in the backyards of so many Brooklyn brownstones were activated with clean laundry once again, not just to help save the planet, but also to help keep Brooklynites from co-opting their borough's air space? If the proponents of the Green movement are proven correct, then reducing the load on New York's infrastructure might eventually have positive repercussions in other parts of the world. What is certain, however, is that it will almost immediately shift more activity from New York's private to its public realm and help encourage a more free-spirited vigour on its streets. Shahane, Aniket. 'Drip-dry urbanism' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Aniket Shahane and On Site review
the architecture of waves
Zubin SinghThrough the act of surfing, as no other human activity, man enters the domain of the breaking wave, is contained by and participates in its broadcast, measures and is in turn measured, meets its rhythm and establishes his own, negotiates continuity and rupture at the scale of the body. What is the nature of this inhabitation? A bold proposition: surfing is an architectural act. Through it the surfbreak is drawn within the sphere of culture and the wave becomes an architectural domain.
Geographically the surfbreak represents an actual threshold between environs, but historically it has also been a symbolic Porta between two overlapping and irreconcilable realms, two inimical elements: the land and the sea, earth and water. On the one hand, the stable and the familiar: the ground upon which humankind has built its civilisations and institutions, established its relation to space and time, defined culture. On the other, the capricious and unknowable: the quintessential other, Nature at her most fecund and ruinous, that which is beyond, indeterminate. It is not accident that Hesiod's Aphrodite was conceived in the spume, or that Botticelli's Venus is born ashore on the crest of a breaking wave: the surfbreak has always been a fertile territory in the human imagination, a metaphor of paradox, of life.
As a point of departure: the pier, beginning with a comparison between surfing and skateboarding — an analogous relation between the surfer's appropriation of the pier and the skateboarder's appropriation of the urban environment. In Skateboarding, Space and the City (Berg 2001) Iain Borden present skateboarding as a 'performative critique' of the values associated with life in the modern capitalist city, specifically as they are manifest in architecture, as they order our relations with space and time. Skateboarding subverts the intended function of architecture (namely utility) by reducing architecture to a terrain — a composition of objects and planes to grind, jump or ride. 'Skateboarders analyse architecture not for historical, symbolic or authorial content but for how surfaces present themselves as skateable' (p 218K); 'the city for skateboarders is not buildings but a set of ledges, window sills, walls, roofs, railings ...and so on' (p229). While skateboarding often rejects the commodification of space (frequently the skateboarder transgresses the boundary between public and private) it is also a rejection of time as a commodity: 'Skateboarders are...more concerned with temporal distance as proximity (temporal closeness of things, temporal locality), and its repetition, than with time as a valuable resource or measure of efficiency' (p226). The surfer appropriates the pier in a similar fashion.
Ever since surfing emerged on the California coast its adherents have congregated around the pier (the Huntington Beach Pier is perhaps the most famous example) because of the structure's inadvertent tendency to create sandbars, whose presence enhances the shape and power of the breaking waves. The intended function of the pier, on the other hand, is primarily commercial. It exists as a simple structure built for fishermen (who pay to use them), or as a more elaborate commercial enterprise designed to attract tourists (e.g. Santa Monica Pier). As skateboarding does with the urban fabric, surfing subverts the intentions of the architectural object; the surfer rejects its commercial function, which she appropriates for her own purposes — free of charge. Surfing transforms this largely utilitarian artefact into an armature of the surfbreak, the locus of an alternative social realm: the privileged refuge of the individual surfer, engaged in the solitary session; or a remote commons, where local surfers gather outside the spatial and social bounds of conventional society. In the end however, it is not the pier but the wave itself to which the surfer is drawn; and it is ultimately the wave that determines not only the space of the surfbreak, but more profoundly the surfer's relationship with time.
In the water the surfer is constantly in motion, negotiating the ever-shifting regions of 'inside' and 'outside', the areas shoreward and seaward of a breaking wave that each successive wave redefines. In surfing timing is everything: not only while riding, but in simply finding the evanescent wave, whose rhythms do not obey the constructed meters of modern society. Surfing is not something to be scheduled; rather it must be scheduled around. consequently, in order to surf on a regular basis, all surfers must inevitably submit to the wave — the spatial embodiment of cyclical time.
Waves are created by vast pelagic storms; they follow the paths of the seasons, respond to the pull of the sun and moon, to the alternations of night and day — to rhythms that once defined our understanding of time's passage. The practice reflects this reality: surfers tend to return to familiar breaks season after season, year after year: the surf-session is defined by elliptical orbits — surfers paddle outside, wait for and catch a wave, only to return outside and repeat the sequence again; there is no score, no tangible goal, no clear beginning or end. This stands in stark contrast to the linear conception of time upon which the idea of progress is founded, the imperative which drives the modern world. As a result, surfers are often caught between the demands of irreconcilable worlds as well as inimical elements.
Even the surfboard spans two seemingly antithetical domains: the mass production of the foam 'blank' (the primary component of the modern surfboard) and the hand-craftsmanship of the board shaper; the impersonal and placeless nature of the industrial process, coupled with the fact that shapers often craft surfboards in collaboration with surfers in response to particular conditions and locations — the gently tapered lines of Malibu or the fast-breaking tubes of Pipeline.
In the threshold between land and sea, between progress and nature's incurable cycles, between the modern and the vernacular, dwells the surfer. In the shadow of the pier a wave swells, steepens, suddenly mortal; and on a thin blade of glass and foam a surfer strokes into the wave, rises to his feet and descends — at the moments of its collapse: a dialogue, an architectural dialogue, between permanence and change.
Singh, Zubin. 'Surfing: the architecture of waves' On Site review, no. 17 Spring/Summer 2007
©Zubin Singh and On Site review
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