Contexte
2023
Non publié Texte de candidature non lauréate
The current and persistent struggle about climate change teaches us one thing: energy is going to be increasingly rare, thus materials and technologies will also come short. Prices of supplies are already rocketing, and we believe this is just the beginning of what it means to live in a world where climatic conditions are worsened.
Against this backdrop, several narratives and solutions come into play. One of the main debates around energy, materials and technologies draws a distinction between high-tech and low-tech solutions.
In construction matters, the majority currently stands for high-tech solutions like heat pumps, dual flow ventilations, increased home automation, which requires building spaces full of sensors (running on proprietary softwares). This belief in technology reaches its peak with Amazon investing in prefabricated houses startups, aiming at injecting sensors everywhere in the built environment1.
We advocate for true innovation. One that might interfere the business-as-usual by extending buildings’ life span. This will not happen by making cyborg-like environments, transplanted with high-tech machinery. Instead it might have a chance to occur by changing the way we behave and conceive our milieu.
Since the teardown of the Yamasaki’s Pruitt-Igoe high-rise buildings in 1972 (that only lasted for seventeen years), it seems that no lesson has been learned about the need to renovate and take care of what we have already built.
Demolition is a tool for urban planners and politicians to indicate their power on the land, their ability to cleanse and purify diseased fabric2. This tabula rasa logic implies a simplified vision of social and political issues, where everything would get back on track once the built environment is completely renewed, totally anthropized and controlled.
In this modernist approach, humans are passive agents, evolving in buildings that must be maintained either by technological ways (automated ventilation, heating, cooling), or by other active humans, cleaning and repairing spaces during times when they shall not be seen or heard. Users occupy a centric position in the built environment, where everything is distributed to them. Water, heat, electricity, internet connection and food are constantly available and/or deliverable at any time.
However, energy is not constantly available, nor materials and technologies. We rely on a cautiously scaffolded structure that shows its early weaknesses. And we believe that there is nothing particularly new to do about it other than shifting our point of view and practices.
Shifting means tackling different perspectives on complexity and entangled situations, and learning from them. To take the time to deeply understand built environments, their human and non-human users, and allow for progressive evolution rather than dumb radical destruction and replacement. Everything that is already there must be taken care of.
This position clearly encourages the reuse and repair of buildings instead of building new ones, thus requiring architects to expand their knowledge on buildings’ diagnoses to accurately evaluate their qualities (structural, thermal, acoustics, among others). This extra task, that comes before any other, allows the architect to precisely design what is really needed and to reduce the overall amount of energy and materials used.
It would also be the architect’s task to shift the final user’s point of view. To give advice on how the building works and how it should be used. A building’s ventilation system can be replaced by natural ventilation, which requires the user to think about it and act accordingly. This is the type of transformation that will happen, whether we want it or not. Rare energy means that we will be facing choices on what to power: it seems reasonable to start answering this question now, while we are designing buildings that will surely be challenged with serious climatic and social evolutions.
Against the high-tech mantra that considers inhabitants unable to take care of their living and working spaces, feeding them with technologically controlled environments that stays at a constant 20°C through the whole year, we advocate for true innovation. Embrace the idea of living in the ruins of modernism. Give existing buildings some extra lifetime.
Footnotes
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Amazon to develop Alexa-enabled prefab homes, by Eleanor Gibson, in Dezeen (2 October 2018), https://www.dezeen.com/2018/10/02/amazon-alexa-enabled-plant-prefab-homes/ (last consulted on the 13th of September 2023) ↩
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About subtraction and demolition, see Subtraction, by Keller Easterling (Sternberg Press, 2014). ↩