SuStainable DeSign

Marie-Hélène Contal
Jana reveDin

Sustainable
Design
towarDS a new etHiC in arCHiteCture
anD town Planning

witH a foreworD by tHoMaS Herzog

birkHäuSer
baSel ∙ boSton ∙ berlin
table of ContentS

foreworD by tHoMaS Herzog 7

froM tHe avant-garDe to SuStainability

by Jana reveDin 8

winnerS of tHe
global awarD for SuStainable arCHiteCture 2007

Stefan beHniSCH, Stuttgart, gerMany 14

“We try to establish modest comfort for work and living spaces.”

— terrenCe Donnelly Centre for Cellular anD

bioMoleCular reSearCH (tDCCbr), toronto, CanaDa 18
— HarvarD’S allSton SCienCe CoMPlex, HarvarD univerSity,
CaMbriDge, MaSSaCHuSettS, uSa 22
— ibn inStitute for foreStry anD nature reSearCH,
wageningen, tHe netHerlanDS 24

balkriSHna DoSHi, aHMeDabaD, inDia 28

“My architecture is human, but devised for a specific climate.”

— SangatH, offiCeS for tHe vaStu-SHilPa founDation anD

StuDio SPaCe for tHe arCHiteCt, aHMeDabaD, inDia 32
— aranya, PrograM for low-inCoMe HouSing, MaDHya PraDeSH,
inDore, inDia 38
— inDian inStitute of ManageMent, bangalore, inDia 44

françoiSe-Hélène JourDa, PariS, franCe 46

“We architects must finally stop wanting to build monuments!”

— botaniCal garDen, borDeaux, franCe 50

— Creation of a MarketPlaCe anD SurrounDing SPaCeS,
PlaCe Du 8 Mai 1945, lyon, franCe 56

HerMann kaufMann, SCHwarzaCH, auStria 60

“We’re just at the beginning of a broad social and political responsibility.”

— luDeSCH CoMMunity Center, vorarlberg, auStria 64

— olPerer SHelter, finkelberg in tyrol, auStria 70
— allMeintalweg reSiDential CoMPlex, luDeSCH, auStria 76

wang SHu, HangzHou, CHina 80

“A stone wall is like a plant. It has to grow.”

— CHina aCaDeMy of art, xiangSHan CaMPuS, HangzHou,

zHeJiang, CHina 84
— five SCattereD HouSeS, MingzHou Park, ningbo, CHina 90
winnerS of tHe
global awarD for SuStainable arCHiteCture 2008

fabrizio Carola, naPleS, italy 96

“Local materials and engineering define a new old ethic in architecture.”

— Hotel kaMbary, banDiagara, Mali 100

— regional Center for traDitional MeDiCine, banDiagara, Mali 104
— Cultural anD SoCial Center, banDiagara, Mali 108

eleMental, Santiago, CHile 112

“Democratic interaction produces more benefit by same investment.”

— reSorPtion of a SHantytown for 100 faMilieS, iquique, CHile 116

— lo eSPeJo—SoCial HouSing PrograM, Santiago, CHile 122
— renCa neigHborHooD—reHouSing PrograM, Santiago, CHile 126

rural StuDio, newbern, alabaMa, uSa 128

“Ours is a simple sustainability born of necessity.”

— fire Station anD town Hall, newbern, alabaMa, uSa 132

— akron boyS anD girlS Club, akron, alabaMa, uSa 138
— CoMMunity Center / glaSS CHaPel, MaSon’S benD,
Hale County, alabaMa, uSa 140
— antioCH baPtiSt CHurCH, Perry County, alabaMa, uSa 142

PHiliPPe SaMyn, bruSSelS, belgiuM 144

“Structure is surprisingly poetic. At any latitude.”

— roof SHeltering of a train Station, leuven, belgiuM 148

— fire Station, Houten buSineSS Park, Houten, tHe netHerlanDS 156

Carin SMutS, CaPe town, SoutH afriCa 160

“Sustainability is about people.”

— DawiD klaaSte Center , laingSburg, karoo, SoutH afriCa 164

— guga S’tHebe—artS, Culture, anD Heritage village,
CaPe town, SoutH afriCa 170
— weSbank PriMary SCHool, weSbank, SoutH afriCa 172

aPPenDix

about tHe autHorS 177

about tHe winnerS 178
illuStration CreDitS 180
 Foreword
by Thomas Herzog

“Sustainability” covers a wide range of issues: choosing and sourcing materials,

the amount of energy needed to transport and finish them, building construction
processes, their thermal performance rating, the amount of energy needed to keep
them running, maintenance processes, durability, internal flexibility in terms of use,
adaptability to new technologies in the supply, disposal and telecommunications
sectors, suitability for dismantling and possible re-erection, the conversion and re-
cycling possibilities; but of course in particular, suitability for the use of solar energy
for the purposes of heating, cooling, for using daylight, and generating electricity.
But I think that complete energy autonomy is required only in exceptional cases. The
amount of radiation this earth receives from the sun is many times higher than man-
kind’s energy needs will ever be. The question is how to exploit this potential.
It is a fact that the amount of energy consumed to meet buildings’ thermal needs is
already a quarter or a fifth of what was achieved only a few years ago.

Today we should make these results affective across the board, instead of flirting
with so-called “zero energy buildings.” Ultimately it is not about an Olympic disci-
pline, but about looking at the matter as a whole and saving energy dramatically, or
using solar energy.
So we must apply the way we look at energy for a single building to whole towns and
cities, and take a similar approach to that used in the single building field: note all
the relevant factors, understand how they interact, and develop new models that
can be integrated into the existing system.
I would particularly like to warn against believing that there are recipes for this. Cit-
ies indeed share some basic phenomena, but these vary greatly in their quality and
internal relations. In any city it is about the buildings, but also about the traffic gen-
erated by town planning, supply and disposal systems, potential energy sources,
options for changing the status quo, and a great deal more.
I am convinced that architects have a key role to play in the extremely complex field
of the world-wide ecological crisis, because this impacts directly on their profes-
sional responsibility. When all is said and done about 40% of primary energy is used
for building and running buildings, at least in Central Europe. Then additional quan-
tities of fossil energy are used as a result of town planning measures. 1

1 Extracts from a conversation with Francesca Sartogo

7
 “Modernity is revealed, as with loos or le Corbusier in its inti-
mate connection to history, to culture (…) and in its relationship
to the city, a relationship that dictates that every development,
every invention must measure up to the built city.” 1

bruno taut, glass Pavilion, werkbund exhibition, Cologne, 1914

froM tHe avant-garDe to SuStainability
by Jana Revedin

In view of the fact that a further two billion people will need to be housed hu-
manely in the next 20 years, architecture is a profession with a promising future.
And in view of the fact that new environmentally-harmful markets continue to ex-
pand rapidly despite worldwide energy shortages, there is a need, as there was
in the early 20th century, the heyday of reforms, for a holistic understanding of
architecture and society that networks technical and social know-how with po-
litical commitment. The architectural hype of the past decades has shown just
how far removed the profession, as well as the paying public, has become from
the notion of architecture as habitat. Buildings serve the purposes of commerce,
event-tourism, market identities. They are visited and treated like backdrops, oc-
casionally perhaps experienced and only rarely, given the enormous operating
costs, invested with sustainable life.

Alarming environmental figures, spiralling energy prices and the worldwide eco-
nomic crisis brought on by irresponsible investment mean that architects be-
come the coordinators of new paradigms. Every individual, every family, every
elderly couple, every single mother will in future have to be prepared to invest
more for a stable or a better habitat, a sustainable energy supply, clean wa-
ter and ecological means of transport. We planners need to fundamentally “re-
think” architecture. The hidden (embodied) energy costs of infrastructure, soil
disposal, transport costs of non-locally-sourced materials, disposal, recycling,
and limited floor plan flexibility are criteria that belong just as much in an energy
pass as a building’s annual heating and air conditioning demand.

The re-densification of cities will become a central issue of the 21st century,
alongside cultural integration and flexible living and working concepts that ad-
dress the issues of global migration. At the same time we need to think back to
our roots as craftsmen, as experts in the sparing and resourceful application of
statics, proportion, structure, and integrative design. The geographic, tectonic,
and climatic conditions of specific planning regions have been carefully studied
in our thousand-year-old history of settlement. Traditional techniques for utiliz-
ing the energy of the sun and wind, the warming and cooling potential of geother-
mal energy, gravity, water power, and the energy of light must once again find a
natural place in the teaching and practice of architecture and be optimized using
innovative approaches to fit local conditions.

1 Rosaldo Bonicalzi, Introduction to Aldo Rossi, Selected Writings, “Aldo Rossi: Scritti scelti
sull’architettura e la città 1956–1972”, Libreria Clup, Milano, 1975 (1983 in English).

8

ludwig Mies van der rohe, Country House in brick and Steel,
1924
Carin Smuts, Social Center, westbank Cape town, 2008
arCHiteCt, born 1960
One could strike lucky and learn from the masters, who in the affluent society of the
1980s, in the “made in …” design capitals of the world, saw themselves modestly as
urban builders. “An architect is a builder who has learned Latin,” is how Adolf Loos
defined his professional ethics. One gets to know places, materials, trades, to re-
spect, even learn to love, the people who make a building and those who make it
possible. One studied the tradition of one’s specific building culture, already then
almost sacrilegious, the architecture of the European city 2 and sought social, so-
ciological, and critical relationships. One trusted only the “proven” masters of the
avant-garde. 3 At that time, neither architecture nor Haute Couture needed glossy
magazines. Yves Saint Laurent’s first designs were made for his Rive Gauche stu-
dents to wear on the street while Aldo Rossi wrote “Architecture (…) synthesises the
whole civil and political scope of an epoch, when it is highly rational, comprehen-
sive, and transmissible—in other words, when it can be seen as a style.” 4 Architec-
ture was an act of political will, a risk, a declaration. “Who ultimately chooses the
image of the city if not the city itself—and always and only through its political in-
stitutions. (…) Athens, Rome, Paris are the form of their politics, the signs of their
collective will.” 5
Those who experienced in the 1980s the transition from the manageable markets of
the industrial age to the global knowledge and consumer society learned that it was
difficult and often costly to transfer certain techniques and material truths from one
realm to the other. In Orlando, carefully selected Italian marble panels a macchia
aperta (with sliced and matching grain) were laid with 2cm wide cemented joins, de-
stroying both their fit as well as their overall effect. On the other hand, timber roof
trusses for town houses in Milan were being dimensioned with the sturdiness—and
expense—of an army bridge.
a ProfeSSion at tHe Start of a new
MillenniuM
If the globe appears to have grown smaller and more comprehensible in the new mil-
lennium thanks to new communication technology, it has in actual fact grown poor-
er, more overcrowded, and increasingly desperate. This is no longer about prosper-
ity. It is about finite energy resources, minimum humanitarian standards for billions
of homeless people, about epidemics, terror, and natural disasters. In this day and
age, who can afford not to advise their clients on appropriate use, construction, in-
tegrative approaches, and sustainability? Who is not already trying to make their
buildings energy zero, carbon zero, and for a low-cost economy?
Meanwhile, star architecture continues its dance with the devil, sweeping through
new markets in triumphant vanity. Uneconomical temples of prestige that defy grav-
ity and ignore the energy of the sun, wind, or ground dominate the test-tube archi-
tecture of wildly sprawling cities in the economic boomtowns of the south and east.
Irreplaceable natural habitats give way to designer resorts, the illusory worlds of
blindly consuming globetrotters with time to kill.
2 Aldo Rossi’s The Architecture of the City (1966, 1982 in English) became an international bestseller. Ros-
si analyzes the historic structure of the European city, introducing his notions of “Locus” and of “Urban
Ecology.” In his later selected writings, “Scritti scelti” (1975, 1983 in English), he details the thinking of
the fathers of the avant-garde, Behrens, Mies van der Rohe, Loos, and Le Corbusier.
3 Jana Revedin, The modern concept of open space, Milan 1991, analyzes the efforts of the avant-garde to
improve the quality of life of the socially disadvantaged through economical, flexible, and hygienic spa-
tial planning in the democratic urban green areas. Her later work Monument and the Modern: the ele-
ments of construction of the New Town, Venice 2000 contrasts the “new city” of the age of reform with
its typologies, materials, and proportions with the organic form of the natural landscape.
4 Aldo Rossi, “The Individuality of Urban Artifacts” in The Architecture of the City, MIT 1982, p. 116.
5 Aldo Rossi, “The Politics of Choice” in The Architecture of the City, MIT 1982 , p. 162.
9
 As if inspiration and hope speak to us from the pages of the old familiar texts and
buildings, as if the overwhelming problematic and responsibility of the profession
of the architect draws from it new confidence, one thinks back to the reforms of a
time of crisis in the not too distant past: only a century before and within a short
space of time, a small group of avant-garde planners reformed the decadent Fin
de Siècle figure of the architect as an artist with that of a restrained, economical,
and socially-responsible craftsman, urban builder, and industrial designer.

retroSPeCtive: tHe urban Planner anD

walter gropius, törten estate, Dessau, 1927
alejandro aravena, renca 3, Santiago de Chile,
2008
DeSigner of tHe reforMiSt age
The age of industrialization brought with it new challenges, new programs, and
a new level of discourse. Materials were experimented with expectantly, Bruno
Taut’s Glass Pavilion 6, Mies van der Rohe’s Country House in steel and brick 7,
Behrens’ and Gropius’ factory buildings and first industrially prefabricated hous-
ing and settlements 8, and Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower 9 were milestones of an
avantgardistic school of new construction with its own formal language. “The
challenge is through artistic means to find forms, that correspond to the machine
and to mass production,” 10 wrote Behrens in 1907, and saw an analogy with the
world of technology in “serial repetition and a respect for the inner construction
by drawing its enclosure close around it.” 11

Consequently, housing, urban set pieces, and industrial prefabrication became

the epochal topics of the day. The Bauhaus and its fanatical young teachers lib-
erated an exploited working class from its unhygienic tenements, created air and
sun-filled garden cities, allotment gardens for self-sufficiency in leafy people’s
parks, extendable “growing houses” in prefabricated dry construction at cost
price 12, public transport systems in structured green streets, colourful children’s
nurseries, cinemas, schools, concert and festival halls.

Economy was the criteria, public spaces that are easy to care for and main-
tain, short distances, locally-manufactured materials, self-sufficiency in the use
of green space. And at the same time the buildings should please, engender a
sense of identity, create an emotional bond. The German housing estates Heller-

6 The “Glass Pavilion,” built for the Werkbund Exhibition in 1914 in Cologne, expressively demonstrat-
ed the surprising design and structural possibilities of new developments in the glass industry.
7 The design employed a grid of steel columns to enable a free plan arrangement that united func-
tional flexibility with the use of locally-available durable materials, natural light, and strategically
placed openings to the outdoor areas.
8 The AEG Turbine Hall, built in 1909, is regarded as a milestone in design history for its rational plan
arrangement and use of material, and its maximisation of natural light. This economy of materials
was developed further by Behrens’ students Walter Gropius and Adolf Meyer in their designs for the
Fagus Factory in Alfeld (1911–1925) and the factory building for the 1914 Werkbund Exhibition in Co-
logne, which broke down Behrens’ “classicist” composition into additive elements for specific func-
tions. Their social aim was to achieve a low-cost industrialized means of prefabrication for
housing.
9 Erich Mendelsohn’s Einstein Tower in Potsdam (1917–1924), planned as a revolutionary concrete
construction but then for safety’s sake built in brick, served as a laboratory for new spatial and
structural programs: Mendelsohn went on to build a series of department stores, cinemas, and ho-
tels throughout Germany and later in Israel that profited from the flexible floor plan arrangements
made possible by steel and glass.
10 Peter Behrens, “Kunst in der Technik” (“Art and Technology” in the English translation of Budden-
sieg, p. 207-208), in: Berliner Tageblatt, 29/08/1907.
11 Peter Behrens, “Über Ästhetik in der Industrie” in: AEG Zeitung, Year 11, no. 12, June 1909, p. 5-7,
(“Behrens on Aesthetics in Industry” in the English translation of Buddensieg, p. 208-209) see also:
Tilmann Buddensieg, Industriekultur: Peter Behrens and the AEG, 1907-1914. Cambridge, MIT Press,
1984.
12 Under the patronage of the industrial union, a competition took place in Berlin in 1931/32 entitled
the “The Growing House,” The list of submissions reads like a who’s who of the young avant-garde
elite and includes Gropius, Taut, Mendelsohn, Migge, Olbrich, Scharoun, Häring, and the initiator of
the competition, the municipal architect Martin Wagner. Industrially prefabricated prototypes were
designed according to ecological and economic criteria using innovative materials and were con-
ceived as a “kit of parts” with an extendable floor plan (from 25 m²).

10

adolf loos, Haus Möller, vienna, 1930
Hermann kaufmann, House overlooking Dornbirn,
2007
au, Dammerstock, Onkel Toms Hütte, Hufeisensiedlung, Törten, Niddaaue, Weißen-
hof, and the Werkbund were perhaps not always technically up-to-date but remain
as popular as ever and are still much in demand with a low tenancy fluctuation rate.
They discussed the question how affordable, how small, and at what level of build-
ing quality a minimum standard of living could be provided, they tested industrial
processes and developed proto-grey-energy concepts. Materials, production, em-
ployment situation, logistics, and capital were factored into a calculation of total ex-
penditure. While Walter Gropius passionately pursued the “mechanization of build-
ing production” in semi-dry and dry assembly techniques, such as used for his model
buildings on the Weißenhof Estate—even in the face of “hut camp”-criticism from
his own students—and along with Martin Wagner was of the opinion that mechani-
zation was only viable for large-scale housing schemes 13, Bruno Taut regarded the
problem as a national economic issue and appealed to society and politics: “In 1926,
as the smallest unit in Britz (47m²) with a rent of 45 Reichsmark per month became
available, we too believed, full of hope, that things were looking up. However, what
went up more than anything else was the interest rate …” 14
Suppressed temporarily by the Nazis, these humane, sustainable, and economical
principles experienced a euphoric renaissance in the 1950s, only to become degrad-
ed in the rush for regeneration or in the hands of new totalitarian powers to an “in-
ternational style,” an increasingly superficial global phenomenon. The cheerful and
colourful housing types, the multi-functional and restrained public buildings, and
the urban set-pieces of modern democracy fell by the wayside in the fast-build of
the post-war period and the economic boom that followed.
arCHiteCt. toDay.
Demographic fluctuations and energy awareness, the creation of living and produc-
tion environments within the existing urban structure, rationalization of infrastruc-
ture and the construction process, minimisation of global energy consumption, and
integrative design are issues that architects are now faced with, but they are not
new. The previous primarily locally-active but nevertheless socially integrated build-
ing lodges, schools, experimental groups, and municipal planning offices today op-
erate on a global scale: in the form of international research teams with engineers,
sociologists, and energy consultants. Not always so efficient, not always quite to
scale, and not always humane. As we enter the knowledge age a new definition of
the profile of an architect is emerging.
The work, lives, and journeys of the ten colleagues shown in this book demonstrate
that it is possible to solve the fundamental and worrying problems of our time in
small, modest, and yet very definite approaches. The elusive constellation of a light-
weight construction with minimal primary energy expenditure, maximum durability,
simplest upkeep, and widest possible flexibility is a recipe that none are able to offer.
A sustainable calculation of investment and amortisation of energy-conscious and
locally-sensitive building methods over decades is on the other hand very possible.
The enormous north-south divide only becomes apparent when one compares the
different living conditions and economic situations in contemporary Africa, China,
Latin America, or Central Europe. Where Scandinavians and the Northern European
countries were schooled by the likes of Adolf Loos, Alvar Aalto, or Jean Prouvé that
architecture and design should be true to materials, easy to use, and durable, Med-
iterranean countries are only hesitantly conceding that they also have cold winters
and hot summers. The former colonial countries have first got to laboriously free
themselves from the built legacy of their “cultural occupiers,” which paid little re-
13 Martin Wagner, “Groß-Siedlungen. Der Weg zur Rationalisierung des Wohnungsbaus” in: Wohnungs-
wirtschaft, 1926, p. 81-114.
14 Bruno Taut, “Gegen den Strom” in: Wohnungswirtschaft, 1930, p. 315-324.
11

Heinrich tessenow, competition for a bathing
resort, rügen, 1936
f.-H. Jourda, Market hall, lyon 2005
wang Shu, recycled tiles posed as in the Ming
period. xiangshan Campus, Hangzhou, 2008
12
gard to climate or tradition, and find a way back to an architecture of their own
that is modern, rooted, and yet unfettered by the past.
in tHe nortH …
“The thing is that we all need to work together towards mastering the future,” 15
explains Vorarlberg architect Hermann Kaufmann underlining his political sup-
port for the mandatory introduction of strict regulations and eco-labelling, even
in social housing. “The enforced introduction of these standards has mobilized
construction firms to learn rapidly and develop their abilities so that they can ap-
ply the new technologies.” Sustainability is therefore a way of life and has to do
with self-imposed restriction. Here well-placed investment in durable materials
and innovative technologies can give new definition to Adolf Loos’ Raumplan.
“We architects must finally stop wanting to build monuments,” 16 continues the
French architect Françoise-Hélène Jourda, advocating a return to more modesty
in professional ethics in France. Where populations are declining and cities are
shrinking, less is perfectly adequate. Simple architectural archetypes made of
primary, local materials are affordable for the municipalities and also age well.
… anD in tHe SoutH
The situation is very different in the world of exploding populations, chaotic in-
frastructure, natural disasters, epidemics, drug wars, and mass unemployment.
“Sustainability is about people. Architecture gives people the possibility of em-
powerment to define who they are, to develop consciously and independently,” 17
says Carin Smuts after 25 years of working for and in South Africa’s black town-
ships, after the completion of dozens of wash houses, market halls, schools, so-
cial centers, and art galleries, all developed in workshops and built by local resi-
dents which she schools in the use of local ecological building materials and the
simplest building techniques.
For Alejandro Aravena in Chile, the settlement problems of the developing coun-
tries (the provision of adequate housing for two billion people in the next 20
years) is a simple mathematical equation, to which a solution is needed: build
a one million people city per week for the next 20 years with 10,000 dollars per
family. 18 His rational low-cost settlements invite people to leave their tin shacks
and through a personal contribution to the building’s construction encourages
them to take part in the overall creative and economic process as well as to as-
sume personal and social responsibility.
And Wang Shu escapes the commercial building sector in China by relying on
hand drawing to determine the proportions and by learning as much as possible
from the building site, where he gives aging craftsmen a purpose in life: square
kilometres of recycled second-hand bricks and stones are built as they were in
the time of the Ming Dynasty. “A stone wall is like a plant. It has to grow.” 19
15 In: “Energiesparen und bauen: wer, wann, wo und wie?”, Discussion with Eva Guttmann, Zuschnitt,
no. 30, 2008.
16 Françoise-Hélène Jourda, Interview with Jana Revedin for France 5, Lyon, June 2007.
17 Carin Smuts, Interview with Jana Revedin for France 5, Cape Town, April 2008.
18 Alejandro Aravena in: Fulvio Irace, Casa per tutti. Abitare la città globale. Milan Triennial 2008,
p. 18-21.
19 Wang Shu, Interview with Jana Revedin for France 5, Hangzhou, May 2007.
13
Stefan
behnisch
Stuttgart,
germany

14
Main façade of the terence Donnelly Centre for
Cellular and biomolecular research (tDCCbr).
toronto, Canada

15
→ Stefan Behnisch
Stefan Behnisch is one of the pioneers who laid the founda-
tions for the constituent debate on sustainable architecture. Or
rather, as he would say, a “climatic and environmental architec-
ture;” in Europe he has created buildings that are already land-
marks in this new history, for instance, the Institute for Forestry
and Nature Research, at Wageningen, in the Netherlands.
Stefan Behnisch was born in Stuttgart in 1957, the son of Gün-
ter Behnisch, an important figure in German architecture. After
initially taking courses in philosophy and economics, he stud-
ied architecture in Karlsruhe, Germany. He received his diploma
in 1987 after having been in California for two years. In 1988 he
joined Behnisch & Partners in Stuttgart, then in 1989 founded an
architecture office on climatic architecture. In 1999 he estab-
lished a firm in California, and today a large part of his business
is American. Following the completion of the corporate head-
quarters for Genzyme in Cambridge, Massachusetts (U.S.), Ste-
fan Behnisch was recognized in the United States as an expert in
the still-experimental field of sustainable design.
For the past 150 years, when a European architect establishes
himself abroad, it is a significant event. The great innovations in
Western architecture all took the boat, and later the airplane,
back and forth across the ocean. Such a trajectory means that
Behnisch in turn has connected “an inventive scene” with a
“society” ready to welcome it. At the turn of the 21st century,
the invention is European—Germany is a center of excellence
for sustainable architecture—and the interested, purchasing
society is American—the knowledge society, of which Califor-
nia has been the crucible for the past 20 years.
The exchange is never one-way, however. In exporting his ideas,
the European Behnisch got a foothold in a world that has cer-
tainly taught him as much as it has received, and allowed him
to develop his vision. Too often one forgets the role of great cli-
ents, when they are the historical avant-garde and give archi-
tects the programs that enable them to affirm their visions
of the future. Would Peter Behrens have been so prolific if he
didn’t work for the pioneers of industry? Similarly, Stefan Beh-
nisch certainly wanted to meet the most innovative people in
the knowledge society, first in Europe and then in the United
States, in order to be part of the milieux where the society of
the 21st century is being invented.
tHe MaJor iSSue of energy
In fact, for Behnisch, the distinctive feature of sustainable archi-
tecture is not purely ecological: “Part of our problem today in
dealing with the imbalanced ecosystem lies in its limited defi-
nition.” The debate over the word sustainable has not ended,
and one finds green industrialists as well as apostles of negative
growth. Following the example of the former, Behnisch thinks
that, for our future, the energy question is even more strate-
gic and encompassing than the ecological challenge. The econ-
omy of energy must be transformed, and the former student of
economics knows full well that to change energy is to change
the world, to give an inevitable impetus to a new development,
which should be a breakthrough. In other words, Stefan Beh-
nisch has “the willed optimism” of those for whom the ecolog-
ical crisis is not the Götterdämmerung but rather the begin-
ning of a historical cycle that will transform man’s pursuits and
social activities.
16
Architecture must give form to the society that will be built on
the new energy deal. Who will define the ethical, social, and
economic foundations for the sustainable city? Behnisch pos-
its that in 2008, as in 1908, it is through contact with the avant-
garde industrialists of this century that these issues should be
settled. Quite simply because this sustainable city will, like the
defunct industrial city, be the driving force behind develop-
ment: “The protection of our environment is seen as an abso-
lute necessity, and as an opportunity for potential growth.”
Stefan Behnisch has two decades of work under his belt. In the
first decade, he honed his knowledge as well as a method—dif-
ferent from the green building rationalism—for designing build-
ings with low energy consumption and strong human synergy.
Today, he dedicates the second decade to investing his skills in
programs, often quite sophisticated, for manufacturers, labo-
ratories, and universities. The wide world cannot be reduced to
that community, of course. But those are the inventors of the
future society and of its practices.
tHe ergonoMiCS of tHe
iMMaterial worlD
In 1992 Stefan Behnisch began to collaborate closely with Trans-
solar Climate Engineering, a pioneering research unit in new
energy technologies. In working with this hotbed of research
and researchers, Behnisch was able to transform his father’s
firm, an outstanding resource for work, into a laboratory for cli-
matic architecture. This pursuit followed an unusual trajectory.
In the early 1990s, most of the people involved approached
sustainable architecture through construction; they worked
on materials, walls, and alternative energies, developing rules
for construction that are, in a way, the hardware of sustaina-
ble architecture. Stefan Behnisch approaches the subject much
further along in the process, at the usage stage, when the archi-
tecture receives the people: “Where can we effectively save
energy and materials? Without a doubt, it is the users of a build-
ing who can influence ecological value through their behavior
and energy demands.” Seen in this way, the challenge is less
about building and more about culture: sustainable architec-
ture is architecture that will train people, teach them the rules
of conduct for the post-petroleum era, and subtly reshape their
behavior. Behnisch speaks of “comfort” and “well-being” to
define this behavioral software, or rather, this “soft power,” for
he wants architecture to be a friendly guide toward the sus-
tainable society. In this regard, we will continue our analysis by
speaking of Behnisch’s concept of “hospitality,” a term that, in
the classical age, gauged architecture’s ability to accommodate
and guide people.
In seeking a contemporary hospitality, Behnisch had to redirect
his approach from the material envelope to the interior space.
The quest does not involve the building system but rather the
elements of ambience: climate, light, air, sound, colors, and
textures. All architects in the ecological movement perform
such analyses, but Behnisch pushes them further and in a differ-
ent way. With Transsolar he builds instruments to measure and
then to channel these flows, such as the spectacular solar chim-
ney for the offices of the LVA State Insurance Agency in Lübeck,
Germany, and the light-collecting “chandeliers” that appear
in the atrium of Genzyme headquarters in Cambridge, Massa-
 chusetts. Behnisch and his engineers of
the immaterial want to succeed in man-
aging these exchanges (thermal, solar,
radiant, and so on) with as much assur-
ance as that possessed by his eco-build-
ing counterparts when they design a tim-
ber frame and its panels. Behnisch works
with the void, the site of exchanges. He
builds a microclimate before the enve-
lope. The projects, developed from the
interior outward, conform to a centrifu-
gal dynamic rather than the “authority of
the plan” from the functionalist era. This
is not the least of Behnisch’s contribu-
tions, in a debate where others recom-
mend, by contrast, a green functionalism
that is even more strict than it was in the
past.
If we pick up the pertinent parallel estab-
lished by Jana Revedin between the
avant-garde of the 20th century and that
of the 21st century, we can recall that
the Modern Movement was behavorial,
seeking to shape man through spaces of
human dimensions. From Le Corbusier’s
Modulor to the tables by Neufert, this Modern ergonomics was
based on the sizing of the space, for an optimal functioning of
the human body, which was linked with the century’s industrial
vision. One hundred years later, research by the likes of Beh-
nisch creates another type of ergonomics: it is the immaterial
flows that are sized. These proportions of air or of light make up
a climate conducive (that is, hospitable and hard-working) to
the optimization of the human intellect, a goal that is linked to
the knowledge industry. The scientific or service industries have
less need for disciplined bodies than for well-formed heads. The
“new man” from the knowledge society is a responsible hedon-
ist, an ecosystem in and of himself, living in larger ecosystems
that are protective and stimulating—“buildings that allow the
individual to customize his own workplace, to individually con-
trol his environment.”
pitality at all the scales: the threshold of each office, the small
interior gardens, and of course the key factor, namely, the gen-
erous lobbies. This “interior urbanity,” which according to Beh-
nisch is one of the elements of environmental architecture,
seems to be taken even further in the American projects now
under development: Harvard’s Allston Science Complex in Bos-
ton and the River Park in Pittsburgh.
These sophisticated “eco-urbanistic systems” are not easily per-
ceived from the exterior. The envelope has become so much of
a system of exchanges that it is no longer a display. The façades
are glass, a material that has all the qualities required by Beh-
nisch: ecological, easily worked, and programmable, it is in
itself a system of exchanges (heat, light, colors). On the façade
and the roof, Behnisch’s glass envelopes never break con-
tact with the exterior; they are checkered with devices (open-
ing lights, screens, collectors, and sun shields) that constantly
interact with the elements, and nothing can disturb this active
role played by the façade. It is customary to say that a work
of architecture must be viewed in person in order to be under-
stood. With Behnisch’s architecture one must, in addition, live
in these spaces through the changing seasons in order to grasp
how they go along with the varying climate, as well as with man
in his diverse pursuits.
This does not necessarily mean Behnisch’s envelopes are mute.
Quite the contrary. The large glazed structural grids do not clog
the work. The small interior world, often teeming, crosses the
envelope, bringing with it a veritable swarm of details: a room
that projects outward, window openings adapted to each loca-
tion, movable blinds. This is the result of the architect’s centrif-
ugal method of design. In looking at his works, one might also
think of the anti-authoritarian architecture found in Germany
in the 1970s: that would be an excellent reference point for the
environmental architecture of the high-tech society.

an arCHiteCture of
HoSPitality
Like the activities that it hosts, the climatic architecture of Ste-
fan Behnisch consumes less energy than information, and it
tends toward a certain dematerialization. If there is a struc-
turing of spaces in his work, it may come more from Behnisch
Architekten architectural know-how than from Behnisch’s own
desire, for his research on space is almost un-tectonic. A project
by Behnisch is read in section rather than in plan, and no doubt
it was designed in this way because it is the section that makes
it possible to shape the void and manage the exchanges. And
these sections are very enlightening, for they reveal architec-
tural systems on a large scale: the atrium for Genzyme is a nave,
the hall of LVA is the active and light-filled plaza of a small (ver-
tical) town, the suite of atriums for the Wageningen institute is
a street with carefully handled transitions. In his large projects,
Behnisch uses the heat and light shafts in order to deploy his
“soft power.” These large voids are handled so as to offer hos-

17
→ Stefan Behnisch

terrenCe Donnelly Centre for These variations in volume, texture, and color succeed in rema-
terializing the envelope of glass—a material that the 20th cen-
Cellular anD bioMoleCular tury often preferred to smooth out to the point of abstraction—
reSearCH (tDCCbr) and also succeed in making a legible, lively workplace for all:
form follows human action.
toronto, CanaDa, 2001–2005
Client: university of toronto
architects: behnisch architekten with architectsalliance
Structural engineer: yolles Partnership ltd., toronto
landscape Design: Diana gerrard landscape architecture
total Surface area: 20,750 m2

The University of Toronto and its laboratories are at the fore-

front of research on the connections between genes and illness.
The agenda for the new center is to provide a link between the
state-of-the-art research and the medicinal applications. The
researchers come here to develop projects in multidisciplinary
teams, in a setting that needs to be functional, flexible, and
conducive to synergies.

The project was built on College Street, on the southern part

of the Toronto campus, at the far end of a narrow dead end
that served as parking between two respected institutions.
To deal with the narrowness of the parcel, a tall, thin building
was designed, rising above the neighborhood in two successive
blocks that go over twelve stories and search out the light via
their entirely glazed envelope.

A large lobby was created on the ground floor backing onto the
Rosebrugh building. The old brick façade forms the back wall of
an interior courtyard, which is treated as a garden and dotted
with concrete columns from the primary frame. In addition to
the reception areas and the elevators, this lobby also had the
researchers’ conference rooms and administrative offices. The
overall composition is very pleasingly illuminated by an angled
glass roof, which highlights the outline of the cornice on the
old wall.

The laboratories are arranged on twelve floors. The configu-

rations vary, from individual offices to collective open-space
modules. The open spaces running east-west receive natural
light throughout. On the south, most open onto large interior
gardens, arranged on three floors and serving as spaces for
conversation and relaxation. While they are certainly not the
greenhouses of the 19th century, these “service-oriented winter
gardens” are nevertheless very visible on the exterior, helping to
animate the envelope, each side of which is designed in accor-
dance with its lighting and the program that it accommodates.
The south wall, on the street side, consists of a double skin of
opaque glass with devices for thermal and acoustic control. The
other façades, which serve the laboratories, are more protec-
tive, thanks to inner skins consisting of opaque glass or cera-
mic grids. On the west façade, the activities inside are never-
theless very visible and comfortable: oversize bay windows
contain interior staircases and their large landings. Thus these
glass frames surround collective microcosms that are active
and colorful, within the large structure—collective microcosms
whose inhabitants can each be tracked to his or her individual
unit, marked by its window and safety rails in colored glass.

18
the west façade of the tDCCbr. on the upper
block, one can clearly see the projection of the large
bow windows that house the interior staircases for
each unit.

19
 top:
the west façade of the tDCCbr, with a ground-
floor section through the lobby and the connection
with the intermediate building

Middle:
the interior courtyard is treated as a garden and lit
by a skylight. this arrangement makes it possible to
bring light to the lower block along entire height (six
stories) of the building.

bottom:
an interior circulation area on the upper lobby

20
on the south, the south gable of the building, with
its interior gardens, arranged over three stories.
these winter gardens, which are very well lit, are
also an ornament for the façade.

21
→ Stefan Behnisch

HarvarD’S allSton SCienCe

CoMPlex
HarvarD univerSity, CaMbriDge,
MaSSaCHuSettS, uSa, 2006–2010
Client: Harvard university
architect: behnisch architekten
environmental Consultant: transsolar Climateengineering
lighting Consultant: lichtlabor bartenbach
architecture and engineering: Philippe Samyn

A typical, complex, centrifugal campus program, one that

must function in accordance with an already urban economy,
that is, one that is both regulated and unpredictable. Ste-
fan Behnisch worked on this program with certain concerns
that were already clear at the scale-model stage. Advanced
research on natural lighting runs through the project, and dis-
persed throughout are solar chimneys and glazed façades that
are handled so that the interior spaces are visible. A certain
pursuit of the deterministic aspects of sites is also visible in the
way in which the plan blends offices and laboratories, sites for
working and those for living, using verticality to increase the
number of footbridges and gathering places where people “can
work, meet, communicate, or just relax in an environment that
is not prescriptive in terms of use.”

above:
a section through the main building, which is typi-
cal of Stefan behnisch’s work on thermal exchanges
and the optimization of natural lighting

right:
Plan of the ground floor—at the research stage

22
Models of the project, at the preliminary
design stage

23
→ Stefan Behnisch

ibn inStitute for foreStry

anD nature reSearCH
wageningen, tHe netHerlanDS

Client: Ministries of Housing and of agriculture

in the netherlands
architect: behnisch architekten
energy Consultants: fraunhofer institute for
building Physics, Stuttgart
total Surface area: 11,250 m2

Although it is only ten years old, IBN has become a classic of

bioclimatic design, and perhaps it can already be “reread” from
various perspectives. That of anti-monument, for example: IBN
combines a new world of values and skills with anti-heroic con-
struction, based on market components—establishing, as of
1998, an eco-architecture that is neither a utopia nor a privi-
lege. Behnisch put into it his key features: the articulation of a
dynamic envelope that filters the energies with the inertia of an
interior void (here an atrium) that regulates the flows; a deli-
cate adjustment of the atmospheres through the presence of
interior gardens, divided up into microclimates that contribute
to and symbolize ambient comfort; the idea of anti-façades,
distorted from the inside, which manage the exchanges more
than they circumscribe the space, enveloping more than signi-
fying—the walls are made here with standard metal frames and
commercially available windows, the winter gardens are made
with horticultural greenhouses. The plasticity of the plan: dou-
ble-thickness modular service decks, distributed through the
atria and connected by walkways. And then life appears, when
these open systems soak up the minute possibilities and trans-
form them into spaces and uses. An office is extended as a ter-
race over the pool, the oiled wood of the hand rails, pleasantly
fragrant. The remnants of the construction used to shape the
outdoor areas.

24
Seen from the north, the ibn with its “standard”
façades. in the foreground is a holding pond.

left:
longitudinal section with detail showing the inte-
rior atria

25
Mapping and site plan of ibn

an interior view of an atrium with its garden that

regulates the atmosphere. in the background, a
glass façade offers a view, from the interior pool, to
the surrounding countryside.

26
the coverings are made with these components
from agricultural greenhouses; one can see the
toothed wheels of the opening system.

right:
a diagram of the system for collecting rainwater, on
the vegetal roofs and in an outdoor reservoir

27
balkrishna
Doshi
ahmedabad,
india

28
Present-day appearance of the houses in the aranya
neighborhood, built in 1986 in indore

29
→ Balkrishna Doshi
The global architectural debate did not have to wait for the
ecological watershed to encounter Balkrishna Doshi, born in
India in 1927. One might even say that, starting in the 1960s,
Doshi was recognized as one of the major figures in Modern
architecture. Today, more than 30 years later, he is recognized
as one of the pioneers of sustainable architecture. A new gen-
eration of critics is going back to study his work in order to find
lessons that are rather different from those sought by the “Cor-
busians.” This double stroke of critical fortune is rare. There
are at least two explanations for it. First, Doshi would not be
the only architect to find himself thus reexamined. For exam-
ple, Alvar Aalto, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Jean Prouvé are all
reread today. The ecological scene is sufficiently mature to
have both the need and the authority to reconstruct the history
of the last century according to its own set of questions. Sec-
ond, Doshi himself has radically changed; he did not let him-
self become petrified in his role as a great Modernist. Doshi
was younger than his Corbusian friends, and he experienced a
personal turning point in the 1970s, after the first energy cri-
sis had begun to erode the historic optimism in Modernism. In
1978 Doshi created the Vāstu Shilpā Foundation and had begun
new research on housing, urban planning, and the search for
affordable building solutions. In his fifties and awash in awards,
the architect set new goals for himself: he was less concerned
about building a new architecture for India than for his fellow
Indians, their housing, environment, and culture. This research
reexamined the connections between Western and Eastern cul-
ture. Today’s new ecologist critics pay tribute to this process
of going through, and then beyond, the challenges of the 20th
century.
tHe MoDerniSt Saga
The architectural work of Balkrishna Doshi, which belongs
mainly to the 20th century, was first written about by the
best Corbusian historians. Perhaps they
envied his life, for it is in itself an epic and
sprawling tale of the saga of the Mod-
ernists. The young Indian, educated in
Bombay and then in London, discovered
the Modern Movement at the Interna-
tional Congress of Modern Architecture
(known by its French acronym, CIAM),
held in Hoddesdon in 1951, and while
there, he met with Le Corbusier himself,
whose firm was then a breeding ground
for young architects who came from the
world over. Pandit Nehru commissioned
the Swiss Master to design a capital for
the new Indian democracy. Balkrishna
Doshi was not 25 years old when he found
himself in Chandigarh and Ahmedabad
to construct the buildings that would
become symbols of his country’s inde-
pendence and icons of Modern architec-
ture. He was barely 30 years old when he
collaborated with Louis I. Kahn, the other
progenitor of Indian architecture, on the
Indian Institute of Management in Ahmedabad. But starting
in 1955, he liberated himself from these masters and founded
his own firm, Vāstu Shilpā. The firm built a great many pub-
lic buildings, the most famous being the Center for Environ-
30
mental Planning and Technology in Ahmedabad, completed in
1972. Having become, with Charles Correa, the guide to Indian
Modernist architecture, Doshi also began teaching. In 1962 he
cofounded the School of Architecture of Ahmedabad, then in
1972 he cofounded the Center for Environmental Planning and
Technology and the Kanoria Center for Arts. These decades of
work earned him early recognition from a historiography that
underscored the progress of Modern internationalism by finding
“national heroes” on each continent. Doshi was one of two such
heroes. He “gives his own interpretation of a new Indian archi-
tecture, based on delicate combinations of concrete, brick, and
quarry tiles.”1
tHe SearCH for SynCretiSM
In 1981 Balkrishna Doshi completed construction on the San-
gath complex in Ahmedabad, which was to house his office and
the Vāstu Shilpā Foundation for Studies and Research in Envi-
ronmental Design. This building inaugurated a new approach.
Admittedly, it picks up a unit module covered by a concrete
barrel vault, of Corbusian inspiration, but Doshi’s module then
becomes the instrument for transforming the site, on the out-
skirts of a hot and overpopulated city, into an urban oasis. The
site is organized as a terraced garden in which the buildings
are partly buried, with an entrance court in front. Water cir-
culates along these downward slopes: the fountains spill onto
the vaults, which are covered with shards, to cool the interi-
ors, and then the water is collected in basins and ornamental
pools that are decorated with these same shards. The vaults are
positioned to optimize the natural lighting, and natural venti-
lation completes the cooling system. The Corbusian module is
no longer used as a solution but as a means serving a new end,
namely, the search for a way to organize the space for the city.
The foundation is an institution that is open to the public for
debates, and Doshi designed it as an example of development
for Ahmedabad. And to do this, he explicitly connected with
Indian culture, in terms of spatiality, materials, and the rela-
tionship to water.
Ten years later, on the Ahmedabad campus, Doshi designed a
small building that broke even more obviously with the works
built on the same site 40 years earlier. The small museum
devoted to the work of the artist M. F. Hussain is a sculpture-
space, built with humble materials and vernacular techniques.
The vaults are formed by wire netting covered by a thin layer of
concrete. They are covered by an insulating layer of earth, set
on clay courses using a local technique, then covered with an
envelope of ceramic shards. This waterproof covering allows for
easy maintenance, compared with untreated concrete, which,
as Doshi learned over the years, ages badly in the Indian cli-
mate. It is also elegant and sculptural, and the unfurling domes
of Hussain Gufa resemble the Naga snake of Buddhist myth.
We must try to understand the reasons for such a marked
change. Doshi’s best biographer, James Steele, mentions the
growing role of Buddhism in the architect’s development; he
also stresses that Sangath can be read as an extension that
goes beyond Corbusian teaching rather than a break with it.
But Steele also advances a perspicacious theory, postulating
that this change is the result of an inner struggle, experienced
by the architects from the south, “in their attempt to assimilate
‘developed’ technologies with their own cultural values.” 2
In other words, Hussain Gufa shows us that it might be time to
stop believing that Doshi’s generation was the protagonist in a
clearly positive struggle for progress, using the peaceful weap-
ons of Modernist architecture from the West, and to understand
that that generation experienced instead a difficult inner strug-
gle between its culture of origin and its acculturation with the
West. And that the outcome of this struggle was less predict-
able than had been thought in the post-World War II period, as
the Western development model split and revealed the harm it
had caused, harm to the environment but also and especially to
people and to their culture. “Balkrishna Doshi’s personal strug-
gle reconciles the obvious discrepancies that he has discovered
between the principles … of the Modern Movement and the
basic realities of building in a developing country.” 3 The Hus-
sain Gufa was built with these basic realities: materials avail-
able on site, earth, and pieces of broken plates, according to
a technique that required men rather than equipment, a tech-
nique that has been used for centuries in the streets of Ahmeda-
bad to construct small reliquary temples in the form of sculpted
grottos.
HouSing aS a ProCeSS
It is for this long, slow work of rebalancing the exchanges
between the north and the south that Balkrishna Doshi deserves
to be recognized as one of the founders of contemporary eco-
logical architecture. “If the debate on contemporary sustaina-
ble architecture is so rich throughout the world today,” explains
Italian architect Benno Albrecht, “it is because pioneers such as
Doshi started to deflect the powerful international currents of
industrial development, refocusing them on behalf of societies
and channeling the effects so that they nourish their culture and
their economy instead of destroying them.”
grid and organized the Aranya project in six neighborhoods, fed
by a central avenue that follows the terrain. Each neighborhood
consists of hamlets made up of ten or so houses separated by
patios made of paving stones. Streets run throughout, and busi-
nesses are easily added, for residents can create a business in
their house or sublet a room to an artisan. Public plazas are laid
out at the intersections.
The city pays for the roads and infrastructure of the neighbor-
hood and of the houses. Doshi designed a basic unit, positioned,
lit, ventilated, and built with a concrete frame. The foundation
welcomes each family and adapts this plan, possibly adding
separate rooms, which the inhabitants would build themselves.
They could even later transform their house, within the bound-
aries of their parcel. For Balkrishna Doshi, housing should be
seen “as a process and not a product.” The Aryana experiment
was not pursued in India,
but it did spread through-
out the world. In this vol-
ume, it brings together
such diverse personalities
as Balkrishna Doshi, Ale-
jandro Aravena, and Carin
Smuts. They all see in it a
key to sustainable devel-
opment, and all are criti-
cal of 20th-century public
housing, which is inflex-
ible, both for people and
for their culture; with its own environment, it prevents people
from taking control of their habitat, which is the first lever push-
ing them toward their own advancement.

Hussain Gufa’s unique manifesto is a milestone, but it is a 1 Dictionnaire de l’architecture du XXe siècle, article on Balkrishna
pause along the way. Before and after, the firm produced many Doshi by WilliamJ. Curtis (Paris: Hazan/IFA, 1996).
works, clearly focused on the development of Ahmedabad and 2 James Steele, Ecological Architecture: A Critical History (London:
its region, with the word development taking on a more com- Thames and Hudson, 2005).
3 Ibid.
plex meaning than the one it had in India during Doshi’s youth.
The architect dedicated himself to housing in particular, acting
through his Vāstu Shilpā Foundation to promote more appro-
priate methods of design and construction. The work carried
out by the foundation in 1983 in the city of Indore, located in
the state of Madhya Pradesh, illustrates Doshi’s more syncretis-
tic approach. The city’s department of development asked the
foundation to lay out an 86-hectare area where the city wanted
to build housing, mostly low-rent units for relocating inhabit-
ants living in unsanitary areas. In this region south of Delhi, the
dearth of housing and the generally unsanitary conditions were
tackled only by the mass construction of residential areas. But
these neighborhoods deteriorate quickly.

For Doshi, the dysfunction of modern neighborhoods comes from

the fact that they deprive their inhabitants of flexibility of use,
as well as of the possibility of expanding, and that they impose
lifestyles that are cut off from common practices. Observing the
neighboring shantytowns, Doshi found some positive aspects
there: these bric-a-brac lodgings are in fact laid out in small
neighborhoods, with their stores, their public areas, and busy
streets that are conducive to exchanges, and they form com-
plete units where families find services, solidarity, and freedom
to build. Following their example, Doshi abandoned the modern

31
→ Balkrishna Doshi

SangatH it in the pools, and from there it descends through a succession

of cascades. In modern architecture, water is emotion. It is also
offiCeS for tHe vaStu-SHilPa life itself: it refreshes people and irrigates the garden, and the
founDation anD StuDio SPaCe sharing of water is a condition of life for society.

for tHe arCHiteCt This haven could have been classified as “later Modern” in the
1980s. Seen through today’s lens, it reveals instead that Doshi,
aHMeDabaD, inDia, 1979–1981 who was born with the Modern Movement, did not get stuck in
Postmodern nostalgia but succeeded in stepping over that time
Client: vastu Shilpa foundation of uncertainties in order to lay the foundations of an architec-
architect: balkrishna Doshi ture for the new century.

Today Sangath, a key project, can be described differently than

it was when first completed, at the start of the Postmodern era:
that nostalgic account fades before the prospects of sustainable
development. Today Sangath can be described as a feat of archi-
tectural syncretism that Doshi attained by fusing the Modern
vitalism and the contemporary vitality of Indian culture.

The complex of offices and gardens is set in the north corner of

a site of 2,500 m2 on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. The buildings
are accessed via a slanting allée that postpones their discovery,
and Doshi recalls that he learned this lesson from Le Corbu-
sier. The main building is set on the north butte, backing onto
the edge of the parcel; it contains the studio space, offices, and
meeting rooms; it is flanked on the south by reception rooms,
oriented toward the allée and forming the main façade. The
site’s slope makes it possible to stagger the whole composition
through a succession of interior levels. It also makes it possible
for the barrel vaults covering each module with a double enfi-
lade to take in natural light through a cutout in the tympanum.

The system of vaults is part of a Corbusian lineage: it revives the

prototype invented in the Indian series known as the Monol, in
which Le Corbusier sought building models that were more suit-
able for Indian culture. Doshi revives not so much the system
as that reorientation in the thinking, and he takes it in a new
direction: a complete adherence to the landscape and its mor-
phology, an interweaving of the architecture and the garden,
with the whole forming not so much an “architectural prome-
nade” as a symbiosis between three elements—mineral, vege-
table, and water.

The discovery of Sangath is in fact an immersion in a whole, via

a gradual ascension from one level to the next, through the ter-
races and patios. They lead to the living areas, some of them
semi-sunken in the slope, covered with their dome and illumi-
nated mainly by the tympanum. These semi-barrels define the
tall, wide interior spaces, well ventilated because their enfilade
is oriented in the direction of the prevailing winds.

In the Monol series, Le Corbusier envisioned covering the roofs

with soil and grass. In the Indian climate, Doshi abandoned that
dream, which was European in nature. The roofs that need to
protect occupants from the sun and the rain become, through a
striking semantic reversal, walls for the drainage of water, which
circulates throughout the complex, transforming the whole into
a garden. The concrete is entirely covered with ceramic shards.
The architecture is part of the earth, where the concrete is still
visible; with its white domes, it is also part of the sky. Between
the parallel vaults, channels collect the water, then discharge

32
the discovery of the complex from the low garden.
one can make out the system of channels that carry
the rainwater from the roof vaults to the pools.

33
 left:
Sangath, interior view

right:
the general plan of the office complex and of the
garden with its terraces and pools.

below:
the site seen from the top of the hill, with its hydro-
graphic system: the hollowed-out channels for the
collection of rainwater at the foot of the vaults feed
the pools.

34
35
a roof vault, with the tympanum that gives natural
lighting and ventilation

below:
a detail of a small exterior terrace, created in the
extension of a unit. these small systems deepen
the symbiosis between the living/working areas and
the garden.

36
the complex seen from the low point in the garden,
where a large pool collects water

37
→ Balkrishna Doshi

aranya
PrograM for low-inCoMe
HouSing
MaDHya PraDeSH, inDore, inDia,
1983–1986
Client: Development Managers for the City of indore
architect: vastu Shilpa foundation, balkrishna Doshi
Planning and Design: vastu Shilpa foundation

Indore is a working-class commercial city, 600 km south of

Delhi. The methods used to reduce the slums were called into
question: the social housing projects built in the Western style
in the 1960s quickly deteriorated and do not work. The city
administration asked the Vāstu Shilpā Foundation to develop
models of alternative housing, for an initial program on an
86-hectare site.

For Doshi, the modern neighborhoods are inhospitable

because they are inflexible. Designed without an understand-
ing of the residents’ lifestyle, they deprive the inhabitants of
certain freedoms (to expand or modify one’s lodging, for exam-
ple) and cut the connections with work and with the environ-
ment. Doshi turns the models upside down and analyzes the
so-called unsanitary residential areas. There, the inhabitants
live in destitution, but they organized the neighborhoods them-
selves. Doshi points out the benefits: the slums are organized
in neighborhoods and bustling streets, with stores and work-
shops. The families find solidarity there and they have freedom
to build.

Doshi abandons the grid and organizes Aranya in six neighbor-

hoods, fed by an avenue that follows the terrain. The houses
are arranged in groups of ten, each behind its offa, or open
patio. The city designs the public squares and “street corners,”
builds the basic units, oriented so as to be well lit and venti-
lated. The inhabitants can expand their unit by adding “sepa-
rate rooms” and can open a business or workshop.

38
left:
Sketch by balkrishna Doshi: studies of the den-
sity and system of services, with the small inte-
rior plazas and the capillary networks of the
interior circulation routes and services for each
house

right:
interior view of a street block. balkrishna Doshi
and the vastu Shilpa foundation still build these
superb designs, at the crossroads of western
axonometry and indian codes of representa-
tion, either scholarly or with broad appeal.

39
the inner life of a street block. each house had
an offa, or small paved terrace overhanging the
street, accessible via a staircase, as indicated in the
diagram.

below:
one of the hamlets of aranya, at the outskirts of the
project. the small neighborhood smoothly connects
the gardens and the orchards.

40
41
42
neighborhood life and busy streets. the itinerant
vendors and artisans set up on the ground floor and
use the small plazas for their work.

right:
a study, with the various sitting options

43
→ Balkrishna Doshi

inDian inStitute of ManageMent

bangalore, inDia, 1977–1985
Client: indian institute of Management
architect: balkrishna Doshi, Stein Doshi & bhalla in association
with kanvinde rai & Chowdhury
engineering: Mahendra raj
total Surface area: 54,000 m2

Balkrishna Doshi remembers that it was near Fatehpur Sikri

that Emperor Akbar had established his capital in the 16th cen-
tury. The Fatehpur Sikri site remains a model of clarity, thanks
to the organizational system of parts and of the whole: a net-
work of galleries organizes the buildings, which are separated
by interior courtyards where people lived.

This arrangement, at once collective and intimate, directly

inspired the plan for the Indian Institute of Management.
The program (classrooms, laboratories, and service areas) is
spread out in open pavilions among gardens with lush vegeta-
tion. The institute is irrigated by a network of covered, almost
monumental culverts, surpassing three stories to surround
the interior gardens. Pavilions and arcades are built in superb
masonry of dressed stone.

The checkered pattern of solids and voids filters the light. The
classrooms and offices receive direct light. The arcades can be
semicovered by claustras that lattice the rays of light. Some-
times these arcades are widened so that people can sit down
or pass one another easily when classes let out. The spatial
richness of the project increases these plays with shadow and
light. The institute is the first in India to reuse the environment
and the elements to deal with functionalities such as light or
ventilation. But above all, the vegetation, stone, and light bring
a real inner serenity to this learning establishment.

below left:
the general plan of the site. the grid of the interior
covered galleries defines little islands, occupied by
the campus buildings and their interior gardens.

44
below:
views of the campus from the galleries: alterna-
tion of solids and voids, of shadows and light, side
entrance to the center of the little islands, a sce-
nography that orders the palatial scale with the
almost intimate scale of the gardens

45
françoise-
Hélène
Jourda
Paris,
france

46
47
→ Françoise-Hélène Jourda
Françoise-Hélène Jourda, who was born in 1955 and received an
architecture degree in 1979, made a name for herself starting in
1980, when she won the competition Pour un habitat économe
en énérgie, awarded by the French government to encourage
research on what is now called bioclimatic architecture. With
Gilles Perraudin, she founded a leading agency in Lyon, which
quickly joined the top ranks of the best French architects. This
young team is acclaimed more for the quality of its architec-
ture, distinguished by a certain expressive power and concern
for updating conventional typology, than for its ecological com-
mitment. But the latter is no less real, and Jourda draws her
references from Nordic and Germanic countries, attuned to the
likes of Ralph Erskine and later Thomas Herzog.
On the French scene, ecological awareness has experienced
and still continues to experience a difficult course. Yet the
debate started there at the same time as in the United States
and France’s large neighbor, Germany—first as an extension
of the 1968 movement, then of the first energy crisis of 1973.
At that time, France started researching renewable energy, a
“timber industry” for housing, and sustainable materials. An
“earth village” was built near Lyon, consisting of apartment
houses made of earth and designed by a squadron of excellent
architects, including the Jourda-Perraudin firm. But in the early
1980s, other priorities emerged in France, and this research
was marginalized. The French government made a strategic
choice—nuclear power—and for a decade would do no more
than keep watch over the development of renewable energies.
On French territory, the priorities were the renovation of large-
scale industrial areas and city centers, which had been trauma-
tized by the brutal renovations of the 1970s. The French scene at
the time found inspiration in Aldo Rossi’s Italian model of recon-
struction “of the city on the city” and “urban architecture.” The
architecture is more elaborately worked in its typology and its
connections with public space than in the area of building inno-
vation. In 1981 the Grands Projets policy, launched in Paris and
then disseminated to other
major cities, initiated a pro-
gram modernizing large pub-
lic amenities; outside Paris, it
was often linked to transporta-
tion systems (modernization of
the railways, the return of the
streetcar system, etc.). In this
way, the scene in France is sim-
ilar to that of its neighbor, Brit-
ain; that nation’s technologi-
cal know-how was imported to
France via the firm Ove Arup,
and its creative engineering
via RFR and Peter Rice. These
large amenities were built in
support of trends such as a
return to the city center and the development of mass tran-
sit—trends that also opened one of the paths to sustainable
development, although the debate was not presented in those
terms. Few architects at the time were interested in the eco-
logical movement, which was asserting itself on the other side
of the Rhine.
This unusual situation reinforced the militant aspect of Jour-
da’s work as she actively participated in the long decade of
large projects. She completed several major projects in this
48
period: the school of architecture in Lyon (1985), the university
at Marne-la-Vallée, and the courthouse in Melun. To promote
her own approach, Jourda had to work continuously on two
fronts: on the one hand, defending the “environmental cause”
within the French architecture scene, where it was not seen as
a major issue, and on the other, defending the cause of contem-
porary architecture among French ecologists, who were much
more conservative than their counterparts in Scandinavia and
Germany.
This go-between status was not an easy choice at a time when it
was more effective in France to flaunt an “author architecture.”
This is why Jourda’s unique work very quickly became better
known abroad than in France. In the Germanic countries, eco-
architecture freed itself from its infancy in the 1968 movement
and continued to develop, technologically and conceptually;
the connection between new energy and materials parameters
and the research on contemporary architectural vocabulary
was obvious. Jourda was hailed by her peers there and received
the commission for several major buildings, including the very
beautiful Mont-Cenis Academy; located in Herne, in the Ruhr
area, the academy consists of a group of buildings completely
sheltered by a large glass envelope with a timber frame, borne
by large stripped pinewood trunks and supporting photovoltaic
panels.
But the winds are changing in France, and for the past few years
Jourda has no longer needed to hide her unique militant-ecolo-
gist position behind the quality of her composition. The debate
on sustainable architecture is under way, and the architect who
has been able to “import” into France the best Nordic and Ger-
manic research is now recognized for what she is: the defender
of refined architecture, open to new technologies, aware of the
urban issues, attuned to social movements and to the political
dimension of the debate that is finally beginning in France. For
Jourda, being an architect is not only about creating but, just as
important, about developing as well; an architect bears more
responsibility than other citizens. Jourda is a typical architect
of the sustainable architecture movement, in constant touch
with her international colleagues and with the current devel-
opments of the debate in which they are engaged. In 1996 she
cosigned the European Charter for Solar Energy in Architecture
and Urban Planning.
But the experience of being a go-between in the 1980s has not
been forgotten. Her projects reveal the search for a French
channel for sustainable architecture, in a country where the
words rational and progress have deep historical meaning, but
a country that is struggling to give them a 21st-century mean-
ing, and that will have to resolve its own energy equation. For
Jourda, this French equation will be urban, and this will set it
apart from the French ecological movement, which is oriented
more toward ruralist nostalgia. Appointed commissioner for
the French pavilion at the 2004 Venice Biennale, Jourda did not
show her own work there but seized upon the opportunity to
draw attention to “sustainable metamorphoses” and to make
her French colleagues think about how to transform the urban
economy in the 21st century.
Françoise-Hélène Jourda’s recent projects in France bear the
stamp of this desire to find in her own country a suitable way
to pose—and solve—the ecological question. Now under con-
struction, the éNergie zérO project in Saint-Denis, which will be
the first passive-energy building constructed in the shape of a
hexagon, seeks to combine the new compactness of ecological
buildings and the building vocabulary inherited from the Hauss-
mannian city. In Bordeaux, the new greenhouses in the botani-
cal garden also blend the vocabulary of bioclimatic architecture
with the 19th-century French tradition of public buildings.

Aware of her unique position, Jourda has just created EO.CITE,

an advisory agency for sustainable development. She wants to
help educate contractors, elected officials, and citizens, using a
global vision of sustainable development to go beyond the issue
of energy economies in order to connect with new ways of living
and working, new social goals, and reflections on the future of
cities. The architect knows that there is a need in France to con-
vince people—starting earlier the process, during the develop-
ment phase—in order to successfully change the cycle of the
urban economy and of construction. In addition to her work as
an adviser, Jourda has also pursued a teaching career, since
1999 serving as chairwoman of sustainable architecture at the
Technical University of Vienna.

Françoise-Hélène Jourda knows well that this triple role—

architect, professor, and now adviser—gives coherence to her
research and, above all, defines a new and larger area of exper-
tise. The global awareness of sustainable development in the
project is new, a strategic position that she believes the archi-
tect can and should seize upon if he or she is to play a real part
in the city of the new century.

49
→ Françoise-Hélène Jourda

botaniCal garDen
borDeaux, franCe, 1999–2003
Client: City of bordeaux
architect: françoise-Hélène Jourda
landscape architect: Catherine Mosbach
Cost of work: 3,050,000 euros, exclusive
of taxes (2001 value)

The young botanical garden in Bordeaux is not set in a beauti-

ful, ancient park lined with monuments, but rather in one of the
city’s new neighborhoods. The garden runs along the right bank
of the Garonne and forms a 600-by-100-meter band. For this
limited space, the program was dense: greenhouses, but also a
herbarium, a library, exhibition halls, classrooms, a restaurant
offering organic food, and a bookstore/shop. In this distended
landscape on the city’s periphery, the architect updated the
typical French cultural building. Replacing the solitary object
inherited from the Moderns is a more complex system, which
blends series of greenhouses, “boxes,” and “pebbles.”

At the beginning are the greenhouses, a building program

with which the architect is well acquainted (she completed a
13,000 m2 greenhouse in Herne Sodingen). Françoise-Hélène
Jourda transposed to Bordeaux the timber frame invented in
Herne: a cluster of Douglas pine columns on slabs support the
glazed envelope, divided into seven different parallelepipeds,
depending on the climates needed for the plants they house.
Their roof carries 650 m2 of photovoltaic cells. The captured
energy gives the buildings electrical autonomy. The watering of
plants on the exterior and in the greenhouses is handled manu-
ally, with 275 m3 of rainwater stored in buried cisterns. The
group of greenhouses is most clearly visible on the southwest.
The alignment of their side walls creates a main façade aligned
on the allée, facing some apartment buildings.

On the other side of the garden, the exhibition halls, storerooms,

and offices are housed in a second arrangement of boxes, using
wood for the building frames and weatherboards. A series of
small boxes accommodates the exhibition halls, and the system
stops with the two large boxes—the herbarium, set on a slant,
and the administrative offices, set above it all—that enclose the
composition on the northeast.

Four huge “pebbles” house the studios, shops, and restaurant.

They are formed by a steel grid coated with gunite and covered
with smooth granite aggregates. They are identical to the pebbles
that Jourda disseminated in Lyon during the same period, under
the roof structure of the market hall at Place du 8 mai and in the
hall of the Jean Mermoz Private Hospital. “I expressed this form,
which sprung up in my work, in a very visceral way. These giant
pebbles are the mineral part of the project. They are disconcer-
ting and ask questions of conventional architecture,” explains
Françoise-Hélène Jourda, who perhaps dreams that nature will
come more often to disturb their sequencing. In Bordeaux, they
came to fit into the arrangement of boxes—unless they were
already in place there? On the east and west, the two largest are
bookends on the north façade, which is freer than the green-
house façade, “organic” in the sense that it makes the interior
life of the spaces very legible.

50
on page 47:
the main façade of the Jean Mermoz Private
Hospital in lyon

above:
façade of the reception building at the botanical
garden, with the recessing of the “boxes” and the
projection of one of the “pebbles”

51
 a b

C
g D

a D
b
e
g
C

above:
aerial view of the botanical garden and the surround-
ing neighborhood

above right:
Site plan. an interior garden runs between the green-
houses that sit side by side and the boxes for the
offices. the pebbles accommodate studios, bou-
tiques, and a restaurant.

52
right:
Section drawings bb and CC (see site plan on pre-
vious page), with a detail of the wooden framework
for the greenhouses, supported by the tree trunks,
which are fit on steel plates

below:
a view of the garden, which winds between the pro-
jections behind the greenhouses and the boxes

53
 above:
Section drawings ff and gg (see site plan on
p. 52), with a detail of the wooden framework for the
greenhouses, supported by the tree trunks, which
are fit on steel plates

left:
interior ambiance in the offices and large rooms,
with views of the interior garden and the effect of
the sudden appearance of the pebble

54
interior view of a greenhouse, with a detail of the
framework with its tree-trunk posts and beams.
Photovoltaic cell panels are visible on the roof.

55
→ Françoise-Hélène Jourda

Creation of a MarketPlaCe
anD SurrounDing SPaCeS
PlaCe Du 8 Mai 1945
lyon, franCe, 1999–2001
Client: le grand lyon/lyon Metropolitan District
architect: françoise-Hélène Jourda with in Situ
landscape architects
Surface area: 23,100 m2
Cost of work: 5,336,000 euros

This small municipal facility is contemporaneous with the mon-

umental greenhouse for Mont-Cenis Academy, in Herne Sodin-
gen, in the Ruhr. The structure at Herne—where the glazed roof
is carried by a “forest” of hardwood trunks, assembled down to
the millimeter by adjustable steel plates—is transposed here
without any mistakes in terms of scale: it sufficed to change the
size of the trees that were cut down in order to obtain smaller
boles. These wooden spindles are attached to the ground by a
plate. On the upper portion, they support the transverse pur-
lins of the roof structure, to which they are attached by a sec-
ond plate. The corrugated metal roof rests on a second row of
rafters. The roof is broken up by glazed panels that illuminate
the stands. The architect had planned for a rainwater recovery
cistern so that the facility would produce its water reserve for
maintenance and safety.

On the street side, the market is protected by a double row

of young trees that are planted on the median strip and that
respond to the “forest” of columns. Large concrete “pebbles”
are set in the ground. They house the public bathrooms as well
as water and electrical cabinets for the road network. As urban
facilities, markets were rarely successful in the 20th century.
Here, the wooden structure picks up the rationality and flexi-
bility of 19th-century steel canopies. Following their example,
this project proposes a standard that is easy to reproduce and
to adapt.

Detail of the silkscreened glass for the openings in

the market roof

56
57
 above:
interior view of the market, with a detail of the upper
and lower steel mounting plates of the load-bearing
tree trunks

left:
Section diagram of the mixed structure, with the
timber frame and the steel cable tie-rods

58
in the foreground, a load-bearing trunk, with its
barked removed and its base made more narrow in
order to fit into the steel caging of the lower plate

59
Hermann
kaufmann
Schwarzach,
austria

60
façade of allmeintalweg residential complex in
ludesch (see p. 76): when constructive rational-
ism defines a new architectural order, or organiza-
tional system

61
→ Hermann Kaufmann
The career of Hermann Kaufmann is inseparable from the recent
history of Vorarlberg, the tiny Central European region that, over
the past 30 years, has become a laboratory of sustainable archi-
tecture, thanks to a handful of participants. This mission took
shape in the 1970s, at the start of Austria’s economic boom, when
the plains of “the young Rhine” 1 were beginning to be urbanized.
In this small, traditionally autonomous land, accustomed to
relying on its own strengths and its culture, the local elite under-
stand that the industrial world will take over this outstanding
real-estate resource and transform the economy, which is still
rural, and the fruits of this growth will be snapped up by people
from elsewhere unless the inhabitants mobilize. The urbaniza-
tion of the Rhine Valley, for example, might be carried out by a
concrete industry from elsewhere, an industry better equipped
to build quickly than are the carpenters of Vorarlberg. The latter
possess exceptional skill, however, but this does not fit with the
new circumstances. Following a very familiar logic, the growth
runs the risk of destroying the major industry that structures the
economy and the society.
The story of the Baukünstler 2 began when a first generation
of architects worked with these carpenters to develop sim-
pler, more economical building solutions for chalets, so that a
householder could build a wooden home for the same price as a
cinderblock one. The story took a new, decisive turn in the early
1980s, when the next generation came back from Vienna or
Zurich, with diplomas in hand and minds focused on the nascent
Green movement. Those young architects brought to a debate
already in progress a broader historical inspiration: the Grünen
(members of the Green Party) were already thinking post-petro-
leum and toward sustainable development and a more liber-
ating cultural vision. They wanted to change the growth into
development, using designer architecture, and in this way, to
bring together local culture and a modern aesthetic, technol-
ogy and ecology, architecture and the building industry.
The originality of this progressivism is that it aimed to bring
about development without a tabula rasa. Vorarlberg could
modernize while keeping its housing styles, its wood, and its
trades. The intellectual Baukünstler positioned the work of the
Grünen to put together what economists call “self-reliant devel-
opment” (a model used more in Africa to get out of the colonial
age than in the center of Europe). The architects and carpenters
of Vorarlberg possess an excellent setting and technical know-
how, which they would put in motion. In project after project,
with detail plans in hand, the architects and contracting firms
of Vorarlberg took up the challenge and transformed a craft
industry, timber construction, into a 21st-century industry, sus-
tainable building.
fraCture anD Continuity
In 30 years, this handful of young architects succeeded in
changing the course of history in their country. This is always
the architect’s dream, but it does not happen often. Hermann
Kaufmann was among these young militant architects. He
was born in 1955 in Reuthe, an Austrian village in the Bregen-
zerwald region, which is the mountainous part of Vorarlberg
Province. Born into a family of carpenters, he spent his child-
hood in the workshops of a region whose only resources were
wood and its trades. He studied architecture at the Technical
University in Innsbruck, and then in Vienna, before returning
62
to Vorarlberg and opening a firm in Schwarzach with Christian
Lenz. Kaufmann’s career merges with the forward march of the
Baukünstler. This movement, with its many strong personali-
ties, fuels a lively internal debate, with various currents in eco-
logical thought running through it: low- or high-tech; ruralist or
urban-centered; in favor of concrete (which is reprogrammed)
or in favor of wood (which is transformed). In this hotbed of
culture, Hermann Kaufmann chose his subject: the search for
an architecture that promotes a sustainable management of
resources. In this land of wood, he chose wood, with the goal of
pushing the limits of its constructive possibilities.
He and his friends share this vision, linked to a real social com-
mitment, of creating an ecological environment accessible to
all, an element of social and cultural development. In 1987,
with Sture Larsen and Walter Unterrainer, he built the first
solar school, in Dafins, and started work on the invention of
the Passivhaus (passive house), marked by a series of build-
ings in Dornbirn, the economic capital that is undergoing very
rapid growth, and in the villages. Next he worked on the “urban-
ization” of wood, that is, its ability to meet the building needs
of multifamily housing and industrial or commercial buildings.
Thus in 1997 he put his name to the Ölzbund, the first program
for three-story multifamily housing with passive energy, built
with a timber structure.
As a builder, Hermann Kaufmann works to make wood compet-
itive in the building economy: through the search for industri-
alizable solutions, to counter concrete, and through the inven-
tion of complex systems in the new area of climate-responsive
architecture. The many works with a timber structure and walls
containing structural insulated panels, ever more refined, are
evidence that this resource has great development potential.
As an architect, Kaufmann seeks an aesthetic that breaks with
the ruralism that had excluded wood in Modernist works. A
regionalist in spirit, he rejects neo-regionalist architecture.
His thinking is not only sensitive but also rational: the need for
housing that is affordable and suited to new lifestyles, which
are more collective and urban, calls for new spatial solutions
and an aesthetic that gives meaning and shape to this progress.
Kaufmann’s architecture draws on the classical Modern culture
to give continuity and to conflict with its context. This aesthetic
provokes, but it also conveys the profound transformation that
Vorarlberg is now experiencing. The elected officials who wel-
come the industries and the rural people who modernize their
enterprises, aren’t they now making the same gamble—break-
ing with their traditions and modernizing their professions in
order to maintain control over their destiny? This rebellion in
identity uses architecture as its vector, with its houses and its
landmark projects—and it can do this because the architects
are remarkably involved in the movements and the debates of
their society.
arCHiteCture anD
teCHnique: a reneweD Debate
Completed in 2005, the Ludesch Community Center com-
memorates the very unusual history of Vorarlberg. Ludesch,
an ancient hamlet that has been pushed too quickly, “sub-
mitted” to the growth and spread into residential neighbor-
hoods, the typical European “weakening” of small towns. In
accordance with the mayor’s wishes, the program for a commu-
nity center was launched to give the city back an identity and
even a center. Hermann Kaufmann, whose work had matured,
seized upon the topic to write a humanist architecture mani-
festo (“Wood is the ‘material of hope’ for a better
world” 3) and an anthology of sustainable building,
with all its issues: energy, materials, economy, and
even health, carried out with the goal of an optimal
ecological performance.
Today history continues to be made in Vorarlberg.
The number of architectural firms has increased.
The time is distant when their older colleagues
came with plans to convince the carpenters to
modernize their output. The companies that
build in wood have become a center of excellence
throughout the world, and their soaring industry
can today pursue its own goals on the European
market. Some of these companies focus on wood’s
performance, to compete with concrete in long-
term structures or tall buildings. Others perfect
prefabrication and invent “eco-construction.” Still
others use wood as a base material in the produc-
tion of components for sustainable construction.
Thus we find that wood is worked in various ways,
as sheets in the sandwiches of complex compo-
nents, as reconstituted load-bearing walls, or cut
into large sheets made in a factory. They all com-
bine to create an industry for the new sustainable
economy.
How can such an outcome be avoided? By continuing to inno-
vate and to set new research goals, replies Hermann Kaufmann.
He is pursuing his own, which continue to connect the explora-
tion of technologies and types of energy. Co-inventor of the pas-
sive house, he works on “energy-positive” buildings. Compre-
hensive ecological calculations are his passion, because he sees
there a “new frontier” that the people in the building industry
can cross only if they work together, as at Ludesch. For exam-
ple, he closely follows the debate on high-rise building, which
would allow wood to truly enter the city: “We find ourselves in
a critical and decisive phase. Is it possible to bring these exper-
iments into general use? Is society’s demand large enough to
influence the market? Is the timber industry able to enter this
market in a professional way?.” 4 Such questions, in their variety
of approaches and their relevance, describe a man better than
the answers do. They describe an architect whose experience
has conferred authority on him, an architect who does not use
it to reign but rather to work. As long as architects such as Her-
mann Kaufmann continue the quest and subordinate technical
know-how to civilization, there is little risk that the architecture
of Vorarlberg will become merely formalism or a trademark.
1 The phrase comes from Liechtenstein’s national anthem.
2 Baukünstler is literally a “building artist”; the term is synonymous
with architect.
3 Otto Kapfinger, Hermann Kaufmann: Wood Works (New York and
Vienna: Springer, 2008).
4 Ibid.

It is quite tempting to draw a parallel with the his-

tory of the 20th century. At the dawn of the industrial age, con-
crete construction was born from the dialogue that took shape
between architects and new industries: think of the adventures
of Auguste Perret and of the Hennebique company in Paris,
which invented the reinforced-concrete construction system,
or the innovations by Pier Luigi Nervi and the Società per Cos-
truzioni Cementizie di Bologna: they made it possible for con-
crete, which was more affordable, to replace steel. One could
compare the work by Hermann Kaufmann, the Baukünstler, and
their carpenters with these dialogues, which were so produc-
tive for modern architecture. The comparison will certainly hold
up, for these new works bring the transformation of a build-
ing method to the same level; they succeed in applying both
the sweeping vision of the architect and the meticulous require-
ments of the experimenter.

One might also wonder about the future in light of this com-
parison, remembering that, as with Perret and Le Corbusier,
the adventure can turn out badly. The productive dialogue was
broken and the world of concrete construction “freed” itself of
architects and pursued only its goals of growth, to the detri-
ment of the environment. Could the state-of-the-art industri-
alists of Vorarlberg move away from the architects and their
humanism? After all, a quick sketch would now suffice for them
to start a building in their workshops. This would mean the end
of an architecture that launched sustainable development, and
a boost for industrial marketing that uses architecture as image
or for architectural marketing that uses wood’s good image
without asking any further questions.

63
→ Hermann Kaufmann

luDeSCH CoMMunity Center With such clarity in terms of the siting, the rest—accommoda-
ting the services, regulating the changes in level, arranging the
vorarlberg, auStria, 2005 passageways in this large volume—was nothing but child’s play
and seemed so obvious for an architect who has reached his
Client: Municipality of ludesch maturity as a designer. An initial grid of steel beams regulates
architect: Hermann kaufmann zt gmbH the general structure and crosses the double height of the cov-
with roland wehinger, Martin längle, norbert kaufmann, ered courtyard and the interior hall. Thus the services fit into
and Christoph kalb the grid of a timber structure, with post and beams and load-
experts: Merz klei Partner, Mader & flatz, Synergy, wilhem bearing caisson walls. With white pine for the façade and the
brugger, bernhard weithas, and karl tofghele walls in a variety of treatments, the place is an anthology of
sustainable building and its technologies: energies, materials,
waterproofing, as well as health for an ecologically optimal per-
formance.
This building, completed in 2005, is an example of the most
successful overall ecological performance in Europe. The strong
backing of the mayor of Ludesch, who is very involved in energy
conservation policies, was at the origin of this building, which is
part of an experimental program called “Houses of the Future,”
run in Austria by the federal Ministry of Transportation, Innova-
tion, and Technology. This program supports ecologically inno-
vative works and aims to use them to perfect an overall method
of evaluating their ecological footprint. The participants in this
program must, in particular, conduct a study comparing tradi-
tional building methods and ecological ones, in order to better
adapt the trades and the practices to ecological construction.

In Ludesch, the experimentation began in a multidisciplinary

way. In 1998 the mayor created a local task group. Hermann
Kaufmann joined it in 2000 with his experts in order to refine the
program and oversee the project. This group then added con-
tractors, and their proposals were evaluated later in terms of
“life cycle,” that new economic model that evaluates the over-
all cost of the material: its production, transportation, installa-
tion, upkeep, demolition, and recycling.

But in this case, ecology also means “living better together.”

The mayor is fighting sprawl in his town. The decompartmenta-
lization of families and the arrival of new residents have trans-
formed this village into a residential suburb, without a soul and
without a center, a suburb where cars are used for every errands
and for daily shopping trips. The problem is eco-social: a city of
3,000 inhabitants needs accessible—and eco-civic—services,
but how can the new community be created without any public
square or town center? The definitive program is multipurpose,
typical of Vorarlberg’s shared, pragmatic community involve-
ment. The program encompasses public services (administra-
tive departments, library, post office), meeting rooms for orga-
nizations, and commercial premises, including a small bank
and a café.

Given this complex deal, Hermann Kaufmann, who is more

often recognized as a builder, should be praised for his empa-
thic understanding of the political meaning of the program. The
architect first offered a center, that is, a central square. He who
loves the compactness of a square plan here uses a half square,
in which he sinks a covered courtyard surrounded by a U-shaped
building. The strip of land runs along a banal intersection. Kauf-
mann positioned this demi-atrium at the confluence of three
routes, which now seem to have been made to converge toward
it. The atrium opens onto a public plaza. A large glazed area
with photovoltaic panels covers the courtyard, which becomes
a gathering place for the whole town.

64
in front of the main entrance to the shopping center
is a large courtyard forming a public plaza.

left:
Site plan of the shopping center—the sitting makes
it possible to structure the urban fabric of the
village.

65
Seen from the courtyard, the side wing on the west
accommodates the public service areas, which for
the most part open onto the plaza. on the glazing,
photovoltaic panels

66
Plan of the ground floor, which houses mainly pub-
lic and private service areas: a small post office, a
café, a municipal library, a gymnasium, and a day-
care center

under the glazed roof of the courtyard: the effects

of the weft

67
the u-shaped community center is integrated into
the fabric of the village, for there are passageways
running through it.

68
Section drawing. the meeting room and music
room are set in the basement. this arrangement
uses thermal inertia and makes it possible to avoid
having a building that is too tall for the scale of the
village.

interior ambiance in the hall and on the upper floor

of offices. the textures and timber frames vary
depending on the spaces.

69
→ Hermann Kaufmann

olPerer SHelter
finkelberg in tyrol, auStria,
2007–2008

Client: Deutscher alpenverein

architects: Hermann kaufmann with C. greussing,
J. nägele-küng, g. Hämmerle
engineering: walter engineering

An initial shelter was built a century ago on this mountainous

headland in the Tyrol, at an altitude of 2,400 m. Reason dic-
tates that it would be in masonry, built with stones gathered
on-site, rather than in wood, which is expensive to transport.
Today, development makes it possible to reverse the reason-
ing even if—or rather, because—building in the mountains still
remains a question of transportation costs and times.

The wood frame and cross-laminated panels of the new ref-

uge were prefabricated in the factory, with 350 components
that were delivered by helicopter and dry-assembled in three
days. The remnants of the old refuge were confined on-site
in the new concrete plinth, protected by a stone facing. The
shell of the shelter was then placed on the plinth. The refuge is
impressively cantilevered over the valley. This overhang of the
floor structure is partially eased by the fact that the ground-
floor walls are attached to the plinth through the flooring. The
cross-laminated panels of the interior and exterior walls are
both load bearing and insulating. This grid of vertical load-
bearing panels is wind-braced by the upper-level floor and by
the rafter roof, positioned as integral plates. The façade pan-
els are protected by the roof shingles. The device for cleaning
up gray water uses rapeseed oil and photovoltaics. A faience
stove ensures comfort in this summer shelter.

Historical photograph and drawings: the first olperer

shelter, built a century ago from stones gathered on-site

70
71
right:
Section and diagram of the shelter. the dining room
is visible in the prow, cantilevered on the retaining
wall.

below:
interior and exterior views of the dining room, with its
panoramic view of the mountains

A B C

72
the frame and panels of the new refuge were pre-
fabricated in the factory, in 350 components that
were delivered by helicopter and dry-assembled in
three days (see photos on p. 63).
A B C A B C

right:
Plans and sections of the shelter and its appendix
of local techniques

73
one can see the base, wider on the terrace, protected
by a stone wall.

74
longitudinal section, with a detail of the general
foundation. the load-bearing panels of the interior
and exterior walls are set on and attached to this
base.

75
→ Hermann Kaufmann

allMeintalweg reSiDential
CoMPlex
luDeSCH, auStria, 2002–2007

Client: vogewoSi
architects: Hermann kaufmann with n. kaufmann, w. bilgeri,
M. längle, t. Hölzl, and b. baumgartl
Consultants: Merz kely Partners, Madder & flatz, M. gut-
brunner, P. Hämmerle, l. küntz
Passive Habitat: 48kwh/m2/year

Hermann Kaufmann is very involved in perfecting collective

passive habitats made of wood. Today wood remains at the
city outskirts because dependable and economical high-rise
building systems in wood have yet to be strengthened. Sev-
eral housing programs, three to four stories high, have already
been built and pave the way for this research.

In Ludesch, the project explores the way to prefabricate ver-

tical service ducts, a technique that was contemplated in the
world of concrete during the great age of prefabricated hous-
ing. It appears more workable in the realm of wood: large ducts
2.8 m wide and three stories high are assembled in the factory
and equipped with all the primary networks and their panels.
They are delivered assembled and lifted directly onto the pri-
mary floor. These ducts are mounted in the wood-meccano of
floors and load-bearing walls that this project patiently helps
to perfect.

76
the completed development, in a valley landscape
that is still rural

left:
the site plan of the development

77
view of the “interior courtyard” of the development.
the terraces and walkways are borne by a thin steel
framework.

below:
Section drawings, with the exterior vertical circula-
tion routes

78
façades, with a detail of the protective cornices of
the roof and the protective devises of the outer skin
on the horizontal joint of the panels

79
wang Shu
Hangzhou,
China

80
81
→ Wang Shu
The position of Wang Shu and his Amateur Architecture Stu-
dio is unique in the small contemporary architecture scene in
China. In this country that is essentially one big construction
site, there are few architects in the Western sense of the term.
Most projects are still designed in architecture institutes inher-
ited from the Maoist period, according to the industrial meth-
ods in which the architect is responsible only for the plans. In
these agencies that employ hundreds of people, an architect
can handle a million square meters per year. In China, millions
of people migrate to the cities, where the pace of construction
is without equivalent in history.
“a wilD anD unCertain era”
China has begun an ecological about-face, spurred on by the
Olympic Games construction, which was observed by the
whole world. Cleaning up pollution, “greening,” using renew-
able energy, etc., figure into the programs, sometimes in a more
pressing way than in the West. “Eco-cities” are under develop-
ment. These efforts should be applauded when one considers
to what point the needs of China for energy and materials will
weigh on our shared destiny. But these policies reproduce 20th-
century flaws: the development methods are
brutal, drawing a line through the historic city,
which was destroyed more by the 1990s than the
Maoist era; the policies are more concerned with
a politically tactical “CO2 report” than with a bet-
ter human condition.
There is a generation of architects, many of whom
studied abroad, that wants to break away from
these methods. They are creating firms of design-
ers in the Western style, ensuring an inventive
and critical practice, and forming a scene “from
which we can expect everything,” to borrow the
beautiful expression of Frédéric Edelmann. 1 But
what should we expect from a cultural domain
that is in ruins? The skillfully handled urban fab-
ric is destroyed, the building culture has disap-
peared, 2 and the enlightened modernity of the
1920s has been swept away. What identity should
be forged for China? The debate has been going on
for a long time. The perspectives opened by eco-
logical necessity are still quite narrow here, in a
country that is, urbanistically, in a state of emer-
gency. Let’s pause for a moment on that issue.
Since this country that is a world in itself holds
the key to the century (depending on whether it
succeeds in managing resources and producing new energies),
and so as not to get lost in the present uncertainties in China,
we can choose to see it solely through this new prism: which
architects propose a new “historical narrative” for China in the
era of sustainable development? Some initiatives have already
taken shape. Among them, the work of Wang Shu can be quickly
spotted.
82
Portrait of a SMiling,
inflexible Man
Wang Shu works in his hometown of Hangzhou, a scholarly
city whose riparian old center was spared. Since 2003 he has
been head of the architecture department of the China Acad-
emy of Art. With Lu Wenyu he founded the Amateur Archi-
tecture Studio in 1997. This name is not neutral. The agency is
small, focused on few projects. Wang Shu is hesitant to build far
away, for fear of losing the connection with the building sites.
In Hangzhou, Wang Shu creates an architecture based on a re-
appropriation of time and of Chinese culture. So that architects
have time to be more attentive to the people. So that a millen-
nial art of living can “infuse” the project, according to the cycli-
cal idea of architecture as an art of managing resources: “Build-
ings that are today 400 or 1,000 years old were built of wood
and brick, fragile materials, and yet they held on, because they
were designed so that they could be perpetually renovated.” 3
Wang Shu wants to show that China should civilize modernity
through its culture.
Born in 1963, Wang Shu comes from a line of scholars, and his
parents were musicians. During the Cultural Revolution, the
family was sent to clear the land in Xinjiang, hundreds of kilome-
ters from the elegant world of Hangzhou. The family secretly
resisted, through culture. Wang Shu learned calligraphy and
poetry. He was 13 when Mao died. He spent his youth reading
the masters of world literature. When it came time to choose
a major, he opted for architecture “because it was a worthless
profession. As an engineer or technical expert, I would have
been kept in Urumqi, whereas as an architect, I knew that I
would be allowed to leave,” he explains with a smile. 4 When
the young man of letters was admitted to the very selective
Tongji University in Shanghai, his relationship to the contem-
porary world was filtered through the study of 20th-century
classics: Wright, Mies, and Scarpa, among others—a modern
culture that had become almost anachronistic, which explains
its uniqueness. He dedicated his doctoral dissertation to Aldo
Rossi, that forgotten supporter of genius loci and of a rational,
sensitive rereading of the major archetypes.
As for building culture, Wang Shu relearned it on the construc-
tion sites where he was very present, another determining fea-
ture of his approach. He noticed that “workers today are former
peasants. They knew how to build, maintain their walls and
their roofs, and they still possess technical skills. When ground
is broken, I question them to find the ones who are knowledge-
able. I set up teams so that we can think together about the
best way to go about the work.” 5 Wang Shu likes to renovate
old buildings, which is even more unusual. For secular build-
ings, refurbished 100 times, he turns to bracing techniques and
reuses the materials, like an archaeologist. Wang Shu uses sim-
ple, durable, sculptural materials: stone, brick, tile, wood, and
concrete, which he employs extensively.
Everywhere else in the world, it is commonplace for an architect’s
work to be anchored in the past. In China, such an approach is
highly critical. In his desire to preserve the architectural herit-
age of his country, the smiling scholar of Hangzhou objects to
costly, obsolescent, and garrulous Postmodernism, which filled
the cultural void of the word Modernity. “I was a writer before
becoming an architect, and architecture is only part of my work.
For me, humanity is more important than architecture, and arts
and crafts are more important than technology.” 6
HiStory anD invention
Amateur Architecture Studio forged its approach methodically.
Small projects are used as laboratories. Wang Shu reworks
techniques, looks for affordable solutions, and also tests the
synthesis of forms that comprise his grand design. He does not
deny himself the refinements of composition. For the Ceramic
House in Jinhua, Wang Shu salvaged discarded tiles and glazed
shards with hues varying from blue-green
to brown. This material is rich only in cul-
tural terms. He designed a Miesian project
and worked with masons for an immac-
ulate implementation. The ceramic tiles
are set in flawless lines, which give them
their evocative power. In Ningbo, the Five
Scattered Houses are variations on hous-
ing: one is protected by thick adobe walls
and glass strips, another by the system of
gray and black bricks that is so specific
to China.
These experiments are recycled in larger
projects, in which Wang Shu uses his full
expressive range. The expansion of the
Museum of Contemporary Art in Ningbo,
built on the river, abandons the rhetorical
pomp of the Maoist period in order to put
forward a gesture that is clear in a differ-
ent way. The building raises the embank-
ments via a massive brick surrounding
wall, with niches for large sculptures.
Placed on this base, the museum takes
over the fluvial landscape through the
form of a portico having a tall, long façade, with steel columns
standing out against a wooden screen backdrop. Patios are
carved out between the rooms—they are high and ventilated by
large bays—and the wooden screen façade can be folded back
so that the river forms the background of the scene. The aes-
thetic proposal is powerful, for Wang Shu is a scenographer who
knows how to provide the foundations and orchestrate the con-
nections with the landscape.
But it is with the campus for the China Academy of Art in
Hangzhou that Wang Shu carried off a project worthy of his
designs. This 143,000 m2 campus occupies 48 hectares and was
built over four years. “Behind this project, there are ten years
of our work in Hangzhou, our knowledge of the city and of its
landscapes. I thought about the fusion between modern archi-
tecture and traditional techniques, between architecture and
nature, so that man would be happy in his environment.” 7 The
Xiangshan campus, completed in 2008, will join the new clas-
sics of world architecture, so much does this work allow us
to glimpse the happiness that would be found and that China
would give if it stopped denying its culture and took only the
best elements from the West.
The site, a “former” industrial area, runs along the Qiantang
River and faces Elephant Hill, which is still intact and wooded.
On this plateau, Wang Shu built approximately 21 buildings: a
library, amphitheaters, offices, a gymnasium, and classrooms.
The architect first took charge of the scales as well as a spa-
tial generosity that is rare in contemporary China and that
Wang Shu acquired while pondering the Moderns (Louis I. Kahn
comes to mind in this place). The promenade orders a site that
is treated like an acropolis. The volumes have envelopes of var-
ying texture: stone, concrete and wood, bricks, and tiles sal-
vaged from areas that the city was demolishing at the time. An
immense building of gray brick, a stone tower made using the
ancient Roman opus incertum technique, which protrudes into
an interior esplanade, which itself leads to an amphitheater,
under a concrete dais that picks up, in three waves, the curves
of old roofs. This approach to the form and the material could
easily turn into a fussy affair—this was considered. Yet these
old materials, which have emotional weight, are executed on
such a large scale that any prettiness is set aside and restraint is
imposed. The architecture avoids facility in its own rhetoric.
We surveyed the campus under construction with Wang Shu and
Lu Wenyu. The masons were testing wapan. 8 These full-scale
experiments preceded the construction of 30-meter-high walls,
in order to verify how this facing would hold with such dimen-
sions. In the presence of the sections of wall, these questions
enabled us to understand that reality in China shields Wang Shu
from nostalgia, from Chinese culture, and from Modern move-
ment, which would immobilize him.
This reality is an expansion of space to the point that it is nothing
like 20th-century space. The modern references that come to
mind did not clog the project, which quite obviously fell within
the framework of a Chinese space that pushed Wang Shu to go
beyond these references, just as a musician seizes on a motif in
order to free up the full scope of composition. Likewise, the size
of the programs transforms the building culture that he wants
to save. These projects are so large that he must in fact reinvent
the skills that he saves, in order to make them competent once
again. The architect who wants to use culture to civilize China’s
giantism puts culture back into the movement of history.
1 “Dont on peut tout attendre.” From an assessment by Frédéric Edel-
mann in Positions—Portrait d’une nouvelle génération d’architectes
chinois (Barcelona: Actar, 2008).
2 The Cultural Revolution unequivocally condemned architectural cul-
ture and building traditions as the “four stale things.”
3 Remarks compiled by Jana Revedin and Françoise Ged, Global Award
for Sustainable Architecture, 2007.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Wapan is a dry masonry technique that makes it possible to build
walls while incorporating fragments—broken tiles, bricks, and
stones. These fragments came from walls or roofs that were de-
stroyed by typhoons. Carefully salvaged, they are quickly reused for
repairs or saved for future construction.
83
→ Wang Shu

CHina aCaDeMy of art through a succession of terraced gardens, supported by stone

xiangSHan CaMPuS
HangzHou, zHeJiang, CHina,
2002–2008
Client: China academy of art
architects: wang Shu and lu wenyu—amateur
architecture Studio/City tectonic institute of China
total Surface area: phase 1: 65,000 m2;
phase 2: 78,000 m2
Surface area of the Campus: 48 ha
Cost of Construction: phase 1: 13 million euros;
phase 2: 16 million euros
The campus is built at the foot of Elephant Mountain (or Hill);
with landmark protection, this almost sacred hill sits in the
middle of the frenetic urbanization of Hangzhou. A river runs
along the edge of the mountain. The site has the contours of an
acropolis, but the upper plateau remains wooded. Inaccessible,
this fragment of nature “magnetizes” a two-tiered architectural
composition: the 21 buildings on the campus and their gardens
are arranged in a fan shape around the hill, and most are orga-
nized as atria, around an open courtyard oriented toward the
hill. From student dormitories to classrooms, from restaurants
to gardens, the routes are all oriented toward the hill, which is,
however, merely a landscape remnant in this industrial area,
but one that Wang Shu succeeded in “framing,” always keeping
it in the field of vision.
walls. Footbridges also run from the upper terraces and come
to a point facing the hill, above the walkways.
On the south, the composition is more dense and mineral, and
deliberately uses a jerky movement of shapes—a rhythm that is
perhaps closer to the contemporary city. Gigantic buildings for
the amphitheaters and offices, built using opus incertum tech-
nique, sit closer to one another. The techniques and materials
vary, and the overall composition creates a stunning architec-
tural catalogue. The volumes are very spacious, and the façades
are framed by the large overhangs that give them real depth and
recall Le Corbusier’s large-scale designs at Chandigarh. These
large, deep screens enclose teeming life inside: we grasp the
movements of this life through all kinds of indentations. Against
these stage walls, porticoes, openings, and high terraces are
silhouetted, and footbridges are attached. In this southern city,
the walkways are very often outdoors, and the interior court-
yards are mostly low so that the breezes can circulate and cool
the site. The walls are made using the dry masonry technique
called wapan, using red or yellow quarry stone and gray and
black bricks.
The architectural promenade plays on the strong downward
slopes in order to overpass itself, and thus one discovers the
roofs that Wang Shu started as large concrete curtains: they
repeat, at a very different scale, the already strong movements
of Chinese palatial architecture. Moreover, the roofs are flat,
but one finds pavilions positioned on top of them and aerial
walkways, creating a second upper city.

This campus that is a world in itself, where students can forget

the metropolis, is of course reminiscent of the Western archi-
tectural promenade, with its visual crossings, its ascending
dynamics, and the aesthetic emotions elicited by architecture’s
encounter with landscape, material, and sky. A certain insi-
stence on the process is more contemporary and perhaps has
its origin in films: the composition “unfolds” according to a long
plan that turns around the hill without taking its eyes off it. It is
also, finally, deeply Chinese, for Wang Shu takes up the spatial
principles of the Shu Yen schools, with their cloister architec-
ture and their sites for contemplation and retreat. On campus,
the typical plan of the often monumental buildings is a rect-
angle, carved out of a square courtyard and leaving a U-shape-
layout. This plan, tested by every civilization, works as well for
studios and classrooms as for dormitories and the library.

North of the hill are the studios and the sports facilities. The
exterior facing on the studio buildings is concrete. These shells
are protected from the elements by several rows of sun baf-
fles: metal overhangs covered with gray tiles—materials sal-
vaged from demolition sites in Hangzhou. The three sides of the
interior courtyards are in solid wood, organized in large panels.
On the ground floor, these panels are doors that can be folded
back like shutters. The studios are all oriented toward the inte-
rior courtyard, which is planted with trees and bamboo, and
the studios can be completely open when the shutters are fol-
ded back. Thus in summer, air circulates from one building to
the next through the atria and gardens. From this tall ground
floor, the students go down toward the river or the gymnasiums

84
the gymnasium, with an access walkway running
along elephant Hill. the gymnasium is below the
site, and its roof is treated as a “fifth façade.” the
roof and the sun shields are covered with old tiles
that have been recycled.

right:
the start of the walkway, at garden level. one can
clearly see the stone base upon which the campus
buildings sit.

85
 general plan of the campus, designed around ele-
phant Hill. to the northwest, the first section of
campus, with the buildings arranged in an atrium
configuration, the gymnasium and the walkways
(see the preceding pages). to the east, the second
section, which is denser and deliberately stands in
marked contrast

below:
an interior view of the east campus. the volumes
become entangled and the circulation routes are
arranged over several levels.

86
interior view and axonometric drawing of the build-
ings under development, in the second section. in
the foreground, note the junction of the circulation
routes. the building is raised to allow the flows to
continue.

87
isometric views of the school buildings of the north-
west wing; they are arranged in a u-shape around
an interior courtyard. the roofs are of recycled tiles,
the interior walls of wooden panels, with movable
leaves.

88
above:
a detail from the arrival point in one of the school
buildings. the northwest wing of the campus is set
on a stone base created with the opus incertum
technique.

below:
a view of the campus from one of the walkways
accessing the hill

89
→ Wang Shu

five SCattereD HouSeS

MingzHou Park
ningbo, CHina, 2002–2005

Client: City of ningbo, China

architect: wang Shu—amateur architecture Studio
Materials: clay, wooden battens, steel, glass; stones and recy-
cled bricks, plaster coating, formed concrete left untreated

The shores of the lake at Mingzhou are dotted with houses.

These small projects are laboratories and tests for vocabulary.
Wang Shu brings together traditional and modern techniques
and plays with the scales according to the art of the garden.
This clever play on cultures is both contemporary and very well
established.

An art gallery was built on the moat, like a little fort. Wang Shu
unites stone and earth with steel and glass. A solid immersed
plinth is built of stones, in opus incertum, a technique used in
the riparian towns on China’s deltas. The envelope is made of
earth, a technique that has also remained in use. These thick
walls were protected by dished roofs. It has become prohibi-
tive to build these codified and complex roof structures except
in the neo-Chinese resorts that are built at great cost in Beijing
or in the spa towns. More simply, Wang Shu positions a glass
envelope, carried by a slender steel roof structure, between
the roof and the house; an empty strip allows air and light to
pass through. A small stone tower supports the ensemble,
shifted away to allow for a terrace on each story.

A teahouse links the concrete with the Chinese brick, which

is gray and black. The walls are raised in wapan, the roofs in
concrete. Their ample shells play with the cultures: allusions
to China or Le Corbusier? The construction prefigures the large
roofs on the Hangzhou campus.

Site plan of the kiosks on the banks of the small

Mingzhou lake

90
façades of the teahouse. the roof is made of
curved concrete curtains.

in the photo below and those that follow, one

can clearly see the wapan work, masonry that
allows for the assembly, in successive beds, of
original fragments of various sizes—old bricks,
pieces of curved tiles, small stones, pieces of
pottery, and so on.

91
top and right:
Side view of the teahouse showing the masonry
details: the primary base of stone, concrete floor
slab, wapan walls

bottom:
Corner detail of the wapan masonry, with the use of
brick to reinforce the wall

Page 94:
interior view of the teahouse, with the concrete vault
system and superb traditional ornamental tiling of
dressed stone

92
93
94
the art gallery, as a peninsula in the lake. the base is made
of dry-mounted stones, a technique that is still used in
China’s delta regions. the earthen walls are protected by a
glass envelope, carried by a thin steel framework; between
the roof and the house, an empty strip allows air and light
enter. a small stone tower supports the composition, mak-
ing way along three level for the entrances and terraces of
the housing.

95
fabrizio
Carola
naples,
italy

96
Cultural and Social Center, bandiagara, Mali.
in the foreground, the storage area for stones, cut
on-site

97
→ Fabrizio Carola
When the world comes to understand that the ecological equa-
tion of emerging countries cannot be solved by exporting yet
another Western model, Fabrizio Carola will look like a pioneer
for the work he has done in Africa. This architect has devoted
his life to inventing techniques and an art of building that are in
keeping with African resources. He could do this only by chang-
ing the terms of the exchange between Western culture and
African culture.
Fabrizio Carola was born in Naples, where his father was a
building contractor. Even as a child, he was well acquainted
with construction sites. He preferred to leave Italy and study
architecture at the École de la Cambre, in Brussels, receiving
his diploma in 1956. His first works were built in Belgium. He
designed several pavilions for Expo ’58 and participated in a
project involving prefabricated wooden houses. At the age of
30, he severed ties and went to Africa for the first time—to
Morocco, which had regained its sovereignty. He was recruited
by the Ministry of Public Works to create and organize a “Cen-
tral Office of Rural Studies,” which was to guide the develop-
ment of the land. From 1961 to 1963 this mission introduced the
young architect to another aspect of his profession: “The new
king Hassan II had begun a process of developing rural areas;
thus it was necessary to lay the legal and urbanistic ground-
work for such development. In particular, it was necessary to
determine the site for the town hall, the school, and the souk
in each of the main rural centers.” 1 Upon his return to Naples,
he rejoined his father’s business as project manager and began
to exert his own taste for inventive construction. The launch of
a large program of residential apartment blocks in Naples ena-
bled him to study a system of prefabrication, which he followed
through to groundbreaking. He created his own architectural
firm within the company. He was interested in new materials,
patented inventions in step with the Italian reconstruction, and
the spirit of the 1960s, such as his prefabricated bathroom-
block in reinforced polyester, to be inserted into large residen-
tial building sites. He also researched reinforced concrete, tak-
ing out a patent that won him the Regolo d’oro Prize in 1967.
From then on, Fabrizio Carola was an inventor-builder, but the
prospect of a “career” in building weighed on him. After turning
40, he decided not to return to the family business.
In 1971 he accepted a job as project manager in Mali. The
encounter with black Africa would change his destiny. There,
the architect in him discovered and fell in love with a world
and a culture; the man of progress discovered the scope of the
needs, and the builder would not cease to look for the right
solutions in order to develop without destroying. “My official
job was to supervise the construction for the restructuring of
the dike at the Mopti river port, the creation of new hangars in
the port area, and the construction of several mixed-use resi-
dential/office buildings running along the
river. When I took over these projects, I
was taken aback: the hangars were hor-
rible … with pillars and beams made of
reinforced concrete and roofs of corru-
gated sheets. … Given the height of the
roof, even a small tilt of the angle of the
sun’s rays would put the shadow else-
where and leave the fish in full sun! What
is more, the hangars were arranged hap-
hazardly, without any logical order, with-
out the least respect for the port, the
98
river, or the people. … So, although no one had asked me to, I
went back to my role as an architect and modified the projects,
trying to minimize the disaster. For the agents’ housing, I pro-
posed building with traditional techniques using clay bricks,
which are much more economical and more in keeping with the
small villages where the housing was located. … Later, manage-
ment asked me to develop the project for a riverside restaurant
in the port. I thought that this was a good opportunity to exper-
iment and to implement traditional building techniques, which
I had researched extensively. I designed the restaurant in clay
brick, with the roofing made of the trunks of palm trees. When
I presented my project, the reaction from the mayor of Mopti
was clearly negative: he told me that it was unacceptable for a
respectable city to build in this “primitive” style, and that the
restaurant should be made of reinforced concrete! I replied that
if I was going to build it, it would be in the traditional style, or
else I would not do it.” 2
in favor of a Cultural
exCHange “between equalS”
Later, in 1976, Fabrizio Carola left for Nigeria, assigned by a
Roman company to research “economical building systems”:
“That is when I first proposed the brick masonry dome as a
replacement for a roof made of wood, whose use leads to deser-
tification.” 3 Other missions would follow in Africa, for Carola
had become an expert on development projects launched in
Europe and NGOs in Africa. He noted that the people involved in
those programs were hardly distinguishable from the preceding
colonial directors. In 1976 he wrote: “Western civilization was
introduced and imposed on Africa through the power of weap-
ons and of dollars, but it was not Galileo or Leonardo, Mozart,
or Einstein—the creators of civilization—who brought over civ-
ilization, but rather, simple users of civilization, who brought
with them what they knew, what they were used to using, and
who often belonged to the lower levels of our culture. Most peo-
ple sent to Africa to fill the technological gap have rather lim-
ited cultural and humanist baggage and, what is more, they are
convinced of the supremacy of their own civilization. Their lack
of sensitivity on the humane and cultural levels prevents them
from recognizing the real values of the so-called poor civiliza-
tions, which they simply deem inferior. Their insufficient prep-
aration leads them to introduce into Africa, without any dis-
cernment, the most absurd products of our civilization. The
quality of these products, brought into countries that are ill
prepared to receive them, makes matters even worse: this is
how Africa is invaded by second-rate products from Western
civilization.” 4 Carola’s approach crystallized over these years.
A trip to Egypt allowed him to reflect on the example of Hassan
Fathi, the architect who invented an Egyptian architecture for
the 20th century, modernizing ancient Nubian techniques and
adapting them for use with the most widely used material in
his country: brick. Steeped in classical culture, Fabrizio Carola
believed that Mediterranean building science could establish
an equally productive dialogue, both culturally and economi-
cally, with African culture and its craftsmen. The classical sys-
tems of the vault, the dome, and the arch grew with the Euro-
pean architecture of stone, but they can work with brick or clay,
provided that sensible building solutions are found. The dia-
logue that is established between the Italian classical tradition
and the architecture of Africa is not an “unequal exchange.”
 a MoDel ProJeCt for Self-
DeveloPMent
Kaedi Hospital in Mauritania, completed in 1984, gave Carola
a prime opportunity for bringing his vision to fulfillment. The
architect first changed the standard program: “I had observed
that in Africa, families always stay near the patient and that
their presence plays a therapeutic role. So I worked on a hos-
pital design that would suit this ‘family therapy.’ In Kaedi, we
were able to enlarge the hospital so that all the families were
able to remain within its walls.” Next it was necessary to build,
using local resources, and for that, to reconsider everything:
“Throughout Sahel, clay is what is most abundant and most eco-
nomical. Wood is rare, and using it contributes to the desertifi-
cation that is already in progress. Reinforced concrete is expen-
sive because the cement must be imported at the cost of hard
currency. Therefore, I chose clay as the base material, using it
to make bricks in the traditional way. Traditionally, brick is used
after simply being dried in the sun; it is therefore very vulnera-
ble to rain and requires constant upkeep. Because there was no
possibility of ensuring the upkeep of a public building such as
a hospital, the correct solution was to bake the bricks to make
them water-resistant. There remained the problem of fuel,
because to bake the clay, I would have had to use an enormous
amount of wood, which brought me back to the problem of
desertification. The solution came from a by-product of rice: the
hulls. A 600-hectare rice paddy, plus a Chinese factory in Kaedi
for hulling the rice, produced a large quantity of rice, bran, and
hull. That last item, which is not edible, was piling up, unused,
free to anyone because not even animals eat it. After several
tests, I succeeded in building a simple, economical kind of oven,
which was made of clay and could be built by local workers; this
oven made it possible to burn the rice hulls efficiently in order to
attain a temperature sufficient to bake the bricks (under certain
conditions, I was able to attain 1200 degrees). For the build-
ing technique, after rejecting wood and reinforced concrete and
instead adopting brick as the sole material, all that was left was
the use of curved structures, namely, the arch, the vault, and
the dome. The brick dome had never crossed over to the Sahara,
so it was a new structure and no doubt it was going to be dif-
ficult to get people to accept it. The Association for the Devel-
opment of African Urban Planning and Architecture (ADAUA)
had already built domes in Rosso using the compass method:
an instrument that makes it possible to build the dome with-
out needing any structural timber beforehand. Therefore, it
was a very economical roofing system, one that Hassan Fathy
had rediscovered from the ancient techniques. The ADAUA had
adopted it, and I took it up in turn. But with this system, only
spherical domes are obtained, and I had noticed, when living
in the housing at Rosso, that they were a little bit oppressive. I
modified the compass so as to obtain ogival shapes that were
taller, and as a result, had greater air volume. After I defined the
character of the hospital on the basis of this first sketch (dis-
cussed above), the material, and the building system, we set to
work and built the new project.” 5
Carola’s narrative brings to mind the beautiful tale by Fern-
and Pouillon about the construction of Cistercian abbeys, 6 but
the hospital’s architecture tells us that we are not in Europe.
The composition as a whole resembles a village, with public
squares, hamlets, an outer life, and as reference markers, the
tall silhouette of the hospital’s domes. Describing this building,
which was a first in Africa, the Italian critic Luigi Alini speaks
of organic—even zoomorphic—architecture. We prefer to bor-
row Fernand Braudel’s concept of “world-work:” a project that
encompasses all the complexity of development in Africa—and
in return proposes a set of appropriate responses. Today Fab-
rizio Carola works mainly in Mali. He brought along his compass
and has trained men on each construction site. Recently, while
on our way to visit his latest buildings in Mopti, we noticed a
beautiful building, in clay and stone, and thought Carola had
designed it. In fact, it was the work of a young Malian contrac-
tor, trained by Carola.
1 Fabrizio Carola, “Autobiography of an Architect,” unpublished manu-
script, 2004.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Fernand Pouillon, “Les Pierres sauvages,” in Les Pierres sauvages
(Paris: Le Seuil, 1964).
99
→ Fabrizio Carola

Hotel kaMbary
banDiagara, Mali, 1997–1999
Client: SoHeMa (Helvetic-Malian Company for the Hotel business)
architect: fabrizio Carola

Fabrizio Carola has done a lot of work in Mali, both in Mopti

and in Bandiagara, at the edge of the land of the Dogon people.
Since its “discovery” in 1935 by the ethnologist Marcel Griaule,
Dogon culture has fascinated the West, and this region has
become the top tourist area of Mali and indeed of West Africa.
The Malian state supports this business but tries to avoid its
pernicious effects. On the east, the large Cliff of Bandiagara—
at the foot of the high plateaus, where Dogon civilization was
established seven centuries ago—received landmark protec-
tion in 1989. Along its entire length (the break line between the
plains and the low sandstone mountains runs for 200 km), tour-
ism is organized around stopover points that are set back from
the cliff.

Thus the Hotel Kambary was built approximately 20 km from the

cliff. This base for hikes is part of a series of projects that Fabri-
zio Carola built in Bandiagara, enabling him to create a “line” of
sustainable construction. Clearly, Fabrizio Carola did not imi-
tate Dogon architecture but came up with an architecture that
uses similar materials and is built by local contractors. In this
landscape of sandstone and limestone, stone was the obvious
choice, but it is not very much in use these days. Fabrizio Carola
reopened the quarries with the stoneworkers. On the rocky sur-
faces the stone is stratified. A simple tool—a heel bar and ham-
mer to lift the stone—makes it possible to extract blocks that
can be broken off and cut rather easily.

The stoneworkers then become masons, raising the domes.

The hotel consists of freestanding domed cabins built using the
compass technique. The restaurant, which is open to the sky, is
formed by a ring of semi-vaults sitting side by side. The balance
of forces is not the same here, of course, and the stone beds
were raised to the building limit. In the rooms, windows are
created with pieces of clay pots set in the masonry. The domes
are open at the top, and hot air passes out through the ocu-
lus. The doors, of solid wood, were also made by Malian crafts-
men. A garden was planted during construction, and today the
restaurant resembles a small oasis. In plan, the hotel could be
thought of as a village, with its cabins and its refuges. But the
dome shapes mimic neither the traditional Dogon architecture
nor that of the plains villages, with their cubical adobe houses.
The Hotel Kambary is indeed a facility for the new century, built
for other needs; perhaps it is closer to the utopian ideals of the
first generation of bioclimatic design in Europe.

100
the hotel forms a “hamlet” consisting of stone
domes with a garden laid out between them. Here,
the main entrance, with a detail of the ribbed vaults
and claustra

101
102
Left and above:
Each dome accommodates a bedroom and its ser­
vice area, arranged in the garden. The relaxation
and restorative areas are housed in larger ribbed
domes. The windows are made of inlaid pieces of
pottery, with the outer neck of the vessel visible
here, in the masonry.

103
→ Fabrizio Carola

regional Center for

traDitional MeDiCine
banDiagara, Mali, 1998–2000

Client: italian Ministry of international Cooperation and

Malian Ministry of Health
architect: fabrizio Carola
Construction: fabrizio Carola with fabrizio Della rocca

The program is a center for research on and production of Afri-

can medicinal plants. It includes a building for laboratories
and medical consultations, a small factory for processing and
packaging the plants, and administrative spaces.

The research and medical center is organized around a circu-

lar central patio made of side-by-side brick vaults. This shady,
well-constructed peristyle leads to the laboratories and con-
sultation rooms, built with double domes ventilated by a ver-
tical shaft. The inner dome is made of bricks, the exterior of
stones. Thus the buildings have an exterior appearance that is
more rough and mineral. The legibility of the geometrical form
is blurred, all the more so given that the vaults are edged by
retaining walls that are themselves also handled as irregular
volumes. This expressionist device glorifies the stone, which
is red and ocher here. The exterior bays of the patio open onto
small gardens, edged by the sunny walls of the domes. The
contrast between the even system of bricks and the bristling
of the stones for the domes is quite beautiful.

104
at the center, the domes’ exterior wall with dry joints
can be compared with the domes of the hotel (see
left page), built in cut stone.

105
 left:
the medicinal herbs are dried outside before being
processed and packaged.

below:
the exterior walls of the center appear almost
defensive, or at least voluntarily rough, like
buttresses.

106
the interior patio. a circular covered gallery makes it
possible to shade the paths and circulation routes.

right:
the interior of one of the medicinal-herb process-
ing rooms

107
→ Fabrizio Carola

Cultural anD SoCial Center

banDiagara, Mali,
2008–

Client: n:ea
architect: fabrizio Carola

The most recent project by Fabrizio Carola is an anthology of

techniques, some of them reinstated and others imported and
adapted. In addition, the cultural center will be a place for
Euro-African exchanges, where retired European professionals
come to train young Malians. The center will extend into sev-
eral hamlets, with housing units, classrooms and studios, and
common rooms for meals and activities.

The long-term efficiency of this project is organized around the

extraction of stones. The construction site is already a training
center. The raw clay bricks that will serve as the surrounding
walls are produced and dried on-site. Several kilometers away,
the quarry workers extract the stones, delivered untreated to
the site. The sizing of the stones is performed next to the con-
struction site, under a shelter made of branches, such as one
sees everywhere in the markets and the villages. The domes
are raised using the compass technique by masons whom
Fabrizio Carola trained to do this work. The construction site
consumes almost no energy or scaffolding wood. On this hill
that is still sparsely planted, the first domes, which are regu-
lar, are more like a 1960s futurist resort than a vernacular hab-
itat. This is not a coincidence. The work of Fabrizio Carola, like
that of Paolo Soleri, retains the imprint of the formal freedom
and historical optimism of the 1960s.

108
the center under construction; in the foreground,
the supply of stone, transported from the quarry
several kilometers away and cut on-site

left:
Plan for the future center

109
top:
the open-air studio for cutting stone

bottom:
installing a dome using the compass technique. at
the end of the rod, one can see a steel l that makes
it possible to adjust each stone.

110
the building site. the raw-earth bricks that will serve
as the exterior walls are made and dried on-site.

111
elemental
Director:
alejandro
aravena,
Santiago,
Chile

112
façades of the renca housing project, in Santiago,
Chile (see p. 126)

113
→ Elemental
Born in 1967, Alejandro Aravena is an architect and a teacher.
Since founding his own firm in 1994, he has won many prizes
for his architectural work: public buildings and universities,
which provide a workshop for a designer who takes pleasure
in substance and geometry. In 2000 he, together with engineer
Andrès Iacobelli and architect Pablo Allard, created Elemen-
tal Team, which is both a research center on urban impoverish-
ment and an architecture firm. Elemental Team is a “Do Tank,”
that is, half public building office, half taller (workshop), allied
with the University of Santiago, with the purpose of designing
innovative models for public housing in Chile. Elemental Team
focuses on the improvement in urban conditions for the poorest
residents, with a view toward a “sustainable urban economy.”
In other words, Elemental believes that the new goal of the sus-
tainable city should absolutely not be separated from the strug-
gle for an equitable city, a struggle that has been carried on
since the 20th century through the question of social housing.
tHe City iS tHe nuMber one
renewable reSourCe
This enormous program shows that this continent posits the
question of sustainable development quite differently from the
way it is handled in the United States or in Africa. The urban
debate involves megacities, not shrinking cities, and awareness
of housing as a pressing social issue remains more intense here
than in Europe. Elemental is proof of that intensity, and it stands
out above all for the quality of its thinking. In Chile, the return
to democracy coincided with the first awakening of ecological
awareness. This is why the analysts at Elemental have shown
that the two goals have a single solution: the return to the dense
city. A sustainable city is a city that has stopped expanding,
owing to the growing costs of sprawl (in terms of transporta-
tion, energy, and pollution). A democratic city is a city whose
inhabitants have easy access to culture, education, and diver-
sity, through density and through fluid connections with the
center. Both politically and ecologically, the city is the means
and the resource for a more harmonious development. The “Do”
that guides Elemental’s “Tank” is based on the conclusion that
“designing and building better neighborhoods is crucial if we
want development to break the vicious circle of inequality.”
The method is dense. It is worth picking out the elements of
a diagnosis that is also a program. First, it contains an ethical
reminder: architecture serves progress. Western disenchant-
ment has not invaded emerging countries, and the idea of hous-
ing as a factor of progress remains valid. But the same formula
clearly shows that, for architects, it is not enough to be part of
the general development. There is a disconnect between devel-
opment and the reduction of inequalities, and this phenome-
non is specific to the 21st century. It is strongly felt in the cit-
ies, where development “gentrifies” the center and chases the
poorest residents further away, into shantytowns. Chile is expe-
riencing a vicious cycle in the form of an urban explosion that
has worsened the creation of favelas. Focusing on the problem
of shantytowns, Elemental went from a diagnosis to projects
that put forward a clear proposal: With its experience, Elemen-
tal wants to contribute, via engineering and avant-garde archi-
tecture, to raising the quality of life in Chile, using the city as an
unlimited resource for building equality.
114
MaS Con lo MiSMo—Doing
More witH tHe SaMe
The young Chilean democracy wanted to reduce the housing cri-
sis. In ten years, a million units were built. This program, based
on home loans, reached the middle classes but did not succeed
in curbing the band of slums surrounding each city. Elemental’s
work aims to redress this flaw. By making a close connection
between ecological and social issues, the “Tank” leaves aside a
debate on sustainable architecture that some in the West might
call “miniaturist,” instead focusing on the “social pillar” of sus-
tainable development, whose area of application is the South
American city. A megacity that is more sustainable and devel-
oped will bring the inhabitants of the favelas (shantytowns)
back toward the center.
In Chile, research on housing as a “factor of progress” should
take place within ordinary market conditions and public spend-
ing budgets. Unlike the situation in Europe, the new regime
does not have—and will not create—instruments such as the
regulation of the real-estate market or public housing offices. If
Europe succeeds, on the one hand, in “protecting” the economy
of social housing by setting aside well-situated sites and, on the
other, by financing the cost overruns of ecological architecture
with its technologies that are still expensive, Elemental, for its
part, must hacer mas con lo mismo: do more with the same—
the same budget as for ordinary public housing, the same high
price for land. This can be done only with inventions—eco-
nomic, typological, and building inventions.
tHe ProJeCt aS an oPen
ProCeSS of tranSforMation
Elemental’s first innovation, the open construction system, is a
direct result of mas con lo mismo. It was conceived and tested
for the first time in Iquique, in a neighborhood created in 2004
to reabsorb a slum that had been right in the center of the city
for the past 30 years. Development logic called for the destruc-
tion of this slum; the neighborhood would then be rebuilt and
occupied by new inhabitants with the means to buy housing
there, with the former residents sent to rebuild a shantytown
on the city outskirts. Elemental fought for 100 families living
in the slum to stay on at the same central site, using a public
program called Vivienda Social Dinamica sin Deuda (Dynamic
Social Housing Without Debt), which gives subsidies to desti-
tute families so that they have access to housing. But once the
parcels were bought, the remainder of the budget allowed for
only partial construction of the housing. After trying all possible
options (group housing, small towers) without solving the prob-
lem, Elemental reversed the question and used this problem as
the solution. The “Tank” worked on a new system: the delivery of
semi-built houses, to be finished by the inhabitants themselves.
This economically strategic solution has a real ecological con-
tent, in a South American perspective of rapid urban renewal:
if the architecture of housing can no longer be a social com-
mission but must become sustainable, it must do so through
its own reversibility, its ability to go back to a former minimum
state, and from that state one can change and rebuild.
The team developed an open housing typology, created with the
essentials for a minimal unit—roof, shell, and rooms with run-
ning water—and the void of a vacant space that could be filled.
In Iquique, the layout took the form of collective row housing,
with a strange crenellated silhouette. On the ground floor, the
strip of kitchens and entryways is continuous and forms a base.
On the upper floor, only half the houses are built, forming a
strip of alternating solids and voids in an L-shape. The build-
ing project was developed, using a doing-the-same
(mismo) mentality that, in Chile, implies the use of
concrete and brick. A rigorous concrete framework
structures the built strips. It is the product of a cross
between economic pragmatism and a rationalist cul-
ture coming straight from the 20th century and its
settlements. The idea is that the residents would
then build in the void of the L, as their means allow.
One year after delivery, the empty spaces were filled
in. The overall project is a convincing demonstra-
tion of the effect of social lever and of the potential
of reversibility of the type envisioned by Elemental.
The framework, which is strong and beautiful, gave
structure to a process that produced a neighbor-
hood and stimulated development, and the frame-
work will continue to evolve.

This revitalized concept of minimal housing took

other forms, depending on the sites and the pro-
grams. Elemental designs social housing for the
most diverse urban sites, always according to appro-
priate, affordable building principles. For Tocopilla,
a city devastated by an earthquake in 2007, Elemental designed
antiseismic dwellings that cost 10,000 dollars each. An already
long list of viviendas sociales is proof that this concept allows
for a densification of cities in the service of the least privileged,
instead of a gentrification that would have sent them to the out-
skirts of the city and worsened urban sprawl and its negative
side effects.

Alejandro Aravena also designs facilities for the slums. For Ele-
mental, “sustainable” means a flexible, affordable facility that
is likely to meet multiple needs. For the 400 Ferias Libres en
la Región Metropolitana project, Elemental researched a light
structure for a covered hall. To be situated on a small plaza or on
an unoccupied space, it accommodates a market, a sports field,
or a performance hall, depending on the time of day. Ten pil-
lars support a steel canopy and its integrated “public” lighting.
Under the shelter, two concrete benches can serve as seating,
tabletops for the market, or stages. The idea is akin to the mul-
tipurpose centers that Carin Smuts designed for the far-away
townships. This resemblance is interesting. It does not come
from an aesthetic that is shared by “sustainable architects” but
from a similar pragmatism, that of architects who pay attention
to the site. It also indicates the power of metropolization, which
is the same from one continent to the next. It calls for pragmatic,
radical solutions and an aesthetic that draws on contemporary
culture.

115
→ Elemental

reSorPtion of a SHantytown
for 100 faMilieS 1 In the classic European fable, Columbus dines with a group of Spa-
nish nobles, and one of them remarks that, had Columbus not dis-
iquique, CHile, 2004 covered the Indies, someone else would have come along later and
had similar results. In response, Columbus asks for a whole egg to
be brought to the table. “My lords,” he says, “I will lay a wager with
Client: Chile barrio any of you that you are unable to make this egg stand on its end like
I do without any kind of help or aid.” They all try without success,
architects: elemental and when the egg returns to Columbus, he taps it gently on the table
neighborhood Committee: Comite de vivienda quinta Monroy so as to flatten its tip. With that, the egg stands on its end, the mo-
engineering: José gajardo and Juan Carlos de la llera ral being that once a feat is accomplished, anyone can see how to
builder: loga S.a. do it. See Story of the New World (1565) by Girolamo Benzoni.

The housing development in Iquique is the matrix of all the

work by Elemental; the firm’s projects seek to resorb shanty-
towns without sacrificing the size of the lodgings or sending
their inhabitants far from the cities. In Iquique, Elemental aban-
doned Western-style public housing. None of its versions—in
blocks, towers, or bands—fell within the budget. And so Ele-
mental broke the model—as Christopher Columbus did with his
egg—thus got public housing to stand on its end. 1 “We prefer to
build half a good house rather than a bad dwelling.”

One hundred families had been living for 30 years in an indurate

favela in the center of Iquique when the city decided to destroy
it in order to clean up the neighborhood. The company Chile
Barrio, a public housing developer, purchased the real estate,
and Elemental designed the site plan for a development where
only half-residences would be built. The site is shaped like two
trapezoids placed side by side. The 100 dwellings that were to
be built took the shape of small strips of attached three-story
units. These strips run along the perimeter of the parcels so as
to form four small groupings with interior courtyards.

On concrete-slab foundations, a first story of side-by-side units

was built with a concrete frame and load-bearing separating
walls. On the concrete floor stands the ground floor, extensible
by DIY in the courtyard as storage room, studio, or else. This
is very well suited to the lifestyle of the inhabitants, who are
craftsmen or journeymen who do not distinguish between their
workplace and their place of business or their side business.
On that slab, the houses are raised, with a concrete frame and
brick walls, but only on half (30 m2) of the surface area. In these
small towers, Elemental used the budget remaining after the
purchase of the site to build “what a family could not do cor-
rectly itself: the kitchen, the bathroom, the party walls, and the
insulation.”

The technique used for the concrete frame with filling in the
walls is today perhaps the most widespread and most economi-
cal in the world. It is within reach of all contractors and, above
all, allows for a very quick construction process: the favela
was demolished in one month, and construction was carried
out over eleven months. The model of social housing may be
broken, but Alejandro Aravena has not abandoned the princip-
les and the aesthetic of European structural rationalism. The
framework and the void/solid scansion of the units are a power- the housing project several weeks before residents
ful expression that managed to “resist” the assault of the ver- moved in. the ground floor is devoted to small apart-
ments, which can be expanded into the courtyard.
nacular structures added in the voids. This framework also suc- above, the “houses” are two stories, accessible
ceeds in “carrying” the later changes allowed for—indeed, via a wooden staircase. the built volumes house a
kitchen/living room and a bedroom with a bathroom.
called for—by this vision of social development. Here, structu- the inhabitants can then add surfaces by building in
ral rigor guarantees flexibility. the empty volume.

116
117
 left and below left:
the interior spaces, as they were when delivered
to the residents, who did the surface treatments
themselves, according to their tastes and for mini-
mal expense

below right:
Diagram of the process: the three construction
phases, followed by the self-building phase

118
the interior courtyard, defined and designed by the
void-solid scansion

119
 left:
an interior, as it was when residents moved in.

below:
exterior façade after the self-building phase

below:
longitudinal section. the wall that runs along the
future expansion is formed from a concrete frame-
work and from a filling, of hollow bricks, that can be
easily taken apart.

below right:
transverse section through the permanently built
portion. the kitchen and bathroom are served by
the same technical networks.

120
a residential unit with inhabitants

121
→ Elemental

lo eSPeJo–SoCial HouSing
PrograM
Santiago, CHile, 2006–2007

Client: un techno para Chile

Site Plan and architects: elemental
Housing Committee: “un Sueno por Cumplir”
engineering: gonzalo Santolaya
Principal Contractor: Constructora Simonetti
initial Surface area of residences: 36.2 m2; duplex: 37.1 m2
Surface area of residences after expansion through Self-
build: 60.2 m2; duplex: 68 m2

This social housing program is set in an area that is already

quite urban, near a new public square. The principle of self-
building is implemented in two ways. The houses are built in
attached bands that are strictly parallel in order to form the
boundaries of the regular interior gardens. Each unit occupies
a 6 × 6 m parcel, extended on the ground floor by a 3 m inte-
rior patio. The houses are three stories tall. The ground floor
accommodates small attached apartments, which have a lit-
tle garden in front and are extended by the interior patio. The
patio can then be divided up and converted by the residents,
on one story. Indeed, this courtyard is today filled by a dou-
ble row of annexes, with a light framework and roofs made of
metal or polycarbonate. Next, on the ground-floor slab, duplex
apartments are built, accessible by a wooden staircase. The
client built the framework of the duplex: party walls and roof
slab. This large, almost cubical “frame” was then half filled ver-
tically by the kitchen/living room on the lower floor and by the
bathroom and a bedroom on the upper floor. The families who
moved in completed the surface treatments and could add
other bedrooms by filling in the void in the duplex.

122
the lo espejo program takes up and improves
the principle of self-building invented in iquique by
putting the roof over the ensemble. the available
volume for self-building is already covered.

left:
Plans for the first and second floors of the duplex
residences for the upper portion. one can make
out the parts built as masonry, with side access
doors leading to the self-build areas in the void of
the loggia.

123
above:
lo espejo after moving in and self-building

above right:
façades and main sections, with the void of the log-
gia set aside for self-building

an apartment ready for occupants to move in

124
general view of the housing development ready for
occupation. the area surrounds an interior court-
yard, divided into family gardens (see the plan on
p. 123).

125
→ Elemental

renCa neigHborHooD–
reHouSing PrograM,
Santiago, CHile, 2006–2007

Client: ConiCyt
Site Plan and architects: elemental
Housing Committee: “Coordinadora de Campamentos
y Comité de allegados Construyendo nuestro futuro”
engineering: gonzalo Santolaya
Principal Contractor: loga S.a.

This low-income housing program involves the inhabitants of

the Renca slums, which are one hour from the center of town.
The site runs along the south side of Brazil Avenue. The natu-
ral setting is beautiful, at the foot of Mount Colorado, but there
was illegal dumping here, and it was necessary to remove a
2.5 m layer of earth. Elemental made the project denser along
the avenue and used the earth-moving to fill in the site on the
north, where a new road would be laid. The efficiency of moving
the earth was key to the feasibility of the project.

The attached houses are organized in groups of 25 in a U-shaped

series along the avenue. Self-managed gardens occupy the hol-
low part of the U-shapes. Each house (two stories with mansard
roof) is 4.5 m wide and 6 m deep, edged by a vertical strip for
the rooms requiring running water. The first phase of construc-
tion saw the construction, in concrete bricks, of “that which a
family would not be able to build correctly alone: the kitchen,
bathroom, party walls, and insulation.” The load-bearing party
walls are raised over two stories. The first story forms a con-
tinuous strip of kitchens/living rooms. On the second story, the
bathroom is the only finished construction. In the next con-
struction phase, two stories of wood flooring and rendered
brick façades were attached to these shells. The houses and
the bathroom niches were given corrugated steel roofs. The
families themselves were responsible for the final phase of
construction, the surface treatments. The whole process took
18 months, including the cleanup of the soil.

exterior view of one of the u-shaped groupings. at

the edge of each house is a technical wing, which
accommodates the technical elements.

126
127
rural Studio
Director:
andrew freear
newbern,
alabama,
u.S.a.

128
on the campus of the rural Studio in auburn, a
students’ studio built of wood and corrugated
cardboard

129
→ Rural Studio
In the United States, ecology came on the scene even before the
first oil crisis, borne along on the spirit of 1968, as in Europe.
Since that time universities have homed in on their subjects:
shrinking cities, new technologies, types of energy—the Solar
Decathlon comes to mind, organized in Washington with the
best architecture departments. “Stop the growth” 1 and “The
Third Industrial Revolution?” 2 —these terms neither clash with
nor encapsulate the debate. The American debate is much more
extended and free-flowing.
The Rural Studio was created in 1992 at Auburn University, in
Alabama, by Samuel Mockbee. A practitioner turned professor,
Mockbee wanted to create a pedagogy that would immerse stu-
dents in social and economic reality. The idea took the form of a
workshop: send the students to design and build houses for the
most impoverished residents of Hale County, the poorest area
in the state. Sixteen years later, the Rural Studio is still going.
More than 400 students have worked in the program; the county
is repopulated, so to speak, with houses that have restored the
living conditions of their inhabitants. Since 2002 Andrew Freear
has led the Rural Studio, which has expanded its range and built
amenities and meeting places. The Rural Studio has gone from a
pedagogical experiment to a laboratory for social and sustain-
able architecture. To understand this evolution, we must look
back to the Auburn campus as it was in 1990.
a Mobile-HoMe SoCiety
It is not by chance that the Rural Studio was founded during
the industrial crisis of the 1990s. In the states of the American
South, the crisis aggravated the poverty that was endemic since
the 1960s. This situation fueled a lively political debate. For the
essayist Wendell Berry, the crisis corroborated the idea that
the industrialization that replaced the rural economy was just
another form of colonialism—in lieu of development, indus-
trialization brought about an exploitation of resources by peo-
ple from elsewhere. So it was in the Black Belt, 3 colonized by
the cotton industry, which would collapse, then by the soybean
industry, which would deplete the soil and collapse in its turn;
then, because of those relocations, the most skilled inhabitants
abandoned the area. Thinking about the future, Wendell Berry
saw no other salvation for the Deep South, after these indus-
trial ravages, than to disengage and return to its agrarian roots,
which were still present in the form of community involvement,
an ethic of personal responsibility, and the Emersonian ideal of
a society of entrepreneurs.
The Rural Studio teaches an architectural ethic based on this cri-
tique of industrialism: the architect’s job is to assume respon-
sibility in the service of development, using construction as an
economic lever and architecture as a cultural lever. Wendell
Berry’s criticism rings true when one travels through the Black
Belt today. Everywhere there is evidence of towns in recession,
land lying fallow, areas that were destroyed by people who built
nothing in their stead. No one repairs the balloon-frame houses,
while the poor, both black and white, live in mobile homes that
do not last as long as the “easy credit” incurred for their pur-
chase. Some are set up beside highways, others gather on no-
man’s-land, along the borders of former farmland.
130
renovate tHe Habitat in
orDer to renovate tHe SoCiety
The idea behind workshops is that contact with reality will trig-
ger in the student a dynamic that the professor can channel
toward the project. With the Rural Studio, Mockbee followed
the rule of the “three unities” 4 to make the experience richer.
The unity of place: in the heart of the Black Belt, Hale County,
still famous from Walker Evans and James Agee’s Depression-
era reporting. 5 The unity of time: six months on site so that the
students live as citizens on the project site. The unity of action:
the experience of being entirely responsible for a project, from
program through construction.
The Rural Studio searches out the worst-housed residents, and
with this the students set to work. They have to design and build
with the means available. The Rural Studio is involved in fund-
raising but the money is always lacking. Mockbee used this bru-
tal contact with poverty so that the students would find appro-
priate solutions instead of applying their scholastic knowledge.
The Rural Studio requires its students to work with, not for.
With the clients, who have needs and skills. With the “assets”
that remain: a network of small towns, tight-knit communities,
plenty of space. The economics are at the lowest level, but the
students learn to find the positive aspects in order to rebuild.
Their projects are discussed by everyone, for the Rural Studio
holds a public debate with many voices, both local regional
and national. In 1999 Andrew Freear joined the team. A grad-
uate of London’s Architectural Association and a professor at
the University of Illinois, he came to strengthen the pedagog-
ical aspects of the program and oversee the degree program.
Together, the students and the local families planned, built,
recycled materials, and invented compositions that were some-
times baroque. The idealism can make one smile, but in fact,
beautiful, large houses are built—a number of them and for a
minimal cost. In opposition to the “compassionate conserva-
tism” that became George Bush’s doctrine in 2001, the Rural
Studio offers “self-reliant development,” with architecture as
the means and the result.
The architectural verve of the Rural Studio should also be noted.
The founder, a southerner, knew that he would find a great free-
dom to act in this forgotten county of villages without town
planning, of regulations without inspectors. Working with the
inhabitants, whose means were always limited, the students
built walls out of old tires, and windows out of windshields; they
rediscovered adobe, of a deep red in this region. The inventive-
ness defies the poverty. As a critic of industry, Mockbee sent
the students to pillage the scrap heaps of factories. As an art-
ist, Mockbee encouraged an aesthetic of recycling that combats
the cultural misery of the mobile home. The Rural Studio builds
houses where the execution of the project is linked to folk art.
This corpus also exudes the historical optimism found on cam-
puses in 1968. The English architect Sarah Wigglesworth sees in
it a counter-definition of critical regionalism: “instead of view-
ing the regions as the area of application for modern architec-
ture, the Rural Studio approaches culture as a space of radical
openness, reversing the hierarchy of knowledge in order to put
the project in the service of a real folk architecture.” 6
 “ourS iS a SiMPle SuStain-
ability born of neCeSSity”
The Rural Studio had changed significantly when Mockbee died
of leukemia in 2001. Appointed director, Andrew Freear had to
handle the mourning and a period of instability. A travelling
exhibition was organized in homage to Mockbee. It gave form to
the message of the Rural Studio, for the experience is now cov-
ered in the media and often distorted. The architectural jour-
nals publish beautiful photographs (the student rooms have
the deconstructivist chic of Venice bungalows) and neglect the
political and cultural density of the experience. The ecological
debate is under way, and the Rural Studio has been pronounced
a forerunner, although this was not exactly “its cause.” What
lesson can be drawn from the experiment?
Andrew Freear proposes transforming the utopian impetus into
sustainable economy (the houses, which are superb, are some-
times unkempt, for the materials and the assembled composi-
tions are fragile). Informally, and through the volunteer commit-
ment of the students, the workshops have been extended by two
semesters in order to increase the quality of
the design (professors of statics and land-
scape design come in to modify the projects)
and of the construction. The new director
also brings a European vision of urban space
and public action. Beyond the re-housing, it
was also necessary to restore the social con-
nection, to build amenities, and to revitalize
the towns. With a growing local reputation,
trusted as a local neighbor the Rural Studio
has taken on the mantle of local or County
architect designing and building many civic
facilities and taking on the responsibility has
embraced more durable materials and with
this an evolved style. The Rural Studio no
longer does ecology out in the wild. Andrew
Freear clearly links the word sustainable to
the word development. In this state, which
is too poor to support sophisticated or costly
energy systems, the new ecological sobriety
is almost self-evident. “Ours is a simple sus-
tainability born of necessity.” 7 The method is
changing. Each project (from a boys and girls
club, to a 40 acre park, or hospital facility and
animal shelter) is entrusted to a team of four
students for two years. The budgets are tight.
Corporate help is sometimes necessary (this fact, which might
appear to be an infringement of self-reliant building, instead
indicates, in this writer’s opinion, that the dynamics of the Rural
Studio are beginning to stimulate the local economy).
The Newbern fire station set off this new cycle of revitaliza-
tion, beginning with the choice of the site. The Studio con-
vinced the elected officials that the fire station, should return
to the center of town in order to contribute to public life. The
fire station was set on the main road (a street whose continu-
ity is broken up by grassy areas each time a derelict house is
demolished). Completed in 2008, this large hall, with a wood
and metal truss structure, would not look out of place even in
Vorarlberg, given the high quality of building and aesthetics at
work here. It is technically quite different, however. The con-
struction is based on the use of small components, 2 m raft-
ers or planks; was a readily available and least expensive mate-
rial. The strong, severe frame is a wood Meccano made of small
components, assembled by the student team. The structural
frame was its own scaffolding. The steel plates and tensioners
were welded in the workshop. The precision of the compositions
and of the surface treatments, as well as the quality of the vol-
umes is proof that “the quality of research is the key to opti-
mizing the material,” as Philippe Samyn explains in the same
book. To the visitors who miss the picturesque quality of the
Rural Studio’s early years, Andrew Freear explains: “We could
paint the wood instead of leaving it natural. But who would then
ensure the upkeep? The facilities that we build should be dura-
ble, because if they deteriorate, no one will have the means to
repair them and the story will go in another direction.” 8 The
construction of houses occurs on a new scale. The Federally
sponsored USDA Rural Development program subsidizes hous-
ing for the poorest residents, through loans of 20,000 dollars
and upwards. At present the cheapest approved model is for
80,000 dollars. Andrew Freear has sought to achieve an afford-
able model of 20,00 dollars for the poorest of the poor surviv-
ing on welfare benefit. Andrew Freear committed the Rural Stu-
dio to this idea with a small group of the Outreach students,
using the formula of 10,000 dollars for labor and 10,000 dol-
lars for materials per house. The first examples of these houses
with porches are clearly archetypal: the aesthetic moves away
from the tires-and-carpet-squares style and comes back to the
don’t-touch-earth simplicity. Everything begins with a platform
that can be assembled on-site, then situated depending on the
slopes, with the height controlled by using four or six small ver-
tical posts. Next, a central pipework unit for kitchen and bath-
room is installed before the frame goes up and then the enve-
lope, in wood-based prefabricated trusses and corrugated steel
sheet; the latter components are assembled in the studio. Cross
ventilation and large roof overhangs on two sides fight the heat.
In the land where the most recent venture was the subprime
mortgage industry, one must hope that the new carpentry busi-
nesses will take over the plans for the “20,000 dollar House”
and continue the story.
1 A report on growth, commissioned at MIT in 1968 by the Club of
Rome and published in 1972 under the title The Limits to Growth,
launched an international debate on the concept of growth.
2 The concept was developed by William McDonough, an architect and
designer, in Cradle to Cradle—Remaking the Way We Make Things
(2002), coauthored with Michael Braungart.
3 Named for the color of the soil, the Black Belt is the very fertile re-
gion, formerly farmland, which stretches from Newbern to western
Alabama.
4 The rule of the “three unities” governed drama in the Classical period.
5 James Agee (text) and Walker Evans (photographs), Let Us Now Praise
Famous Men, 1936–40.
6 Andrew Freear, interview by Jana Revedin, Global Award for Sustain-
able Architecture, 2008.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.
131
→ Rural Studio

fire Station anD town Hall

newbern, alabaMa, uSa, 2004
Client: town of newbern
architect: rural Studio
Student team: will brothers, ellizabeth ellington, Matt finley,
leia Price

In rural America, fire stations are as much—perhaps even

more—a hub for the community than a practical amenity. In the
villages, teams of firefighters are composed of volunteers. The
firefighters offer classes on public safety to all local citizens,
thus instilling the idea of solidarity. The program established
by the Rural Studio focused on this civic aspect, for the fire sta-
tion is not only a place to park the fire trucks and store equip-
ment but also has classrooms and a meeting place for commu-
nity, and functions as a town hall.

Well situated on the main thoroughfare, the fire station has

thus become a place for community gatherings. In plan, it is a
large rectangular shed made of wood, with a frame consisting
of a double row of columns. The choice of a single slope for the
roof simplified the load-bearing roof structure, which is clad
in metal. On the street façade, a large overhang runs all along
the top. The first portal frame with double columns frames the
large door, creating a playful reference to the beautiful colon-
nades on old southern houses, with their Doric capitals made
of wood.

The ground floor houses the garage for the trucks and the an-
nexes where material is stored. The classrooms and a small
meeting room are suspended as a mezzanine in the middle of
the shed. A simple floor is attached to the structure. The space
is defined simply by a wooden balustrade and, below, by the
thickness of the floor, which is painted white. This terrace,
seems to float in the space, like a tree house in a tree, and the
luminous shed retains its legibility. The mezzanine is accessed
by an exterior wooden staircase on the southwest side façade.

The indoor light comes from this side façade, whose wall is made
of translucent polycarbonate panels attached to the columns
and, on the exterior, protected from the sun by wooden slats.
This façade is pierced by a large sheltered door. At night, the
façade lights the meadow next door, and the protective siding is
lifted: the fire station becomes a community center, and tables
are set out on the lawn. The other façade, on the north, is pro-
tected by cladding that comes down from the roof. This genu-
inely roomy building is built entirely with off-the-shelf lumber—
rafters, floors, and small boards, such as the local people have
always bought to build and repair their barns.

132
the fire station opens onto Main Street. the tall
porch picks up the proportions of the old plantation
houses, with their verandas and wooden columns.

133
the architectural details are very well done: note
the framework, a mixture of wood and steel, and the
skillfully handled geometry of the “miller staircase” in
folded sheet steel.

134
interior view of the fire station. on the right, the
translucent wall is punctuated by a large opening.
the whole building can be transformed into a village
hall for the town.

135
evening gathering in newbern. the translucent
wall, which is illuminated, lights the plaza like a large
Japanese lamp.

136
all the gates are open to facilitate the flow.

137
→ Rural Studio

akron boyS anD girlS Club

akron, alabaMa, uSa, 2006–2007
Client: town of akron
architect rural Studio—student team:
whitney Hall, John Marusich, adam Pearce, and Daniel wicke

The club has rooms and a covered basketball half-court. A

wooden building contains the rooms for classes and games. It
is set lengthwise on the parcel and, as is typical, has its gable
wall aligned with the street. On one side, a superb wooden grid
roof structure covers the basketball court.

The students participated in a Structures seminar in which

they were supposed to devise building systems made of small
wooden components. Andrew Freear’s idea was to successfully
cover large-scale structures without a steel beam system or
expensive steel roof structures. The Akron team worked on a
system of lamella vaults. It is created by a grid of small wooden
boards that are bolted together, braced, and assembled in
groups. Their edges are cut on a 30-degree angle so that they
can come together and be bolted. They are recut in a tapered
form following the outline of the vault in order to be assembled
according to its curve. The vault grows out of a long shed with
entrances on an angle. The vault, which takes on a horseshoe
shape on its exterior, is anchored on the club side by inclined
columns in order to pick up the forces. Once again, a rough
material—small wooden boards—makes it possible to build
sophisticated and elegant works. This, thanks to the quality of
the concept, the design of the details, and the execution.

the superb roof structure of the basketball court,

which is attached to the clubhouse by studs

138
a detail of the netting and its bolting. a single sys-
tem of studs makes it possible to join three small
boards, sawed on the edges to allow for assembly,
then tapered to pick up the curve of the vault.

139
→ Rural Studio

CoMMunity Center/glaSS CHaPel

MaSon’S benD, Hale County,
alabaMa, uSa, 1999–2000

Client: Community of Mason’s bend

architect. rural Studio—student team:
forrest fulton, adam gerndt, Dale rush, and Jon Shumann

The Rural Studio has worked extensively in Mason’s Bend, a

hamlet of mobile homes. The descendants of a handful of farm-
workers had inhabited this forsaken area at the edge of agricul-
tural land. The Rural Studio built houses here as well as a can-
opied hall for parties and chapel for prayer, where the children
in free school lunch programs also come to eat in the shade.

The chapel is circumscribed by rammed earth walls, made of a

mixture of red clay and a little cement. The interior space, which
is mostly open and ventilated, is protected by a roof made of
sheet metal. On the northeast side, a taller rammed-earth wall
creates a protective screen. On the southwest, a spectacular
roof runs all the way down to the wall, with a glazed area made
of car windshields. They come from General Motors factory
stock and were found at a scrap car dealer’s shop. These con-
vex pieces of glass are screwed together on thin metal cross-
beams using rivets and small spacers. They cover one another
like open scales; between them, air circulates and cools the
spaces. These scales were carefully adjusted one by one; they
can be taken down and replaced, even with different wind-
shields, thanks to a clever system of spacers. The high quality
of technical detail and of execution makes it possible to build,
using an approximate material, a self-ventilating glazed area
that is as sophisticated as a green-tech component.

an interior view of the room for worship and classes,

with its segmented frame

140
an exterior view of the church, with the superb com-
position of handrails consisting of low wall of red
clay and glazed prisms

Drawings left and right:

Site plan for the chapel, with the long horizon-
tals of the low walls that anchor the building on its
site, and section drawing through the large glazed
structure.

141
→ Rural Studio

ANTIOCH BAPTIST CHURCH

PERRY COUNTY
ALABAMA, USA, 2001-2002

Client: Antioch Baptist Church

Architect: Rural Studio—student team:
Gabe Michaud, Jared Fulton, Marion Mcelroy, and Bill Nauck

The Antioch Baptist Church in northwest Perry County has a

small congregation based on four families. In this clearing, they
have built a chapel. The chapel, which had a poor foundation,
was demolished with the help of the students, who charged
themselves with using all of the salvageable materials from the
original church. The vocabulary goes beyond “recycled style,”
for here there is first architecture, then construction. On a rec-
tangular plan, the church is oriented east-west and fits into
the slope of the site, along a new retaining wall on the north.
On the east, a first volume contains the church office, which
runs along the entrance. A second volume houses the prayer
room. The two rooms fit together with a slightly shifted posi-
tion, underscored on the interior by a line of vertical light. They
are prismatic and are structured on a downward slope, under
the butterfly-wing roof. In the prayer room, the ceiling rises
from the east to the west, where the altar and baptistery are
located. Behind them, the west wall is opened by a vertical bay
that floods the space with light. The foundation wall is topped
by a horizontal bay that opens, on the same level, onto the
meadow of the old cemetery.

The two volumes are made of wood. On the interior, the move-
ments of the roofs are carried by a framework made of old steel
beams and wooden supporting piers. The walls are clad in sal-
vaged laths. The chapel is covered with a skin made with the
old chapel’s siding. Their clear lines underscore the sculptural
form. The edges of the gray sheets play with the boss of the vol-
umes in light wood.

Longitudinal section and site plan for the chapel.

On the plan one can make out the original site of the
chapel, of which only a staircase remains. The roof-
ing and framing materials were stored in this area,
before being reassembled on the new site, which is
several meters further away.

142
views of the church—the side where the faithful
enter and the interior of the church. at right, the
horizontal course offers a view of the community’s
old cemetery.

143
Philippe
Samyn
brussels,
belgium

144
the new laboratories of the seed bank in the wallo-
nia region of belgium, at the heart of the ardennes
forest. the double-curved timber frame and tem-
pered-glass covering

145
→ Philippe Samyn
Philippe Samyn was born in 1948 in Belgium. An architect and
engineer, he founded his own firm in Brussels in 1978. Today his
firm has a large oeuvre, with some works clearly dating back to
the ecological awakening. This part of his work already bears
the mark of a rational designer set on affirming “the balance
of form, function, and technique,” 1 an architect of large struc-
tures, and an engineer keen on materials science. That last
aspect of his work also earned him a solid university career as a
professor of building sciences.
For the past ten or so years, this renowned firm, founded in the
golden age of large-scale international architecture and of a cer-
tain view of performance, decided to explore the new area of sus-
tainable economy, at its founder’s behest. We know from Samyn’s
theoretical research and recent works that he decided to commit
his credibility as an expert in the debate on sustainable architec-
ture. No doubt this decision stems from personal, ethical convic-
tions; it also comes from the fact that he has classical building
knowledge, closer to the likes of Perret or Eiffel, who, in order to
be great designers were first rationalists, concerned about the
correct use of the materials, and from the fact that this vision of
the art resonates with our contemporary concerns.
Admittedly, the engineer Samyn built his career during Les
Trente Glorieuses, 2 with that era’s great certainties and great
means, but he has not forgotten what the 19th-century struc-
tural inventions accomplished, in terms of the restraint of
means and expression. When the successive oil crises cut
short the Postmodern “swinging eighties,” he was well posi-
tioned to understand that the crisis of resources would make
skill sets and practices outdated and would call into question
the sometimes-extravagant technologies of the 20th century;
conversely, he was quite wary of the energy scientism and the
new green functionalism that might hastily replace them. As an
architect, Philippe Samyn also wants to remind us today that an
architectural problem is not solved in the same way as an equa-
tion, and he wishes that a new definition of rationality would be
considered. On the sustainable architecture scene in Europe,
Philippe Samyn thus makes a stimulating and solidly argued
contribution, that of an architect-engineer who is convinced of
the importance of the ecological challenge and who applies his
knowledge in service of the cause.
Philippe Samyn establishes this authority in the debate in a wide
range of areas. With his scientific training, he entered the Ecole
Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts Visuels in 1971,
the same year he completed his studies in civil engineering.
Then in 1973 he obtained a masters of science in civil engineer-
ing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). Upon his
return to Brussels, he also trained in the field of urban planning
and then worked in design offices while pursuing his architec-
ture studies—he would not receive his degree until 1985, after
he had opened his own firm. A short while later, once his firm
was established, he found the time to resume his studies and
received a Ph.D. in applied science in 1999.
146
froM effiCaCy to effiCienCy
With 20 years of experience in handling large international
projects, Philippe Samyn is very familiar with the 20th-century
cult of functional efficacy. Today, as materials become precious,
he criticizes a fin de siècle in which “structures became heavier,
initially because of industry and subsequently through infor-
mation technology.” 3 The 1980s saw the quest for solidity take
precedence over the economical use of materials, with a great
many spectacular or soaring structures consuming lots of steel
and concrete. The wastefulness did not bother anyone at the
time and even had the advantage of driving the market. More-
over, a tendency toward conformity in the design professions
gave engineering no incentive to optimize through calculations
the use of material, as happened in the time of Nervi or Prouvé,
for instance. Engineering dozed off in the comfort of these com-
putation programs and then on “the assumption that reducing
materials would increase costs since more technical research
would be required.” 4
But today, as materials are becoming scarce and the pace of
building slows down, Philippe Samyn believes that it is neces-
sary to rethink project design and especially to redefine what his
biographer, Pierre Puttemans, calls “the ‘vocation’ of the mate-
rials, in other words, the most rational use of their mechanical,
physical, and chemical properties.” Replacing the expensive
cult of efficacy is what Samyn calls efficiency. To invent lighter
structures, the engineer rejects “turnkey” software, returning
to analytical geometry and inventing, for instance, “indicators
of volume” to manage material in another way.
Thus the new canopies at the Leuven train station, delivered in
2007, consumed four times less steel than other entries in the
competition, yet they are every bit as expressive and luminous.
Philippe Samyn won the competition for the roof that covers the
platforms—this was part of an urban renovation of the neighbor-
hood, in connection with the arrival of the TGV (the high-speed
train). The creation of a canopy behind the existing train station
and a footbridge connecting to the neighborhood beyond the
tracks were to be treated as background and to energize the old
center-city neighborhood. The plans of this work show a skill-
ful, highly composite structure: the four tracks are covered by
16 “umbrellas,” which are parabo-
loids with double curves, with the
load carried by large steel arches
that spread the stresses on con-
necting nodes, which are them-
selves carried by steel columns
grouped in fours. From one track
to the next, the slits between the
arches are filled with glazed open-
ings that illuminate the platforms.
The work clearly involves a lighten-
ing of the structures: the beams of
the arches are made of perforated
steel, the columns in groups of
four are made of steel rather than
heavy concrete, and this structure
does not sit on a base but rather
on steel decking.
When one visits the station,
it is amazing to discover that
this nimble structure, as large
as Anglo-Saxon stained-glass
windows, with their high-per-
formance steel superstructure
and their well-shaped pieces,
is itself made entirely of sim-
ple, basic industrial products:
steel strips, steel columns, T-
or U-shaped beams. All the ten-
sions that circulate in the structures converge in nodes built with
a combination of these simple materials, which are bolted and
welded. This is perhaps a salute to the Belgian steel industry, as
well as a use of local products, for these strips were made just
a short distance from Leuven. But simplicity of execution and
pragmatic use of reliable and inexpensive projects were already
in use in Gustave Eiffel’s viaducts and Jean Prouvé’s porticoes
of folded sheet steel. The structure has the stretched appear-
ance of a textile, and this architectural effect helps lighten the
overall composition, for these domes seem, not heavy, but
“lifted up” by the air. Efficiency is also the search for “a bet-
ter link between the use of a building and its durability,” in a
century in which the functions change even before the building
can wear out. Philippe Samyn believes that architecture, rather
than seeking to be efficient, should first offer “general conven-
ience” (an interesting definition of sustainability). In Belgium,
the seed bank, built in 1997, was to accommodate laborato-
ries and storage spaces. These low-cost premises are sheltered
under a superb glass shell, supported by a timber structure.
This durable and generous volume will be able to accommodate
other uses and will always offer comfort and economy, of both
resources and management.

Philippe Samyn is already a critic of 21st-century neo-efficiency.

He has declared war on wind turbines, a product whose suc-
cess is based on an ecological calculation that is too narrow to
be correct. “Just measure the energy used in transporting these
mastodons, the concrete swallowed up in their foundations, the
concrete platforms they stand on.” 5 He has invented a guyed
wind turbine, consisting of a very light and easily transporta-
ble mast, which is erected using its own cables, like a circus big
top. The example illustrates Samyn’s historical optimism, close
in this respect to that of Stefan Behnisch: the century of dimin-
ishing resources is also the century of the knowledge society,
of unprecedented growth in intellectual resources, of scientific
means. It is on this that architecture must draw in order to rein-
vent itself.

1 Pierre Puttemans, Philippe Samyn—Architect and Engineer. Construc-

tions (Brussels: Fonds Mercator, 2008).
2 “The Glorious Thirty” refers to the prosperous years between 1945,
when World War II ended, and 1975, when the economic effects of
the oil crisis of 1973 were felt.
3 Philippe Samyn, lecture at the Global Award for Sustainable Architec-
ture, Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine, Paris, 3 March 2008.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.

147
→ Philippe Samyn

roof SHeltering The “fabric” of the canopies is made of aluminum sheets, fol-
lowing a curve that is not simply the result of forces but seems
of a train Station to have been made slightly bulbous. In this way, the canopies
leuven, belgiuM, 1999–2006 seem to be not so much domes that weigh on the columns but
rather balloons held in place by the columns. Of course, this
architectural effect accentuates the feeling of lightness in the
Client: national belgian railway Company building. The Kessel-Lo façade consists of a large glass wall,
architect: Philippe Samyn suspended from the arches and wind-braced, with the upper
Structural engineering: Samyn and Partners with Setesco portion intersected by the footbridge that connects to the
total Surface area: 14,622 m2 neighborhoods beyond the railways.

Upon visiting the station, one is struck by the great simplicity of

Philippe Samyn carried out this project within the context of the
renovation of the neighborhood surrounding the Leuven train
station, a renovation sparked by the arrival of the TGV (high-
speed train). As is often the case in Europe, the train station
had been built in the previous century, on what was then the
outskirts of the city, in the form of a classical building orien-
ted toward the city center, with the platforms and rails hidden
behind it. These tracks later created a difficult-to-cross trench
between Leuven and the working-class neighborhoods of Kes-
sel-Lo, which stretched out later. The renovation of the train
station neighborhood, with its new buildings and its esplanade,
had to suture this cut by creating a link above the tracks to join
the city and its nearby suburb.
The competition program for the roof sheltering the platforms
included this urban component. Behind the renovated train sta-
tion, the plan for the roof covering was supposed to allow for
the reorientation of the whole neighborhood toward Kessel-Lo,
with a connecting footbridge and a structure that would no lon-
ger be the rear of the train station but rather a modern and open
façade oriented toward the neighborhoods. One of the reasons
that Philippe Samyn won first place in the competition in 2000
should be singled out, for it reveals an interesting development
in criteria at the start of a new century: the structures and the
proposed canopies consumed four times less steel than the
rival projects.
the composition. It comes from the functional clarity of the lay-
out and also from the legibility of the structures, which are very
well defined and at the same time not at all opaque. Canopies
of this kind are often used with much more imposing structures.
On the ground, the “do-it-all” columns are almost transparent
because they are not massive. This architecture does indeed
belong to its century, and yet, all things being relative, the visi-
tor is more inclined to think of the Eiffel Tower than of a bit of
high-tech derring-do of the late-20th-century variety. The com-
parison continues when one looks more closely at the assem-
bly nodes and the twin arches: the simplicity of these effects
required great ingenuity in calculation and design. The inter-
secting pieces, the arches, are made of common materials,
but their assembly is meticulously conceived and designed,
requiring careful execution. It must be noted here that Philippe
Samyn’s architecture brings together two building skill sets:
the art of calculation and of composition (skills belonging to
the architect and the engineer) and the art of execution, which
belongs to metalworkers who understood that this construction
site, where the material is simple but its transformation compli-
cated, was an excellent opportunity to apply and demonstrate
their savoir-faire.

Philippe Samyn achieved this very concrete lightness by com-

bining ingenious technical solutions with simple materials that
could be made lighter through their assembly system. The metal
umbrellas that provide shelter for the passengers on the four
platforms are carried by five rows of five piles, formed from four
hollow steel tubes that are clustered and joined on the upper
portion by assembly nodes. These support points, built in steel
tubes and sheets, have many functions: they support the roof
covering and take the force of its arcs, they collect water, they
carry the electrical power cables, and they even house the elec-
trical cabinets between their ties.

Each platform covering consists of a “train” of four canopies

that are linked together. These canopies are carried by 20 para-
bolic twin arches, built as in the 19th century by assembling
flat steels. This Meccano, simple in principle, makes it possible
to obtain a structure with a very openwork design. Between
each canopy, the lateral forces are transferred transversally by
beams that join the two parts of each arch. At either end of the
roof coverings, aluminum sheets are extended by a low steel
nosing that reduces the gusts of air, similar to the ones set at
the ends of high-speed trains for the same reasons.

148
the platforms of the train station under their new
canopy. the grouped columns consisting of four
tubes can be seen, as can the openwork structure
of the load-bearing arches and the alternation of
aluminum canopies and translucent portions.

149
Diagrams of the structure. working document

150
aerial view and plan of the four “trains” of the cano-
pies. at the ends, the steel “noses”

151
life at the train station under the new canopy. note
the minimal visual clutter of the structures, which
have been hollowed out, lightened, and “simpli-
fied” in order to allow for flow—both of light and of
passengers.

152
153
a detail showing the fastening of the canopies to
the existing building

154
the new railway landscape of leuven

155
→ Philippe Samyn

fire Station
Houten buSineSS Park,
Houten, tHe netHerlanDS
1998–2000
Client: town of Houten, the netherlands
architects and engineering: Philippe Samyn

The fire station for the new town of Houten is a facility that
plays a role that is both technical (six trucks, four firefighters,
and their equipment) and civic (management of volunteers and
training for young people), in a country where protection of the
seawalls structured the community.

The fire station is located in a well-organized park that is green

and not at all dense. There, Philippe Samyn positioned a sim-
ple, transparent form; on its interior, he pursued his research
on the efficiency of materials. To do this, he often breaks away
the envelope from the contents. In this way, it is possible to
streamline and slim down the envelope, which is returned to its
archetype as shelter, and to design the interiors more simply,
as they are freed up from the job of bearing the roof. The shel-
ter is a parabolic vault carried by seven arches made of steel
beams. The north façade is covered, the south façade glazed
and equipped with photovoltaic panels. On the interior, a large
wall divides the volume lengthwise. On the south, under the
glazing, a large hall is used for the preparation of the trucks,
which are parked just opposite the frames that open. On the
north, the service areas occupy four detached stories under the
vault, which is made of brick. The two tympana, which are half
covered and half glazed, are framed by hollow steel sections.

Philippe Samyn had the fine idea of liaising with the neighbor-
hood schools. Each child did a beautiful drawing on paneling
for the fire station. The ensemble makes a superb fresco on the
interior wall, which has become a work of urban art.

the fire station on the garage side. one can see the
photovoltaic panels arranged on the roof.

156
157
the simplicity of the garage operation. the trucks
are maintained and equipped at the place where
they are parked.

Details of the opening of the doors

right:
Seen from the garage, the interior façade of the
offices, where the children collaborated on a fresco

158
159
Carin Smuts
Cape town,
South africa

160
in the market town of laingsburg, in the karoo
Desert, is the Dawid klaaste Multipurpose Center
(see p. 164).

161
→ Carin Smuts
Since 1989 the architect Carin Smuts has worked on a single
area and for a single client: the inhabitants of the South African
townships. Precision is essential when approaching her archi-
tecture. If the cities of white Africa belong to Western archi-
tectural culture, the Africa of townships has not, until now,
appeared on the same stage. Its status merges with that of a
third world country, and before the ecological crisis, only the
vernacular architecture and the colonial and postcolonial archi-
tecture were known. Western critics might sometimes have
expressed interest in the latter, but it cannot be said that they
showed great interest in examining that half of the world. The
fate of architectural culture did not play out there. The ecologi-
cal imperative is changing this vision of the south, for its urban-
ization considerably increases energy consumption and pollu-
tion, included water pollution, and this on a worldwide scale.
Now that there exists a sustainable architecture that makes
sense within the ecological debate, architectural critics are
examining this third world with a new eye, seeking architects
who can set an example.
townSHiPS
There are many ways to act. The first consists of disseminat-
ing a European model of sustainable architecture. But in its
race for sophisticated technologies, Europe might lock itself
into a model that cannot be imitated further south, because it
is too expensive and, above all, unadaptable. The second way
involves searching for architects who are part of an economy of
self-development.
Carin Smuts works in the townships, whose inhabitants had
been excluded from development and who lost their vernacular
culture. Does she practice sustainable architecture? She says
so, and explains how: “The meaning of economy and the meas-
ured use of resources—we learn this at school. It is the very
ethic of architecture! But to build in the townships, people must
already be able to express a need, formulate a program, and
know how to implement it. My experience has taught me that
this is not possible unless people have taken back control of
their own freedom. I see architecture only as a means for these
men and women to regain control of their own governance.”
“our SuStainability iS about
PeoPle”
The work of Carin Smuts originates in the last decade of apart-
heid, which ended in 1989 with the abolition of the last seg-
regation laws. She established her firm that same year. Born
into a family of politicians and intellectuals (her great-uncle Jan
Christiaan Smuts is one of the founders of holistic thought), the
162
young architect wanted to participate in the future policies for
renovating the townships.
This commitment began in 1982, when Carin Smuts, then a stu-
dent, was assigned by her professor “a group of eight black
youths who had come the university seeking help for the con-
struction of a school in their township, in Cape Town, district
21. The inhabitants had bought the land but did not know what
to do next. The project lasted five years and taught me a great
deal. First, I learned that European architectural culture would
be of no help to me. I also discovered that the NGOs funded
only those projects that corresponded with their vision. They
came to assess and to diagnose the needs but without ever ask-
ing the communities what their wishes were. The NGOs that I
contacted did indeed want to give funding—one for a day-care
center, another for a studio. We wanted a school.” Since that
time, CS Studio has worked for the black communities. Its cor-
pus is impressive: more than 100 built works, of all scales and
in all localities. One might wonder how a small firm can do so
much in so little time. Is Carin Smuts still an architect? Yes,
but according to a different model, which she created with full
knowledge of the facts: “In this country where no town plan-
ning agency oversees the plans of the townships, no public util-
ity arranges for their needs or manages services, the architect
replaces the public action at every stage.” CS Studio is dedi-
cated less to sustainable architecture and more to sustainable
development, using the architecture as a means. This mission,
which could be called sustainable micro-development, through
analogy with Muhammad Yunus’s micro-credit, requires a
method as well as organization.
“arCHiteCture by
eMPowerMent”
CS Studio covers a wide range of functions: architecture, urban
planning, landscape design, project management assistance,
feasibility studies, and fund-raising. The team builds amenities,
housing, and public spaces. The crystallization of the program is
a large part of the work. The end product will be a work of archi-
tecture, but CS Studio first gets involved long before that, work-
ing with the inhabitants in order to help things “mature.” “Peo-
ple know how to define their needs but not to articulate them
in a program. Before designing anything, we listen for a long
time—it could take two years—in order to catch onto the pro-
gram.” Next, Carin Smuts launches studies, with special atten-
tion paid to the urbanity of the projects. She combines a solid
knowledge of the townships with—perhaps for the only time—
a classical project practice. While they have lost their culture,
the inhabitants have, by building and tearing down the town-
ships, created an urban counterculture that Smuts has stud-
ied: “I learned that these in-between spaces matter the most.
The living space is very small, there are no amenities, and so
all social life takes place in the street. For this, the inhabitants
make, out of nothing at all, small public spaces, the interstices
that I have often studied in order to find the project’s appa-
ratus. (…) Our projects are small. A large project such as the
Guga S’thebe occupies 800 m2, which is the size of a bourgeois
house in Cape Town. We had to expand this area, to transform
it into a small town, with intersections between the rooms, in-
between spaces that the inhabitants can use as public space.”
The project is designed in collaboration with the users, “who
do not have an architectural requirement. (…) But they have
a creative energy that I wish to free. I think that once the pro-
gram is set, the project should not impose a goal but rather pro-
pose an infrastructure that the inhabitants will then take over.”
In fact, the firm often designs projects as a collection of auton-
omous spaces, brought together under a structure that bears
and distributes the load. The fitting out is done with the inhab-
itants, who know that they will take up a trowel or paintbrush
to do this.
This retreat by the architect can be explained by the lack of a
shared vernacular building culture: deprived of this resource
and not wanting to import Western build-
ing culture in an abrupt way, Carin Smuts
keeps construction to a minimum, pre-
ferring to transfer the challenges of self-
development further along in the proc-
ess, at the fitting-out stage. All the same,
these simple building envelopes speak
strongly, whether one is looking at the
large golden cone that tops the hall of the
Guga S’thebe Cultural Center or the soar-
ing roof structure of the Gugulethu Cen-
tral Meat Market: “People weren’t con-
cerned by architecture but architecture
becomes the element of fun! And we use
it in the process.” The strategy continues
further along in the process. “The com-
munity center or the school are discussed
with the residents, who should then get
involved during the construction phase.
Construction should not come from
somewhere outside. The best way that I have found is to recruit
the workers in a 2 km radius. The problem is that the inhabitants
of the townships never received any training. I negotiate with
the contractors for training workshops on-site, in masonry, for
example. That requires the use of appropriate techniques.” The
firm’s presence is a long-term fact, and the architect remains
the expert on the micro-development that is promoted by this
vision: “People need to be able to count on our help always: say,
when the facilities run into problems or need to be expanded. If
requested, I return to the sites to “inject” an idea or help with
the construction, but on the condition that people achieve the
results by themselves.”
the plastering and painting. The use of the sheet metal comes
from the townships: “Corrugated iron is the essential material
of the townships, and the roofing trade is the only one that the
inhabitants have mastered, using solutions that we could never
have invented. I steal from them, and I give it back to them!”
“tHat’S wHy i Start to
reinforCe tHeir Creative rigHt”
Carin Smuts also steals color from them, using it in very bright
hues. It is not a question of beautifying the townships but rather
of observing the same economy of means: “The inhabitants use
lots of colors to ennoble the humble materials. I do as they
do. I also use color in public spaces and schools when there is
no money in the budget to plant and maintain gardens.” Carin
Smuts is clearly less concerned with the architectural form than
with organizing the various strands of the designing and build-
ing process, a process that should produce its own aesthetic.
This aesthetic, which she does not control, is asserted from one
project to the next, however. Has Carin Smuts spent the past
20 years building “models”? The word evokes a “completed”
form. The facilities by Smuts never seem finished; moreover,
they change often.
Carin Smuts’s architecture brings sites together without the
concealment of an envelope—it does not hide the frugality of
materials but instead leaves its door open. The many multipur-
pose centers that she has built are in themselves an interesting
concept. This somewhat fuzzy name enables CS Studio to forget
functionalist programs from the West, where a school can only
be a school and a sports field is exclusively for sports players;
instead, the firm designs and builds sites that are less defined,
more flexible, expandable, and made to accommodate a society
that needs development rather than codes of practice. A project
by Carin Smuts produces more cultural energy than it spends on
material. If her work serves as a model, it is because of this way
of treating architecture as a means rather than an end.

“arCHiteCture beCoMeS SuS-

tainable only if it’S aPProPriateD”
The micro-development process logically results in building
choices. When budgets are small, it is necessary to choose:
what material can be bought with the budget. Can it be found
within a 30 km perimeter? Will the people know how to work
with it? Carin Smuts sums up her approach with a formula: “I
do local: materials, details, labor.” Throughout the projects,
Carin Smuts favors the use of brick, which is inexpensive, plen-
tiful, workable, affordable in terms of maintenance, as well as
recyclable and beautiful. Using brick, she implements a “sus-
tainable construction system,” surely the least expensive in the
world: double walls separated by a slot for air and ventilated
by openings. The exterior wall ensures waterproofing, while the
inner wall can be delivered untreated to the users, who will do

163
→ Carin Smuts

DawiD klaaSte Center Obviously, this building puts on quite a show in the desert, whe-
ther paying homage to the bygone days of the railroad or brist-
laingSburg, karoo, ling like a giant scorpion with its protective shells and sharp
SoutH afriCa, 2002–2005 angles. This very figurative side deserves a comment. In Europe,
architecture is often abstract now. In the south, it retains an ico-
nographic role in the society. The architecture of Carin Smuts is
Client: town of laingsburg resolutely figurative because it plays a very strong role in terms
architect: Carin Smuts of training and identification.

The Karoo is a vast semi-desert region stretching along the

large plateau of South Africa, in the backcountry. The small
town of Laingsburg, 280 km from Cape Town, is a stopping place
along the large east-west axis linking Cape Town to Pretoria.
The town was established in the 18th century as a market-gar-
den area where travelers would stop to pick up fresh produce.
More recently, this agricultural oasis delivered up a eurypterid
(sea scorpion) fossil dating back to a time when the country
was under water. Local myth soon turned the fossil into “giant
cricket.”

The Municipality of Laingsburg commissioned a multipurpose

center to house the social services and foster young businesses,
offering office space and studios. First, the site was selected by
a project management committee made up of members of the
communities, the town council, and the region. The selected site,
a former rugby field in one of the old black neighborhoods, was
occupied by two metal hangars and a large windmill. Carin Smuts
offered to transform them into an attractive ensemble. The con-
cept matured during collective workshops that addressed sub-
jects as diverse as the rich local environment, the memory of the
1981 floods, the giant cricket, and even the joint role of the wind-
mill and the train in the history and the imagination of Karoo.
Carin Smuts also learned that she would find good iron crafts-
men in Laingsburg.

The project is structured by a new concrete ramp that leads to

the upper level, passing through the windmill. Upon reaching
this platform, the visitor discovers an old freight car, which has
been turned into a restaurant, and then accesses a walkway
leading to the hangars and to the washrooms, added to the
west façade. The hangar on the south accommodates a large
public hall for parties and performances, while the hangar on
the north has two floors devoted to the social services and the
premises for new businesses.

The hangars were renovated. The roofs, redone with new sheets,
were lowered in order to form overhangs shading the ground
floor. The old roofs were reused for the vertical siding that pro-
tects the walkway and the upper floor of offices. The center was
painted bright red in memory of the victims of the 1981 floods.
The poet Diane Ferriss composed a now-famous text about that
event, in which she compared the explosion of water with a red
bull. The renovation of these metal hangars was embellished
by ironwork, executed by Willie Bester and his apprentices. The
ramps of the walkways and of the buildings were made with
pieces of farming tools salvaged and assembled in baroque
grids.

164
general view and site plan of the center, signaled
by its windmill

165
166
left and above:
exterior views of the center

below:
façades of the center, on the side of the large
access ramp and on the service-area side

167
 a
b

C
D e

f
f

above:
a “model” of the center by the artist willie bester

right:
Plan of the center: the windmill (a) and the restau-
rant/freight car (b), the offices and studios (C), the
village hall (e), and the bathroom block (f)

below:
view toward the restaurant car, set in the windmill

168
the interior gallery between the offices and the
restaurant

169
→ Carin Smuts

guga S’tHebe—artS, Culture,

anD Heritage village
CaPe town, SoutH afriCa,
1996–1999
architect: Carin Smuts
built Surface area: 800 m2
Cost of Construction: 3.5 million rands (300,000 euros)

The small world of Guga S’thebe offers an auditorium, studios

for applied arts, a boutique, and a restaurant. It is built with the
budget of a Cape Town house, a venture made possible by the
simple construction: no excavation, few service spaces, brick
walls, single-slope roofs. Carin Smuts and her representatives
were able to use each square meter by putting each function in
a simple box, two stories high at the most. The boxes are posi-
tioned in an arena-like configuration around a courtyard and
outdoor amphitheater that they protect from the sun. Within
the surrounding wall, a walkway leads to a large central foyer.
The lower level accommodates a boutique that sells the work
from the studios and gives access to the parterre of the audito-
rium and the amphitheater. The upper level leads to an interior
balcony of the hall and a balcony outside the amphitheater.
The boxes are assembled outside. This conserves the small
public squares that expand the space and are heavily used:
the boutique opens onto an atrium, musicians set up in front
of the restaurant, the workshops open onto the courtyard. The
potters, painters, and sculptors take over the walls and the
floors, with the complete consent of the architect. To find Guga
S’thebe in the slums of Cape Town, the visitor looks for the
large concrete cone of the nuclear power station. From there,
he or she finds the gilded cone of the auditorium, which took
over as the emblem of the neighborhood.

the access gate to the center and, on the interior,

the podium of the amphitheater, which is open to
the sky

right:
the entrance on the street. at right, the golden
cone of the performance hall

170
exterior view

171
→ Carin Smuts

weSbank PriMary SCHool

weSbank, SoutH afriCa,
1999–2002

Client: town of kuilsrivier

architect: Carin Smuts

This school hunkers down in the middle of the slums, offering

space and safety to the students. The classes and offices are
set in small buildings that fan out around a courtyard. They are
grouped and arranged by a two-story covered gallery, in thin
concrete slabs carried by columns. This arrangement allows
for the protection of arriving students. On the interior, the
courtyard is truly refreshing, a public space that has no equiv-
alent in the surrounding slums and one that allows the children
to frolic in safety.

The pavilions are made of double brick walls, with a roof and
shading device in corrugated iron. The gallery that runs around
the courtyard is punctuated by concrete walls that control the
security doors between two pavilions and carry the stairwells.
In general, Carin Smuts has abandoned the idea of planting
trees, which are expensive to put in and which often wither
for lack of care. The trees are replaced here by these vertical
concrete walls, which are sculptural and painted bright green.
Carin Smuts used other very bright colors coming from the
slums: a very bright blue and a primary yellow to showcase the
formal beauty of the concrete walls.

interior view of the gymnasium

172
the entryway to the school

173
the interior courtyard, accentuated by the green
walls of the stairwells

below:
an interior view from the upper arcade

174
the interior courtyard

175
appendix
about tHe autHorS
Marie-Hélène Contal, born in Nancy, France, in 1956, studied
architecture in Nancy and political science and urbanism in
Paris, taking her diploma in 1981. In 1982 she started her career
guiding the greater projects of Vittel, specializing in the follow-
ing years as architectural critic at Archi-Créé.
In 1991 she was named state counsellor of public building pro-
jects of the ministry of Emile Biasini, guiding the cultural projects
of the grands travaux up to 2001, when she was named deputy
director of IFA, the French Institute of Architecture at the Cité de
l’Architecture et du Patrimoine in Paris.
Since then she has been responsible for the scientific and didac-
tic activities, planning nationally and internationally acclaimed
expositions, symposiums, and publications, such as “Construc-
tive Provocation” about the rational architecture school of the
Austrian region Vorarlberg, a milestone in sustainable design.
Her critical work on the role of the planner and architect in a con-
temporary urban and political context that moves toward sus-
tainability has been published in several European countries.
On behalf of the European program “EU Culture 2000” she
launched the gau:di actions on sustainable architecture for the
profession and the greater public, creating a biennial European
student competition on sustainable design, pedagogic programs
for kids, archival work on avant-garde architects’ heritage, and
an international stock-exchange for architecture critics.
Since 2006 she has worked on the creation of the Global Award
for Sustainable Architecture on behalf of the Cité de l’Architec-
ture of Paris and an international scientific board of specialized
architecture centers and schools.
In 2009 she served as curator of “International Experiences in
Sustainable Architecture,” part of the exhibition “The Ecological
Habitat,” at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris.
Thomas Herzog, born in Munich in 1941, own practice since 1971,
Professor of Architecture since 1974 in Kassel, Darmstadt, and
Munich; Dean of the Faculty of Architecture at the Technische
Universität München 2000–06; Guest Professor at Tsinghua Uni-
versity Beijing; Graham Professor at University of Pennsylvania
(PENN). Chairman of 4th European Conference on Solar Energy
in Architecture and Urban Planning 1996. Principal awards: Mies-
van-der-Rohe-Prize 1981; Auguste-Perret-Prize for Technology in
Architecture 1996; European Prize for “SOLARES BAUEN” 2000;
Heinz-Maier-Leibnitz-Medal for excellent research 2005; Euro-
pean Award for Architecture and Technology 2006; Internation-
al Architecture Award, Chicago, Athenaeum 2007; Global Award
for Sustainable Architecture, Paris 2009.
Jana Revedin, born in Constance, Germany, in 1965, studied
architecture in Buenos Aires, Princeton, and at Milan Polytech-
nic, where in 1991 she was awarded her diploma with a thesis
entitled The Concept of Open Space in the Social Architecture
of German Avant-Gardes. From 1991 she taught as Aldo Rossi’s
assistant at the IUAV Venice, receiving her diploma in architec-
ture teaching and taking her PhD with a dissertation entitled
Monument and Modernity: Elements in the Construction of the
Avant-Garde Town.
In 1996, she created her own architectural practice in Venice
and in Villach, Austria. This professional decision—to begin
immediately by building a practice with a European dimen-
sion—proved decisive, giving her access to new research on
sustainable architecture. Her dual Italian and rationalist Ger-
man culture gives her a special eye for this movement.
As an architect, Jana Revedin has a predilection for timber
construction and for sustainable mixed structures, using local,
recyclable materials. Her productions include passive energy
housing programs and public buildings as much as renovations
of historical works and interior design.
With a specialization in the Early German Moderns, she has
published numerous works on architecture and public spaces
in the Modern Movement.
In 2005 she was selected to be curator of the biennial gau:di
European Student Competition on Sustainable Architecture,
launched by the Cité de l’Architecture et du Patrimoine of Paris
and co-produced by a European network of specialized uni-
versities.
In 2006 she became creator and curator of the Global Award
for Sustainable Architecture, the first international architecture
prize that honors sustainable design worldwide.
177
about tHe winnerS
Stefan beHniSCH, gerMany
Stefan Behnisch (born 1957) is the most promising Euro-
pean architect currently introducing state-of-the-art tech-
niques of sustainable architecture to the USA, techniques that
have already been realized in Europe. His partner for all these
projects was the innovative climate engineering firm Transso-
lar. With projects for a laboratory building in Cambridge, MA
(Genzyme Center), and one in Toronto, ON, Canada (Centre for
Cellular and Biomolecular Research), Behnisch Architects has
proven that these high standards can indeed be realized within
competitive budgets and within American contexts. With the
commission for the 100,000 m2 Allston Science Complex at the
renowned Harvard University, Behnisch is moving to the next
level of building for Ivy League schools.
fabrizio Carola, italy anD Mali
Born in Naples in 1931, Fabrizio Carola is a graduate of the ENSA
de La Cambre (1956) in Brussels and of the Naples Faculty of
Architecture (1961). He discovered Africa in 1971 with a com-
mission in Mali. He has continued to work primarily on that
continent, in collaboration with UNESCO and many NGOs. His
major works include: Kaedi Hospital in Mauritania (1984), the
Center for Training and Research on building technologies suit-
able to the Sahel at Mopti in Mali (1995). In 1985, he founded
the Napoli: Europa-Africa (N:EA) Association, which he heads.
He was awarded the Aga Khan Prize in 1995. He receives fre-
quent invitations to teach the technologies of curved surface
masonry construction in Barcelona, Genoa, Brussels, Grenoble,
and other European cities.
balkriSHna DoSHi, inDia
Balkrishna Doshi, born in 1927 in Poona, India, is a fellow of the
Royal Institute of British Architects and a fellow of the Indian
Institute of Architects. After initial study at the Sir J J Col-
lege of Architecture, Bombay, he worked for four years with Le
Corbusier as Senior Designer (1951–54) in Paris and for four more
years in India to supervise his projects in Ahmedabad. His office
Vāstu-Shilpā (Environmental Design) was established in 1955.
Doshi worked closely with Louis Kahn and Anant Raje when
Kahn designed the campus of the Indian Institute of Manage-
ment, Ahmedabad. In 1958 he was a fellow at the Graham Foun-
dation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Doshi has been a
member of the jury for several international and national com-
petitions, including the Indira Gandhi National Center for Arts
and Aga Khan Award for Architecture.
178
eleMental / aleJanDro aravena,
CHile
After graduating from the Catholic University of Santiago in
1992, Alejandro Aravena took the famous IUAV course in history
and theory of architecture in Venice before returning to settle in
Chile in 1994. He has taught at Harvard, in Barcelona, and now
at his own alma mater. He joined the Elemental team in 2000
and became director in 2006. His personal production has been
widely published and recognized: he received special mention
at the Venice Biennial in 1991, was selected by Architectural
Record for its list of the ten most promising architects in 2004,
and won the Erich Schelling medal in 2006. Aravena has had
several works of architectural theory published by Ed Arq.
françoiSe-Hélène JourDa,
franCe
Françoise-Hélène Jourda was recognized early in France for
combining her search for architectural beauty with a sensitiv-
ity to the new fundamentals of the post-Industrial Age. As a
pioneer of sustainability, she focused on the economic usage of
materials and energy, new approaches to lifestyle and work pro-
cedures, and the development of towns and cities. As a result of
her work as a professor and an architect in Germany and Aus-
tria, Jourda has become a central figure in the debate regarding
sustainability in Europe. She maintains the idea of architectural
research, open to new technologies, social trends, and urban
issues. Her activism led her to found Eocité, a sustainability
advisory board specializing in initiating collaboration between
construction companies, local members of parliament, and citi-
zens in the lead-up to undertaking any urban development.
HerMann kaufMann, auStria
Born in 1955 in Reuthe, Austria, Hermann Kaufmann comes from
a family with a long tradition in the carpentry business. In the
parental business he became fascinated by wood as a build-
ing material but also learned about technical thinking, which
fundamentally shaped his work as an architect. He graduated
from the Technical University, Innsbruck, and the Technical Uni-
versity, Vienna. In 1983, after two years of practice, he founded
his own architectural office with Christian Lenz in Schwarzach,
Austria. Residential construction became his focus—especially
in connection with wood and the question of energy consump-
tion—as well as schools and public buildings. Since 2002 he
has been a professor of architecture at the Technical Univer-
sity, Munich.
rural StuDio /
anDrew freear, uSa
Andrew Freear, an Englishman from Yorkshire, is a graduate
of London’s Architectural Association. He practiced in Lon-
don, then in Chicago, where he became Professor of Design at
the University of Illinois. He then joined Rural Studio as deputy
director, in charge of undergraduate studies. In 2002, he suc-
ceeded Mockbee as director of Rural Studio. In 2005, Andrew
Freear received an award from the Rural Sociological Society for
“Distinguished Service to Rural Life.” In 2006 he received the
Ruth and Ralph Erskine Nordic Foundation Award. However, he
is also keen to remain a member of the Rural Heritage Founda-
tion in Thomaston, Alabama, and of the Volunteer Fire Depart-
ment in Newbern, Alabama.
wang SHu, CHina
One of the most experimental and outspoken architects of
China, Wang Shu, born in 1963, surprised the world at the 2006
Architectural Biennale Venice with the Chinese contribution
“Tiles Garden: A Dialogue Beyond City, Between an Architect
and an Artist” in which he presented an installation of a sea
of gray Chinese tiles, crossed by a bamboo bridge. Those tiles,
thousands of them, came from demolition sites in China, where
old structures were being replaced by new building complexes.
Wang Shu shows how recycled and familiar materials (tiles and
bricks) can be used in very contemporary architectural projects.
His work refers to the large-scale demolition so common every-
where nowadays in China and explores how to keep up tradi-
tional modes of living in a rapidly changing context. Wang Shu
is professor and head of the architecture department at China
Academy of Art, Hangzhou.

PHiliPPe SaMyn, belgiuM

Born in 1948, Philippe Samyn is a civil engineer (UL Bruxelles,
1971) with a master of science in civil engineering (MIT, 1973),
and a civil urban design engineer (UL Bruxelles, 1973) with a
degree in architecture from the La Cambre School (1985) and
a PhD in structural mechanics (U. Liège, 1999). In 1980, he
founded Samyn and Partners, which has become a major archi-
tectural and engineering practice in the Anglo-Saxon style. He
teaches stability and structural design at La Cambre as well as
teaching in the civil engineering departments at universities in
Mons and Brussels. He has been a member of the Belgian Royal
Academy of Sciences, Art and Literature, since 1992. Philippe
Samyn’s objective is to open up new conceptual approaches in
the field of constructional ideas and efficient use of energy and
materials.

Carin SMutS, SoutH afriCa

Born in Pretoria in 1960, Carin Smuts is a graduate of the
UCT (1984). CS Studio, the firm she founded in 1989, deals
with projects of all sizes: large structures such as the Laings-
burg multipurpose center or expansions to Cape Town Uni-
versity but also rural community hostels, community centers,
and currently the project for Caledon-Helderstroom prison. An
acknowledged specialist in “low-cost housing,” Carin Smuts is
often called upon to work on similar sites abroad, for example,
in Brazil in 2000, where she was invited by the MST Movement.
She teaches in workshops at many universities in South Africa
and Namibia.

179
illuStration CreDitS

Albertina Wien, Adolf Loos Archiv 11 bottom

Amateur Architecture Studio 86 top, 87 bottom, 90, 91 top,
Arban, Tom 15, 19, 20 bottom
Bastinc, C. & Evrard, J. 145, 147 left
Bauhaus Archiv Berlin 10 top
Behnisch Architekten 20 top, 22 right and left, 23 top and
bottom, 24, 26 top, 27 bottom
Carola, Fabrizio 97, 108
Clearey, Melanie 172/173, 174 bottom
Cook, David 20 middle
Coolens & Deleuil 151 top
CS Studio 163, 165-167, 168 top left, 168 top right, 169
De Coninck, Jan 154 left
Elemental 10 bottom, 113, 115, 118 bottom left, 120 bottom,
122/123, 124 top left, 124 top right, 124 bottom, 125-127
Gandhimurthy, Jagadishkumar 45 bottom left and right
Hammer, Manfred Richard 36/37
Hermann Kaufmann ZT GmbH 63 top, 63 bottom, 64, 67 top,
69 top, 71, 72-76, 78 bottom
Herzog + Partner 177 bottom
Hoof, Khushnu Panthaki 30 bottom
Hursley, Timothy cover illustration, 129, 131, 135, 136-138,
140 left, 141 top, 141 bottom right, 143
Jana Revedin Architetcs 177 top right, 177 top left
Jourda Architectes Paris 12 middle, 49, 51, 52-57, 58 bottom
Kandzia, Christian 27 top
Klomfar, Bruno 61, 65/66, 67 bottom, 68, 69 bottom left,
69 bottom right, 77, 78 top, 79
Kunstbibliothek Berlin, Tessenow Archiv 12 top
Lambro 161, 165 top, 168 bottom
Museum of Modern Art New York, Mies van der Rohe Archive
9 top
Nachrichtenamt der Stadt Köln 8
Pahad, Himansu 33, 34 bottom
Pandiya, Yatin 30 top, 40 top left, 40 bottom
Plissart, Marie-Françoise 147 right, 149, 152/153, 155
Rahn, Ben 21
Revedin, Jana 9 bottom, 11 top, 12 bottom and middle, 17,
26 bottom, 58 top, 59, 82/83, 97/98, 99, 101-107, 109, 111, 133,
134 top left, 134 bottom left, 139, 162, 170-171, 174 top, 175
Richters, Christian 156/157, 158 top and bottom right, 159
Rural Studio / Will Brothers, Elizabeth Ellington, Matt Finley,
Leia Price 134 bottom right
Rural Studio / Forrest Fulton, Adam Gerndt, Dale Rush, Jon
Shumann 140 right, 141 bottom left
Rural Studio / Gabe Michaud, Jared Fulton, Marion McElroy,
Bill Nauck 142 left, 142 right
Saillet, Erik 47, 48
Samyn and Partners 146, 150, 151 bottom, 154 right,
158 bottom left
Schodder, Martin 25
Vāstu Shilpā Foundation 29, 31, 35, 38, 39, 40 top right, 41-43,
44 left, 45 top
Wang Shu 81, 85, 86 bottom, 87 top, 88/89, 91 bottom, 92-95

The authors and the publisher thank the photographers, archi-

tects, and organisations for the kind permission to reproduce
the photographs and drawings in this book. Every effort has
been made to trace the copyright holders of images. We apol-
ogize in advance for any unintentional omission and would be
happy to insert the appropriate acknowledgement in any sub-
sequent edition of the book.
51 Seine Aval cities, 51 avant-garde works in 2058.

For the Yvelines general council, the Global Award for sustainable
Architecture/Collection Manifeste d´Architecture du XXIème sciecle
en Seine Aval is much more than international awards granted to
skilled architects. Indeed, it is an esthetic and tangible symbol in
order to show that sustainable development is not only interesting
for preserved lands but that it is an everyday concern for all of us.
This contemporary full-sized collection is meant to lead to the future,
to accompany the Yvelines citizens in this inescapable and necessary
change of mentalities, which concerns the places where we live, how
we move-to sum up, where we feel alive. That is the reason why these
awards will be granted, throughout the years, to architects who will
have conceived small, innovating and ecological buildings, which
are totally adapted to the needs of the cities in which these houses
will be built. Every one of us must acknowledge the fact that it is no
longer time for architectural excessiveness, but that it is now time for
creativity and sobriety, in order to invent and experiment areas more
respectful of environment.

Pierre Bédier
President of the Yvelines general council

51 communes de Seine Aval, 51 œuvres avant-gardistes en 2058.

Pour le département des Yvelines, le Global Award for sustainable

Architecture/Collection Manifeste d´architecture du XXIème siècle en
Seine Aval est bien plus qu’une distinction internationale pour des
architectes de talent. Ces prix sont le symbole esthétique et palpa-
ble que le développement durable n’est pas le privilège des terri-
toires préservés, mais qu’il peut être l’affaire de tous. Cette collec-
tion contemporaine grandeur nature a pour vocation d’ouvrir la voie
du futur, d’accompagner les Yvelinois dans cette révolution des men-
talités inéluctable et nécessaire quant à notre manière de nous loger,
de nous déplacer, en un mot de vivre. C’est pourquoi ces prix récom-
penseront au fil des ans les lauréats qui auront imaginé de petits
bâtiments écologiques, innovants et adaptés aux besoins des com-
munes d’accueil. Chacun d’entre nous doit prendre conscience que
le temps n’est plus à la démesure architecturale, mais à la sobriété
et la créativité où s’expérimentent et s’inventent des territoires plus
éthiques.

Pierre Bédier
Président du Conseil général des Yvelines
Translation from French: Elizabeth Kugler, Boston
Translation from German: From the Avant-Garde to Sustainability
Julian Reisenberger, Weimar

Project Management: Henriette Mueller-Stahl, Berlin

Layout: Nadine Rinderer, Basel

Lithography: Thomas Dillier, DillierundDillier, Basel

Selected texts in French are available at www.global-award.org

Library of Congress Control Number: 2009923706

Bibliographic information published by the German National Library

The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche
Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the
Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de.

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