foresight/ vol.03, no.06, dec.

01
the journal of futures studies, strategic thinking and policy

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© 2001 MCB UP Limited

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1463-6689/01/050495
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fo r e f ro nt :
architecture for the
new century
jacques richardson*

What does living mean today? This was the theme explored at Archilab 2001, an
international working laboratory for young architects. The expo illustrated that
architects are taking account of global warming and the need for sustainable
development as well as integrating consumers’ concerns not only for flexibility in new
lifestyles but also for utility and comfort.

Geography, ecology, hydrology, topography and

landscape, and lighting can be best appreciated as
influences on design. Readers planning a visit to
France who seek inspiration from the past should
include at least one town of the South on their
itinerary. I suggest Albi on the Tarn River, an
hour’s drive from Toulouse. Its medieval Berbie
Palace (thirteenth-fifteenth centuries) was built as
a fortified ecclesiastical seat (Figure 1).The palace
is made entirely of brick, traditionally considered
by the French as neither a `noble’ nor a durable
material, but today again more in use than in
recent generations.Albi’s bricks, of irregular shape
and many of them already eight centuries old, are
usually heavy baked slabs about 30 ´ 50 cm and
5 cm thick ± originally an Italian design. (The
construction material preferred nation-wide,
however, is the Seine Valley sandstone called grès.)
The immense structures at Albi have lasted

*
admirably, with only the lime-and-sand mortar
Jacques Richardson, a member of foresight’s editorial board,
may be contacted at Cidex 400, 91410 Authon la Plaine,
needing pointing up and the slate roofs repaired
France (E-mail: decicomm62@aol.com). every three generations or so. Since 1922 the
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Figure 1 Albi’s Berbie Palace and St Cecilia
Basilica seen above the eleventh-century Old
Bridge across the Tarn River
Photo: Office de Tourisme, Albi
Berbie has been the home of most of the artistic
production of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, more
than 1,000 objects that were turned down at the
time by the leading museums of Paris. All are on
display, and a splendid excuse for touring the
entire community on foot. The year 2001 marks
the centennial year of the death of the famed
portrayer of bordello women and, incidentally,
the inventor of the advertising poster.
Albi’s delightful streets, its attractive shops and
small restaurants beckon. While the museum
undergoes total restoration that will take a
decade, visitor circulation is uninterrupted. The
renovations should be completed by 2011, if, in
the meantime, no significant archeological finds
(Gallo-Roman or, conceivably, Roman) are
made. Virtually next door to the palace is the
basilica of Saint Cecilia, an even larger
monument in brick that had its beginnings late in
the twelfth century. There is no problem of the
durability of structural materials here, either.
Public and private buildings in Albi are usually
topped by the ubiquitous Provençal tile, although
only a few kilometers from Albi slate becomes
the traditional roofing material together with
regional hard shale known as lauze. The old and
the new find common cause in Albi’s
architecture, where the very modern glass-and-
metal post office blends harmoniously with
centuries-old construction on either side.
Past and present translate into
future forms and functions
Albi is indeed worth the visit, especially if you can
combine it (as I did) with an architectural visit to
Orléans, just south of Paris. Orléans is a veteran
settlement, too, but one with an eye on what
architecture should mean in the twenty-first
century. `It isn’t every community inhabitant or
building occupant who has the chance to design
where he will live’. With these words the then
mayor of Orléans, Jean-Pierre Sueur, created in
1999 the annual architectural happening called
ArchiLab.This international working laboratory for
young architects, materials creators, and a few artists
lasts seven weeks. During the first week, architects
from 21 countries meet at roundtables for two days,
then play host to a lively public on opening day.
The 90-project expo, mostly scale models, then
remains accessible by the public, this year round the
theme of `What does living mean today?’
Answers to this thematic question are
especially pertinent in this first year of a new
century.The expo site at Orléans, the Loire River
town liberated from English occupation early in
the fifteenth century by Joan of Arc, occupied
most of the floor space in a nineteenth-century
structure originally built to stock quartermasters’
stores ± in an era when large, mobile armies
consumed rations and clothing in prodigious
quantities. The disused warehouse makes an
excellent gallery, and some of the habitat models
exposed urged the recycling of old building
materials (wood included), using again the sites
where houses or apartments have already stood.
Indeed, Kyong Park and his International Center
for Urban Ecology of Detroit rebuilt an
abandoned wooden house from the USA and
displayed it in the exhibition’s courtyard as
centrepiece. Collective and individual housing
does not have to seek, in other words, suburban
farmland or forest.
Béatrice Simonot, one of ArchiLab’s two
commissioners, reminded visitors that architects
today and tomorrow need increasingly to
integrate consumers’ concerns not only for
flexibility in new lifestyles, but also for utility and
comfort, and the ambient landscape in growing
demand during the past century. Housing has
now to be, in a word, open-minded, providing
space for the handicapped and for those doing
business at home. In an era of probably global
warming, too, one can expect more sunlight in

northern climes, hazier skies in the temperate-
tropical zones. To capitalize on sunlight, Gerhard
Kalhöfer and Stefan Korschildgen of Cologne
(Germany) have created a summer pavilion/
winter garden they call the Tourne Sol, French
for `sunflower’ (Figure 2). This opaque-and-
transparent solarium, in the form of a very large
apostrophe, can be rotated by a feminine hand
around a vertical pivot (see photograph).
Air and light are very much the concern, for
tomorrow as well as for today, of Japanese
architects. Among those exhibiting at ArchiLab
this year were Shoei Yoh, Hideyuki Yamashita,
Osamu Ishiyama, and Toyo Ito & Associates ± all
of Tokyo. They showed a marked preference for
astute uses of wood, the country’s original home-
building material. (Today Japan must import most
of it.) All accentuated the need for easy human
circulation between interiors, gardens and street
Figure 2 German architects Kalhöfer-Korschildgen created this displaceable summer pavilion-winter garden
Photo: Kalhöfer-Korschildgen Architekten
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egress. Hitoshi Abe, another exhibitor from
Nippon, who has an atelier in the northern city
of Sendai, fears that architecture has the habit of
creating separation within interiors. Cross-
culturally conscious, Abe teaches that the
specialist’s role is not to invent `an ideal life, or an
ideal home, but to give form to the interaction
between a life and a specific environment’.
Shigeru Ban was given the brief by his client
that home design must `give everyone the
freedom of carrying out private activities in a
house where the spirit of the united family
predominates’. Result: the Naked House, with a
large, free space and four movable cubes for
varied uses (Figure 3), with translucent walls
(corrugated fibre glass) on the outside and lined
inside with nylon. The wooden structures give
rigidity to the plastics. Naked House is flexible,
`just as the client wished’.
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Figure 3 Model of Shigeru Ban’s Naked House, an illustration of the architect serving his customer exactly

Photo: J. Richardson

A project-to-be, seeking to concentrate dense

Figure 4 Californian Wesley Jones and students
living space as aesthetically as possible within built this stack of residences/offices from shipping
a dwelling, is the `36 Units in 5 Houses’ containers
concept of a firm of young French architects
called Périphériques (`Peripherals’). Louis
Paillard, Anne-Françoise Jumeau, Emanuelle
Marin-Trottin and David Trottin plan to attach
their unusual design to a green belt planned along
the Boulevard Richard Lenoir in eastern Paris.
Each dwelling will be two-floored, with three
exposures and direct access to greenery. Dagmar
Richter of Germany has interpreted the roles of
the home as something less than the old functions
of shelter, sleeping room and storage space, but
more the applications of brand-new lifestyles. She
sees the habitat of the future as far more than a
mere dwelling: a `place of sojourn, leisure and
social exchange’.
Perhaps not to everyone’s taste as a living or
working locale, architect Wes Jones and a team of
students from the University of California at Los
Angeles’ School of Architecture displayed a scale
model of a real structure they have assembled of
used shipping containers (see Figure 4). Compact
and colourful, the use of these metal boxes as
home or office concentrates the utilities (water,
electricity, sewage) but is not likely to embellish a
neighbourhood.
Habitat designers came from small nations
(The Netherlands, Slovenia, the Czech Republic,
Croatia) to exhibit in Orléans, as well as from Photo: J. Richardson

Figure 5 How two US architects construe the flows influencing architecture, urbanism and landscape
Photo: Field Operations, Philadelphia and New York
very large countries. With the Cold War behind,
architects from Eastern Europe are suddenly
unfettered ± no longer condemned to planning
dreary, low-cost public housing and the building
of environmentally unfriendly factory, office or
laboratory space.
Federico Soriano and Dolores Palacios from
Spain conceived their Six Chimneys housing
project at Barkaldo (near Bilbao) in the form of
towers on a tract of wasteland. Visitors are
reminded of the factory-and-smokestack skyline
of the first of Spain’s communities to succumb to
the industrial revolution. Is it a coincidence that
one of Europe’s most novel architectures, the
Bilbao Guggenheim Museum, is only a short
distance away? From Austria, the distinguished
Coop Himmelb(l)au of Wolf Prix and Helmut
Swiczinsky combines its `awareness of the crisis
shaking Western culture’ with future-oriented
conceptual art, scenography, design and city
planning.The Coop is in the midst of creating an
apartment building from a municipal gasometer
in Vienna, the practical results of which should be
no less than astounding: a project worthy of the
basic idea of ArchiLab itself.
Two US designers preoccupied with the
synergy between architecture, landscape and
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town planning are Stan Allen and James Corner,
who recently founded a group in New York City
and Philadelphia called Field Operations.
Building on one of the dictionary definitions of
field, `a complex of forces that serve as causative
agents in human behaviour’, Allen and Corner
visualize the flows of all the mentioned influences
± between landscape, urbanism and architecture
as specific interactions of the various strategies,
geographies, techniques and communication
involved. This is the way they diagram their
analysis-synthesis for application by the
conscientious architect (Figure 5).
This perspective from Field Operations brings
us back to the old and reliable, as seen in Albi.
Tomorrow’s architect will need to concentrate as
never before on the transdisciplinary, the
interfunctional and the cross-cultural aspects of
home design. The organizers of ArchiLab in
Orléans are thus on the right track, and next
year’s production should be even more exciting
than this year’s.