In this third issue of the Frugality series -a critical response to the demands of the environmental agenda- component hunting, urban mining, and biosourced materials- challenge the notion of architecture as a finite object, advancing instead a material ethic in which design becomes an act of negotiation, translation, and ecological and economic commitment.
In the contemporary context, concepts such as component hunting, urban mining, and bio-sourced materials do not merely denote technical strategies. Rather, they articulate ways of reconfiguring the relationship between architecture, materiality, and productive processes.
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The combination of the resources available to architecture and the ability to resort to a creative finesse is our proposal for this issue of the Frugality series, a critical response to the demands of the environmental agenda.
These are mechanisms without cost, pure intellectual reflection. The absence of su-perfluous components creates objects stripped of cladding and unnecessary layers. Simple constructions that employ the pseudo-craftsmanship of industrialised assembly as a personalised pattern, imparting identity to the final outcome.
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Frugality means less material, less energy, less expense, greater respect for the environment, greater constructive sincerity, and greater social honesty.
Frugality is not imposed by social or cultural movements, or even by political transformations. It is the pure awareness of the moment of restriction and deprivation that conditions the way of acting. Frugality is dismantling the iconic and symbolic character of architecture. It imbues it with a basic rationality, a new classicism without style, standardised technology, and programmatic flexibility.
The first issue of this new series is entitled Abstraction and Responsibility, the essential features of this frugal architecture whose sole aim is to become a structure-shelter of life.
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Currently, electronic devices transport the self to virtual realities, blur public with private, even the innermost, and provide a foretaste of a different domestic spatiality. Facing this challenge, and taking a resistant stance, architecture turns its gaze to the recent past and is capable of constructing a privacy in which materiality still preserves its full evocative power.
The third volume of the GENEROSITY series is dedicated to delving into how this privacy is built in the collective housing environment. Stephen Bates signs an extensive article on new architectural options for living together, Javier Mozas summarizes in five points the benefits of a home in which it is possible to achieve domestic happiness and Aurora Fernández Per compares the strategies to improve privacy followed by 8 selected projects.
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The second issue of the GENEROSITY series is devoted to strategies of domestic exterior space.
The different degrees of domestic exteriority were modulated over time through openings or closures, with one defining moment, when the envelope was released from its load bearing functions.
From a distance, the modernist façade has multiple readings and Le Corbusier’s thick diaphragmed ‘fourth wall’ is not the same as Mies’ fine curtain wall.
Contemporary domesticity plays with the creation of thresholds to extend the liveable domain outside the envelope.
The three-dimensionality facilitates the construction of liveable spaces within a thick façade.
Works by Caruso St John Architects, Atelier Kempe Thill, Vivas Arquitectos, Henley Halebrown, Schneider Studer Primas, Studio Woodroffe Papa, MIA2, ITCHstudio + Vincenzo Di Salvia, MVRDV, Flint and Duncan Lewis - Scape Architecture.
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From his early years in Germany to the end of his life in the United States, collective housing has been very present in the work of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The research carried out by Fernando Casqueiro, Associate Professor at ETSAMadrid, compiles, for the first time, the entire collection of collective housing projects signed by the master.
Each work has been analysed, redrawn and compared on the same parameters.
The result is a voyage through the creation and consolidation of a typology, culminating in 860-880 Lake Shore Drive and the Lafayette Pavilion.
The collection is made up of 36 projects, built or only designed, that cover Mies' life, his relationship with his clients and the influence of his collaborators, from his beginnings in Berlin until his death in Chicago.
MIES VAN DER ROHE. THE COLLECTIVE HOUSING COLLECTION is a reference volume to learn about the innovations that Mies brought to the composition of the modern floor plan and its relationship with the façade.
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Boven Bouw took on the renovation work for several 19th century buildings in one of the main shopping streets in Antwerp with small or mid-scale projects on the existing structure. In order to represent the interiors they make use of collages, which enable them to remain true to the material of mock-ups yet also to recreate the static vision of drawing...
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Project published in: Japan Diaries. Architecture and more
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