Article About Construction

One of the favorite gimmicks of Business Administration lecturers is the well-known story about the NASA discovery that the pens given to the first astronauts refused to write in space. Following the conclusion that the ink couldn’t defy the laws of non-gravity, it was decided to develop a pen working on other principles. After 10 years of research and an expenditure of around $12 million, NASA succeeded in developing a pen that works in any condition.

Encountering a similar problem, the Russians sorted it by simply using a pencil.

So as not to be hooked on “Soviet” solutions, another gimmick of the same series tells about a prestigious Japanese soap factory that received a letter from a customer who had bought a box containing no soap. The hi-tech factory immediately rushed a computer program to pinpoint the hitch in the packaging line. The plant engineers convened to prevent such a mishap in the future and decided to install along the packaging line sophisticated x-ray cameras, posting next to each machine a supervisor who would remove any box that the machine bleeped empty. A smaller soap factory solved the problem with a domestic fan aimed at the packaging machine. Whenever an empty box passed in front of the fan, it simply flew away.

One of the great advantages of computer aided planning lies in the ability to produce complex and complicated products at top speed, mainly ones that could not be attained with a conventional draftsman table. However, after the computer aided had glorified some architecture tycoons, it soon became clear that the path from the computer to earth is, as yet, complicated. For it turns out that neither Ahmed nor Sergei nor Fung Yu can translate their fantastic plans into a real building.

Like in the Japanese soap factory story - the best computerized brains work to provide a complicated answer to every complicated problem that they themselves had previously created. And so, after some years of failed attempts to teach low-tech workers how to build the hi-tech images rendered on the computer screen, there was a shift to computer controlled process, whereby the building is done merely by machines, like any other manufactured product. But the existential problem of Ahmed, Sergei and Fung Yu, who still sweat to support their families, remains unsolved.

This brief introduction is not intended to detract from the computer’s importance, as there is no doubt of its contribution to advancing building technology, saving work space in architects’ offices, reducing the number of workers, and - consequently - saving in expenses of air conditioning, detergents, coffee, water, and great amount of toilet paper.

However, in view of this, one should frankly ask: are complicated hi-tech buildings necessary at all for most of the people, who have to live, work and spend their leisure in them with bodies and souls no different for our forefathers? Does anybody really prefer to live in a computer product instead of a vernacular structure made of simple sustainable materials? And do these complicated buildings at all truly reflect a loftier architecture than that reflected in conventional building?

To answer these not so simple questions, we’re juxtaposing works of two productive offices of totally different nature: The Viennese Coop-Himmelb(l)au which is considered one of the leading firms in computerized structures; and the Chilean architect Maria del Carmen of the AIRA group, who laudably represents conventional architecture, with almost fanatic adherence to basic planning based on low-tech technology and sustainable building materials.

The Viennese name Himmelb(l)au expresses a play on the words ’blue heavens’ and ‘heavenly building’. The ‘Coop’ preceding it comes from deletion of the hyphen in ‘co-op’, as that established in 1968 by the three founders - Helmut Swiczinsky, Michael Holzer, and Wolf D. Prix - the creative backbone of the firm.
Prix studied architecture in Vienna, at AA in London, and at SCI in California. Since 1993 he has been Professor of Architecture at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, and since 2003 - Head of the School of Architecture and Vice-Rector.

Although born into the formative years of Post-Modernism, and immediately contributing to advancing its Deconstructivist branch, the firm has survived the vagaries of time and remained loyal to its personal style laden with abstract ideas - a style that, at least seemingly, blurs the building’s purpose while expressively speaking for the architect, very much as in the case of other archistars such as Frank Gehry, Zaha Hadid and Kalatrava.

In addition to its extensive activity in the field of education, Coop-Himmelb(l)au, with offices in Los Angeles, Ohio, France and Mexico, continues to plan (and in many cases successfully build) projects world renowned. A number of these projects have won the firm prestigious awards and contributed to consolidating Prix as a sought-after lecturer by the most prestigious universities around the globe.
The most prominent of the buildings distinguishing the firm today are: the BMW Welt Delivery Center in Munich, the Akron Art Museum in Ohio (won the 2008 RIBA European Award), the School of Performing Arts in Los Angeles, the Museum of Contemporary Art and Planning Exhibitions (MOCAPE) in Shenzen, China, and the fair center under construction in Riva del Garda, Italy.

A prominent characteristic of Coop Himmelb(l)au is the ongoing attempt to grant the buildings a sense of imbalance. Since this logically opposes the static essence of buildings, the effect is mainly achieved by use of diagonal lines, which - as it were - divert the center of gravity from the base. Since in the computerized world image is more important than essence, this illusion is made all the more extreme by photos or renderings that are reduced upwards, contrary to customary norms of architectural photography whereby all the vertical lines run parallel almost obsessively.

To demonstrate the widening dissonance between hi-tech architecture and the low-tech user, we went afar to the office of Chilean architect María del Carmen of the AIRA group (Art, Imagination, Rigor, Amor). Architect Maria del Carmen, also known as Cazu Zegres G., began her professional career in New York, where she graduated in 1984 and worked as a furniture and lighting designer. She was Prof. at Talca University (2002-05), and Universidad Catolica de Chile (2005).

Contrary to the highly complex computer products of Coop Himmelb(l)au, Maria del Carmen's structures could have been built also thousands of years ago - in terms of the professional skill required to carry them out, the architectural conception putting man and place in the center, and the sustainable materials. Whether private home or church, most of Maria del Carmen's projects are simple, and implemented almost obsessively, though brilliantly, with one material - timber or bare concrete, sometimes impeccably embedded with stone. The plan is made of basic geometry, usually a rectangle or a circle, expressing a conceptual idea of some sort - often related to the place.

While Maria del Carmen's buildings appear formally simple, their conceptual explanation is far more complicated, since it reflects, according to her, the relation between architecture and poetry, and as such may be subjectively interpreted by the viewer, depending on his socio-cultural background.