Small Grains
Currently there is a shortage of available housing that Reykjavíkurborg is trying to mitigate with increased densification (þétting byggðar). With a heavy emphasis on density single family detached housing does not really enter the discussion very often and rarely in a positive way. What this means is that over the next decades single family housing will make up an ever-smaller proportion of the housing pool and while other typologies might stagnate or decrease in price it will continue to get more expensive and eventually pricing out a significant portion of future generations from having it as an option. This project explores what can be done to make single family detached housing fit within the new plans for a denser Reykjavík and more affordable for an average citizen.
Applying the diagrammatic research to the existing infrastructure of Rafstöðvavegur requires some modification where the road bends. The new neighbourhood is situated on rafstöðvavegur moving to the east and stopping when the landscape starts to climb.
Single family units can increase social isolation as it doesn’t normally promote interaction between units. To decrease the social isolation I have designated one building in each lot for services or social buildings. These services should have a program that encourages interactions and enables neighbors to build relationships. Taking a closer look at one of the blocks to se what this could look like i have chosen a greenhouse for construction as the social building. As it requires residents to help each other to plant, maintain and harvest the plants as well as the need for sharing tools and gardening knowledge all serve to build a stronger community
Essay - What is good architecture?
Introduction
The earliest attempt at answering the question what counts as good architecture can be found in the 10 books of architecture by Vitruvius where he lays out his three fundamental laws of good architecture: Venutas, Firmitas and Utilitas. Venutas is the aesthetic beauty, artistry, and experiential enjoyment of the architecture. Firmitas is the structural integrity, durability, and quality of construction. Utilitas is the functionality, usefulness, and ability to satisfy programmatic requirements. I won’t say that these elements aren’t important, but they miss the social, political, and environmental aspects of architecture. This focus on Vitruvian laws and circumvention of external factors has led to the philosophical thinking of aesthetic moralism where ethics and aesthetics are mutually dependent.
“In the last resort great art will be distinguished from that which is merely aesthetically clever by a nobility that, in the final analysis, is moral; or, rather, the nobility in life, which we call ‘moral’, is itself aesthetic.” —Geoffrey Scott
“A building must be beautiful when seen from the outside if it reflects all these qualities. The architect who achieves this task becomes a creator of an ethical and social character.” —Bruno Taut
“We are aspiring to a new ethic. We are looking for a new aesthetic.” —Le Corbusier
Creating an ethical system that takes no stance on social, political, and environmental issues can only serve as a system for the self-aggrandizement of architecture. I reject the idea that a work of architecture that causes environmental or social devastation cannot be criticized as bad architecture because it satisfies Vitruvian laws. Critiquing architecture through an internal lens has been done many times and is the most common form of analysis instead I want to focus on the external. What amount of influence can architecture have on it, what amount of moral responsibility can we put on architecture, and what are the social and environmental impacts and responsibilities that architecture has.
The influence of Architecture
In 1939 during the New York world’s fair industrial designer Normal Bel Geddes unveiled his one-acre animated model of an American utopia as it might appear in the year 1960 titled Futurama. The Futurama sponsored by General Motors fused the center-oriented geometrical city planning of Le Corbusier’s Ville Contemporaine and the decentralist approach of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre city and was presented to 28.000 people a day among who were politicians, journalists, and other wealthy and influential people. Viewing the model spectators would travel along a winding conveyor belt looking down on the model as if they were in a low flying airplane to better illustrate the layout of the new design. The Futurama was touted as the largest most lifelike model ever constructed contained more than five hundred thousand individually designed buildings, a million trees of thirteen different species, approximately fifty thousand motorcars ten thousand of which careened along a fourteen-lane multispeed interstate highway, powerplants, farms, rooftop platforms for flying machine, industrial steel mills and more. Though this vision of the future may seem familiar now the Futurama is widely held to have been the first introduction of the Controlled-access highway to the general public. I bring this story up because I think it displays how far an architectural idea can go and the influence it can have, but also how many factors and outside influences have to line up for it to be adopted and used.
Moral Responsibility
Architecture is not autonomous but dependent on outside forces such as politics, finance, and societal pressures. Contractors want quick and cheap developments to help them increase their profits and governments want to grand project that they can unveil to legitimize or strengthen their political image. With all these pressures seeking to influence the end result of architecture limits the power an architect has, so then the question becomes to what extent do architects have a moral responsibility to act?
When questioned about the migrant workers who died while working on the al-Wakrah stadium in Qatar Ms. Hadid claimed powerlessness saying “I’m more concerned about the deaths in Iraq as well, so what do I do about that? I’m not taking it lightly but I think it’s for the government to look to take care of. It’s not my duty as an architect to look at it. …I can make a statement, a personal statement, about the situation with the workers, but I cannot do anything about it because I have no power to do anything about it.” The comparison between the deaths of migrant workers on a project her firm designed and profited off to those of civilian deaths in Iraq is a poor one as her firm was not getting paid to develop a project that was killing Iraqi civilians. This answer is an attempt to free herself from facing the difficult questions about the morality of the situation. How much she could have done is impossible to say because instead of facing a terrible situation and whatever part she had to play in it Ms. Hadid chose to remove herself from all moral responsibility while continuing to profit from the development of the al-Wakrah stadium. Architects will have a varying amount of power and influence to change a situation politics and finance often stand in the way but the moral responsibility I want to put on architects isn’t to succeed but to try and that is my problem with Ms. Hadid’s response to criticism, her unwillingness to try.
Environmental Responsibility
“In its final, constructed form, architecture has its place in the concrete world. This is where it exists. This is where it makes its statement.”
The construction, maintenance and operation of a building has a high environmental cost on the planet. The global buildings sector consumed nearly 30% of total final energy use in 2016. Buildings construction, including the manufacturing of materials for building such as steel and cement, accounted for an additional 6% in estimated global final energy use. Accounting for upstream power generation, buildings represented 28% of global energy-related CO2 emissions, with direct emissions in buildings from fossil fuel combustion accounting for around one-third of the total. Buildings construction represented another 11% of energy sector CO2 emissions. In total Buildings and construction account for more than 35% of global final energy use and nearly 40% of energy-related CO2 emissions. These numbers have not been improving between 2010 and 2016 CO2 emissions from buildings and rose by nearly 1% per year.
Many attempts have been made to quantify how environmentally friendly a given building is this always comes in the form of a rating system such as LEED (Leadership in energy and environmental design) system which can be boiled down to a series of boxes that need to be checked. Once enough boxes have been checked the building will get a rating, a certification of how environmental it is and some tax exemptions for the developers. My problem with this system isn’t necessarily the reward structure of it but more the implicit notion it gives that environmentalism in architecture is a technical problem to be solved after the fact by applying technical fixes. To make environmentally friendly architecture good architecture it must go beyond ticking boxes to get a high score it should become a part of the design itself. The quality of buildings relies upon the quality of its joints, the quality in which its constituent parts are assembled. By making environmentalism one of the core constituent parts of the building instead of an after though. Environmentalism as a constituent part integrated into the design of the building will make it a lot more resilient to external interference seeking to save time or money and will become almost impossible to remove without compromising the architecture of the building.
Social responsibility
Emmanuel Levinas, for whom ethics is defined simply and directly as “being- for the Other.” To assume an ethical stance means to “assume responsibility for the Other.
The “other” here is the diverse mix of builders, users, occupiers, and observers of architecture, people whose political and phenomenal lives will be affected by the construction of a building and its subsequent occupation. How Modernist architectural theory has affected the “other” in cities has not been positive. With the goals of increasing efficiency and public health their main focus was sunlight, greenspaces and quick travel by car. This failed to consider the social and psychological factors of its design. This has resulted in cities with a lot of traffic large open green spaces between buildings and the removal of any defined public space where people might congregate. The elevation of modernist thinking in the 20th century helped fuel a vide variety of harmful social policies such as gentrification and redlining using aesthetic moralism as justification “slums” where clear to make space for “purer” forms to solve societal problems but these policies did not solve any problems but made more by further increasing the wage cap between whites and minority groups. For something to be considered a socially responsible work of architecture it has must not participate in systems of social injustice but work at undoing the damage done by architecture in the past. It also must realize that it operates within a political structure with limited finances. Take for example the suburbanization that happened in many cities across the United States, it means that the cities infrastructure has to spread a lot wider then in a denser city increasing the cost of it. This has left a lot of cities struggling financially and bordering on bankruptcy witch has left them unable to fund social programs and education leading to a large public harm.
Conclusion
What makes something good architecture? First it must accept the impact that comes with making architecture and the moral responsibility that comes with it. For it to be good architecture it must go beyond sustainability and thinks of ways it can offer something more. Good architecture has to be mindful of it’s political, social and environmental standing and strive to make a positive impact for social justice and a livable environment. Despite the dependance that hold it back good architecture should seek integrate these values into its design process not as an afterthought but a core design principle that should be as important as the constituent materials of its structural frame. Good architecture should undo social harm and improve the public life of the city. Good architecture must mitigate its environmental harm as much as possible. Finally god architecture has to try.
Urban Lab - Design Agency