2021 ACSA/EAAE Teachers Conference

The chemical compound titanium dioxide (TiO₂) circulates extensively through our architectural, biological, and economic systems, most of the time completely unnoticeable: in the food we eat, the paper we print on, the paint on the wall, and our iPhone chargers. This man-made substance is a white pigment that has been used in the mass-production of materials and goods since its discovery around 1910. TiO₂ has been called “the whitest white” and its material properties are inextricably related to invisibility, permanence, and surfaces.

Representing the new, the bright, and the clean, TiO₂ was discovered and patented by Norwegian chemists Peder Farup and Gustav Jebsen, and production for the global market began in the mine Titania AS in Norway in 1916. After a hundred years of mining, the extraction of TiO₂ has left an irreversible change in the local landscape: The environmental trace of mining modernism consists of a vast cut through the surface of the earth and a white artificial desert of mining waste.

Focusing on surfaces—both geological, architectural, and critical—this paper first investigates the invention, extraction and production of TiO₂ in the mine Titania AS. Then the paper introduces an alternative material history of the white walls of modernism, and finally, the paper discusses the prospects of the material as a component in the next-generation of sustainable architecture. Once a signature of modernism, TiO₂ has now become a signature of innovative materials and smart technologies. Architects, chemists, and building engineers progressively investigate the future prospects of the material as an essential component in renewable and alternative building technology. Today, TiO₂ nanopraticles can produce smog-absorbing building surfaces, self-cleaning windows, and antimicrobial coatings for laboratory use.

There is an urgency to discuss materials in relation to design and sustainability. This paper argues that in order to change ethical attitudes towards use and reuse of materials, design discourse must forge bonds with environmental history in order to unearth the unseen material practices and expand its material investigations into the very core of its production. Thus, the paper ties bonds between mass-exploitation of natural landscapes, TiO₂ as a planetary matter—hidden but everywhere—and smart materials for sustainable futures. By writing a novel material history of whiteness, this paper uncovers a continuity of mining modernism concealed in today’s paradigm of surface sustainability.

Cardellicchio, Luciano. “Self-cleaning and colour-preserving efficiency of photocatalytic concrete: case study of the Jubilee Church in Rome, Building Research & Information” in Building Research & Information, Volume 48 (2020).

Fox, John and Nik Nikolov. “Next-Generation Sustainable Architecture: Buildings as Air Pollution Remediators” in Braving a New World: Design Interventions for Changing Climates – Papers from the Subtropical Cities 2013 Fall Conference of the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture (ACSA). Washington, DC: ACSA Press, 2013.

Johnslien, Marte. White to Earth. Oslo: ROM Forlag, 2020.

Krumdieck, S.P., Boichot, R., Gorthy, R. et al. “Nanostructured TiO2 anatase-rutile-carbon solid coating with visible light antimicrobial activity” in Scientific Reports 9, 1883 (2019).

Leydecker, Sylvia. Nano Materials: in Architecture, Interior Architecture and Design. Berlin: Birkhäuser, 2008.

Ritter, Axel. Smart Materials in Architecture, Interior Architecture and Design. Basel: Birkhäuser, 2007.

Wigley, Mark. White Walls, Designer Dresses: The Fashioning of Modern Architecture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1995.

The paper aims to present an ensemble of new theoretical frameworks that would allow historiographies of architecture and urban design to take into consideration the question of migration as a gendered process. Unauthorised immigration has emerged as a generalised fact in all Western economies in the post-Second World War era. In such a context, mobility and migration are constituting elements of urban society. Taking as a starting point the fact that domesticity is a construction of the nineteenth century, the main objective of this paper will be to shed light on how migration challenges the concepts of user, domesticity and citizenship. Saskia Sassen’s understanding of immigration as “a process constituted by human beings with will and agency, with multiple identities and life trajectories beyond the fact of being seen, defined and categorised as immigrants for the purposes of the receiving polity, economy and society” is useful in order to better grasp the impact of migration on the status of public space, leading to a more open conception of it and to the reconceptualization of the notion of place beyond traditional definitions, while challenging the boundaries between what is public, communal and domestic. Migrant incorporation triggers processes of place-making which open up new social and conceptual spaces in the city. Over the last four decades, there is a changing paradigm in migration studies that are gradually paying more and more attention to the gender composition of the migration streams. This trend of studying conjointly gender and migration phenomena becomes more and more dominant. Special attention will be paid to methods of gender and migration scholarship drawing on social science approaches, treating gender as an institutional part of immigration studies and establishing legitimacy for gender in immigration studies. The paper will reflect upon the implications of establishing methods based on the endeavour to merge migration studies, urban studies and gender studies for the perception of the concepts of placemaking, displacement and domesticity, on the one hand, and for how the mobility from city to city is understood within the contemporary transnational context, on the other hand. Particular emphasis will be placed on the relationship between the migration processes and social sustainability.

Heynen, Hilde, “Modernity and Domesticity: Tensions and Contradictions,” in Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar, eds., Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture (London; New York: Routledge, 2005), 12.

Nawyn, Stephanie J., “Gender and Migration: Integrating Feminist Theory into Migration Studies,” in Sociology Compass 4, no. 9 (2010): 750.

Saarikangas, Kirsi, Liisa Horelli, “Modern Home, Environment, and Gender: Built, Planned, and Lived Spaces in Post-war Finland,” in Alexandra Staub, ed., The Routledge Companion to Modernity, Space and Gender (London; New York: Routledge, 2018), 44.

Sinke, Suzanne M., “Gender and Migration: Historical Perspectives,” in The International Migration Review 40, no. 1 (2006): 82.

‘Do not fight forces, use them.’
Buckminster Fuller (American Architect 1895 – 1983)

Fundamentally, the core function of architecture is to define interiority from exteriority, with the intention of reshaping harsh or inhospitable conditions into comfortable environments of inhabitation, the meso-environment: warmth, coolth, dry, wet, dark, light, and secure.  These alterations to atmospheric conditions of the meso-environment remains a question of energetics.  In American Building 2, James Marston Fitch recognizes architecture as an instrument capable of modulating energy flows responsible for the meso-environment atmosphere and subsequently requested the discipline of architecture judge buildings through their performance.¹  These assertions published by Fitch’s in 1947 were not aimed at climate change or energy demands, but instead were concentrated on architectural accountability.  The core lecture course Environment | Building | Systems (E|B|S) acknowledges Fitch’s request and posits the methods and techniques used to shape interior environmental conditions cannot be conceived in isolation, but, instead as a collective of interconnected decisions– a system thinking approach.

Through a union of lectures, workshops, hands-on exercises and physical testing, the E|B|S course introduces students to the looming energy and environmental issues facing the discipline of architecture.  Course content is delivered explicitly through the lens of energy, reframing investigations in architectural precedents, proposals and analysis lest by formal interests but instead through performative measures.  Operating as a supporting course to the technical and integrated studios, design ideas are tested, interrogated, and analyzed as students are exposed to the successes and failures of their architectural strategies.

The paper Performative Architecture: Outcome of Assumptions, will focus on the evolving curriculum within the E|B|S course; specifically two exercises employing physical testing and environmental metering– a Climate Walk and a Foam-Box-Model– linking atmospheric conditions with design decisions through quantifiable data of thermal modulation.  Through a series of systematic iterations investigating color, shading elements, thermal mass and phase change materials students learn how to manipulate the temperature profile of the meso-environment through form and material.  The physical testing provides quantifiable empirical data to otherwise assumed outcomes of design decisions. Ultimately, these exercises implement a rewarding process to design decisions that reinforce performative form augmenting the relationship between form and the interior temperature profiles.  The outcomes in the E|B|S course position energy and environment as design drivers influencing formal explorations, spatial configuration, and material selection directly translating to studio projects.  The primary course objective is to provide emerging students methods and techniques to address the imminent pressures of climate change through performative architecture⁴

‘Man’s energy and health depend in large measure on the direct effects of his environment.’
Victor Olgyay (Architect 1910 – 1970)

Finally, an underlying but equally critical impetus to the class curriculum is the practice of Consortium Community. Through the development of a simple algorithm; a range of learning parameters that each student may experience during this current expanded modalities are analyzed and sorted to create equitable learning communities. These communities are composed of ten students and utilized for class exercises to build and disseminate knowledge.

¹ Marston James. American Building 2: The Environmental Forces That Shape It. Houghton Mifflin Co., 1972.

 ²Olgyay, Victor, et al. Design with Climate: Bioclimatic Approach to Architectural Regionalism – New and Expanded Edition. Revised, Princeton University Press, 2015.

³ Banham, Reyner. The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment. 2nd ed., The University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Core-sampling has long been used as a method to uncover hidden conditions by archeologists, geologists or glaciologist (or medical doctors, on a much smaller scale of biopsy) by physically extracting fragments of the natural and built elements embedded into their contextual situations as a coherent object. This investigative process, instrumental to understanding the various complex strata, served as a generator for several architectural design studios. The concept of core-sampling was used to investigate specific buildings and larger urban conditions, in order to map, reveal, and muse upon the past, present and future of a complex, messy multi-dimensional construct that is an architecture that has been in use, misuse or disuse for a number of decades.

Unlike architectural analysis techniques, core-sampling is not reductive. A “core-sample” consists of layers of material, fragments of details, debris, bits of color, space, and even time. The isolation of a sample from its larger spatial and temporal context revealed relationships formed by time, serendipity, use and decay, instead of pure design intent, form, or technology. The goal of this analysis was to re-introduce context, place, history and memory via (constructed) core artifacts so that the layers of derelict, mundane, unremarkable built form could be considered as geological and anthropological artifacts, and the temporal and material stratigraphy of a historic building or a city can be operated on by an architect in the present.

A large part of the curriculum was dedicated to designing and representing the architectural core-sampling processes. Core-sampling suggests operations at full scale. In drawing and modelling a fraction of building or of a city, weight and gravity, texture and grain, color and decay, as well as occasional contaminants became problematic and generative. The stratified layers of latent history and the imaginary emerged as analytical tools and as self-sufficient objects, providing material (physical and conceptual) for the narratives inspired by “extracted” cores (artifacts) and for the genesis of an architecture simultaneously of the future and of the past.

The paper will present the idea of an architectural core-sampling as an analysis and representation technique on the examples of work in two design studios. One dealt exclusively with a factory building, constructed in phases over the last 100 years in a small post-industrial town, now so contaminated that its preservation, as well as its disuse, is guaranteed by the virtue of its environmental degradation. The other took on a large north-American post-industrial city as a multi-cultured and multi-layered environment in which core-sampling was used to probe the possibilities of operating within the strata normally out of scale and reach to architects. While dramatically abstract, the idea of removing a manageable sample of a building or a whole city that contains not only built form but its temporal aura, traces of its users, immediate and accumulated climatic conditions, etc., seems to be a productive step toward an architecture that is not purely formal- or material- or economy-driven, but that of a holistic construct in tune with the changes in its cultural, temporal, and climatic environments.

Otero-Pailos, Jorge, Erik Langdalen, Thordis Arrhenius (eds.), Experimental Preservation, Lars Mueller, 2016

Ruskin, John, The Seven Lamps of Architecture, Smith, Elder & Co, 1849

DeSilvey, Caitlin. Curated Decay: Heritage beyond Saving. Minneapolis, Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 2017

This paper outlines and discusses a number of novel pedagogical strategies developed for a recent First Year Design Studio at [redacted]. The global climate and resource crises are calling for paradigm shifts in the way we design, build, and manage our physical environment. Importantly, those paradigm shifts also fundamentally challenge the way we teach architecture. The studio aims to introduce students to the issues, elements, processes and interdependencies of both sustainability (environment, climate, politics) and architectural design (geometry, materiality, form, structure).

The ON PAPER First Year Design Studio aims to challenge our understanding of paper, engaging it both in theory and practice, as medium and material, as mediator and actor. Throughout the semester, paper creates the foundation and constitutes the common thread which we use to dissect architecture, pedagogy, and spatial exploration while training the skills, methods and tools of the discipline, as well as critical and proactive student minds. In this context, paper is understood as a practical and widely available resource that is easy to manipulate with basic tools, which is essential during a pandemic.

The studio loosely borrows and appropriates pedagogical strategies developed by Josef Albers in his Vorkurs at the Bauhaus [1], which themselves are based on the work of Friedrich Fröbel and Japanese Origami Traditions. However, it aims to drastically augment abstract-geometric and analytical “Bauhausian” investigations and digital paper-folding explorations [2] by imbuing assignments with new relevant narratives for creative exploration and critical reflection. One assignment, for example, playfully introduces the notion of environment and performance: utilizing origami and kirigami techniques, students manipulate a planar sheet of paper into a complex and performative surface. The addition of environmental forces such as wind, light, shade, cold, heat, sound, scent, or vapor introduces new design objectives that address environmental performance. A later assignment argues for material as an active participator in the design process: materials are perpetually invented, designed, re-designed, fabricated, or augmented, challenging the very nature of the material, its structural and chemical composition, economic business models and most often aesthetics. Based on haptic qualities (fluffy, spongy, rough, cracked, thorny, granular, smooth, viscous), students are asked to manipulate the materiality of paper and its composition of matter with the goal to investigate, react to and enforce the many physical and aesthetic qualities paper might have. The resulting paper-based material systems in each of the two above mentioned exercises create playful dialogues between performance, geometry, proportion, material, structure, and design concept.

A total of five assignments and their results will be presented in this paper, historically contextualized, and pedagogically analyzed. Each of the exercises incrementally introduces new architectural concepts related to environment, body, material, culture, landscape, spatial tectonics, and representation. As the semester progresses, project narratives are layered, expanding a student’s understanding of architecture as a complex set of abstracted, reciprocal – geometric, proportional, formal, performative, constructed and natural – relationships.

[1] Foster, Hal, Terence A. Senter, Hattula Moholy-Nagy, Nicholas Fox Weber, and Michael White. Albers and Moholy-Nagy: From the Bauhaus to the New World. Yale University Press, 2006.

[2] Greg Lynn (Ed.). (1993). AD: Folding in architecture (Vol. 102). Academy Editions Limited.

Contemporary design pedagogy has failed to produce architects that can operate effectively within today’s time-based global crises. Embedded in (and dependent on) industries where ‘permanence’ is measured in 10-30 year warranties and sustainability is achieved by moving points around a spreadsheet, architecture has internalized many of these misconceptions about the nature of time. By considering only time-span, architects have trapped themselves in a false dichotomy, perceiving structures to be either temporary or permanent. The type of architecture produced exists asynchronously to the vast temporal scale and complexity of the global climate crisis, and challenges the seemingly inextricable link between architecture and time. The profession must reevaluate this relationship through the creation of a new pedagogy, educating a generation of practitioners that can think differently about time. This project, Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall, focuses on rethinking the true beginning of the design profession, the moment of inception, the first-year design studio.

Design education’s formidable legacy of first-year studio exercises, from the Nine Square Grid Problem to The Cube and The Hidden Room, have historically inducted students into the profession using critical principles of abstraction and composition to explore tectonics and form. However, these same exercises have effectively stifled the aptitude of students for temporal thinking through their insistence on static conventions of orthography. The media students work through directly impacts how they think and grow as designers. In order for the next generation of architects to engage the time-based urgencies of the Anthropocene, architectural education must engage a new critical eye on time and develop tools and methods for exploring its cyclical, recursive nature.

Pedagogy of the Fourth Wall is structured as a fictional studio course founded on a working methodology focused on time and perception, rather than program and form. This new framework around time mandates the use of time-based media at the very beginning of the design process. Students work through video and sound to employ abstract structures of composition through the montage and manipulation of image over time. A series of prompts dictate the resolution, duration and temporal rate of the working media, encouraging students to experiment with specific structures of cyclical time. Initially addressing foundational principles of composition and rhythm, the prompts eventually broaden to encompass the perceptual affordance of matter and energy. The studio generates new, productive forms of abstraction that directly engage the underlying temporal principles of environmental exchange and material entropy on multiple scales.

The impact of propagating this pedagogy through an entire architectural education could produce a fleet of architects that are capable of addressing architecture through time. How could this then redirect the course of the profession?

Franzen, Ulrich, Gómez Alberto Pérez, and Kim Shkapich. Education of an Architect: a Point of View, the Cooper Union School of Art & Architecture. New York: Monacelli Press, 1999.