Book Review: Leftover Rightunder

Leftover Rightunder: Finding Architectural Potential in Found Materials by Wes Janz
Half Letter Press, 2013
Paperback, 96 pages



I've often written that small things don't necessarily equate with small impacts, be it buildings or other projects. It's the ideas embedded within a design that are important, not necessarily their physical size or visibility. The work of Wes Janz certainly fits within this statement, given his predilection for small projects (heck, his studio is even called onesmallproject), as well as the fact Leftover Rightunder is a compact expression of his various studies, installations and buildings that are focused on "finding architectural potential in found materials."


[Green Springs | Photo: Wes Janz]

Flipping through the book is like rummaging through the mind of Janz, a professor at Ball State University in Indiana. The book starts with the "leftover lexicon," a collection of terms (some of them defined, most of them not) that offer "a more useful vocabulary" from the normal way of thinking about architecture. But the list of terms gives way to photos of dumpsters, "small architectures" and other found objects, only to pick up later in the book, interspersed with student projects, installations, an essay, more found objects, and a garage built almost entirely from pallets (more on that later). The book bounces all over the place, but somehow it works. Kudos should go to book designer Jerome Daksiewicz, who took Janz's voluminous photographic documentation (over 9,000 photos on Flickr!) and distilled it into a readable book that really stresses the huge amount of waste in the United States that could be put to good use.


[Arbor in Indianapolis | Photo: Wes Janz]

But what to do with an old couch? Or a mattress? Or pallets? These are the three main sources of material for Janz and his students. One of the most impressive projects in the book is Green Springs, an exhibition at the Sheldon Swope Art Museum in Terre Haute, Indiana, where designer Azin Valy and fabricator Brian McCutcheon worked with Janz to fashion trellises for plants from old bed springs. Other projects include an arbor made from branches downed by storms and materials from Janz's late parents' house, resulting in a construction "of memory and love."


[Timber Pallet Workshop | Photo: Wes Janz]

About one-half of the book is devoted to pallets, which makes sense given their ubiquitousness, orthogonal shape and materiality; they are much easier to transform into architecture than couches and mattresses. Janz worked with students to fashion pavilions made from pallets, but then he designed a garage made with pallets, what he calls "the first and only permanent building in the United States to be constructed almost entirely of timber pallets and authorized with a building permit." Not only does the small project express Janz's idea of finding potential in found materials (close to 200 million pallets are disposed of every year), it does so beautifully, thanks in part to how it interfaces with other materials – most notably the corrugated translucent plastic on the exterior – but also in how the pallets are detailed, so they don't look simply like pallets slapped on the wall.


[Pallet Garage | Photo: Wes Janz]

Ultimately Janz's work – both his teaching and his architecture – can be seen as an inversion of the usual direction of influence, which goes from first world countries to third world countries. He works the other way around, finding inspiration in the methods of third world countries, where resources are scarce and creativity is a matter of finding the right uses for what is available. As well, materials don't have a limited shelf life, after which they are discarded; they are reconsidered after fulfilling their primary use. Pallets, therefore, are not thrown away after carrying boxes of dry goods, or whatever the case may be, for a period of time; they are fixed up to become walls, floors and even roofs for different types of shelters. It's an admirable position that should be more widespread, and perhaps this small book will help.

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A Few Competitions and Prizes of Note

Built By Women New York City

The Beverly Willis Architecture Foundation received grants from the New York Building Foundation and the New York Council for the Humanities to identify 100 outstanding structures and built environments, either contemporary or historic, designed and/or constructed by women in New York City. You are invited to nominate a woman or yourself using the following criteria:

The structure or built environment must have a woman who was directly responsible for leading the design (architecture, engineering, or landscape) or who led the construction, either from the development or construction management team.

Nominations are open until October 2014.


Breaking New Ground

Breaking New Ground is an international design and ideas competition addressing the urgent affordable housing needs of farmworker and service worker families in the Coachella Valley. Efforts to improve living conditions suffer from a lack of funding and coordination. The competition seeks to address this by harnessing the power of design to envision new precedents, mechanisms, and policies for affordable housing implementation and development, with implications for California and the nation.

Registration opens in October.


The Dead Prize

In the past decade we have seen an explosion of honors and awards for the most innovative and forward thinking solutions. Yet no one recognizes the projects that have caused harm to the environment - designs that are helping shorten our existence on this planet. This is why we created the DEAD prize. Let's recognize the bad, honor the failures and hopefully do something to rectify these designs against humanity.

Nominations happen exclusively via Twitter (for now), with a deadline of November 1.

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Book Review: Torre David

Torre David: Informal Vertical Communities edited by Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner, Urban-Think Tank Chair of Architecture and Urban Design, ETH Zürich; photographs by Iwan Baan
Lars Müller Publishers, 2013
Hardcover, 416 pages



Think of "informal housing" and most likely the slums of cities like Mumbai, Lagos, Rio and Caracas come to mind. Built from corrugated metal, CMUs, plastic and other readily available materials, these informal settlements share a condensed, horizontal orientation, following the land they are built upon. But think of vertical versions of the same and only two places come to mind, at least to me: Kowloon Walled City and Torre David in Hong Kong and Caracas, respectively. Each construction arose from particular conditions of place and time: KWC evolved over about a century by its occupants, thanks to it being located in an in-between zone separate from Chinese and Hong Kong rule; and the unfinished Torre David was occupied by residents due to a number of factors, including the death of its developer David Brillembourg, a contemporaneous economic crash in Venezuela, and a political leader eager to house all of its country's residents. Now that the residents of Torre David have left the downtown tower, it seems like a good time to look at this book that documents the unique conditions of the place.


["Torre David" installation at 2012 Venice Biennale | Photo by John Hill, image source]

The book is a result of Urban Think Tank's (UTT) years spent studying the tower as it evolved from an unfinished part of the skyline to a partially occupied "vertical community," and of Iwan Baan's visual documentation of the place. Their contributions to the project were also made part of the 2012 Venice Architecture Biennale, where Baan's photos were hung on brick walls that echoed those built by residents to "complete" the unfinished tower's exterior walls, and a cafe turned the middle of the Arsenale into a bustling spot. Curator Justin McGuirk, who has just written his own book, Radical Cities, on Torre David and other settlements in Latin America, transplanted the essence of Torre David – the improvisation, the materials, the vitality – to Venice. The Biennale jury was impressed enough to award it the Golden Lion for the Best Project of the International Exhibition Common Ground.


[The unfinished 45-story tower is the third tallest in Caracas | Photo by Iwan Baan, image source]

In order to convey the qualities of the place without the benefit of creating a space that can be occupied temporarily, the book relies on Baan's photographs to a great deal, as well as UTT's descriptions and drawings. Both are necessary to understand the extents of the construction (Torre David, for example, is actually made up of multiple buildings, not just one tower), the layout of the informal residences, how services are integrated into the unfinished building, and how people have improvised homes in 28 of the tower's 45 floors. To put it another way, where the drawings describe the place, the photograph's describe the lives within the place. In this sense, the two means of visualization are necessary to each other.


[A basketball court has been inserted in the gap between the tower and the parking garage | Photo by Iwan Baan, image source]

It's important to note that UTT's efforts weren't limited to capturing Torre David and its residents as a situation, nor were they interested in promoting the residents' efforts as the ideal. UTT made proposals for making the settlement permanent, focused primarily on sustainability, so that all of the tower's floors could be used and each resident would have safe access to water and power. But as recent news has made clear, the squatter's lives inside Torre David were numbered. Initial rumors indicated that a Chinese bank bought the building and thereafter evicted the residents, with the goal of restoring the building to its original function as an office building and bank center. Yet other reports say the buildings will be torn down and replaced with cultural buildings. Whatever the case, most of the roughly 1,000 families have been moved to new housing outside of Caracas.


[Only one stair is available for ascending the tower | Photo by Iwan Baan, image source]

That the book/exhibition/project did not result in getting the residents and city to work together to make this iteration of Torre David more permanent does not mean the book is meaningless. Far from it. The book's greatest value – much like Greg Girard's and Ian Lambot's great book, City of Darkness, on KWC – is to break down the myths of the place (that it's crime-ridden, unsafe, etc.) and describe to readers how it really worked. That Torre David had security guards on the ground floor, a community hierarchy of leadership, community services within the building, small business catering to transit and other needs (the list goes on), shows that there was a great deal of organization in the seemingly chaotic and improvisatory creation. Those traits, to a greater or lesser degree, will follow in the families new homes, even as the circumstances will be very different.


[Inside one of the units in the tower | Photo by Iwan Baan, image source]

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Today's archidose #774

Here are a couple projects in Poland photographed by Maciek Lulko.

Brama Poznania ICHOT ("Poznan Gate" Interactive center of Cathedral Island, 2014) in Poznań by Ad Artis Architects:






Zespół Szkolno-Przedszkolny nr 12 (School and kindergarden nr 12, 2009) in Wroclaw by Biuro Projektów R2 Rubik Lesław:








To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

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Today's archidose #773

Here are some photos of the Market Hall and Central Squares (2012) in Ghent, Belgium, by Robbrecht & Daem, photographed by Maurice Tjon a Tham. Previously the building was featured as Today's archidose #664.

















To contribute your Flickr images for consideration, just:

:: Join and add photos to the archidose pool, and/or
:: Tag your photos archidose

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A Tale of Two Chicagos

There's the Midwestern "Windy City," "City of Big Shoulders," "Second City," etc.:

[Photo by John Hill]

And then there's the "Mideastern" Chicago, an urban warfare training site for the IDF in the Negev desert:

[Chicago #2, Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin, 2005 | Photo source]

The Midwestern Chicago's name is "derived from a French rendering of the Native American word shikaakwa, translated as 'wild onion' or 'wild garlic'," according to Wikipedia. In the 17th century the area that would become Chicago was referred to as "Checagou" and "Chicagoua," but by the 1833 incorporation of the city it took on its familiar spelling.

The Middle East Chicago, on the other hand, "[invokes] the bullet-ridden myth of the American city," according to Eyal Weizman in his fascinating, must-read book Hollow City: Israel's Architecture of Occupation (Verso, 2007). The fake city, whose creation dates back to the mid-1980s and the Israeli occupation of Lebanon (yet it has morphed and expanded over the decades to resemble Gaza settlements and other urban contexts of battle), was documented by photographers Adam Broomberg and Oliver Chanarin in the book simply titled Chicago (SteidlMACK, 2008).

I'll admit I'm late in discovering the fake Chicago (Cabinet wrote about it in a 2006 issue, as did Pruned in 2009, among many others I'm sure), but suffice to say the photographers managed to bring the non-place to the attention of a global audience; they were aided by Weizman, no less, who wrote an essay for the photo book. Pointing out the existence of this other Chicago is also timely, of course, given what has been taking place in Isreal and the Gaza Strip for the last month or so.

And while the Chicagoan in me wishes another name was chosen for the military training ground in the desert, my travels over the years, when I've met people overseas and mention the city I called home for three decades, have made me realize how much the Capone-era past of Chicago sticks in people's minds.

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The Post Is Hating Contemporary Architecture

The New York Post published a couple pieces over the weekend that openly criticize projects dedigned by famous architects. First is an editorial on the Eisenhower Memorial in Washington, DC, designed by Frank Gehry. The yet-to-be-built project has been mired in approvals and budget cuts, and hampered by some neotraditional opposition with the Eisenhowitr family on its side. But for the Post the Memorial is marked by "a design process flawed from the outset," leading to a design that "ignores Ike’s achievements as both general and president," and ultimately "obscure[s] rather than enhance[s Ike's] historic achievements."

More premature criticism (before the project is completed) comes from Steve Cuozzo, in an opinion piece where he blasts Santiago Calatrava's Transportation Hub under construction (my photo is from Friday) at the World Trade Center as a "4 billion boondoggle, ... a hideous waste of public money." More than the admittedly bloated budget, Cuozzo hates what the design looks like: he calls it "The Calatrasaurus" with "scary 'wings'" and describes it as "LOL-ugly." This is hardly nuanced architectural criticism.

A couple statements stand out in Cuozzo's piece: "a self-indulgent monstrosity wildly out of proportion to everything around it, and 100% aloof from the World Trade Center’s commercial and commemorative purposes." And: "today’s 40,000 daily PATH riders make do very well with the current temporary station." I'd argue respectively that, while the skeletal form contrasts with everything around it, the building bridges between the voids of the Memorial and the tall skyscrapers above (it's actually close in scale to the St. Paul's Chapel across Church Street); the site is in need of some relief from commerce and commemoration; and just because the temporary terminal served its purpose, that doesn't mean it should do so indefinitely or not be replaced with something more uplifting.

If anything, Couzzo's commentary shows how much the tide has turned against Calatrava. Even he was enthusiastic about the design, praising its "lyrical buoyancy" and "optimistic and resilient aesthetic." But lots of bad press about the PATH station and projects in Spain have made architects and the general public critical of Calatrava's projects, especially when the budgets balloon.

I bring up these two articles* because buildings by Gehry and Calatrava, and other famous architects for that matter, deserve some scrutiny, if anything so people are not so easily swept away by their name brands, but this is not the way to do it. Architecture opinion pieces deserve some intelligent thinking and clear statements rather than superficial judgments wrapped in hyperbole (this applies more to the piece on Calatrava than Gehry). Of course, should I really expect such thoughtful commentary from the Post? 

*Since I'm writing this post on Blogger's bare-bones mobile app, which doesn't appear to allow links within the text, here are the links to the articles discussed above:

"We Still Like Ike": http://nypost.com/2014/08/02/we-still-like-ike/

"New York’s $4B shrine to government waste and idiocy": http://nypost.com/2014/08/02/new-yorks-4b-shrine-to-government-waste-and-idiocy/

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