Liquid states and concrete uncertainties

Abstract

Through the lens of a specific material, the paper advocates a risk-based methodology in design-research, teaching and practice. In search of alternative to more immediate design protocols and diagrammatic thinking, pressuring architectural education today, new ways of making are sought for making ways. Concrete as process rather than concrete simply as material sets an empirical endeavor in prototyping, where risk is averted by an urgency to gradually anticipate a high plausibility for failure. From active experimentation with the material (liquid to solid formations) and its properties (pressure and leakages), the curious mind is provoked cautiously to failure and is left no choice but to reinstate a ‘No Safety Factor’ approach, if creativity is to be prolonged once more. Incremental trial and errors experiments in formwork design, closely engaged with a short-lived liquid mass in space stretch at most a design process opportune to physical discoveries yet prone to uncertainties; a potent diversion to resist any predicable formations. The current (formwork) findings from a live design-research project, titled ‘New Orders (NO), in search of a new point-block diagram for Hong Kong ’, manifest some of the claims raised above and further speculate from case studies in studio teaching. NO projects a series of alternative structures for housing through a prototyping process. Nine proto-structures are developed through the conception and realization of columns cast in concrete. The series explores specific structural articulations at 1to1 scale which are further architecturally tested as speculative towers for urban living at 1to100 scale. At 1 to 1 scale, new techniques of formwork design, which employ a range of materials (hard and soft) are put forward in an effort to anticipate more responsiveness to the concrete properties and to strive for more fluidity lacking between tectonic elements currently. The point of departure for this project is the ubiquitous and rudimentary column-slab system, still dictating its way at most building scales. By revisiting the work of the early ‘structural rationalists’ (E. Torroja, F. Candela, P.L. Nervi, H. Isler, R. Maillard, E. Dieste, et al.), NO considers the transformation of structural languages to revive an architecture for vertical living (point-block). While these structural mavericks took reinforced concrete to the limit of what the new material could do both structurally and spatially, their pioneering work responded, for the most part, to lower building scales and to singular programs (i.e. civic, cultural, religious); all but Housing. NO revives the dialogue in the context of high density Asian living. The dialogue is being pursued with new formwork techniques that break the homogenizing influence of concrete. The overarching design-research proposition is to reassert structural design, construction procedures and material properties as the main driver for novel spatial organizations in a way that helps break from the monotony of current systems. In support of risk-taking, NO argues for design anticipation through non-linear ways of making; more specifically by concocting temporary apparatuses or falsework (in the case of concrete formwork) that refrain and swerve the Maker away from that first impulsive sketch.