Broken World Building – Future prospects for a Fragile Architecture

Date
30.05.2024 - 31.05.2024
Time
09.00
Price
Free with signup - 9-15 both days

The international symposium Broken World Building examines how repair, care and adaptation can lead to a new conceptualisation of architectural production.

By challenging building completion as a single end‐point for design, the international symposium asks how actions of care and repair can form the basis of a new critical sustainability discourse.

The symposium brings together novel interdisciplinary perspectives from practice and theory to discuss the foundations of this emerging discourse. By framing ideas of fragility and impermanence as novel axioms for architectural production, we ask how we can imagine building as an expanded process of continual construction. The symposium is structured across three key questions:

  • Broken World Building: Framing fragility and impermanence as new questions for architecture 
    Architecture is traditionally cast in the image of the permanent and durable. How can new discourse informed by limited life‐spans, circularity and reuse challenge the foundations of architectural thinking?

  • Material Value: Care & Repair as practices of circular construction
    Care and repair are key principles of the circular design framework conceptualised through processes of material cascading (the practices of refitting, reusing, repairing, and recycling materials). But current industrial building practice cast these as consequences of failure. How can new frameworks allow us to understand care and repair as constructive middle‐points and fundamentally integrated with design practice?

  • Material Practice: Design for Repair & the ideation of continual construction
    Care and repair are mainly performed outside the pretext of design and by actors removed from the initial process of fabrication. How can we learn from existing processes of care and repair through the specifics of surveying, building pathology and remediation, and how can these be translated into languages of design and processes of fabrication?

The symposium presents a wide spectrum of keynote presentations and case studies exploring the emergent vocabulary of care and repair. From theoretical overviews to real‐world practical cases and speculative arts‐based presentations, all contribute their unique perspectives on broken world thinking and fragility in architecture from material, societal, social and technological perspectives across the fields of cultural heritage, anthropology, self‐build and fabrication studies.

With this interdisciplinary approach, we aim to conceive and initiate a new sustainability discourse for the built environment that assigns broader social and ecological responsibilities to architecture.

Keynotes

Steven Jackson, Professor - Cornell University

Steven Jackson, is a Professor of Information Science and Science and Technology Studies and Vice‐Provost for Academic Innovation at Cornell University.

His work combines theoretical and methodological traditions from pragmatism, critical theory, and the interpretive social sciences to study how people build and maintain order, value and meaning in and with the worlds around them. He’s especially interested in problems of infrastructure, repair, and hope, and the times and places where new computational practices (always plural!) meet shifting social and material worlds, with implications for sustainability, inequality, and collectivity.

His most recent venture is the Computing On Earth Lab, an experimental collaboration that brings together social scientists, humanists, artists and engineers to rethink the material and planetary foundations of computing.

For more information, see: https://infosci.cornell.edu/content/jackson

Silke Langenberg, Professor - ETH Zürich

Dr. Silke Langenberg is full professor for Construction Heritage and Preservation at ETH Zurich. Her professorship is associated to the Institute for Preservation and Construction History as well as to the Institute of Technology in Architecture.

Silke Langenberg studied architecture in Dortmund (D) and Venice (I). At ETH Zurich, she addresses theoretical and practical challenges in the inventory and preservation of monuments as well as younger building stocks.

Since her engineering dissertation on ”Buildings of the Boom Years”, her research focusses on the rationalization of building processes as well as the development, repair and long‐term preservation of serially, industrially and digitally manufactured constructions.

One current research and exposition project with the title “A Future for whose Past?” deals with questions related to the heritage of minorities, fringe groups and people without a lobby.

For more information, see: www.langenberg.arch.ethz.ch

 

Kiel Moe - Architect

Kiel Moe, FAIA, FAAR is an architect, builder, and graduate student in forest ecology. In recognition of his design and research endeavors related to the energetic and material basis of building, he was awarded a Fulbright Distinguished Chair in Helsinki; the Gorham P. Stevens Rome Prize in Architecture at the American Academy in Rome, the Architecture League of New York Prize, and the American Institute of Architects National Young Architect Award.

He has published nine books including Unless: The Construction Ecology of Seagram Building; Empire, State & Building; Wood Urbanism: From the Molecular to the Territorial; Insulating Modernism; and Convergence: An Architectural Agenda for Energy.

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Centre Pompidou
The Corviale House Estate
The German Pavillon, Venice Biennale 2023
Diversify Now!
3D‐printing biopolymer facade panels
Historic Building Conservation

Cases

  • The Pompidou Centre (F) - Adrien Paporello, Director, Architect, ATA Architects.
    Adrian Paporello, the project lead on the recently finished first stage of the Pompidou
    Centre renovation, will present and discuss the challenges of preserving and
    repairing recent past, listed buildings.
     
  • The Corviale Housing Estate (IT) - Ruth Baumeister and Carolina Dayer, Associate Professors, Aarhus School of
    Architecture.
    Ruth Baumeister and Carolina Dayer will present their research on maintenance and repair at a resident level at the Corviale Estate in Italy.
     
  • Open for Maintenance (The German Pavillon, Venice Biennale 2023) - Büro Julina Greb.
    Juliane Greb and Petter Krag will present and discuss their thinking behind the 2023
    Venice Pavilion which focuses on repair, care and maintenance.
     
  • Diversify Now! Urban Self-build at Musicon, Roskilde (DK) - Silje Erøy Sollien, Architect Ph.D. Alternative Architectural Ecologies.
    Silje will discuss her postdoc at Vandkunsten Architects, exploring design for self-build and alternate housing typologies for the Musicon neighbourhood in
    Roskilde, Denmark.
     
  • Eco‐Metabolistic Architecture, 3D‐printing biopolymer facade panels (DK) - Ruxandra Chiujdea, Ph.D.fellow, Royal Danish Academy - CITA
    Ruxandra will present her research on design for repair through 3D-printing of biopolymer composites
     
  • Historic Building Conservation, retrofit, and repair in Architecture’s Sustainability (UK) - James Ritson, Senior Academic for Sustainability, University College of Estate
    Management, Reading.
    With a background in historic building conservation, James will present his work to link repair and retrofit in a sustainability context.
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