Openings

Openings represent the weakness within a wall, and constitute the permeable edge where trespass and intrusion are most likely. Doors and windows present the building façade to the outside world and produce the daylight necessary to perform tasks on the inside of the wall – a dichotomy that challenges architects to resolve the sometimes incompatible: organization and available light.

The earliest openings were just that, but mankind found ways to screen the outside with plant materials and animal hides. The discovery of glass (over 5,000 years ago in Mesopotamia, but probably first used by the Romans as a building material in 300 BCE) allowed visual connection with the outside without any of the noise, dust, and thermal discomforts from the raw climate. Window glass remained uncommon until the 1600’s, and only important rooms had glazed openings – other openings had shutters. In 1696 the English placed a tax on windows, ensuring that common people avoided putting windows into unimportant spaces… including bedrooms, servant’s rooms, privies, and anywhere that didn’t require daylight. The tax didn’t end until 1851, when construction of the Crystal Palace demanded the resources of the nation’s glassmakers for a building made entirely of windows.

Glass can make entire walls disappear; the boundary becomes potential and not permanent. This was the intent of Joseph Paxton in 1851 when he designed the Crystal Palace for “The Great Exhibition of the Works of Industry of all Nations.” Celebrating industrial practice and culture, the exposition structure embodied the most advanced technology of its time – an enclosure of 990,000 square feet, 1,851 feet long by 128 feet high, constructed with a frame of cast iron columns and trusses supporting 293,655 individual panes of glass. It was a marvel of engineering. Bill Bryson writes, “Today we are used to encountering glass in volume, but to someone living in 1851 the idea of strolling through cubic acres of airy light inside a building was dazzling…. It would have appeared as delicate and evanescent, as miraculously improbable, as a soap bubble.”

With new technologies, windows have realized greater strength than their nineteenth century predecessors. Windows stiffened with stainless steel splines, laminated with multiple layers of glass and interlayers of Lexan, can resist bullets and blasts, hurricane winds and debris impacts. These armoured plates are no longer the weakest link in the wall, but the one thing they cannot do is… open. Therefore, these may be the riskiest windows of all, demanding mechanical ventilation 100% of the time and eliminating all possibility of egress in an unthinkable scenario. 

Technology provides defenses against other enemies – ultraviolet rays, solar heat gain, and glare. Glass coatings defy climatic foes, improve energy efficiency, and allow windows to expand to previously unrealized sizes. (The largest single window in the world was made for the Dubai Aquarium, measuring 21 feet wide by 18 feet high, comprised of 15 inch-thick acrylic polymer.) 

Walls are made to divide, while openings join together. Without openings we are blind, disconnected from weather, daylight, fresh air, street life, and human congress. Without openings, we would rely on the artificial environment 100% of the time, to heat and cool, dry and humidify, light and color and exhaust our rooms. Studies show that children perform better in daylighted classrooms, with increased productivity, better retention, and improved morale. The only rooms without windows should be uninhabited spaces, for machines and not people.

New Year in Mumbai

My travel companions and I had been on flights for days, travelling from Mississippi to Mumbai.  As we left Heathrow, heading east, we realized not only that we would arrive near midnight on New Year’s Eve, but that we could celebrate the new year in each time zone along the way.  

When we arrived, there was the typical chaos of a foreign airport: unknown customs, money exchange, and baggage retrieval.  The wait for our bags was quite extended, and people were restless to be away with their families; we could hear celebrations outside.  The luggage hall was marble-tiled and quiet with exhaustion, but the muttering began as we waited.  A young man lifted the flap on the conveyor to see if anything was happening, and shouts rose from inside.  I had time to see open bags, and frantic searches by the baggage handlers before the flap was lowered, but the bags began to arrive immediately afterwards.  Two of our group had locked their suitcases, and those locks had been broken and the contents overturned.  We would discover later that all electronic items had been pilfered, but only from the locked cases.  My unlocked bag was untouched.

We exited into a rush of taxi-wallahs, all clamoring for our business.  We were to spend one night in an airport hotel, and the only man in the group, an older Sri Lankan returning to Asia for the first time in years, went back inside to find coins and call for the shuttle.  That left four young women on the curb as the midnight hour struck, surrounded by men chattering in English, Hindi, and all manner of dialects.  Our general lack of enthusiasm hardly dampened theirs, until the pink shuttle bus arrived from the Orchid Hotel, and they melted away. 

The short ride from the airport to the hotel fulfilled all of our stereotypical expectations of India.   The slums of Dharavi are right there.  Even in darkness we could see a tremendous gap in the city fabric: handmade enclosures, common water taps, children sleeping in the open, watchmen guarding refuse piles, the clutter and density of human inhabitation within circumstances hardly imaginable to us.  It was our New Year’s Eve, but not their Diwali celebration, so there were occasional fireworks, clusters of people sitting around fires, and children playing late in the darkness; all this activity contained on one side of a smooth new highway lined with billboards for cell phones and Bollywood movies.  The infrastructure was built to get tourists from the city to the airport on new tarmac, and a wall to hide the teeming informal settlements from view was sure to follow.

We pulled up at the Orchid, and it was as if we had magically teleported right back to London.  We entered the lobby’s multi-story atrium - a party was underway in the second-level disco, and there were beautiful Eurasian women in high heels and short skirts, accompanied by young men in bespoke suits, drinking champagne and laughing.  The elevator was filled with these ephemeral creatures, so we left the girl who had overpacked two huge duffels, and humped our single cases up three flights of wool-carpeted stairs.  At the rooms, we were confused by the eco-feature requiring the room card key to be inserted for lights and ventilation – it was 2001 by only a few minutes, but none of us had ever seen this system before.  The amenities were fabulous – spa settings on the tub and showerheads, fluffy towels, and of course, Western toilets. 

It would be a long time until we saw such luxury again, as we traversed the country.  We became accustomed to the juxtaposition of abject poverty and profligate luxury, between the extensive natural resources and intensive degradation of the land.  We stayed in private homes, racetrack clubs, restored boat houses, political guesthouses, ashrams, and in Pondicherry we were guests in the Governor’s Mansion.  Every place told a story from a civilization more ancient than our own and a place long inhabited.  Our preconceptions were gone by our second day in India, in this puzzling place where everyone had a cell phone and no one a landline, where infrastructure was elaborate except where it didn’t exist, where neighbors across state lines couldn’t communicate unless they did so in English.  Adaptability is the most useful thing to pack.

Indeterminate Space

As young adults, most of us spent a lot of time in transitional spaces - neither within nor without, incompletely lit and arbitrarily organized - occupying them in ways that mirrored our own lack of fixedness in opinion, friendship, ambition, and lifestyle.

Transitional spaces are not only transportation spaces, but there is  overlap; bus stops are the last resort of those without autos, but so are sidewalks, stations, and bridges.  Rooftops, empty lots, childless playgrounds, embankments, docks, trails, underpasses… young people spend a lot of time outdoors, seeking a new view of the world, or the company of others, or the adventures denied in their everyday pursuits of school, and chores, and modesty.

As a teenager, I spent a lot of time outdoors at night.  My friends and I would linger in stadium stands, parks and soccer fields.  We were tied to trees on the hillsides of Tantalus, saved later by older brothers and treated to a terrifying ride down the mountain in the back of a pickup.  We traversed hotel balconies on the eleventh floor, strolling through empty guest rooms to escape, still unscathed.  We would dare each other to slip naked beneath the crashing waves, to be the last one out in the freezing darkness before bodysurfing in to shore.  There were never consequences. We reveled in the terror of nighttime exploits, tired of the programmed spaces of classroom, chapel, gymnasium, bedroom – every room with a purpose, but none for dreams.

Humans speak more freely in darkness than in daylight.  Movement and wind, unknown shadows and sounds inspire confidences in one another.  Sharing the experience of deprivation, triumph and lust releases inhibitions.  Young people need emotion, the overwhelming acknowledgement of perception, the rush of blood that accompanies fear and trials. 

We never grow out of the need for spaces of potential, for unprogrammed and loosely defined places.  In cities, rapid deindustrialization and shrinking urban populations have supplied new space for occupation by informal economies and activities.  The cracked lots previously for car sales, warehouses emptied of their goods, and apartments long unserviced by power and water, encourage spontaneity and artistic experimentation.

In recent months, we have seen the occupation of public spaces by a vocal new crowd, united not by age or faith or even intent, but by an emotion that is no longer willing to be limited by fear.  In spaces across the globe, with virtuous slogans of wealth-sharing and equality, justice and rage begat by the lack of corporate accountability.  “Representation through occupation” reads one of the signs.  Sparked in part by the similar intensity of the Arab Spring uprisings against power and tyranny, Occupy Wall Street appeals to those who were too young for the sit-ins of the 1960’s and the civil rights movement, but who wish to contribute their time to an ideal, albeit one with a still-undefined outcome.  The tent cities and bonfires, the overwhelming visual attack of handmade signs and vandalism of corporate identity, have returned these planned and formal green spaces to indeterminacy.  The protestors have made places of conflict out of the formal lands developed by commerce and government, and have created the necessary incompleteness in the system to allow spontaneity to thrive.

Architects continue to experiment in making indeterminate space, especially within places of culture, loci of creativity.  Provocative spaces for learning such as SANAA’s Rolex Center in Lausanne, empty the frame of the wall with floor to ceiling glazing, and establish circulation paths that curl in waves beneath the feet of university students.  The fiercely iconographic patterning of the façade and dogmatic geometry of the CCTV tower in Beijing by Rem Koolhaas, “promotes the void as the structuring agency of the new urban form,” according to the New York Times.  We work awfully hard to capture and collect playfulness in structures that must act as anything but. 

We desire the rough achievement of gaining safe ground, but only after experiencing a tremor of thrill, a doubt, a connection, a surprise.  The best spaces have unclear corners, hidden lighting, tangible air movement, sudden views back to where you have already been…. We need look no further than our nearest abandoned warehouse for inspiration.

Treasure

The most efficient way to preserve the potential for life, paradoxically, is cold and snow, darkness and ice. The most treasured resources of mankind are the seeds of crops once grown across the globe in small gardens and wild preserves, in forests and wetlands, along river valleys and canyon cliffs. Collected, they offer a glimpse of the potential to fulfill dreams: cures for animal and plant diseases, insect-resistance, drought-tolerance, explosive fertility and exceptional harvests. Seeds are stored by the Global Crop Diversity Trust in an ark – a secure, underground cavern devoted to preserving the world’s plant resources – in the tiny island of Spitsbergen in the arctic Svalbard archipelago of Norway. The treasures are duplicate samples of seeds held in 1400 other gene banks, and in the event of cataclysmic losses of crops and caches worldwide, could be the last survivors. 

The site was chosen because of the permafrost, which naturally maintains temperatures close to freezing year-round, reducing the possibility of seed sprouting. The site is 130 m above sea level, and the island has no history of tectonic activity. The sandstone bedrock of the tunneled site shields the seeds from harmful radiation or exposure to light, with limited supply of oxygen to further slow deterioration. The vaults can store 4.5 million samples, from the estimated 1.5 million distinctly varied crops thought to exist (in 2009, at the one year anniversary of its dedication, it held approximately one-third of known crop species.) The Global Seed Vault’s mission is to provide a safety net against accidental loss of diversity, whether through neglect, mismanagement, destruction, war, fire, or other events, either natural or manmade.

Norway’s Directorate of Public Construction and Property led the construction of the vault within an old copper mine, only 800 miles from the North Pole. Crops such as peas may survive for 20-30 years, but sunflowers and grains may survive for hundreds of years. Even with the protections of the site and structure, the seeds will one day lose the ability to germinate. A constant stream of replacement seeds are supplied by taking seeds from the stored samples, planting, harvesting, and replacing them in storage.

The vault is unassailable, beyond the reach of accidental harm and with limited access for intentional acts. But this is not an architecture which can become a model for most communities, or can accommodate most functions. The exposed entrance is beautiful, logical, and practical… but the majority of the project exists in extreme temperatures, low oxygen, and severely restricted light. This prototype exemplifies “inhumane” conditions, but it is not for humans, after all.

The treasures with which we live are susceptible to loss, through burglary and vandalism, flood and fire. As the creators of shelter for humans and their goods, architects take on the mantle of public health, safety, and welfare. We rejoice in light and air, moderate temperatures and access to the outside. We consider security, but not at the expense of beauty. People cannot live in suspended animation like the seeds of Svalbard.

“Not what we have But what we enjoy, constitutes our abundance.” Epicurus

Abundance

Feverish accumulation of strange and wonderful things began with the Renaissance exploration of the world in the fifteenth century, and exploded in contests between philosophers, popes, and emperors to field collections of botany, geology, alchemy, medicine, and archaeology.  The catalogue of Collection of Rarities assembled by John Tradescant in the 1630’s documents curiosities such as: “Nunnes penitential Girdles of Haire, A Bracelet made of the thighes of Indian flyes, Edward the Confessors knit gloves, Divers night-caps made of grasse, A little Box with the 12 Apostles in it, Variety of Chains, made of the teeth of Serpents, A book of all the Stories in the glasse-windowes of Sancta Sophia lim'd in vellum by a Jew, Flea chains of silver and gold with 300 links a piece and yet but an inch long, A piece of the Stone of Sarrigo-Castle where Helen of Greece was born….”

Cabinets of Curiosities were assembled as symbolic demonstrations of power and influence.  The urge toward accumulation, and the juxtapositions that resulted from the excess, fueled collectors’ passion.  Inspiration found in the random placement of serpent’s teeth and nuns’ girdles led to more careful cataloguing of the provenance and history of the objects, with annotations of botanical, medical, and skeletal remains. Haphazardness made possible only by the sheer volume of objects gave way to scientific classification.  Matching like with like may have started as a parlor game, but the groupings that organize artifacts through taxonomies of time, place, antecedents, or other natural relationships were later encoded in the nomenclature of science.

As collections grew, in place of a cabinet, architecture became the spatial organizer and the generator for contemplation about relationships between objects and systems.  

The Gesta Grayorum (1594), a court revel performed before Queen Elizabeth I and attributed to Francis Bacon, described an imaginary research facility containing “a most perfect and general library” and “a spacious, wonderful garden” filled with wild and cultivated plants and surrounded by a menagerie, aviary, freshwater lake, and saltwater lake. Spaces for living nature were complemented by a museum of science, art, and technology – “a goodly huge cabinet” housing artifacts (“whatsoever the hand of man by exquisite art or engine has made rare in stuff”), natural oddities (“whatsoever singularity, chance, and the shuffle of things hath produced”), and gems, minerals, and fossils (“whatsoever Nature has wrought in things that want life and may be kept”). The fourth and final component was a space in which to test nature, “a still-house, so furnished with mills, instruments, furnaces, and vessels as may be a palace fit for a philosopher's stone.’ [i]

Bacon’s imaginary place brings together natural history and science, medicine and engineering within one edifice, a trove of all of the abundance of the world through all times in history.  We  can accomplish this today with a computer and a connection, and yet we demand so much more.  Many of the botanic and animal specimens of the 1600’s are endangered today because of our overuse of the world’s abundance.  Instead of preserving habitats and cultures in place to continue production of the unique and exotic, we collect and number the dwindling species, study and classify their remains, and archive them in cabinets with humidity and temperature control.  By making these fragments ours we ensure their rarity, and perhaps extinction; after all, the archetypal dodo was one of the star attractions of the Ashmolean Museum, the successor to John Tradescant’s collection. 

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[i] Paula Findlen, Early Modern Science.  The Cambridge History of Science, Volume 3, 2006.

Longevity

The seeds of Welwitschia mirabilis may drop unnoticed into hollow pockets, to be covered with sand and left to slumber unnoticed for many years or even decades, until unusual rains cover the Namibian desert – storms of five days or more that wash the seeds from their gullies and into sunlight, leaching away the protective coatings and allowing the plant to begin its 1000-year cycle toward death.  For this strange plant, nearly alone in its taxonomy and a living fossil, embodies as many unknowns as if it were not just a primitive plant, but an altogether alien one.  Two permanent leaves, over time, are shredded into limp streamers – the only two leaves the plant shall ever bear, and the only source for harvesting water from the arid desert's fog.  A desert plant, and yet not a succulent in the way that we know members of the cacti family, with no deep roots, no water bladders for storage; none of the standard features.  Everything about it seems accidental – the anonymous pollinators who fertilize one plant from another, the unlikely events that lead to seed germination, the swollen pink cones bursting with seeds splitting from the two, vulva-like lips of the female plant, and the outlandish idea that a plant might have just two leaves – the same two leaves – for the whole of its 2,000 years.

Survival relies on just such implausible truths.  Plinths of stone may stand as long as this plant survives.  Pyramids may falter and crumble in neighboring deserts.  The lives of the few intrepid passersby in this parched place are as nothing to Welwitschia, whether human, or oryx, or Namib beetle.  Continuance is everything.

The plant offers no defense other than life.  It carries no spines and produces no foul poison.  It cannot close its leaves to protect the fleshy body, which is said to taste like onion when cooked in hot ashes. It has no armor to repel predators, and protects no symbiotic allies within its sparse foliage.  It simply exists… and endures.

Structures may learn many lessons from Welwitschia, beginning with the site.  In a hostile climate adjacent to nowhere, few threats come from mobile bands of marauders.  In the mirabilis life cycle, the plant thrives where not much else can survive, so threats are fewer and there is less chance of it NOT surviving. 

There is something poetic about creating only two leaves – two spreading wings that continue to grow and thicken and separate throughout their life.  Even as time passes and they are teased into filaments by wind and adventitious injury, they reach like tendrils into the morning to strip moisture from the wind and air.  Sunshine is never in short supply when thousands of days pass between rainfalls.  If architects could create wing structures of great flexibility without loss of function; mechanically perfect gleaners of the resources they need solely from sunlight and air; and celebrate the complete denial of aesthetics whether in its age or infancy, then there would stand the structural embodiment of Welwitschia.  It would likely fail to outlive its model.

Dig for Victory

The victory gardens of World War II in America contributed food with a value of $1.2 billion by 1945, in the backyards of 20 million households. Victory gardens were once the answer to the question of food supply and provenance, delivered with a morale-boosting reward for labor. Publicly promoted by Eleanor Roosevelt at the White House in 1943 (she tried to plant a vegetable garden in 1941 but was discouraged by the USDA for being unpatriotic), the effort was repeated by Michelle Obama in 2009. The resurgence of the edible garden in American public life is due to the rise of locavores including Michael Pollan, who writes, “The power of cleverly designed polycultures to produce large amounts of food from little more than soil, water and sunlight has been proved... (they) can produce more food per acre than conventional monocultures, and food of a much higher nutritional value.”[i]

In America today, fresh food supplies are ubiquitous with rapidly expanding retail options. Food is found at the corner store, the big box, and the dollar store. The rarest spices, the most indulgent fruits, and the leanest cuts may be had with very little preparation or effort. Only the miles that food has traveled has increased – it is unlikely that your shrimp come from Mississippi or your rice from Louisiana when refrigerated containers bring them so much more cheaply from China or Central America. The unintended spatial consequences of access to the unseasonable are pollution, waste, higher traffic, wider roads, isolated distribution centers… and the consequent loss in flavor that accompanies the time in transit.

The average consumption of fruits and vegetables is 708 lbs per person in the U.S.; even if backyard food plots only contribute one quarter of our daily needs, they save billions of miles of transport and billions of tons of carbon dioxide emissions. Community-scaled urban farming is achievable within most cities, even at a small scale. Interest grows in times of economic hardship – waiting lists for garden allotments in central London in the past few years have become so choked that many lists have been discarded.

Home-grown produce requires no increase of industrial agricultural lands and labor, does not unbalance the world economy, does not require transportation, and does not use significant amounts of pesticides or fertilizers.  As a defensive strategy in the modern world, food security ranks with energy security, especially in response to recent food riots and increasing prices. Food security depends on decentralized food production: small farmers and rooftop gardens, backyards and planter boxes.  And the results taste a lot better.

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[i] “Farmer in Chief”, New York Times Magazine, October 2008.