Glazed tile loveliness

Glazed surfaces offer something distinct and at times surprisingly beautiful. The idea of the decorative concrete facade panel as something highly refined works well with how houses are built in Northern Europe anyway - cladding facades and hiding the loadbearing structure and sometimes constructing exposed concrete walls that are not as loadbearing as one would think. When the facade is 'just' a facade, tiles in geometric patterns and treated with special surfaces, offer something refreshingly different than the more traditional Nordic material principles, wood, brick and metal. As long as the facade does not look like huge, scary bathroom walls...

[In-house production and packing of the Quasi Brick tiles, via, reproduced from]

I cannot mention Anja Bache's glazed concrete investigations without coming to think of an art installation produced for a Tadao Ando home/museum in Tokyo by Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic/Danish superstar artist - we love to call him Danish but he has resided in Berlin for almost 20 years now. 

Blogger Greg Allen describes the 'quasi brick' as "technically a rhomboid dodecahedron" and continues to remind us how "it emerged from Olafur's ongoing collaboration with the Icelandic architect and former Frei Otto student and Buckminster Fuller disciple Einar Thorsteinn. Rhomboid dodecahedrons are one of five space-filling polyhedrons, shapes that can stack on themselves and fill a solid space. Like a cube, but without the regularity."via 

[Platinum glazed bricks, Art installation by Olafur Eliasson in an Tadao Ando house for Takeo Obayashi, the head of one of Japan's leading contractors and a contemporary art collector 2007. via]

Former Eliasson employee Andreas Eggertsen is interviewed in another blog:
The idea of the quasi brick is that it is an expression of high complexity. The quasi brick is a space filling geometry based on “fivefold symmetry”, a mathematical description of a quasi-chaotic geometry, which was found by a physicist in the 80´s.

The bricks can be rotated into 6 different positions, and put together randomly they create a very complex pattern. As the Japanese are a very thorough people they were not pleased when the construction had started and we had not supplied them with a list of how each brick should be rotated. As there were thousands of bricks, we had not figured out a way to indicate the exact rotation of each and every brick and thought that it would be easier for the construction workers to rotate the bricks themselves on site.

We did not realize that the Japanese were going to be so confused by this. They could simply not work without a drawing that showed them exactly what to do. So when we received this e-mail we got a bit frustrated. The construction had already started and in order not to delay the entire project we had to supply them with new and accurate drawings the following day. Via, an account by Andreas Eggertsen of some interesting cultural clashes between Japanese regularity and the basic planned chaos rules formed by the brick bond. 

[I wonder if the facade turns into a giant mirror ball in the sun? Platinum glazed bricks by Olafur Eliasson and Einar Thorsteinn, via, reproduced from]

The geometry of the brick is fixed as a modular system but as other examples below show, the 'bricks' can be formed from any material.

[Quasi bricks made from bent steel and with mirrors, 2002 Basel, via]

[Double-fired quasi brick used for the Blind Pavillon, 2003 Olafur Eliasson in collaboration with Einar Thorsteinn and Petersen Tegl.]

Despite speaking warmly of the glazed tiles, I have rarely come across any in the Nordic neighborhood. Off the top of my head I think of Jørn Utzon who used the patterns created by white glazed and unglazed tiles for the wonderful Bagsværd Kirke with an intentional industrial look and in traditional formats (Also used more spectacularly for the Sydney Opera). 

[Detail of tile patterns in glazed tiles used in the iconic Sydney Opera, via]

The only quasi-bricks that I have experienced in person are the dark, double-fired brick used for the Blind Pavillon, 2003. I love, love, love the earthen materiality here, it is so 'of the ground' terroir like architecture. I must say that for a decade now, I have been secretly dreaming of these tiles to clad a project somewhere close by. - The closest one is the cave-like Royal Danish Playhouse in Copenhagen by Lundgaard & Tranberg and using Petersen Kolumba Bricks. But I love and want the sculpted relief pattern as well.

Want more tiles??
Explore more great tile projects informally collected at the Danish 'Klink' blog - some remarks are in English and some in Danish.

Slow architecture - Future Baroque landscaping

[Photo of the Colonnade Park by Brett Milligan, via]

Slow place making in Seattle

To me, architecture is very much about making places more than spaces and technology (yes, despite this blog’s focus on architectural technology). I'd like to share a great article about a remarkable place, the Collonade Bike Park project in Seattle. A landscape developed over years in a leftover, urban space, the deeply-shaded underbelly of an elevated section of Seattle’s I-5 freeway. It is user-driven slow architecture and the authors compares its becoming with Baroque gardening that happens over centuries.

The project is the slow development of a bike park, built by volunteers and using only scrap materials collected bit by bit (or load by load). - The park has taken four years to build and is on-going.

About this ‘Future Baroque’, the authors Rob Holmes and Brett Milligan, write:

“But, as appealing as it is, the lo-fi aesthetic of these pragmatic and hand-made constructions is not the most important lesson of the Park. What Colonnade Park suggests is a re-orientation of the practice of landscape architecture away from faceless capital and towards creative and vested labor; away from design elitism and towards the participation of the users of a landscape in its construction; and away from standardization and mechanization towards difference, variability and the instantiated volition of the individual laborer.”

[Photo of the Colonnade Park by Brett Milligan, via]

As examples of aspects for a successful future baroque (user-involved) project, the authors name three factors that made the Bike Project possible:

• Someone had to recognize the latent potential of those couple of abandoned acres beneath I-5. In this case, that someone was a local bike shop owner and used the place anyway, sheltered from the Seattle weather.
• The site had no commercial value - in fact, the shadowed space was considered a safety hazard by the future park’s neighbors. The mere increase in safety for the neighbors was thus considered a benefit and aided the project to come through.
• The volunteers were specialists: the volunteers are experienced bikers who wanted to ride in the future park themselves. They possessed an innate and specific understanding of the physical geometry of the future uses of the park.

[Photo of the Colonnade Park by Brett Milligan, via]

Baroque fabric-formed architecture

I constantly deal with a paradox when discussing the future of fabric formwork for concrete. On one hand, the craftsmanship involved in the process of construction is what shows as the direct relation between principles, techniques, and material, on the other hand, this slow and low-tech architecture is simply too exclusive in its slowness and thus too expensive for conventional and industrialized construction, at least in the context of Northern Europe’s high cost labor. The issue of scale and time is at stake.
 


Meanwhile there are important and parallel investigations in construction, making things happening using community labor as well as scrap materials. In our reality in which raw materials are becoming scarce, dealing with waste is becoming gold - the economy of recycled or reused material is immense and, at least in the Bike Park project, its pragmatic aesthetics is wonderful on a number of levels because it is so closely connected to its place-making abilities and the result of something more.

As the article suggests: "the labor of knowledgeable and motivated ecological hobbyists could transform gardening from an individualistic and primarily ornamental practice into a communal effort, cultivating whole and diversified cities. Labor, which like the volunteer labor that built Colonnade Park, is uniquely motivated, local, and capable of imbuing its work with creative intent, falls outside the typical boundaries of landscape architecture as ‘professionally practiced’. And as these vested pools of labor fuse user, designer and builder they are more invested and broadly knowledgeable of its future use and how it will be occupied than the wage laborers of capital projects, opening diverse realms of possibility for the design of urban landscapes." via

[By the way, Yay – this is my blogpost number 100]