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Consider the notions time, efficiencyand interactivity in the context of ar-chitecture and instantly you may findyour head clouded with images oftechnocratic modernism. Think ofecology and environmental issues inrelation to buildings and what you getis either a vision of Arcadian greenlandscapes sparsely populated withreed-roofed cottages or horrific projects with environmentally re-sponsible add-ons. The smart thing todo is think in terms of interaction,minimum use of materials and en-ergy, and careful planning over longer periods of time, to reduce theenvironmental impact of this majorhuman activity called building. Whatyou then get is smart architecture.Smart Architecture is a gloriously il-lustrated light-hearted book based onthe outcome of the research projectpresented by SLA Foundation on itssmartarch website. It consists mainlyof examples involving new ideas on

planning, building and constructionand the application of intelligent sys-tems, all in aid of sustainability.Analysing the challenges and oppor-tunities with the help of numerousinspiring examples, it presents asmart way to fulfil user demands nowand in three hundred years time.

www.smartarchitecture.org

Smart Architecture

Ed van HinteMarc NeelenJacques Vink Piet Vollaard

Ed

van Hinte

Marc N

eelenJacques V

ink P

iet Vollaard

Smart Architecture

ISBN 90-6450-490-3

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SmartArchitectureEd van HinteMarc NeelenJacques VinkPiet Vollaard

010 Publishers, Rotterdam 2003

Preface:The green challenge 007

01.TimeFuture dynamics 009

02.SystemCycles and systems 047

03.EfficiencyEfficient building 091

04.Process Practice 129

Where next? 161Project index 166Credits 171

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The greenchallenge

We could have been happier, to say theleast, five years ago after our search forinspiring examples of green sustain-able, ecological architecture. We weredismayed by the pessimism that had infact marked ‘traditional’ ecological architecture ever since its emergencein the 1960s. Global disaster was onthe way, it proclaimed, thanks to thewastage of fossil fuels and materialsand the irreversible pollution of land,air and water. Out of that doom-mon-gering grew a defensive, conservativearchitecture with a deep distrust oftechnological innovation. We coulddraw little inspiration from this quar-ter. Surely there had to be an architec-ture that despite all the majorproblems brought by our dealingswith the environment, was still opti-mistic? An architecture that wouldtake up the ‘green challenge’ as the basis for innovation? We decided to muster this alternativearchitecture under another slogan:Smart Architecture. Smart, we rea-soned, is always good and never pessi-mistic. Smart is airy and graceful. As aconcept it is broader than just sustain-ability or ecology. Smart architectureobviously is environmentally aware,not just in terms of protecting our environment but because energy andmaterial efficiency is always smart. Butthere’s more to smart architecturethan that. It is interactive, a smart

building presents itself as an interfacebetween its users and the surround-ings. It mediates between the demandsand desires of users and environment.In doing so it is behaving intelligently;it uses its sensors to build up a ‘memo-ry’ and to learn. Smart architecture isefficient, it does more with less. Lightand ephemeral may be the most effi-cient point of departure, or maybeheavy and enduring; it depends onwhat the use and purpose are. Smartarchitecture is always time-based, it re-acts in differing time cycles to chang-ing user exigencies, climatologicalconditions, changes of function andsocial developments. Smart architec-ture is system-based, it relates back, itis evolutionary, it is network-mindedand exhibits swarm behaviour. Smart architecture is ‘natural’, it speaks for it-self, learns from nature, uses it whennecessary. Smart architecture seestechnology not as an enemy of naturebut as a natural ally.When we looked round again, clutch-ing this new definition, we were all atonce confronted with a great many examples of this smart architecture.You can check out the results of ourstock-take, begun in 1998, of concepts,designers, techniques and projects onthe websitewww.smartarchitecture.org. This bookis the next phase. In it, three themedchapters based on the key words Time,System and Efficiency, chart the greatdiversity of departure-points, direc-tions of advancement and concrete an-swers we encountered. The book endswith a number of examples by architec-tural practices which, armed with thesethemes, are blazing new trails in searchof a ‘green’ architecture.

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01.TimeFuture dynamics

1.01. Never-ending architecture1.02. Future shrinkage1.03. Constructed time1.04. Changing speeds1.05. Flexible concrete1.06. From now to eternity1.07. Crystal skin1.08. Changing flexibility1.09. Wrong place, wrong time1.10. Miele space station1.11. Rethink recycling1.12. Feed car1.13. Old New College1.14. Virtual living1.15. Sound building1.16. Sly glass

Underlying our inventory is the sup-position that environmental issueswill radically change architecture. The environment is unquestionably one ofthe key social issues of our day andthus of seminal influence on thecourse architecture is to take.It is not so much the built projects,perhaps, that tell us that somethinghas changed fundamentally. Rather, itis the many enthusiastic architects,designers and clients who continue toamaze us with their ideas. This bookdescribes a few of these inspiring pro-jects and thoughts. Not that they arenecessarily the best of the batch, aneco-architecture top ten. The manyideas, projects and concepts, large andsmall, included in these pages aremost of all intended as eye-openersand as sources of inspiration. Thisbook asks more questions than it pro-vides answers. We hope it will inspirearchitects to formulate new questionsand new answers and thereby furtherthe cause of a new, smart and vibrantarchitecture.

Stichting Slimme Architectuur / Foundation for Smart Architecture

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human challenge of all times: do more with less. What ismeant by ‘more’ and ‘less’ needs to be redefined over and overagain. In some cases this may lead to flexibility and eventhrowaway buildings or maybe even degradable cities, in othersthe message is durability. The common factor is sustainabilityachieved by tuning quality to the foreseeable future.

In order to find out what has to be done to create this strangelynew dynamic efficiency – an open-ended condition to startfrom rather than a final condition to arrive at – a brief criticaldescription of current Western planning practice is the obviousway to begin. The most important observation is that the plan-ning and design of buildings tends to drift away gradually fromactual needs and developments once the building is in place. Itusually takes a few years to materialize designs and it is not un-common for programmatic demands to already begin changingslightly during that period. When a building is finished, differ-ent kinds of developments gradually put it under severe func-tional stress and not just because of the usual mistakes, likehospital beds not fitting through hospital doors. Design con-straints for factories, office buildings and schools change everyten years. Office facades are replaced within an average of 20years. Part of this is due to fashion change. In architecture onecould already imagine some ‘Style of the Year Award’.Fashion, however, is hardly recognized as a legitimate param-eter by architects, which is strange since architectural style issubject to the same phenomena as fashion, except that its de-velopment is one-sided compared to that of clothing becauseof traditions of style and building. Installations usually havehad it after 15 years, with the exception of computer systemsthat take only a couple of months to become obsolete, ifthey’re lucky. Technological improvements are an importantdriving force behind aging. A building with up-to-date energyefficiency now, may be hopelessly outdated before you knowit. Technology, demographic changes, new commercial oppor-tunities and shifting political opinions are difficult if not im-

01.Future dynamics

If people would waste more time they wouldn’t get themselvesinto so much trouble. The difficulty probably is in determin-ing whether or not time is spent meaningfully, which in turndepends on the definition of time itself. Time is one of thosethings that everybody intuitively knows the meaning of, butthat still is not really understood, not even by physicists. It canbe considered some kind of absolute measure that indicateswhat happens after what, but it is also the opportunity re-maining to a person to do all kinds of things before an ap-pointment, and ultimately before he or she dies. Most of whatmankind does can be considered to be driven by the fear not tohave taken care of everything before the inevitable occurs.In architecture time usually is a human criterion to describeplans for the building process and what happens thereafter.The community that devotes itself to building is quite good atplanning the process. Deadlines are not always met, but byand large buildings are finished within a reasonable time spanaround the projected date. What happens after that is a differ-ent story altogether. Some buildings succeed in surviving gen-erations of people without anyone having arranged thisbeforehand. Others are demolished way before they weremeant to be. It is clear that in this respect time is more oftenthan not overlooked.The ultimate architectural plan so far has been an illusion. Theonly successful utopias are the ones in books. Slowly, veryslowly, designers are beginning to realize that the future hasno final stasis in store for mankind and that people will haveto learn to ride the waves of uncertainty. Everything, includingideas about building, will always be changing. This can be tak-en as a starting point for further development. The efficiencyof building functionality needs to increase drastically. It is the

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from a segregation of disciplines, mainly architects, engineers,various suppliers, and builders with different specializations.Together they are trapped in a building tradition in which thelives of buildings after they are finished is simply not an issue.

The alternative, the dynamic condition of sustainability, is bydefinition generous and forgiving. There are limits to our abil-ity to plan the future. Maybe one third of what is to come canbe planned or foreseen, the rest is to remain foggy until fur-ther notice. The more we look ahead, the greater the chancethat we’re wrong. So whatever is projected and built should al-low either for easy modification or for a change of programmethat implies minimal material adaptation. This begins at thelevel of city planning, which is dynamic by nature. In this areaseduction always works better than force. Even in the virtualcity of Alpha World on the Internet participants choose a vir-tual building location by picking coordinates that are easy toremember. Seduction in its simplest form. Examples from thepast further prove this point. The Centre Beaubourg in Parisrevived an entire neighbourhood. So if you want certain activ-ities to come alive it is wiser to stimulate and facilitate themthan to forcefully allocate them. And when change is called for,it is easier to change the bait than to try and convince the fish.A city is a facility rather than a rigid masterplan, with a givenset of buildings and an infrastructure. The more encompass-ing a plan, the bigger the chance that it, or parts of it, will havethe wrong result as time passes.

Architecture and design are always a matter of finding a bal-ance between control and release. But designers of all kindsunderstandably tend to put the emphasis on the former, be-cause they like to be able to fix and predict the result of theirwork. They are control freaks, to the point that some won’t al-low any change to their finished design. This is also a matter ofart convention: sometimes the architects who don’t mind iftheir creation crumbles are ignored by the future which judges

possible to predict. It is as if fewer and fewer buildings can copewith that.The Pantheon in Rome can be a tourist attraction now, eventhough it started out as a temple in the Roman era and had achurch function for quite a few centuries in-between. A mod-ern office building, however, may very well turn into a failureafter just a few years, because in hindsight it would have beenbetter if it had been a mix of shops and apartments or hadbeen left unbuilt altogether.Some building may have been designed as a theatre but hastoo few restaurants and entertainment facilities in its neigh-bourhood to be exploited successfully. And in a home theroom allocation may suffer in the long run from a wrong esti-mation. Because of this poor compatibility between plans andchanging context, buildings and whole neighbourhoods haveto be demolished and replaced before they have had a chanceto mature. There is this strange current phenomenon that abuilding still in use after 50 years, albeit for a purpose differ-ent from what it was planned to do, is standing next to one 30years younger that has to go because this happens to be cheap-er than adapting it to new demands. Evidently, something isgoing wrong in matching design with programmatic con-straints. Because of a natural inclination towards efficiency inthe limited sense of doing the minimum to comply with thebrief, the match between design and programme may becometoo perfect, leaving no margin for change either, so that it isnecessary to completely demolish and rebuild all too soon.Apparently we still live under the illusion that waste disposalis futile, easy and cheap in relation to the precision with whichwe can match designs to temporary constraints, either by de-signing for temporary use, or by incorporating flexibility inthe design. Time is hardly a consideration. Things change fast-er now than ever before, but this doesn’t imply that the longerterm is obsolescent. We are, however, constantly seduced intofrenetic renewal and therefore incapable of thinking ahead ofthe built result. In addition planning and architecture suffer

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At the same time the real investment object is not the buildingbut the ground on which it stands. A more intelligent optionwould be to build light buildings on relatively expensive in-vestment ground. The framework houses of Alsace have beenconsidered moveable for a long time. It is a simple matter ofremoving the limestone and breaking down the framework toput it up somewhere else. Therefore they are a good exampleof temporary as well as sustainable architecture. On the otherhand there is nothing against buildings that are built to lastlong, provided they allow different interpretations with regardto functional, technological, economic and cultural evolution.

There are other contextual changes than the programmaticones, that also can be dealt with in smarter ways. These occurwithin shorter terms that are defined in length from one yearto one day. In fact some of them are closely linked to the veryfoundation of our chronology. The year of course is a brilliantway to define the change of seasons. Buildings have to be ableto protect their inhabitants and users against all the weather’suncomfortable manifestations: cold, heat, rain, wind, snow,you name it. Therefore they must be able to withstand allweather conditions themselves. How complicated this destinyis depends on the climate and their location on the globe.Heating space in the desert requires solutions that differ fromthose in polar areas. By far the most complicated climate con-trol systems occur in areas with all the extremes of droughtand precipitation and heat and cold. It is easier to create an ef-ficient system in the north of Canada, where it is always moreor less cold, than in the middle of Russia with icy winters andhot summers. The desert can be both hot and cold, but be-cause temperature variation occurs within a day it is possibleto create mutual compensation: use the heat of the day towarm space at night or the other way around.

Computer technology has provided experience in thinking interms of memory and automatic feed back systems. This gives

whether their work has become part of cultural heritage.More often than not, what happens is control failure. Theproof is everywhere. Simple but typical examples are all thewalking paths across lawns that originate from people prefer-ring a shortcut to the planned and built road. In the worstcases control failure results in the destruction of costly addedvalue. Because of the observation that a neighbourhood or anoffice building is surpassed by new demands in a time span asshort as 20 or 15 years or even less, added value is tuned toshort life spans. In effect this entails a reduction of the qualityof use.The other option is to think in terms of the capacity for adap-tation or flexibility. If a reduction of programmed rigidity andthinking in longer terms than just the surrender of finishedprojects is achieved, then building and sustaining the built en-vironment can become a process that is much more efficient inenvironmental terms. It becomes generous in the sense thatprogrammes allow for changes of functionality instead of be-ing just a recipe for use, and forgiving in the sense that changescan be made with minimum effort and destruction.The culture of engineering has turned us into overzealousmakers, constantly creating new things to help us save time ‘todo something else’. Now it has the opportunity to bring us intothe next stage, in which we save time by thinking ahead, con-stantly reusing what is already there. A major part of what wecan reuse, however, still has to be designed. Architectural de-sign can start to incorporate the concept of evolution, creatingcities and buildings that intrinsically allow further develop-ment without a precise vision of what it is going to be like.On the one hand it can lead to light and informal city planningwith a more flexible infrastructure and greater influence bythe inhabitants. Buildings could be recycled after just tenyears, or moved to a different spot or just left to nature. Tradi-tionally dwellings are also investment objects. Because of thatthey are built ‘for eternity’ as a result of which many housesare no longer in line with current energy efficiency standards.

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lines and eternity can lead to an enrichment of the architec-tural vocabulary. Accepting the dynamics of buildings and cit-ies, which are now usually ignored or rather considered anunavoidable temporary discomfort, can turn architecturalchange into an ecologically efficient process as well as a newurban experience.

us the opportunity for a brief side trip to the real-time levelthat will be dealt with in the chapter on System. Physical phe-nomena can be exploited in such a way that climate control lit-erally becomes just that: it provides comfort, or heating, orcooling, by letting air and materials do the work throughphysics instead of turning on a noisy and unhealthy power-devouring climate-conditioning system. Because of the com-plications mentioned earlier, this becomes more difficult inthe face of variations in the weather.We have now arrived almost automatically at the daily cyclewith its most obvious characteristic: night and day. Peoplehave become accustomed to the blessings of artificial lightingwhen darkness rules. This requires a great deal of fumblingaround, turning one kind of energy, usually electricity, intolight. For it is not yet feasible to store daylight directly for lateruse. Lighting systems too, however, can be made more effi-cient. Light can be turned into electricity that can be stored. Inaddition light allows itself to be reflected and guided to placeswhere it is needed. Some isolated experiments have been goingon in this field. There are lamps on the market that work onsolar energy. And some large buildings by Norman Foster,Renzo Piano and others possess advanced light reflecting sys-tems. A systematic approach to let lighting control benefitfrom mass production may lead to drastic improvements.Use can also be considered a contextual factor for functionalproperties. It varies with the daily cycle, and with the weeklycycle for that matter.Functionality can be defined in broader terms than we havebecome accustomed to. People can sleep in office buildingsthat are also hotels, and work in sports centres. A great deal ofspace can be saved if different consecutive activities can takeplace in the same facility. An office building doesn’t have to re-main empty during evenings and nights and weekends, and ahome garage can be a kindergarten during the day. It is a mat-ter of time awareness and flexible thinking.Recognition of time with all its nuances instead of just dead-

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1.01.Never-endingarchitecture‘If you allow everything and everyone togo their own way you’ll end up with chaos.’‘Exactly,’will be Louis Le Roy’s reply to theusual criticism of his work,‘that is thewhole idea, for only in complex dynamicsystems can everything and everybody gotheir own way.Only in systems like that doI have the guarantee that my freedom isoptimized and only then can I go on per-manently,exploiting my free creative energy in a continuous flow of time.’Louis – ‘The Wild Gardener’– Le Roy is aDutch artist,who became well known forhis ongoing building and gardening pro-jects.He refuses to even consider the endof the processes he sets in motion.Hiswork consists of trying to free a piece ofland in a city and consequently get theneighbourhood inhabitants involved in acontinuous process of changing it bybuilding stacks of rubble and seedingplants at will, for years on end.His mainenemies are civil servants.They obviouslyexpect some kind of definitive arty cre-ation,but become scared of a loss of con-trol as soon as they begin to realize thatthere is no end.Le Roy is interested in on-going processes and a complex entangle-ment of systems.His most successful project to date is theEco-cathedral in Mildam in the north ofthe Netherlands.At first sight it looks like aneglected forest with a landfill of streetrubble.But there is more to it.A closerlook shows that there are paths throughthe wilderness.Between trees and shrub-

bery you’ll find stacked buildings over-grown by vegetation.Louis Le Roy is atwork there,has been at work there for 30years on every day when weather condi-tions allow it,constantly rearranging pave-ment tiles,bricks,drains,curbs and all otherstony street materials.The stacks,all in bal-ance without any cement,have their ownbeauty.Le Roy has developed a special skillfor this.The paradox is that even though hiswork looks natural it is man-made.Cultureand nature have become one.Le Roy’s work is not,as one might think,naive architecture.He is not making hisutopian dream come true.It is the processand its complexity that he is after.He isfighting urban monoculture with vigour.In an article entitled ‘Our spectacular society’(1975) he explains his philosophyby strongly criticizing La Grande Borne,an urban planning feat by Emile Aillaud.Despite its many ‘cultural’tile tableauxand interesting objects, this neighbour-hood is dead.Time is switched off and theinhabitants are not allowed to contribute.In Le Roy’s view such a project is doomed,and time has proved that he was right.He based this article mainly on HenriBergson’s ‘L’Evolution créatrice’, in whichthe philosopher places man as an activecentre in a creative evolutionary process inspace and time.Shortlived actions or ‘spec-tacles’can release creative powers for awhile,but in the end they have to takeplace in a time continuum to bring abouta true ‘évolution créatrice’.Bergson’s wordsare almost literally put into practice by LeRoy.Ironically, it is what mankind doestoo.It is just that evolution acts up regular-ly.But the time awareness that Louis LeRoy brings in is quite important.The Eco-cathedral process is due to continue for atleast 1000 years.

project: Ecokathedraalartist: Louis Le Royyear: 1970-3000location: Mildam, the Netherlands

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1.02.FutureshrinkageArchitecture can be the beginning of aprocess rather than the end. That wasdemonstrated by a multidisciplinarygroup of four designers working together in Australia. They made aproposal for a limited entry competi-tion to design a university encompass-ing sustainability in all respects. Thecommissioning body wanted an en-tirely different campus concept andthat is what they got. It was called ‘Future Generations University’ andwas based on the principle of shrink-age. Only half of the programme wasto be built and half of that wasplanned to dissipate across the worldinto small auxiliary branches thatcommunicate through the Internet.Instead of being a traditional ‘templeof science’ this University was to be aforum, where people meet, discussand learn from each other.Physically the University is ‘lean andclean’ and flexible. It consists of twotypes of buildings. One kind is char-acterized by ‘green membranes’,through which it interacts with its en-vironment. These are lightweightstructures that can easily be movedand serve to house some 2500 stu-dents. The other type has ‘informa-tion membranes’ and facilitatesknowledge and argument exchange.These buildings contain work spaces,a conference centre, a library, a thea-tre and retail facilities and are more

definitive in nature. They are placedin the middle of the campus and willcontinue to function even if the Uni-versity disappears altogether. Thecharm of this proposal is that it pre-sents two opposites, the flexible andthe fixed, as one.

1.03.Constructed time

which was turned into a rigid recipefor all daily life and the entire humanlife cycle. Most activities, eating,sports, studying, have been scaled upto public urban level. Even the time totake a shower after getting up early inthe morning, is prescribed. Every-body, except the youngest age group,consumes food in the same giant res-taurant. An inhabitant going into thebuilding will first pass through all thecollective facilities. The individual liv-ing cell is in the top layer. It is barelycomfortable enough to sleep and reada little. The integration of architectureand social structure strongly resem-bles a beehive. Except that a dom-kommuna looks better and bees aren’tinterested in happiness.

Humanity has somewhat lost theknack of proposing utopias. Timesused to be more prosperous for therigorous rigidity that these ideal or-ganizations entail. The Russian Con-structivists in the beginning of the20th century were still full of hopethat they could build a social ma-chine. Their art and architecture, inparticular the buildings of KonstantinMelnikov are famous the world over.Less well known is the fact that theydidn’t just create objects, but that theywere trying to determine a socialstructure to match.One of the most radical proposals isthe plan by Barshch and Vladimirovfor a ‘Dom Kommuna’ or collectivecondominium. This is one huge build-ing for 1680 inhabitants. It contains asmany living cells and extended com-munal provisions. Families are re-duced to their bare essentials: parentsor ‘productive units’, babies, under-fives and children of school age. Everycategory has its own accommodation.The plan is based upon an analysis

project: Future Generations Universityresearch and design: Jacques Vink, Rhea Harbers, Conny Bakker, Machiel van Dorst and Atze Boerstrayear: 1996location: Wyong, Australia

project: Dom Kommunaarchitect: M. Barshch and V. Vladimirovyear: 1929location: USSR

Dining by conveyor belt

Smart architecture is not complicated. Sometimes a simple andhence ostensibly ‘dumb’ building is smarter than a technology-dominated living-and-working machine over which the userhas lost control.

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1.04.Changing speeds

Buildings aren’t just buildings. Theycan be divided up into seven system-based layers. Each of these has its ownlifespan, all the way from centuriesdown to a couple of years.

1. Location. Generally speaking the geographic location has a very longlifespan. Amsterdam and New York, toname just two examples, have main-tained the same grid of streets androads for many years.2. Structure. It is quite costly to changethe foundation and the main carryingstructure of buildings. Therefore theirquality determines the architecturalendurance of a building. The structureusually lasts between 30 and 300 years.3. Access. Stairs, escape routes, escala-tors and lifts have a long life, but not aslong as lift shafts that are part of themain structure. Changing these can bea far-reaching process. Emergency andsecondary stairs on the other handmay be replaced more quickly becauseof changing regulations.4. Facade. If the facade has not beendesigned to last, it usually has to be replaced or renovated after some 20years. This is mostly a technical matterbut fashion can be a consideration.5. Services. Systems for climate con-trol, wiring, sprinklers, water and sew-ers are outdated after seven to fifteenyears.

6. Dividing elements. In a commer-cial context it is common practice torenew doors, inside walls, elevatedfloors and lowered ceilings as often asevery three years.7. Furniture is replaced fairly quickly.

For a flexible building, by and large,the dynamics of these layers have tobe taken into consideration. If, for example, the facade is part of themain structure, the resulting buildingmay be too rigid, because to changethe facade the whole building has tobe taken apart. The same holds truefor a service that is too ‘deeply rooted’in the building. Integration of differ-ent parts, the destiny of technologicaldevelopment, may hamper flexibility,which is a different kind of develop-ment. Like scale (should energy beprovided to a city by a power plant orshould every building or even everyhome have its own generator?) flexi-bility is a complex issue to decide on.Be careful when mixing systems to-gether.

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1.06.From now to eternityLife span traditionally is hardly a designparameter. Its essence is that functional,economical and architectural aspects oflongevity are carefully attuned. This canlead to temporary structures as well asflexible buildings that can last becauseof their ability to adapt to changing cir-cumstances. Gerd Wingårdh designed adwelling block for the Malmö Bo01Housing Exhibition that is built to lastfor ever. It consists of sturdy materialsand has evolved from proven technolo-gy. The apartments are roomy and theirarchitecture is meant to withstandchanges in trends.

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1.05.Flexible concreteDealing with change doesn’t always haveto be designed to work out well. The factthat the Groothandelsgebouw – next toRotterdam’s Central Station – is a wellknown example of flexibility based oncoincidence. One could say that becauseof its properties it was able to evolve intoa structure that is now continuously being adapted to meet new demands.The building can handle this.Right after the Second World War tradehad to be started again almost fromscratch and in Rotterdam there was a serious demand for a building wherewholesale companies could be domi-ciled. Perhaps it was an advantage that itwas not known in the beginning whatkind of companies these were going tobe. It was given a neutral floor plan and astrong structure for storage purposes.The total space is no less than 128,000

m2, grouped around three inner court-yards where trucks can makes deliveriesor collections. Separate spaces can beused both as offices and as storage facili-ties, all have identical concrete facade ele-ments. Staircases, entrances and a movietheatre provide architectural accents.Currently the Groothandelsgebouw isused to house a collection of companies,a congress centre and a restaurant.People are even living in some remotecorners of it. The inherited over- dimen-sioning allows for industrial activity andarchiving. Parts of the wide hallways thatwere used for the internal transportationare now incorporated in office spaces.Some of the lift shafts have been trans-formed to hold modern climate controlsystems.Flexibility requires organization. Noisyoperations are only allowed after officehours. In general, maintenance in flexiblebuildings is something that should bedealt with at the design stage. One can-not always depend on coincidence.

project: Groothandelsgebouwarchitect: H.A. Maaskant and W. van Tijenyear: 1951location: Rotterdam, the Netherlands

In one of his shows the late Dutch co-median Toon Hermans told a storyabout a place in France where he usedto stay, a small inn: ‘As a matter of factit was so small, that when it rainedthey had to put it inside.’ Buildingswith two skins to accommodate cli-mate control are not that uncommonanymore. The way in which thoseskins are designed can still be a sourceof pleasant surprise. A building com-plex to house several companies,appropriately called ‘Crystalic’ be-cause of the way it looks, has two en-tirely different outsides, one of whichis inside. It could also be considered abuilding inside a greenhouse, a bit likethe French inn. It has efficient climate

1.07.Crystal skin

control of course, but there are otheradvantages. The inside buildings don’thave to be wind- or waterproof. Theirstructure can be simple enough to beeasily adapted to changing demands.There have been large-scale unfeasibleplans to put domes over entire cities.The problem that arose was that be-cause of condensation of water in thecool upper part, rain would becomean everlasting nuisance. On this mod-est scale, by contrast buildings withina house function well and may keepon doing so for a long time to come.

project: housing Bo01architect: Gerd Wingårdhlocation: Malmö, Swedenyear: 2001

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From the end of the 1960s until wellinto the ’80s most Dutch family TVprogrammes were broadcast from ‘De Meerpaal’ in Dronten, a large hallmade of steel with glass facades thatwas designed as a meeting place foranything: sports events, a weekly mar-ket, stage plays, with bowling some-times taking place at the same time.There are several fixed elements, suchas two cinema screens, a theatre and arestaurant. The original buildingstood for everything that character-izes Dutch post-war architecture:belief in progress, the makable societyand modernization.De Meerpaal embraced flexibility butthat very characteristic did not re-main the same over the years. In 1988the building was adapted to new localdemands. In 1999 it went through adifficult period, because demolitionwas regarded as unavoidable by the

local authorities. A protest action bythe Dutch architecture portal Archi-Ned among others, created new chan-ces. A design study was launched andmoving De Meerpaal to a different lo-cation came under consideration. TheGovernment Architect became in-volved and seven architecture studioswere invited by the Dronten councilto make proposals. The plan by Ate-lier PRO was chosen in 2000. Two ex-tra theatres are now being built. DeMeerpaal will rise from its metaphori-cal ruins in 2004.

1.08.Changing flexibility

project: Crystalicarchitect: Gunnar Daan year: 2002location: Leeuwarden, the Netherlands

project: de Meerpaalarchitect: Frank van Klingerenyear: 1967location: Dronten, the Netherlands

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The future can be cruel. Circumstancesand opinions change in unforeseeableways. Duiker, one of the top Dutch architects in the first half of the 20thcentury, built beautiful buildings.Being a true functionalist he wantedbuildings to be broken down whentheir job was over. One of his master-pieces, however, sanatorium Zonne-straal in Hilversum designed togetherwith Bijvoet, was not demolished andsurvived in a bad state. It had ended upon the list of important monuments,but for years it kept crumbling until agroup of interested people succeededin giving it a new destination and hav-ing it restored. It will again have amedical function. It was meant to last40 years but now that period has beenrewritten as ‘eternity’.

1.09.Wrong place, wrong time

project: sanatorium Zonnestraalarchitect: J. Duiker, B. Bijvoet and J.G. Wiebengayear: 1931location: Hilversum, the Netherlands

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1.10.Miele spacestation

traption has taken the guise of an artbar, a terrace and a music shop but itcan also be an architects’ studio. Inthe latter case it functions as a labora-tory used, for example, to survey waysof exploiting waste flows before, dur-ing and after the construction of anew neighbourhood.In its caravan-like constitution thestation is already suitable for func-tioning as a mobile office, but thepick-up truck that pulls it also carriesconnecting pieces that enable buildinga camp of about 20 metres long. Themodules contain the utilities: kitchen,shower, electronics and archive,whereas the connections provide thespace to live and work in. The stationis autonomous too. It can take care ofits own energy and water manage-ment and has a compost toilet andeven a greenhouse.

Forget grinding and shredding and in-stead reuse, well, everything really toprovide new applications. 2012 Archi-tects built their very own space sta-tion from old washing machines, thusextending their lifespan. Not that itfloats above the earth, but it is mobileand it provides space. It consists offive 60 centimetre wide modules thatcan each be carried by two people.The five elements can be mounted ontop of a trailer to form a caravan. Onlocation the segments can take vari-ous configurations. So far the con-

project: Miele Space Stationarchitects: Jan Jongert, Denis Oudendijk and Césare Peerenyear: 2003

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The vernacular ‘Trabbi’, better knownas the Trabant, the car with the plasticbody that conquered Eastern Germanydespite its unhealthy coughing sound,is notorious for its inability to be re-cycled. It is made of Duraplast, a com-posite consisting of phenolic resin andcotton.That problem seems to be solved now.‘Rumour has it that the only way todispose of the bodies was to grindthem up and turn them into pig feed’,says a website devoted to the Trabant.Edibility is not such a bad option forrecycling.

1.12.Feed car

The end of the ’60s saw the arrival ofa counterculture, mostly in the west ofthe US. Its protagonists established complete idealist villages with pecu-liar self-wrought shelters. Many ofthem took the shape of domes, for inthose days Buckminster Fuller was thehero of construction. Cult books –‘Shelter’ and ‘Domes’ – were pub-lished on these contraptions, and in-deed the dome is popular even inHolland where an environmentalistfoundation called ‘De Kleine Aarde’(Small Earth) builds its own experi-mental autarkic version. The standardbuilding material is waste. DesignerVictor Papanek, famous for his book‘Design for the Real World’, advocatesthe reuse of waste and simple technol-ogy to be applied in Third Worldcountries. The cover of his most fa-mous book shows a radio entirelymade out of waste materials.These days reuse and recycling are accepted strategies. In the case ofbuildings reuse can work very well ifit involves waste from the immediatesurroundings, because obviously thatminimizes transportation. Recyclingis a useful way to cleanse the cycle ofproduction and disposal. But current-ly it can be considered to be slightlyoverestimated. It is a relatively simpleprinciple. Therefore one tends to viewit as an important contribution tocounteract pollution. The disadvan-

tage of recycling, however, is that thevalue that was created before in usefulbuildings or products is entirelydemolished to be created all overagain. Both destroying and reproduc-ing involve effort and consume energy, which can be quite inefficient.Sustaining added value over a long period of time can in many cases be asmart alternative to the shredder.

1.11.Rethink recycling

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Smart architecture offers an integral solution to a variety of de-sign challenges: the environmental problem, the optimal use ofspace and other resources, a functional utilization of materialsand technology, and aesthetics.

New College in Oxford, UK, is famousfor a story told by Gregory Bateson.Allegedly a college restoration com-mittee recently discovered that oaktrees were planted in the forest nearby350 years ahead of their time, to beable to replace the beams in the mainhall’s ceiling when they started to suf-fer from dry rot. Bateson remarked:‘That’s the way to run a culture.’ It is atruly remarkable story, but the NewCollege’s website puts it this way:‘The affair of the oak trees.This is another hoary tale, which hasdone the rounds in various guises.The story is that when the college fel-lows decided to restore the hall roof in1862, they were wondering where toget the oak for the beams to supportit. The college woodsman pointed outthat their predecessors had plantedacorns in their Buckinghamshirewoods in about 1380, so that maturetrees would be available when neededfor the repair of the buildings.’

This story is an embroidery on thetheme of continuity and foresightwhich, when examined in detail, isnonsense. For one thing, the roof ofthe hall had already been rebuilt once,by a local builder named James Pearsin 1786. He used pitch pine timbersand Westmoreland slate. The hall it-self had a plaster ceiling in Pears’

design. Hereford B. George in hisbook ‘New College, 1856-1906’ saidthat it had just enough mouldings togive it the appearance of an invertedtea tray. If the college woodsman hadbeen so free with advice in 1862, whydid his predecessor hold his tongue in1786? More pertinently, the Bucking-hamshire woods where the matureoaks were felled did not come into thehands of the college until 1441. Thetruth is that the oaks came from thecollege woods in Great Horwood,Akeley and Whaddon Chase, wherethey had indeed been maturing forseveral hundred years. Yet, if youthink back to a society where hard-wood was the principal constructionmaterial, it is obvious that some treesin every wood had to be left to growon, while the others yielded a crop ofcoppiced poles every 15 years or so.

1.13. Old New College

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The little lamb is part of nature as isthe ancient oak. So are the gnat thatbrings malaria, poison ivy, meteoritesand earthquakes. Gradually man islearning to deal with the latter to someextent. Systems are being developed toprevent buildings from tumblingdown. These bear a remarkable resem-blance to noise control. An earthquakeis indeed a kind of sound of very lowfrequency and high amplitude, guidedby the earth’s crust. Therefore prevent-ing earthquake damage entails insula-tion, damping and vibration control.In high-rise buildings damping may also serve to compensate for the effectsof wind force.An earthquake, beside vertical vibra-tion, mainly consists of horizontal ro-tation and translation of the earth’scrust. Insulation ideally implies thatthese movements are not transferred tothe building. It is like a magician whoquickly draws away the tablecloth fromunder the arrangement of cutlery,plates and glasses. Everything stays inplace because of the inertia of the ob-jects and the smoothness of the table-cloth. Buildings can rest on smoothsupports on top of the foundations.When the earth moves the foundationswill too, but the building remains inplace. A new insulation system hasbeen under investigation but has notbeen applied yet. It starts from the as-sumption that at a considerable height

above ground level it is more difficultfor ground shaken by an earthquake tomove the mass of a building. The idea,developed by Prof Teiichi Takahashi, isthat the building is hung by its roofstructure from a very high column-shaped foundation on which it canslide back and forth.The simplest principle of damping is topassively absorb a major part of theenergy that the ‘quake’ tries to transferto the building. This can be achievedwith elastic materials, like rubber, orwith metal that will undergo plastic de-formation. Steel spring absorbers, forinstance, are transformed during themovement and have to be replaced afterwards. Lead can also be used. Vis-cous fluids can dampen movement ifthey have to be pressed through a nar-row opening. Generally the energy ofmovement is transformed into deform-ation energy, and heat. Electricity foruse after an earthquake would be nice

1.15.Sound building

Apart from the energy and materialneeded to build and use computers,which is a lot really, you won’t needanything to create a luxurious homewith a pool somewhere on the Inter-net. Alpha World is a 3D virtual en-vironment that was started as soon asweb browsers appeared. It evolvedfrom ‘computer ancient’ conceptscalled ‘Multi User Dungeons’, or‘MUDs’, that were (and still are) en-tirely text oriented net communities.In Alpha World, which has severalmillion inhabitants, everybody canbuild his or her dream home on a spotthat is defined by its X and Y valueson the Alpha World map. Because it iseasier to remember simple numbers,‘from above’ the city looks like a cross.There is still a lot of space available,particularly if you don’t mind remem-bering difficult coordinates.

1.14.Virtual living

Heliport as mass damper,Hanku Chayamachi Building,Osaka, Japan

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which means that they are ‘aware’ ofwhat they are doing. They react totheir own effect by countermovementcontrol of the mass and/or by adjust-ing the amount of mass involved in themovement, both by means of motors.The 200 metre high building ORC 200in Osaka, finished in 1993, features twohybrid combinations of passive and active mass dampers on the 51st floor.Rotation is controlled actively andtranslation passively. They are twoconcrete blocks of 100 tonnes each ontop of layers of rubber. Two motorscan adjust the system characteristics byinvolving less or more of these layers inmovement damping. Under normalconditions the blocks are fixed withpneumatic brakes, but if movement exceeds a certain value these are disen-gaged and the system is ‘switched todamping mode’.Twice 200 tonnes is quite a lot for build-ing elements that enjoy leisure most ofthe time. An interesting alternative builtin the same year in the same city is theHanku Chayamachi Building, alsoknown as the Applause Tower. The 480-tonne mass on top, which rests on rub-ber layers and can be moved by twomotors, happens to be the heliport.No spare time for this mass.

Climate systems involving glass arenot that exceptional anymore. Thom-as Herzog, like many an architect,allowed himself to be inspired by theCrystal Palace, the legendary worldexhibition building in London, whichwas built by Paxton in 1851. Herzog’sDesign Centre in Linz has the sameshape of glass roof, but the facade hasventilation valves controlled by anelaborate learning computer systemthat gets its information from almost2500 sensors providing feedback toany action that takes place. This sys-tem prevents the building from be-coming too hot in summer. Inaddition the roof is kept low to mini-mize the air volume to be heated.Lighting is also a matter of climatecontrol, especially in the exhibitionspaces of a Design Centre. A refined

system was developed for temperingthe light entering from outside. In thecavity within the double glazing is amicro-mirror screen that transformsthe light from unidirectional into dif-fuse. The screens inside the glass pan-els have a different direction,depending on the position the paneltakes. As a result, seen from the insidethe screens facing north are virtuallyinvisible whereas in other directionsthey give a shimmering impression.An exhibition, even with large ob-jects, looks as though it is in the openair but there are no sharp contrasts.

1.16.Sly glass

The building’s wooden structure acts as ashock absorber, not only in the event of anearthquake but also to resist the strongwinds on the top of Mount Myoken.

project: Seirei Hallarchitect: Shin Takamatsuyear: 1998location: Mount Myoken, Japan

but is obviously too far away from theconcept of disaster prevention to betaken into account.If the shock energy is forced to movemore mass than just the building thishas a damping effect too, provided theextra mass is attached to the buildingas a mass spring system in the sensethat it can move relative to the build-ing. The same principle is frequentlyapplied to reduce vibration, even inelectric shavers.All the aforementioned compensationand absorption systems have provedtheir right to exist but still they are notsmart, for their function is not propor-tional to the earthquake at hand. Theyare ‘passive’. A more refined principleallows adjustment of the mass to tuneit to circumstances but the most sophisticated ‘active’ damping systemswork on the basis of direct feedback,

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02.SystemCycles and systems

2.01. Small worlds CCCP2.02. Small worlds US2.03. Ecotoys2.04. Cars feed oxygen production2.05. Industrial ecology2.06. Wetland2.07. Werner Sobek’s own house2.08. Energy labyrinth2.09. Green stair2.10. City Fruitful2.11. Scale of limits2.12. Water rebalance2.13. Survival of the cheapest2.14. Hot dog system2.15. Natural models2.16. Treemicry2.17. Merry manor 12.18. Merry manor 22.19. Green shutters

project: Design Center Linzarchitect: Thomas Herzogyear: 1993location: Linz, Austria 49

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have an output that can consist of waste, products, movement,material and energy, well anything really. To reduce complexityin man-made things like landscapes, cities, buildings, bed-rooms and electric tooth brushes, it is quite convenient for thepurpose of optimization to define systems and combine thesein hierarchies. Something as seemingly simple as a garden shedcan be described as a shelter system that protects tools from therain, and that may have a subsystem to provide electricity andlighting, another for daylight, a closing system that consists ofa door with a locking system and a hinging system, but also anecosystem since it usually is the habitat for a community of spi-ders, insects, fungus and plants.

In the case of ‘ecosystems’ the elements always include livingorganisms and everything they produce, and energy input isrequired. An ecosystem can be defined as very small, but all thebio-elements inside need to be able to feed on each other. Now-adays you can even buy pocket-size toy ecosystems in glasscontainers called ‘Ecospheres’ through the Internet. It is nowquickly turning into a successful promotional gift. At the veryleast an ecosystem with rabbits would need rabbit food that isable to thrive on rabbit excrement, for the interaction betweenelements always takes the shape of time-consuming cycles inthe sense that on the sub-microscopic level atoms and molecu-les travel around in a circle of consecutive chemical reactions.You can choose any micro-element and observe its adventuresof arrival at and departure from different life forms.An ecosystem usually manifests itself as a balance betweenplants and animals, bacteria and bacilli and their environment,living on each other’s secretions and devouring each otherdead or alive, in the meantime getting the benefit of each oth-er’s gaseous and liquid by-products. This balance may vary.There is no absolute and objective optimum, although someare more stable than others. A balance that favours one collec-tion of species may be detrimental to another. Species alwaysdisappear and evolve and there is a general belief that a wealth

In 1859, 24 small systems were brought to Australia. Hobbyhuntsman Thomas Austin had them sent over from England byhis brother. Each consisted of one long-eared furry organism,several dozens pests and any amount of messy microspecies.These systems were called rabbits and they interacted witheach other so energetically that only seven years after their in-troduction 14,253 of them could be shot dead by their only ca-pable enemies: two-legged not very furry small-eared systemsarmed with rifles. A rifle is a mechanical system capable of fir-ing small lumps of heavy metal at high speed in a certain direc-tion that is then changed by a rather gigantic legless andearless, but nevertheless balanced and rich spherical ecosystemthat by and large doesn’t do much more than exert gravity andrelease minute figments of scientific imagination into the uni-verse, occasionally. A visionary called Richard BuckminsterFuller christened this system ‘Spaceship Earth’, a romanticname since, although Earth moves at high speed relative to fel-low celestial bodies, it doesn’t really go anywhere interesting.But, like a spaceship containing organisms, it truly is an eco-system, and a fairly big and vulnerable one too. It consists ofnumerous interacting sub-ecosystems, one large continent ofwhich was changed dramatically and not very smartly in 1859by Thomas Austin.A system is not an objectively observable phenomenon. Theword ‘system’ merely is a means to define a combination of ele-ments that interact with each other and the outside world. Evena layer of paint can be considered a system, and paint market-ers don’t hesitate to do just that. Systems can clarify architec-tural planning constraints. They can for instance be defined toachieve input in terms of energy, water, material, informationor earthquakes; and because of what all the elements do, they

02.Cycles and systems

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car transport, factories – to ensure a healthy environment.Some cities employ biologists to protect the interests of non-human inhabitants.Eco-buildings may serve to help us understand ecosystems.There have been a few attempts made to build isolated closedenvironments for a carefully selected combination of species,including humans, to explore the possibilities of creating anecosystem in space, or on a different planet. Space stations likethe former Russian Mir and now the international ISS, andspace suits, can be considered quite successful synthetic ecosys-tems, apart from the fact that astronauts need something to eatalong the way. Much more down-to-earth are designs for autar-kic houses that ideally don’t need any input from central ener-gy and water supplies, nor food input because it would grow onthe land around it. Existing natural processes, such as trees tak-ing water from the ground and bugs feeding on leftovers, canhelp optimize design.

The definition of ecosystems and their often awesome sophisti-cation has proved to be very inspirational. The ‘solutions’found in the habitats of groups of plants and animals often areexemplary for ways to optimize cities by trying to mix dwell-ings and work areas with crop growing facilities, instead of justshops. City Fruitful, a combination of houses and greenhouses,does just that. Buildings can be improved too, with the sameprinciple in mind, and even toys for that matter (Ecosphere).Analysis of the mutual dependence of plants and animals hasalready taught us quite a lot about survival and needs. Never-theless we should keep in mind that it provides us with insightinto rules and principles: combine animals (including people)and vegetables, keep distances short, try to minimize input andoutput. This is not the same thing as an ecological appearancewith lots of greenery. A striking number of ‘environmentallyresponsible’ architectural proposals and realized buildings fea-ture integration of the man-made structure with ‘nature’, moreoften than not in the shape of trees. The presence of flowery

of different species is favourable to the success of ecosystems. Likeall other organisms people generally prefer ecosystems in whichthey can survive. For this reason they are now gradually develop-ing a feeling of responsibility to be able to sustain their environ-ment by keeping up the balance to their own advantage.Cycles in ecosystems can be virtually closed, as in an Ecosphereor a space ship. The only thing that is always needed as an extrais energy. Without that, every ecosystem is doomed. It takes en-ergy to turn chaos into a sophisticated living order.On a higher level ecosystems interact among themselves, beinga part of larger ecosystems. They need to import materials andfood and export polluted air and waste. Even earth interactswith other parts of the universe or it wouldn’t be hit by meteor-ites all the time or absorb and radiate heat and light. However,as far as food and materials are concerned, interaction betweenour planet and our solar system is futile.Thinking in terms of ecosystems tends to be a bit blurry since itinvolves life that has a strong tendency to travel. Usually areasthat are more or less isolated are defined as ecosystems, but onthis planet they are always open to influences from outsidesuch as oil spills, and on the inside changes are going on con-tinuously because of growth, and because of fitter creaturesand species surviving at the cost of the less fit.Cities and buildings can be technically declared ecosystems, al-though because of their population density they do need foodand oxygen from outside and need to get rid of enormousamounts of waste. It is nevertheless quite relevant to considercities as ecosystems, since they are clearly defined places wheredifferent species live and evolve together, influencing one an-other. Human beings may suffer from the presence of micro-organisms and stinging insects, whereas animals and plants,both having to deal with us humans, may have mutual or op-posed interests among each other. For a city to be a comfortablehabitat, its ecology needs to be healthy. Some circumstancesmay force inhabitants of large cities, like Mexico City or Athensin Greece, to temporarily close down part of the ecosystem –

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of another. Systems can be defined on all levels of construction.Wind forces can be counteracted with intelligent sensor-acti-vating contraptions instead of brash oversizing, thereby allow-ing lighter structures and intelligent ventilation.Computers are an inspiration for a much broader interpreta-tion of what architecture could be. Buildings that allow easyfunctional change are an old idea that is now going through arevival that extends as far as creating games and to what isknown as kinetic architecture. Architectural systems don’t haveto be material anymore. It depends on the kind of performancerequired. They can be interactive systems that react to yourevery move. However, the promise of computer involvement inliving environments is not limitless. Loss of control by over-integration is already emerging, expressed in phenomena suchas being unable to close the curtains if the door is still open. Ex-periments with ‘smart houses’ have been going on for at least20 years. The length of that period might mean that this kind oftechno-smartness is unwanted.

plants and furry animals may be pleasant, but in itself this is noguarantee for sustainable ecosystem quality. Eco-reality is not asprimitive as that. It’s the cycle that counts.

Ecosystems have a fairly narrow definition. When we really getinto the technicalities of planning and building, the wider notionof system thinking becomes a useful tool. A city can be consid-ered a complicated system in which people live, work, die, havefun or rob banks. It interacts with the surrounding world by ab-sorbing energy, traffic, information and material and disposingof products, waste and other information. The city also interactswith the people using it. The energy subsystem provides electric-ity, and public space partly serves as a system for information ex-change. Traffic systems enable people to move around safely,partly because of the use of the cybernetic principle of feedback:the output of a system is redirected back to the element that con-trols it. Traditionally the buildings in cities provide people with acomfortable and functional climate. They do so most often bygenerating it synthetically through a subsystem that consumesenergy – often quite a lot of it – and sometimes by interactingwith climatic influences.Some buildings can react to sunlight with shutters or to over-heating with valve systems. The feedback principle undoubtedlyhas the potential to reduce energy consumption, if applied clev-erly. This has been done many times already. However, in build-ing there is a tendency to overlook the interrelationship betweensubsystems and to forget about feedback. It has resulted for in-stance in oversensitive shutters opening and closing with everypassing wisp of cloud because their operation was only linked toincoming light and not to indoor atmospheric conditions.

The rise of computer intelligence may cause a shift in emphasisfrom synthetic cooling and heating to a more reactive energyhousehold. Buildings as structural systems may be able to reactto change by adaptation and self-repair. Connectivity betweendifferent systems may lead to one compensating for the failure

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can biologists to rival the physicist‘cyclotron’ invention. Regeneration ofgases seems well under control. Exper-iments have shown that the closurepercentage appears to be hamperedmainly by the edibility of plants. Therecycling system needs to be muchmore refined, maybe with contribu-tions by animals, to become really independent.

2.01.Small worlds CCCP

In business related to space travel andplanet colonization the Russians haveproved to be the great initiators. Theywere the first to experiment with hermetically closed ecosystems, with humans inside them, to find out if wecould survive together with a selec-tion of plants without introducing ad-ditional food. As early as 1965 in theSiberian town of Krasnoyarsk, theybuilt the Bios-1, a tiny (only 12 m3)‘living’ room connected to a tank withalgae that produced oxygen from thecarbon dioxide exhaled by the oneperson inside. A supply of food andwater, 80% of human survival needs,had to be brought in. In scientificterms this set-up thus resulted in‘20% closure’. Not a very spectacularachievement, but by expanding theBios-1 into Bios-2, with a water recy-cling system, bioscientists succeededin reaching a closure of over 80%three years later.Their successor, Bios-3, built in 1972and still functioning today, providesmuch more comfort with its 315 m3.It consists of welded steel plates andsits pragmatically underground to accommodate a crew of three peoplewith sleeping rooms, a kitchen, a lav-atory, a control room and equipmentfor processing, purification of excre-tions, and repair. Half the area is occupied by plants in the so-called‘phytotrons’, a word coined by Ameri-

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2.03.Ecotoys

Anything we know can be turned intoa toy, even an ecosystem.The EcoSphere® claims to be the firstself-containing miniature world. It accommodates real life in a glasssphere (or a pod), and you can buythem on the Internet: ‘Inside eachEcoSphere are active micro-organ-isms, bright red shrimp and algae in aclear “soup” of filtered sea water.Because the EcoSphere is a self-sus-taining ecosystem, you never have tofeed the life within. Simply provideyour EcoSphere with a source of indi-rect natural or artificial light and enjoy this aesthetic blend of art andscience, beauty and balance.’ Until itdies on you after a couple of years.EcoSphere is probably the first ecosys-tem that can actually break.

tion, considering the range of circum-stances on distant planets, and insteadfocus on research into the Mother Biosphere-1 herself, encompassingprogrammes for education and publicoutreach. The laboratory for instanceprovides unprecedented opportuni-ties for doing ecosystem research andstudying climate change. For this pur-pose the structure was renovated andmodified. Now Biosphere-2, managedby Columbia University, employssome 200 people. Since 1996 over1200 students from many universitieshave graduated from its programmes.

2.02.Small worldsUSOf course the Americans couldn’t staybehind in researching closed ecosys-tems. In the ’80s they started to builda much more ambitious (over 1200 m2)airtight biolaboratory in the Arizonadesert near Tucson. It was to becomethe famous Biosphere-2. The namesuggests that there is a Mark 1, whichhappens to be Mother Earth herself.The glass facility contains a smallrainforest, a bit of ocean, some desertand agricultural terrain and a humanhabitat, and apart from a rich florathere are several species of insectsfrom all over the world living inside.Like its Russian predecessor, Bio-sphere-2 was originally meant to ex-plore extraterrestrial colonization.Indeed, two crews of people lived inthere. The first eight ‘Biospherians’(four men and four women) lived inthe artificial ecosystem for two years,despite the level of oxygen goingdown after nine months, which wassolved, and a lack of produce towardsthe end of the mission. Next, twowomen and seven men went in. Thistime problems of a physical and socialnature meant that the mission wasaborted after six months. The socialnut of any system is a hard one tocrack for techno minds.In 1994 it was decided to no longeruse this unique laboratory for this -let’s face it – rather naive and arbitra-ry kind of space travel experimenta-

2.04.Cars feed oxygen production

project: Infra-Ecologieresearch and design: Willemijn Lofvers,Jago van Bergen and Duzan Doepelyear: 1999

Highways are considered a nuisancethat can best be hidden somewhere.On the other hand these functionalroads have become familiar in our everyday life and can legitimately beintegrated in architectural develop-ment. Willemijn Lofvers, Duzan Doepel and Jago van Bergen graduat-ed at the Academy for Architecture inRotterdam with four ideas that turnthe motorway complete with movingvehicles into an integral part of a

countryside ecosystem. Here are two:A network of fuel stations brandedBP-Koolzaad, accommodates energyvegetation to absorb exhaust gases.Rape, algae, beetroot and willow pro-duce enough fuel for Dutch traffic.The oxygen produced in photosynthe-sis is used in the combustion process.In this way the fuel station becomespart of the agricultural landscape. Oryou could have a Greenhouse Office, acombination of greenhouse landscapeand paperwork facilities. All trafficemissions are filtered and fed to thegreenhouse plants. Carbon monoxideenriches the soil, small dust particlescleanse the water and the absorptionof sulphur dioxide cools the building,providing a comfortable working cli-mate and the recognition that trans-portation could become part ofecosystem thinking.

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Current industry is caught up in anenormous amount of avoidablewheeling and dealing, for what iswaste to one company may very wellbe raw material to another. So whynot put the two close together? Kalundborg in Denmark was the firstindustrial area to set ecology as a con-dition for participating industries. Anenergy producer sells electrical cur-rent to a fish breeder, an oil refineryand a plasterboard factory. So farnothing special, but the latter also getssurplus plaster from the energy com-pany’s smoke filtering installation.The oil refinery’s waste gases go toboth the energy guy and the plastermaker and the biotechnological fish

firm sells its nitrogenous deposits tofarms in the region. The whole systemreduces costs for all parties involved.The principle of this system of ‘parkmanagement’ has three levels. In thefirst place, cooperation increases eco-efficiency. On top of that, sustainabili-ty is enhanced by a more intensive useof space, a shared clean water systemand shared environmentally friendlyenergy resources. The third conditionis the forming of an administration toenforce quality standards. Transporta-tion of goods and people and wastedisposal can be combined in a syner-getic effort.

2.05.Industrial ecology

Smart architecture is sometimes surprisingly obvious. You getthe feeling ‘If only I’d thought of that myself ’. Simple solutionsare anything but dumb. They are beautiful and elegant.

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2.06.Wetland

The more space gets occupied, themore regulations are needed – at leastthis seems to be the standard opinionin the Netherlands. Currently, guidedby a considerable amount of legisla-tion, about a million new dwellings arebeing built in this country on so-calledVINEX locations. In huge projects likethis it is difficult to evade regulations,for instance to be able to discover newsolutions for housing that don’t puttoo much of a burden on the environ-ment. This is one of the reasons whyattempts to create sustainable livingconditions are limited to add-ons, likeextra insulation and the occasional solar laundry dryer, for houses thatmay vary in style but all contribute toan extreme suburban monotony.As it happens, in city planning and architecture many of the aforemen-tioned rules and laws are directlylinked to the presence of an infrastruc-ture: water, electricity, gas, sewers androads. However, regulations simplymelt away if the infrastructure is leftout. This scheme is used by some de-signers and architects in the Nether-lands to experiment with ‘autarkic’housing that is totally independent ofinfrastructural provisions – almost,that is. Autarkic homes are designed tofit into the local ecosystem on theirown terms.For a competition Tom Mossel, EstherGonzalez Aurignac and Bert Fraza

developed an in some respects lessdrastic autarkic home as part of a land-scaping system called ‘Wetland’. Intheir vision the house is not entirelyautonomous: it gets its energy throughthe mooring post to which it is at-tached. But it does have a septic tank.Vegetation on the roof purifies greywater and provides insulation. Inhabit-ants can do their job thanks to thewireless telecommunication network.The house is linked to the existingroads using Stelcon slabs and net re-inforced grass in the polder.The mooring post suggests that thehouse is a boat, but it is not. The secretis that there are no foundations onheavy and expensive piles that needsinking in a layer of specially raisedsand. Instead the principle is appliedthat an object – in this case a house –can replace a removed quantity of soilwith the same weight. Houses will bebuilt on concrete trays. In this waybuilding is possible in marshy areas.Swampy land happens to have been re-instated as normal landscape in largeparts of the Netherlands by extendingthe water buffering zones of the rivers.In this particular project several waterlevels will occur. In some, the dwellingswill start floating every now and thenand drift around their poles. Thesehouses will have no fixed orientationor view. Because Wetland has no publicspace in terms of roads and squares –there are just the concrete slabs and thegrass – the allotment will be different,to say the least. The landscape will givean impression of space and be an ex-pression of weather change and flowsof water. It all adds up to a system ofwhat could be called ‘re-pioneering’.

project: Wetlandarchitects: Tom Mossel, Esther GonzalezAurignac with Bert Frazayear: 2000location: the Netherlands

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2.07.Werner Sobek’sown houseThis professional engineer and archi-tect designed his own perfect dream tolive in: Römerstrasse 128. Not only is itdesigned according to traditional mod-ernist architectural standards in steeland glass, it boasts zero emission andthe ability to produce its own heatingenergy. It has no inside walls, consistsof modular elements and functionsthrough the ample application ofhome electronics with touch screens,voice control and the like, reminiscentof Jacques Tati’s ‘Mon Oncle’. It can betaken apart and recycled and is light-weight (just under 40 tonnes). On siteit leaves a size zero environmentalfootprint because of triple glazing, heataccumulation in the ground under-neath and a solar cell rooftop to keepthe heat pump and ventilation systemrunning. It is an intriguing project be-cause of its stubborn combination ofenvironmental awareness and a sup-posedly correct architectural style.

project: R128architect and engineer: Werner Sobekyear: 2000location: Stuttgart, Germany

project: Federation Square Labyrinth and Atriumarchitects: Lab Architecture Studio year: 2000location: Melbourne, Australia

2.08.Energy labyrinthThe centre of Melbourne recentlygained a new space for urban interac-tivity and cultural opportunities onFederation Square. It is a spectacularatrium, an enclosed street with shops,the National Gallery of Victoria, androom for concerts and performanceswith glass internally and externally. Atthe north entrance the space betweenthe glass is extended into an airlock,to prevent warm air from dissipatingon cool days. What’s more, the build-ing has a unique passive cooling sys-tem. The principle is almost as old ascivilization, but the Melbourne ver-sion is up to date.Underneath the atrium’s structure,and above the deck that covers therailway on the south side along theYarra River is a dark and complexspace called ‘the Labyrinth’. Its sole

purpose is to accumulate heat. It con-sists of corrugated concrete walls thatadditionally support the deck of thesquare, arranged in cells that togethertake up a surface of 1600 m2. This spacewould have been useless if the idea hadnot arisen of storing energy in it.The Labyrinth exploits Melbourne’svariation in temperature. During thenight cool air is moistened andpumped through its cells, cooling theconcrete walls. By day the air ispumped to the atrium via the cells toprovide cooling. As a consequence thetemperature inside can be as much as12ºC lower than outside. The cells arenot used up all at once. On hot days aportion of them can be held back tobe deployed in the evening. In winter,the Labyrinth stores supplementalheat. When the Labyrinth’s function isnot required for the atrium its coolingcapacity is used to pre-cool air for theairconditioning systems of three near-by facilities. The energy system re-quires only about one tenth of aconventional airconditioning system.CO2 emission is reduced by the sameproportion.

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Dutch cultivation under glass is huge.It is one of the largest industries in theworld. As a consequence, greenhouses -‘the City of Glass’ – take up a large areain the west of the Netherlands, landthat cannot be used for anything otherthan harbouring flowers and cucum-bers. At the same time this zone is sub-ject to an ongoing urbanization processand is densely populated because of it.Municipalities are almost literally fight-ing over space for housing. The project‘City Fruitful’, planned for an area nearDordrecht, illustrates that there is a lotof space, as well as ecological efficiency,to be gained by radically mixing twopurposes. It was done by a group of cityplanners, architects, market gardenersand technicians. Borderlines betweendifferent kinds of use appear to becounter-productive.City Fruitful is a combination ofabout 1700 dwellings and 22 hectaresof cultivation under glass adding upto 56 hectares altogether. Homes aresituated not just next to, but also be-neath and on top of greenhouses.Energy, water and waste cycles areclosed. Houses will have the same airquality control system as green-houses, with automatic control ofvents and blinds. The roof surface ofgreenhouses is ideal for passive solarenergy generation. Transportationsystems are shared between habita-tion and production. Most of the city,

however, will be car free. There is onemain road. Walkers, users of publictransportation and cyclists are well offbecause of the fine-meshed infra-structure. Area use would be aboutone and a half times greater than inthe situation normally prevailing today.There is also the enhanced quality ofboth production and living environ-ments. Lastly, the scheme unfolds anew greenhouse typology in whichgreenhouses can be part private con-servatory, part public winter garden.

2.10.City Fruitful

2.09.Green stair

The main feature of Mewah OilsHeadquarters is a continuous land-scaped ramp which links the groundfloor all the way up to the roof.Adjoining the landscaped ramp arewater features, a grand stair, terracesand a cafeteria. The densely plantedlandscaped ramp displays a variety oftropical plants while the cascadingwater feature generates a sonic ambi-ence that relaxes visitors and thebuilding’s users alike.The building almost acts like anorganism that hosts people. Likemany of Yeang’s buildings it has intes-tines running through it, covered withvegetation. They act like lungs thatkeep the air clean and moreover guar-antee a pleasant space to be and towork in. The plants inside are watered

project: Mewah Oils Headquartersarchitect: Ken Yeang year: 2003location: Sengalor, Malaysia

project: City Fruitfularchitects: Kuiper Compagnons, Kas Oosterhuis Architekten et al.year: 1992location: Dordrecht, the Netherlands

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by a system that recycles collectedrainwater. Ventilation requires littleenergy, if any. Nature does the job. Insome instances it may get help fromelectric fans. There is a water featurewith cascades that absorb superfluousheat from the air.

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Ecology is not as new as it seems. As adiscipline it dates from the 19th cen-tury. It is rooted in geography and biology, but even though it is as old asmany other sciences, it is not a sep-arate university subject. Sybrand Tjallingii is an ecologist and planner.He studied landscape ecology as apart of biology at the University ofUtrecht. Later he specialized in land-scape architecture and planning at theUniversity of Technology in Delft. Atpresent he is working with the UrbanDesign and Development Group ofthe Faculty of Architecture at Delft.The supporting of biodiversity is aparadigm in ecology. There are twoviewpoints on which ecological poli-cies rest. The main issue of the theoryof ‘Island Biogeography’ is that ofhow organisms might reach an isol-ated habitat, such as an area enclosedby railways. Species will have moredifficulty surviving in small andisol-ated areas. The other is the ecosystem theory: this puts the quality of habitatconditions first. In somewhat exagger-ated terms: anything can live any-where, but the environment selects.Mankind is an integral part of this environment. Sybrand Tjallingii ob-serves that planning decisions reflectmainstream thinking about the rela-tionship between man and nature.Culture and nature are supposed to beopposites. Island thinking rules.

Green borderlines are to separate cityand wilderness and designers ban nature from cities, allowing a smatter-ing of lawns at the most. In reality, thelimits are not quite that clear-cut.Since 1970 the city has been con-sidered a system, but the question re-mains of where the borderline shouldbe drawn. There are some in-betweensolutions now. In Emscher Valley inthe west of Germany there has beenan attempt to integrate water systemsin the city grid by giving the water ofthe river, which used to be regarded asan obstacle, much more space.The determination of city limits is re-lated to scale. In the early days of en-vironmentalism, when the Club ofRome published its first report, therewas a strong tendency towards scalereduction: the world would be betteroff if everybody were to become aself-supporting farmer. Now ecolo-gists have come to realize that eco-efficiency would perish if that were tohappen. Sharing facilities is muchmore advantageous in urban situa-tions. Compost toilets in a city, for example, are no option. Companiesbenefit from sharing energy and waterfacilities. Generally engineers thinkon a large scale and architects createsmall-scale solutions. It is quite diffi-cult to make the right choices. Scaleand limits are not objectively measur-able parameters. They are always sub-ject to decision-making procedures.

2.11.Scale of limits

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‘Wrong!’, says Dutch landscape archi-tect Dirk Sijmons about the principleof starting a new regional plan by al-locating areas to agriculture, officesand homes. ‘Water management isparamount in this country, especiallyin the west.’ Indeed it always has been,but because of tradition things aregrowing out of balance, to the pointwhere floods are bound to occur thiscentury if nothing changes. The waterretention capacity of land as it is nowis insufficient. The first part of the rationale behind reconsidering the water balance in the west of the Netherlands is that this part has ur-banized more than three hundredfoldsince 1850. Apart from the birth of theso-called ‘Randstad’, the urban clusterof Amsterdam, Utrecht, Rotterdam,The Hague and everything in-be-tween, this has led to an increase inaverage soil density and a decrease inopen water. The second part of it island consolidation to increase agricul-tural productivity. The problem is puton edge as a result of climate change.This is bringing in more and heavierrainfall which also burdens the riversflowing in from the east through this‘Delta metropolis’.Sijmons made a proposal for the westof the Netherlands adding extra waterretention capacity to the existing sys-tem. It consists of peat pasture areasand extra polder drainage areas. In

this way the region gets a new systemof more sustainable inner lakes thatcan be financed with private money,simply because people love to live insurroundings like these. Moreover theplan will create recreational opportu-nities. The planning of buildings willfollow suit; some of these will float.

2.12.Water rebalance

The combination of housing and waterretention is worked up in detail for an areanear Kamerik, near Amsterdam.

landscape architect: Dirk Sijmons year: 2020location: Randstad, the Netherlands

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Smart architecture is optimistic and cheerful and it doesn’thave to be expensive. There is always something pleasing aboutit and often it’s even witty. Smart architecture is architecturewith a smile – and a sincere one.

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Julian Vincent is a biomimetics spe-cialist. He works at the Department ofMechanical Engineering of the Uni-versity of Bath in the UK as a biolo-gist. To illustrate his peculiar job: atsome point in the late ’90s he wasproud to announce that he had beengiven the opportunity to purchase apenguin to do research to support thedevelopment of new insulating ma-terials. Since insulation is relevant tothe functionality of building skin hereare a few quotes from his analyticaldescriptions:‘Survival of the cheapest’ is Vincent’sparaphrase of Darwin’s most famousobservation. Only the cheapest build-ing design will survive. Vincent refersto energy: ‘Organisms have to put alot of it into keeping a delicate balancebetween the temperatures inside andoutside themselves: under hot condi-tions one needs to lose heat; when it’scold heat needs to be conserved.’ Wa-ter plays an important role here, be-cause the best way to lose heat isevaporation. The more ‘work’ it takesto maintain the right inside tempera-ture the more ‘expensive’ life gets. Theeffort is in creating and controlling arate of temperature change from insideto out. Penguins – here they come – aretrue masters in this. The gradient canbe as steep as 80ºC, meaning that sucha bird has to be able to maintain abody temperature of about 40ºC un-

der polar conditions of minus 40ºC.The art lies in having very sophisticat-ed plumage. The down layer close tothe body divides the air into parcels.These are so small that the gas be-comes more viscous, almost like trea-cle, and is drastically slowed downbecause of that: ‘We have investigatedtheir feathers. The vane is requiredsimply to provide a smooth and wa-terproof outer covering. It constitutesonly the outer third or so of the feath-er, the remainder being occupied bylong strands of down. We calculatedthat the average size of air space with-in the down layer is only about 50 mi-crometres across. The entrained aircan account for the excellent insulat-ing properties of penguin feathers.‘The penguin has a problem, though.When it dives all the air is driven outof the insulating layer by water pres-sure. If the down were wetted it wouldlose its ability to subdivide the air intosmall parcels. So the feathers collapseand lay close to the skin, and havehooks connecting them, rather likeVelcro, so that the outer layer remainswatertight. When the bird returns tothe surface the feathers are pulledback upright, partly by springing,partly by muscles at their base, andthe down layer fluffs out again.’It is a well known fact that penguinfeet are not covered with feathers.There is a different principle at work

2.13.Survival of thecheapest

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2.14.Hot dog systemSystem thinking in relation to smartarchitecture tends to be associated withsensors and computers controllingvalves and shutters and lighting, gener-ally things that are dynamic but don’tmove around. That needn’t be so. Aus-tralian artist and researcher at MITmedia lab Natalie Jeremijenko loves tomix phenomena from different worlds.Her mission is ‘to reclaim technologyfrom the idealized, abstract concept of“cyberspace” and apply it to the messycomplexities of the real world’. So forinstance she reclaims technology fromthe world of toys in her Feral RoboticDog project. For the past few years shehas hacked several species of toy robot-ic dogs to do dangerous security jobs.She develops hobby kits to turn robo-dogs into specialized toxin sniffers thatwander around in shopping malls andother public facilities to track downpoisonous or radioactive substances.The project provides instructions torebuild your own electronic pet into awell-trained specialist watchdog. Oneof the models she used is Sony’s Aibo.The company protested against thisunforeseen exploitation of their care-fully developed pet.

here: ‘counter current heat exchange’.The outgoing arterial blood loses itsheat to the venous blood that goes in.This system allows fine-tuned heatregulation. When a penguin emergesits feet are yellow in polar regions butwhen it waddles ashore on warmerland they are pink, because they areset to get rid of superfluous energy.Counter current heat exchange is notexclusive to penguins or birds. As amatter of fact it is the standard princi-ple in fish and insects, the so-called‘cold-blooded’ animals.Apart from anything else a collegeroom full of students constitutes aroom full of small stoves. Tempera-ture control can be a social matter forsome species. Vincent: ‘A swarm ofbees changes its behaviour as the tem-perature increases. At low tempera-tures the insects huddle and present asolid shell to the world. The core tem-perature is 35ºC, although the outsideof the swarm is colder. At an externaltemperature of 30ºC the swarm seemsto have grown due to the incorpora-tion of airways through the middle toconvey some of the inside heat away.

Bees overwinter using the design ofthe nest and stored nectar to maintainviable temperatures. Clustered in thecentre of the comb and shivering toproduce heat they can easily survivelong periods of frost. During summerthe nest is cooled by forced evapora-tion. Bees sit at the front entrance ofthe hive, which is always at a low posi-tion, and fan their wings so that theair is driven through. Water broughtinto the hive by foraging bees (someof it in the gathered honey) evapo-rates. Any undesired holes in the out-side of the nest are blocked with awaxy material called propolis.’ Andthis is not unlike the application ofweather stripping we know from hu-mans.

Summary of a 1998 paper by Julian Vincent

Counter current heat exchange is also tobe found in the fins of warm-blooded dolphins.

Penguin feather

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Rain, heat, distance, gravity, findingfood: we humans clearly are champi-ons in adapting to the difficulties thatnature presents us with, so much sothat we tend to become counterpro-ductive. We owe our resilience to ourability to learn and to understand.Mankind has invented ways to createnear-perfect artificial ecosystems andcopied the achievements of fellow spe-cies. The cliché example is the termitehill, a living environment with an ad-vanced ventilation system that miracu-lously emerges from the simplebehaviour of extremely stupid insects.The functioning and structure ofplants and animals themselves alsoserves as an inspiration, judging by,say, the striking similarity between the‘Mathematical Bridge’ at Queen’s Col-lege in Cambridge and bone structure.A more extreme example is the re-search that has been going on duringthe past decade into the workings ofthe nanoscale ‘flagellar motor’ bywhich bacteria propel themselves.Janine Benyus has written a famousbook on this subject entitled ‘Biomim-icry: Innovation Inspired by Nature’.Biomimicry is learning from organ-isms or imitating them, in order tosolve technical problems.

Benyus observes that man is a rela-tively young species that can learnfrom the 30 million survivors thatturned earth into a durable ecosys-tem. She describes many examplesthat she calls ‘a pattern language forsurvival’. Spiders, bird feathers, trees,anemones: they all provide practicalknowledge and inspiration for today’stechnology developers.

2.15.Natural models

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2.16.TreemicryMost people consider nature to consistof everything that lives, apart fromthemselves. They tend to overlooksmall but significant details such asmountains, Jupiter and the Universe.Trees are by far the most importantrepresentatives of what is considered‘nature’. Perhaps that is why the Barce-lona-based architect Enric Ruiz-Gelidrew a gigantic stainless steel tree tostand in the middle of the double coneshaped aviary he designed for the Bar-celona marine zoo. Wrapped in a net,the metal structure is 62 metres wide atits widest point and 237 metres long toaccommodate the birds inside.The counterfeit tree is not just that.The branches are hollow and at someplaces there are mats that are moistur-ized through a system of water pipes.The mats serve as ground for real treesto grow on. The birds can build theirnests in them.

project: Cloud 9architect: Enric Ruiz-Geliyear: 2001location: Barcelona, Spain

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project: house in Cap Ferratarchitects: Anne Lacaton, Jean Philippe Vassalyear: 1998location: Cap Ferrat, France

2.17.Merry manor 1There is this unavoidable associationbetween the label ‘eco’ and romanticforest surroundings. For an elderly lady, the French studio Lacaton & Vassal designed a simple minimaldwelling that is almost completely ab-sorbed by the trees around and insideit. The house doesn’t even touch theground and is totally unobtrusive. In-terestingly this architecture continu-ously changes with the seasons. Inaddition the trees need to be cared for.

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2.18.Merry manor 2The young architectural practice ofEdouard François and Duncan Lewishas developed a reputation for thiskind of work in sensitive environmen-tal areas.In the village of Jupilles, south of LeMans, they designed a small com-munity of rental homes for all-year-round use. To avoid turning the community into a housing estate eachset of two houses is designed as a boxconcealed behind a hedge. In a fewyears the ‘nature’ will completely cover the houses.

project: rural holiday village, Jupillesarchitects: Edouard François with Duncan Lewisyear: 2000location: Jupilles, France

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03.EfficiencyEfficient building

3.01. Evolution of efficiency3.02. Eden3.03. Tall and light3.04. Airdrop3.05. Water branch3.06. Close to clothes3.07. Stiff space suit3.08. Steaming briefcase3.09. Green Building3.10. Efficient styles3.11. UBA Dessau3.12. Scooping wind3.13. Sunny clouds3.14. Tokyo inventory3.15. Weather bashing3.16. Broadacre City3.17. In-betweenness3.18. Urban Lite

A rule of smart design could be: watchwhat you’re doing. Many houses inNew Zealand have a balcony or a veranda on the south side, which isnormal from the northern hemi-sphere’s point of view, but in fact rath-er chilly in summer. Another rule ofsmart design might be: don’t use com-plex technology unless it is absolutelynecessary. Trees are perfectly capableof providing shadow in summer, whileallowing the costly light in during win-ter. This building has a smart slowshutter system consisting of trees.There are of course millions of exam-ples of buildings with the same kind ofsystem, except that in most cases itwasn’t designed.

2.19.Green shutters

project: shop, office and warehousearchitect: Osamu Ishiiyear: 1982location: Japan

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tioned. An office building may be what you get, but is there aneed for it, or is it a dream come true, or is it a wonderful icon?And is it efficient if only half of it is rented? And is it efficient toreplace it after 20 years? Well, it can be. It depends. It is quiteimpossible to have a general notion of ‘what you want’.The cost is the other part of the incomplete definition. Do weadd up design, destruction of wildlife and/or social organiza-tion, construction, beauty, enjoyment, location quality, use,networking functionality, exploitation and demolition? Againit depends. Efficiency can be interpreted in many differentways. The main thing that is true in any case is that we have tobe careful how we define it and that we have to include as muchas is relevant. This holds true for the three main architecturalstages: planning and building, use, and disassembly.

Efficiency has always been a major consideration for architec-ture. Cities owe their very existence to ideas and expectationsof efficiency in terms of transportation, trade, weather condi-tions, geography. Even in the virtual city of Alpha World, build-ing locations are chosen on the basis of simplicity ofcoordinates, which is efficient, because they take little effort toremember. Cities basically provide a rich environment withshort distances between provisions. Interestingly, conditionschange with time. A location that was perfect 700 years agomay be a wrong choice in the 21st century. Expanding a citystill evolves from considerations of efficiency. It seems more ef-ficient to add new neighbourhoods than to start all over againsomewhere else.Before building starts, many things can be done to take carethat appropriate structures will be developed. The first deci-sion to be made is about whether one or more buildings areneeded at all at a particular location. Only very few architectsdare to propose building nothing at all, or to reuse whatever isalready available. Dutch architect Willem Jan Neutelings is anexplicit advocate of laziness. He may, for instance, suggest leav-ing an old building as it is. Some other architects propose that

03.Efficient building

The earth is extremely efficient in maintaining life on and in-side its surface. Man on the other hand in his infinite wisdomhas wrapped the earth in a somewhat messy layer of extremeinefficiency, to his own disadvantage. For a comparison withman, take his fellow animal the hippopotamus – it is best to usea big creature to make a stronger point. The hippopotamuswalks and swims a bit, eats and drinks a lot and excretes theleftovers which are digested and transformed by other faunaand flora. That’s it. Man does all that too, but as an extra he haslearned to make all kinds of goods to make his life more com-fortable: pocket knives, coffee-makers, art, cars, computers,weapons, buildings, ships, cities. Most of these things cannotbe digested and their making and transportation and use anddisassembly and recycling need energy and landfills. In com-parison with the hippopotamus man has made a gigantic leapin consumption, thereby providing the needs and means foreven more production and consumption. The richer a nationthe more inefficient it is. The easy way out would be to statethat man should stop all this. This will never happen because ofwhat we are, but we could try to be more efficient. The firstquestion then is: what is efficient? Most people have an under-standing of the word, mainly by comparing observations ofsimplicity, like the lifestyle of the hippopotamus with theirown. Efficiency is an old word and its use probably becamemore frequent at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution inthe mid 19th century. That is when it became a means to definesuccess by producing more with less effort. There are as manydefinitions of efficiency as there are sciences, but the most eco-nomical one is: ‘the ratio between what you get and what itcosts’. Unfortunately this doesn’t really get us anywhere, be-cause there is a whole lot of meaning still missing. ‘What youget’ doesn’t say very much if need and demand are not men-

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The efficiency of lightness may involve replacing material masswith intelligent feedback systems. There have been some experi-ments in this field. The German pneumatics company Festohas developed pneumatic ‘muscles’ (tubes that become shorterwhen the air pressure inside is increased) and their head of de-velopment Axel Thallemer led a project to build an inflatableexhibition hall to demonstrate their potential. Of course pneu-matic muscles are just one option. Elastic tailoring is another.It involves designing composite structures that change shape inrelation to load, a strategy that doesn’t require extra energy.The way buildings are used, however, provides by far the larg-est contribution to their consumption of effort. They needheating and/or cooling, cleaning and maintenance, and ofcourse water and sewage. These all add up to the cost compo-nent of efficiency. In principle there are two strategies to putlimitations on this. One could be called ‘symbiosis’, which in-volves using the waste of one facility as input to the other, pref-erably to the benefit of both. The second is self-sufficiency byminimizing input from energy and water systems and outputto a sewer system. It is what makes space stations tick, but so-phisticated technology is not necessary on earth. Down here itis called autarkic living. Dutch designers and artists are experi-menting with it. The two strategies can be combined to furtherenhance exploitation. If waste water from a home is used to fer-tilize land on which to grow vegetables, what you get is bothautarky and symbiosis at no cost.Symbiosis is being developed in industry. It is not uncommonto use surplus energy from production to heat buildings. Eventourism is learning to benefit from symbiosis. In a Dutch citycalled Den Bosch, there is an ice rink situated in the vicinity ofan indoor beach. Fake winter heats fake summer. By and large,a lot of heat is still allowed to simply dissipate into the atmos-phere. Some people living on the streets have found a way tocatch it in the plastic bag they use as a temporary shelter. Theyjust attach the bag to the outlet of a heating system. In this casemaybe ‘parasite principle’ would be a more appropriate name,

making clothes is sufficient, since keeping warm in them takes agood deal less energy than heating a building. The office of KenYeang in Kuala Lumpur is one of the few that make a thoroughassessment of the building site, its geological characteristics andthe climate at hand. It helps to exploit a location’s assets to mini-mize the need to include climatological appliances. Climate mayalso influence the structure of a building. The British architectRichard Horden for example, designed a tower that reacts towind forces by aerodynamically choosing the right position.Building tradition involves the erection of heavy stony struc-tures that derive their strength and stiffness from resistingpressure forces. Stone bridges from before the Industrial Revo-lution, before the discovery of iron’s ability to resist tensile andbending forces, demonstrate this beautifully. This respectabletradition of sturdily building for eternity, which now embracesconcrete for its tremendous applicability in combination withsteel, has been the cause of overlooking lighter alternatives. Ac-cording to lightness specialist Prof Adriaan Beukers, who leadsthe Laboratory for Lightweight Structures at Delft Universityof Technology, most buildings could be 50% lighter if notmore, by applying different combinations of materials, con-cepts and processing methods. Currently his laboratory isworking on a principle to build high structures that consist ofhollow composite shapes filled with air under high pressure,the advantage being that buckling is excluded. The implica-tions of weight reduction are potentially enormous in terms ofproduction and transportation efficiency. Theoretically theywould consume a lot less energy if all building componentswould be, say, 25% lighter. Now it is standard procedure toplace concrete piles, chop off the top metre (and in the case ofunderground building sometimes as much as six metres) andtransport these leftovers back to some demolition facility. Eventhe ancient pyramid builders would have loathed such a proce-dure. Building sites are usually even more messy than demoli-tion sites. This has its charm for building professionals, butalso indicates a lack of efficiency awareness.

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ing’ is a key notion. It is difficult to set up a system in which ar-chitects can search for building parts that ‘may come in handy’.Here we find a strong relation with style. On the one hand thearchitect may have a view on style in which old parts just don’tfit. On the other we see that people who bought themselves anold house try to completely return it to its original state. Thereis a gap in-between that somehow could be filled. A groupcalled 2012 Architects proposes the reuse of components, suchas the carcasses of washing machines and submarines, but alsobuildings and neighbourhoods for purposes other than theiroriginal designation. They have brought reuse to a high valuelevel.

Apart from aesthetics reuse is also complex because of the par-ticularities of buildings. They vary in size and they depend onwhat is available on the site in question. It seems almost impos-sible to completely exclude the occurrence of ‘leftovers’. A wayout may be to distinguish in advance between parts that are al-ready available in the waste mine, parts that have to be madenew but can be reused later on, and parts that can be recycledor burned, for which someone invented the term ‘thermo recy-cling’. In fact it can even be considered a component of thesymbiotic principle if we use the remains of one building tokeep another warm. The most interesting issue is the awarenessof value: if the costs of creation are high, make sure that thevalue can be kept up too. This sheds new light on the meaningof efficiency. What you get and what it costs is not a one-shotdeal, but rather a ratio that is monitored in time.

except that the donor building doesn’t really suffer from the ex-traction of a little warmth.Autarky is a way to thoroughly integrate a home – but theoreti-cally it could also be an industry – into the ecological cycle atthe location where it is built. Studio Schie 2.0 for one is work-ing on ways to make a home entirely independent from all ex-isting piping systems so as to evade the rules these imply. It isdesigning homes that get their energy from a windmill or solarpanels, and from biomass. Their water comes from rain or di-rectly from the photosynthesis process that takes place in trees.Waste water feeds the earth. To experience minimum energyuse, the studio closes down all its electrical equipment one dayevery month. Computer silence frees the thoughts of the peo-ple who work there. It is amazing what you can do withoutelectronic devices. Lightness can of course be part of the autar-kic principle. If a building doesn’t have to be attached to pipesand cables, it doesn’t have to be fixed to a place and it doesn’tneed a heavy foundation. It can drift around on a layer of insu-lating lightweight foam. The principle of autarky can be ex-tended to the urban scale, like ecosystems. On that level somefacilities can be shared, while others are limited to single house-holds.

When the exploitation of a building has reached its end, costsare further increased because it has to be changed, or disman-tled or demolished, which may destroy existing value. Thisshould always be weighed against sustaining the existing andreusing parts elsewhere. For many years now recycling is ahousehold word in any kind of production, but sustaining valuemay increase efficiency in many cases.Reuse of complete parts has been an important issue for thoseinvolved in the idea of ‘industrial architecture’, but the out-come shows that especially in the realm of building design thisis not an easy goal to reach, since every location, and every ar-chitect for that matter, requires a different solution. Because ofthis, production is always limited and expensive. ‘Waste min-

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3.01.Evolution of efficiency

Jeroen van den Bergh is a professor inenvironmental economics at the FreeUniversity in Amsterdam. Recently hewas awarded the Royal Shell Prize forhis research work on sustainable devel-opment and energy. Currently hismain interest is in evolutionary eco-nomics, in which economics is gradually freed from its disciplinaryconstraints to become analogous toDarwinism. We asked him to help uscome to grips with the notion of ‘effi-ciency’, since it is very important in relation to the sustainability of cityplanning and architecture.It strikes Van den Bergh that the termis so often used in some partial sense.For instance one definition of efficien-cy is the ratio of work done, by a ma-chine or people, to the cost. ‘This to meis a strictly technical approach.‘Economists define efficiency on a so-cial level as well. There it means thatno one can be made better off exceptby the worsening welfare conditions ofsomebody else.‘In a building a lot of things come to-gether. People like to have a big house,for instance, but it is quite expensive tokeep it warm. So where does this leaveus with efficiency? Another phenom-enon that is always overlooked, whenefficiency is defined in the strict tech-nical sense, is the notorious reboundeffect.’ This is the effect of saving mon-ey through efficiency increase. If

warming the aforementioned dwellingbecomes more efficient and cheaper,the owner may decide that he can af-ford to fly to Bangkok for a holiday,thereby unknowingly destroying allenvironmental profit. Efficiency iscomplex.We are acquiring more knowledge onthe idiosyncrasies of economics, how-ever. Jeroen van den Bergh teachessome basics: ‘The first economist Ad-am Smith believed that if all economicactivities were left free this would be toeverybody’s good. Later on, extra con-ditions had to be set. There should be nomarket imperfections and no environ-mental effects, to name two. Arthur Pigou in the 1920s and ’30s was thefirst to suggest that market failurescould be corrected through taxes andsubsidies. He came up with the idea oftaxing pollution arising from the use ofcoal and brown coal, the Pigouvian tax.Environmental economics didn’t reallystart until the ’60s. Now we know wehave to encompass everything, not justprofitability which includes environ-mental costs, but also values like livingnear water. Efficiency depends on values that not everybody agrees upon.We have to build on hypotheses. Notall parameters can be expressed innumbers. Empirical data has to becomplemented with a good policy.‘This implies that design too has to bebased on broader ideas. And some-times you have to take imperfection forgranted in the beginning. Sectors withvery strict policies can serve as exam-ples. On the whole reuse should be puton a higher level. Waste mining is becoming an important issue. Econo-mists are discussing whether 100% recycling is possible at all.’ Ironically

The formula describes how we should increase the efficiency(E) in the use of materials and energy to keep the pressure onour environment limited.

On the left there is the pressure on our environment (P),it equals:W = average global welfare multiplied byO = the global population multiplied byE = efficiency

In 1989, when this formula was introduced, the global popula-tion was expected to grow four times and its average welfare togrow five times by 2030. To keep the pressure on our environ-ment equal (=1) we should then increase the efficiency (E) in theuse of materials and energy by a factor of twenty.

P=WxOxE

100% recycling is what you get if youcalculate on the very long term. Naturedoesn’t waste a molecule. So we have tofind an optimum between short-termefficiency of culture and total absenceof waste.Van den Berg: ‘We also have to includeuse. I mean, there’s no simple solution.Ideally we would like to measure every-thing according to one criterion. Moreoften than not, this is simply money.What people are prepared to pay for ahouse tells us a lot about their environ-mental preferences: the amount ofgreenspace, noise, air pollution, water.Statistics are an important democratic

indicator. Money expresses intrinsicvalue, including religion, ethics andwhether frogs are survivors. A lot ofdata become available if you combinethe prices of dwellings with environ-mental values.‘We have to weigh and aggregate. Eco-nomics is similar to ecology. Bothstudy complex systems that are diffi-cult to experiment with. Both deal withflows of energy and recycling. Bothneed the sun. And both are self-organ-izing. That’s why I consider myself anevolutionary economist. We don’t planas much as we’d like to think.’

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project: New Edenarchitect: Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners Ltd.year: 2001location: Bodelva, Cornwall, United Kingdom

3.02.Eden

The American visionary RichardBuckminster Fuller provided the basicconcept for the structure of NewEden, a spectacular public greenhousein Cornwall. A mid 20th-century mas-ter of lightness, Buckminster Fullerinvented the principle of tensegrity inwhich a structure is held up mostly bytensile forces, thereby requiring theleast amount of material. We nowknow that tensegrity is the structuralbasis for biological organisms all theway from giraffes to one-celled ani-mals. And you can’t get more efficientthan nature.His other major proposal is the geo-desic dome structure. It consists of acombination of hexagonal frame ele-ments that has been so inspirationalthat chemists called a peculiar spheri-cal carbon molecule they discovered,with atoms on the corners of hexa-gons, ‘Bucky Balls’ or ‘Fullerenes’.The Eden roof consists of a snakelikechain of several geodesic domes. Untilthis building was created, Fuller’sdomes stood for ambition rather thanpractice. A number of modest oneshad been built, but the idea for adome to entirely cover Manhattan ob-viously went a bit too far. The designof domes was always hampered bystandard design difficulties: edges andlinks. A dome must stand on some-thing, needs an entry and may need tobe linked to other building elements.

The idea for a structure can be mag-nificent, but it always has to prove it-self in the way it ends and how itrelates externally. That is where Edenhas improved on earlier solutions.For delivering daylight inside, the ob-vious solution used to be glass, whichis heavy, needs strong, stiff supportsand introduces the risk of leakage. Ar-chitect Nicholas Grimshaw found anentirely new way to create a translu-cent dome. It is quite a complex struc-ture of tubes and trusses. The cover ismade out of a double layer of antistat-ic Ethylene Tetra Fluoro Ethylene foil.In each hexagon the double layer isheld under pressure with air guidedthrough the tubes to form a cushion.The result is extremely light, certainlyin comparison with glass. Making thefoil is not very energy intensive. Nei-ther is transportation from the pro-duction plant to the building site.

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The skin is under permanent tensionbecause of the high pressure inside.A tube like that could be made out offibre reinforced plastic, which is highlyresistant to tensile forces, and it couldbe filled with air. The building processwould imply that the hose is put up(or maybe let down from a special lift-ing airship) and consequently placedunder pressure. Columns can be builtthis way to support floors. Obviouslythe bottom of a column has to be wider than the top. This implies thatthe lower floors have less space. A 400-metre-tall, square high-rise with a col-umn at each corner would have some75% less floor space at the bottomthan at the top. The acceptance of lossof floor space determines the limit ofheight. A range of very light columnsof different heights could facilitate anew type of city. Since pressure is easyto measure, built-in intelligence couldenhance structure safety.

3.03.Tall and light

Building technology is gradually de-veloping along the lines of improvingand rationalizing traditional methods.Because of the considerable risks in-volved in high-rise structures due tothe concentration of large numbers ofpeople in a very small area, there hasnot been a major innovative sidestepin tall buildings. They are all basicallytowers with a steel and concrete struc-ture and glazing to allow in light andcontaining a comfortable climate. Thisimplies that they are regarded – andthis is more important than you wouldthink – as very large houses, while bythe sheer number of people inside theycan be big enough to be called cities.The logistic effort used in building tow-ers is a principal contributor to the en-vironmental burden. The Sears Towerin Chicago, to name one, weighs about200,000 tonnes, one fourth of which issteel, enough to produce 50,000 cars.To develop a new type of high-risestructure with minimum environmen-tal impact as far as the building pro-cess is concerned, attention could bedirected to lightness, thereby reducingthe burden caused by material trans-port, and to replacing the tower con-cept with the idea of a tall city inwhich different means and directionsof internal transport are possible. Thestructure could be a city facilitator, anextension of available floor space,rather than a very large house.

At the Laboratory for Lightweight Ma-terials and Structures of the Facultyfor Aeronautical Engineering at DelftUniversity of Technology a new prin-ciple for very light high-rise buildingis being developed by Sotiris Koussiosand lab head Prof Adriaan Beukers.Basically it can be compared to what itis that allows trees to stand tall instrong winds: the skin dries and losesvolume while the core remains moist;because of that the skin is always un-der tension and less likely to crackthrough bending forces. The newstructure type also features a skin un-der tension, thereby theoretically ex-cluding the risk of buckling.The key to required stiffness consistsof pressure and smartness. Now let’sstart with the former. A classic high-rise structure used in Russia for highvoltage masts and for a tower in Kobe,Japan in 1940, has recently been pro-posed for a very tall telecommunica-tions tower. It is held upright with astay system of steel tension cablesplaced together as a hyperboloid – callit a cylinder that is narrower in themiddle. If this particular structure ismade gas tight and filled with air un-der pressure, the shape will change into an isotensoid, which is any shapewherein, by definition, tensile forcesare identical throughout its surface. Inthis case the shape would be somewhatlike that of a rugby ball. It can be de-fined as one element, several of whichcan be stacked. It could also be madeinto one elongated shape, thus turninginto a long hose of varying diameter,almost like a caterpillar. If this tube isput under pressure by filling it with agas or fluid, it will become extremelystiff and theoretically unable to buckle.

project: cooling tower of nuclear plant atSchmehausenengineers: Günter Mayr and Jörg Schlaichlocation: Germanyyear: 1974

Smart architecture cooperates: it responds to its surroundings.Not only does this apply to the physical environment: climate,urban landscape, conditions like that. It is also true for the so-cial environment, for the political and historical context.

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3.04.Airdrop

You wouldn’t expect this kind of in-spiring design from a pneumaticscompany, but Axel Thallemer wholeads Corporate Design for Festo inGermany, is something else. His ideasare truly innovative and right on theedge of technology development.Thallemer allows himself to be in-spired by what he observes in natureand he succeeds in understandingprinciples rather than creating banalcopies.In earlier years he designed several mo-bile buildings. The best known is Air-tecture, a rectangular exhibition hallheld upright by an inflatable outsideskeleton and computer controlled bypneumatic muscles that contract whenthe air pressure inside them is in-creased. His most recent design, intro-duced in 2000, is different altogether.From a distance it looks like a hugedrop of water. As a matter of fact thisstructure, which is 32 metres in dia-meter and 8 metres high, does involvewater. It is inside the foundation ringthat keeps the pneumatic structurefirmly fixed on the ground withoutthe need for further attachment.

‘Airquarium’ has a translucent spheri-cal roof made of Vertoflex, a glass fibre reinforced rubber specially developed by Festo and Continentalthat now has many different applica-tions. The material is harmless whenit burns. The whole structure fits intotwo 20-foot containers, one for thenecessary technical equipment andone for the structure consisting of theroof and the ring, of course withoutthe water.

project: Airquariumresearch and design: Axel Thallemerfirm: Festoyear: 2000

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3.06.Close toclothesBy far the most efficient means toprotect a human being from theweather’s whims is clothing. Manypeople live in conditions that are diffi-cult enough to resort to solutions thatcan hardly be called buildings any-more. These vary in concept and ap-plication. The cities’ homelesssometimes use plastic bags that theytie to airconditioning ducts to catchwarm air in cold times. Michael Rakowitz designed for them a special‘parasite’ bag that feeds on HVAC airand can be used as a warm shelter.They are custom-made. For his firstattempt Rakowitz used black bags butthis solution was rejected. The home-less prefer visibility over privacy forsafety reasons. New York has specialregulations. The height of a structuremay not exceed a certain limit or itwill be considered a tent and thereforeillegal. So the designer made it slightlylower. In addition his bag contrap-tions have been defined as ‘body ex-tensions’ by court order. So they areviewed as clothes.‘Refuge Wear’, designed by Lucy Orta,arose from the observation that entirepopulations were on the move be-cause of catastrophic circumstances.Several versions of suits that can easi-ly be turned into a tent illustrate heridea of architecture as a body exten-sion, just like Rakowitz’s. The systemwas later updated and called ‘Modular

3.05.Water branchFor their project ‘Autarkic House’ Stu-dio Schie 2.0 built an interesting con-traption that literally feeds on naturalefficiency. It is a bag that catches treesweat, or water as we call it. And whenyou’re thirsty you can drink it. Trees‘breathe’ carbon dioxide and collectwater through their roots to feed theprocess of photosynthesis by whichthey produce oxygen in their leaves.As it happens only one per cent ofthat life-preserving root fluid is actu-ally used. All the rest evaporates, un-less of course you catch it in a smallzeppelin made out of readily availableand cheap PVC electrical tubing andplastic foil.

project: Drinkwaterboomdesign: Schie 2.0year: 2002

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3.07.Stiff space suit

Fossils require a high quality storageatmosphere if they are to survive evenlonger than they already have. Tem-perature variation, for instance, has tobe kept within 1ºC per year. In regionswith unstable climatic conditions thisis normally achieved with sophisticat-ed energy-devouring airconditioningmachinery. However in the new Natural History Museum in Leiden,Netherlands, the climate control is inthe hands of an even more sophisti-cated system that is far more efficientand cheaper too. For this, architectFons Verheijen was inspired by spacesuits.The floor space of the building isabout 25,000 m2, half of which con-tains the priceless fossil collection thatoriginated 180 years ago and whichincludes the remains of some animalsnow extinct. The architect decided toput this archive into a tower, to func-tion as a prominent landmark tostimulate development of that partic-ular part of the city. The advantage ofa tower is that the climate is easier tocontrol, to the point that some moneycould be reallocated to the quality ofexhibition and office spaces.The archive cannot be accessed by thepublic. Bugs that are notorious fordamaging fossils cannot travel fromfloor to floor because the tower is di-vided up into separate compartments.The clever thing about the tower,

apart from being well insulated, isthat the climate control is applied tocavity air inside the walls rather thanto the air inside the tower space. Theprinciple is the same in a space suit. Itisolates the astronaut from extremelyhigh and low temperatures and un-derneath the outer layer is an ad-vanced temperature regulation systemthat preserves the heat generated bythe person inside. Superfluous heat isguided through radiators in the astro-

Architecture’, which may be too broada term, but now any number of suitscan be linked together to form a col-lective camp site. Modular Architec-ture is a way of ‘building physicalconnections between displaced peo-ple’.Iranian born US high-rise architectNader Khalili travelled through hismotherland for five years to discoveruseful shelter-building methods. Hewas inspired by ancient mud-brickbuilding in his design for a simple refugee shelter. He makes simpledomes with long mud-filled sandbagsthat are coiled up and held togetherby barbed wire. The structures aresimple enough to be moved fromplace to place. It is not difficult tocombine several into ‘superadobes’.Khalili has a vision of entire settle-ments built from them and evendwellings with three bedrooms andtwo garages, an entire Broadacre Cityof mud. NASA has been consideringsuperadobes for putting shelters onthe moon. Of course they would re-place the barbed wire with Velcro.

(previous page)product: Parasitesdesign: Michael Rakowitzyear: 1998

project: Modular Architectureartist: Lucy Ortayear: 1996

project: Superadobe Domesdesign: Nader Khaliliyear: 1991

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3.09.Green BuildingIn the early ’90s Future Systems in co-operation with Ove Arup & Partnersdeveloped a thorough concept for aGreen Building with offices and anup-to-date climate control system.Ideas for a better workplace were inte-grated with the latest insights on cli-mate control. The entire building isenveloped into a second skin that allows more or less air, light and heatto pass through, depending on theweather conditions outside. Thewhole structure is set 17 metres aboveground level to allow clean air to flowin from underneath. Air is guidedthrough the offices via the centralatrium. On the roof is a heat exchangesystem that collects superfluous ener-gy to warm the incoming air. Thebuilding’s slick shape is the result ofthinking of its enclosure as a secondskin. Its principles were soon adoptedby many of today’s architects.

3.08.Steaming briefcaseEnergy is not necessarily a big thing,in the literal sense. Building servicesare becoming smaller and more effi-cient. In Germany the company Enginion AG is developing an almostzero emission power unit about thesize of a briefcase. It is a clean recipro-cating engine that drives a pump thatcompresses water, turning it intosteam to drive a dynamo (or someother rotating energy converter) thatallows the steam to become wateragain. It has a host of applications, thesame as any power generator.Fuel cells may speed up the process of‘energy democratization’ in the fu-ture. A fuel cell is in fact a battery thatworks on hydrogen. It can be quitesmall, so small in fact that it could bepart of your laptop. Energy efficiencyis a matter of time.

naut’s life pack. Thus the climate of thesuit’s skin is regulated, not the inside.To protect the tower’s interior fromrain, the facade has a stainless steelskin on top of a layer of insulatingmaterial. Immediately behind that is a60 millimetre cavity, followed by a 300millimetre thick layer of concrete. Thecavity in-between is divided up into600 millimetre wide vertical air ducts.Modest equipment at ground leveltakes care of the airconditioning in-side these. The steel outside layer isdesigned like the scaly skin of a rep-tile. Shingle overlay absorbs thermalexpansion. This tower is an impregna-ble fortress for temperature changes.

project: archives Naturalisarchitect: Fons Verheijenyear: 1997location: Leiden, the Netherlands

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3.10.Efficient styles

Whereas efficient climate control usedto be considered peculiar, now it hasturned into an asset of prestige. Oneof the early examples is the main office building for the NMB Bank inAmsterdam by Alberts & Van Huut. Itreally is a little strange, relating as itdoes directly to Rudolf Steiner’s ideas,with its mountain-like slanted struc-ture, elaborate brickwork and smallwindows. It is one of those buildingsthat is loathed by most of the archi-tectural community and loved by thepublic. Its climatological qualitymainly depends on insulation and water flows inside. Alberts & Van Huut continued to refer to organicshapes, but climatic efficiency becamesubject to modernist architecturalconventions about transparency.The NMB Bank is now part of INGGroup, an organization with a longhistory of important architecturecommissions. They were one of theearly clients of Berlage. Recently Meyer & Van Schooten designed anew high-tech building for their top-level executives in Amsterdam. It fea-tures the latest in efficient climatecontrol and bears a strong resem-blance to Future Systems’ GreenBuilding. To the users inside, the steelstructure, glass, gardens and largeempty spaces provide a dynamic ex-perience of workspace quality. Thelook of this slick modern product-

form with its aluminium panellinghas caused the building to be popular-ly dubbed ‘The Dustbuster’. What remains is the question of whetherprestige and efficiency are compatible.

project: Headquarters NMBarchitects: Ton Alberts & Max van Huutyear: 1987location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

project: ING Housearchitects: Meyer & Van Schooten Architectenyear: 2002location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

project: Green Buildingarchitect: Future Systemsyear: 1990location: Londonengineering: Ove Arup & Partners

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3.12.Scooping wind

Why is it that design and architectureoften involve compensating for theshortcomings of the original plan?Buildings, for instance, are meant toprotect people from climatic influen-ces and they end up doing this so wellthat facilities are required to improvethe interior atmosphere. It would bewiser to try and control the impact ofweather conditions instead.Some buildings succeed in doing justthat, because they have been designedto turn the wind from outside into apleasant flow of air inside. It is cheap-er, involves less energy and helpsavoid the feeling of enclosure you getin an airconditioned space. The prin-ciple is very old, and modern ex-amples in Dubai and Hyderabad arederived from it. It is simple too: createa pressure differential between thewindward side and the lee sidethrough the clever formation of anobstacle, which is the building itselfplus a wind tower that scoops up theair and directs it to the interior.The wind scooping principle doesn’tneed a desert climate to function. InBluewater in the UK Erich Kuhnebuilt an enclosed ‘shopping avenue’with an outdoor climate, which is thenicest part of the concept. There issunshine, no pollution, and fresh airfrom a natural ventilation system thatconsists of 12 conical wind scoopsable to rotate into the wind.

project: Bluewater shopping centrearchitect: Eric Kuhneengineering: Battle McCarthy year: 2003location: Bluewater, United Kingdom

Ancient wind scoops in Hyderabad,Pakistan, channeling cool afternoon air into

each room of the multi-storey housing.

3.11.UBA Dessau

The German Federal Agency for theEnvironment can’t afford to neglectenvironmental efficiency. Its new office building is currently under con-struction and the process is due forcompletion in 2004. It is being builtaccording to energy consumptionstandards that are some 50% morestrict than those required by law. Thisnoble goal is reached through a com-bination of intelligent measures. Forone thing the building exploits theoutside climate to the maximum.When the weather is agreeable the offices have access to natural ventila-tion. In summer the heat storage capacity of ceilings and walls ‘slowsdown’ the temperature changes of day

and night. During the day these arenice and cool because of overnightventilation, and the heat they captureduring the day provides warmth inthe evenings. Extra heat can be re-covered from the thermal mass of theground, using the largest heat ex-changers to date. At least 15% of theenergy used by the electrical facilitiesis supplied by renewable sources.But this is all just technology. Thebuilding and its surroundings are ex-pected to provide the sensual feelingof climatic comfort of a park land-scape. The building’s shape is de-signed in such a way that a major partof it is accessible to the public. It is entered through the ‘UBA Forum’ thatvirtually draws the park inside andserves as a link between public facilities, including a library and aconvention hall, and the offices. Eventhe interior is like a park, featuring islands of greenery. What better wayto achieve natural efficiency than toincorporate the natural environment.

project: Umweltbundes Ambtarchitect: Sauerbruch Hutton Architekten, Berlinyear: 2004location: Dessau, Germany

Smart architecture is technology-wise. Using advanced engi-neering and materials and dressing up a building with energy-saving devices is not necessarily smart, while a distrust oftechnological solutions is pretty stupid.

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If only the sun would do exactly whatwe wanted it to: not too much, not toolittle. This ideal of climatological effi-ciency has been approached in anacademy building in the city ofHerne, Germany. The AkademieMont-Cenis is a glass building with aroof that provides both shadow andenergy. With its 12,600 square metresit is the largest roof with an integratedphoto voltaic system in the world. Itcovers a box that contains severalbuildings: a library, a hotel, a restau-rant and the academy complex itself.

Glass structures are notorious foroverheating. Shadow is provided by acombination of transparent glass pan-els and semi-transparent solar panelswith six different cell densities. Theircarefully engineered arrangementgives the impression of a cloud pat-tern that allows daylight to enter butalso provides pleasantly shaded areas.Palm trees, water and natural ventila-tion cause the inside climate to beMediterranean all year through. Theinside is estimated to be warmer thanthe outside only a couple of days ayear. But then: no building is perfect.

3.13. Sunny clouds

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project: Akademie Mont-Cenisarchitects: Jourda & Perraudin Architectesyear: 1999location: Herne-Sodingen, Germany

restaurant – the same category. On theother hand: if the road and the build-ing at the same location were not evento share their structure, this urbanpotential would still be enhanced. It isan interesting proposal to understand urban life and, who knows, to make itmore efficient.

3.14.Tokyo inventory

project: Made in Tokyoresearch: Bow-Wow, Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda and Yoshiharu Tsukamotoyear: 2001location: Tokyo, Japan

In Tokyo one can play golf in buildingswith several floors. Tokyo has to be efficient in its use of space. If it wasn’t,there would just be too much going onfor this hyper-urban environment tocontain. The obvious way to extend theavailability of space, and time, is to in-telligently and pragmatically combinefunctions. Atelier Bow-Wow has sum-marized multiple use of space in thiscity in a book called ‘Made in Tokyo’.It holds many examples of locationsthat are, for instance, both a depart-ment store and an expressway. ‘Madein Tokyo’ is not about charm, norabout beauty, or function or even con-struction. All it shows is radically prag-matic use.The authors define the ‘EnvironmentalUnit’ as an urban entity characterizedby category, structure and use. Adepartment store that is also anexpressway, because they share theirstructure, has more potential for un-expected urban phenomena to occurthan a structure that is shared by adepartment store and, for instance, a

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project: visitor centre at Terrassonarchitect: Ian Ritchie Architectsyear: 1995location: Terrasson, France

The main purpose of most buildings isto counteract the capriciousness ofweather conditions. Nowadays this ismost often done by creating a closedstructure with your usual walls androof and fitting it with electric climatecontrol devices that provide heatingwhen it’s cold outside and coolingwhen it’s too damned hot. Generallyspeaking, this is not a very clever solution, since the structure itself canbe designed in such a way that it is capable of providing a comfortable inside climate.In the ‘Jardins de l’imaginaire’ in Terrasson, in the middle of an areawell-known for the caves of Lascauxand other prehistoric sites, Ian Ritchiebuilt a greenhouse with near-perfectclimatic control. It contains a café, aterrace, a shop, an auditorium and anexhibition space. A thick semicirculargabion wall made from crude localstone supports a flat glass roof. Thewall is capable of accumulating heat.Because of that, it evens out the tem-perature change between day andnight, a well known principle that hasbeen applied for thousands of years.Between the wall and the roof is a gapwhich allows air to flow through. Insummer this, together with blinds andthe air moisturizing effect of plants,keeps the inside cool, something thatis difficult to achieve in greenhouses.In addition the ventilation prevents

water from condensing against theglass in spring and autumn. Thebuilding is not open to the public inwinter, but even then the accumulat-ing wall provides sufficient heating.

3.15.Weather bashing

In spring and autumn, the air gap at theedge of the roof prevents condensation.The external wall acts as a heat sink, sta-bilizing internal temperatures.

In summer, blinds prevent direct sunlightfrom causing overheating. Evaporationcools the wall, producing ‘cold radiation’which improves internal comfort.

Towards the end of his life FrankLloyd Wright proposed one of the highest skyscrapers ever, but in the1930s he didn’t like the ideas of theInternational Modern Movement andindustrialization at all. He wanted tostart a new civilization no less, and hehad almost metaphysical notions ofwhat architects could achieve. Hewrote: ‘A good plan is the beginningand the end, because every good planis organic. This means that its devel-opment in all directions is inherentand unavoidable.’ He sought to designthe outline of organic urbanizationcalled ‘Broadacre City’.Wright was convinced that all ‘Usonian’ citizens should be allowedto own land, at least 400 acres of it, tobe allocated by a civil architect, thuscreating a world in which peoplecould take care of themselves, developintellectually and do some industrialwork on the side. With Broadacre CityWright literally blew up urban life toscatter it across the country. He said:‘It is the country itself, come to life asa truly formidable city.’ He was in favour of a radical decentralizationbased on the opportunities of cartravel, which no longer required compactness and even measuredprosperity in the number of cars perhousehold. Cultural entertainmentwas to be provided in communitycentres and an unfinished cathedral

nearby could serve to fulfil people’sspiritual needs. Industrial facilitiesand schools could be made muchsmaller. Wright was disappointed thatAmerica did not accept his Usoniancitizenship. His vision of car useturned into a traffic jam reality, butBroadacre City has not entirely lost itsinspirational qualities.

3.16.Broadacre City

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project: Broadacre Cityarchitect: Frank Lloyd Wrightyear: 1932location: USA

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3.17.In-betweennessLandscapes are not always being ex-ploited by official owners. For periodsof years they can be in a state of ‘in-betweenness’, left over from one kindof use and waiting for the next. Thisdoes not imply that nobody is inter-ested. People with a keen eye and afeeling for what they need discoverthese seemingly barren and uselessstretches of land and give them a newpurpose, albeit temporary. Photog-rapher Bas Princen has turned the observation of people using their particular discovery into a project.Landscapes are pictured in their tem-porary interpretation by people wholike to drive 4x4 cars, spot birds, surf,fly kites, hike or, in this case, build aMillennium Tower.

‘Thursday morning, September, future harbour’

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The weight of a fire engine holding30,000 litres of water determines theconstructive constraints for roads.Therefore all infrastructure and every-thing else in the west of the Nether-lands for that matter, has to be builton a two-metre layer of sand. This isone of the regulations that determinethe quality of reclaimed land. Theground needs to stabilize and lie fal-low for a couple of years and all build-ings are founded on piles because ofthat. This procedure interferes withthe water balance. Moreover, it costs afortune to reverse, which renders landexploitation inflexible.

There have been alternative proposals.Wetland, described elsewhere in thisbook, is one of them. At city scale,MVRDV/Jón Kristinsson have sug-gested a solution called ‘Lite Urban-ism’ for a location south of Rotterdam.No sand, and the opportunity for abalanced water management usingswamps and natural drainage. The in-frastructure is a lot simpler too. Tele-phone cables are gone, as well as gaspipes, as electricity is provided locallyby renewable sources on the same levelas water purification, which takesplace in gardens. Using simple knock-down housing systems, a suburb canbe created and disassembled when de-mands and circumstances change. Theconcept of the ‘light’ city can provide a more efficient way of thinking whereflexibility, temporariness and even do-it-yourself dwellings are required. Andmaybe Lite Urbanism can survive withsmaller fire engines.

3.18.Urban Lite 04.

Process Practice4.01. 2012 Architecten4.02. Lofvers van Bergen Kolpa Architecten4.03. RUIMTELAB4.04. Schie 2.04.05. STEALTHgroup

Where next?Project index

left page:project: Lite Urbanismarchitect: MVRDV and Jón Kristinssonyear: 1996location: Midden-IJsselmonde, Rotterdam, the Netherlands

existing situation lite scenario

04.Process Practice

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Buildings are not inert things, they are alive. This insightseems to be radically altering the way architects work. Whilemany still feel that their buildings look their best on the daythey were delivered and ruefully watch their spiritual off-spring age from that day on, more and more are grasping thefact that buildings are not some lifeless end-product but thatthey change over time. These architects often work at practiceswhere environmental issues are addressed on the road to asustainable architecture.

If we examine the spectrum of so-called sustainable or eco-logical architecture, we see a ‘deep-eco’ attitude at one endand a ‘high-tech’ approach at the other. Both stances locatearchitecture in time but in fundamentally different ways.The ideal behind the deep-eco attitude is a cyclic time frame.Just as primitive peoples live in ever recurring cycles of sea-sons and generations, so too should we, for the sake of the en-vironment. The deep-eco attitude rejects progress, seekinginstead to at least maintain the status quo from a defensive,conservative position. Instead of the efficiency, momentumand renewal inherent in the process of modernization, itpropagates reduction, inactivity and even a return to a pre-in-dustrial era. Buildings designed on the back of this ideal, onemight assume, should be fundamentally different from thosebeing built today. In reality, the distinction is not that great.Aside from reinstating many neglected materials and devel-oping eminently usable construction and installation tech-niques, these buildings still look familiar to us.

At the other end of the spectrum is the high-tech attitudewhose state-of-the-art application of climate-responsive tech-niques sets out to lessen the building’s negative impact on the

environment. It slots into the generally accepted time frame,which is linear instead of cyclic. Its practitioners seek toachieve an ideal situation in the future. Everything will bebetter then, they claim. And if the climate-control equipmentdoesn’t do its job properly, well, just add some more. Thisstrand too has provided many, largely technical innovations.For one thing, innovations in eco-tech have lifted the ban ontransparency. Glass buildings were not only notorious energy-wasters, their whole image was negative. High-tech has becomeeco-tech and has shown during the past decades that energy ef-ficiency and a transparent architecture can go together well.

Much has changed as a result of these developments. In theNetherlands, buildings and urban areas are cleaner and moreenergy-efficient than they were a few decades ago.Slowly but surely we have seen energy efficiency, the use of al-ternative sources of energy and environmentally friendly ma-terials percolating into everyday building and architecturalpractice. In part through government legislation, in part un-questionably out of a sincere environmental awareness, con-struction techniques are becoming more enduring, so that theimpact of building on the supply of raw materials and fossilfuels is decreasing. But all this has done little to produce atruly new architecture.Despite these efforts to build a better, cleaner world, currentarchitectural practice can’t seem to shake off the traditionalimage of buildings as static objects and the equally tradition-al notion of what architects do.

The circumstances surrounding a building’s functioning, andaccordingly the demands made of it, are constantly altering.This holds for short-term as well as long-term change. Theway a building is used can change drastically from one day tothe next or even at different times of the day. And it is not on-ly the use that changes, the external circumstances are dy-namic too. In the short term, the climate changes in a rhythm

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of seasons and a rhythm of day and night. In the long term,there is the dynamic of the changing physical and social con-text. How much more comfortable and enduring buildingswould be if they could react flexibly to these changes, if theywere to form a self-evident entity with nature! Architects aregoing to have to reformulate their brief if this is to be achieved.

Instead of being merely the producer of a unique three-di-mensional product, architects should see themselves as pro-grammers of a process of spatial change. The time factor andthe fact that life is enacted in dynamic processes needs incor-porating in the architectural design. A process-based archi-tecture of this order brings about a process rather than afinished article, a set of possibilities that puts the product as-pect in the hands of its users. Process-based architects need toconcern themselves most of all with creating a field of changeand modification, with generating possibilities instead offacts. It doesn’t need to be an immaterial, virtual architecture.On the contrary, the presence of a physical, spatial structurealways will be a necessary condition for potential use. It is theform that is no longer stable, that is ready to accept change.Its temporary state is determined by the circumstances of themoment on the basis of an activated process and in-built in-telligence and potential for change. Not product architecturethen, but a process-based architecture whose form is definedby its users’ dynamic behaviour and changing demands andby the changing external and internal conditions; an architec-ture that itself has the characteristics of an ecological system,that emulates nature instead of protecting it and therefore en-gages in a enduring fusion of nature and culture. Now thatwould be a truly ground-breaking ecological architecture.A process-based architecture as described above has yet to be-come everyday practice. Yet it does exist. In our firm’s imme-diate surroundings we know of several mainly fledglingarchitectural practices that are working on such a process-tar-geted approach to architecture, each in their own way. We will

be showcasing a number of these neighbouring practices inthe final section of the book. Theirs is not the last word on thesubject, nor are they the only ones. We are convinced thatmany such firms exist, maybe still operating in the marginand yet to break surface. Who knows, maybe these are the ad-vance guard of a new, smart, process-oriented architecture.

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4.01.2012 Architecten

2012 Architecten is a Rotterdam-based practicerun by Jan Jongert, Denis Oudendijk and CésarePeeren. Their basic premise is to address the poten-tial – context, sources of energy, waste materials –at the site where the design is to be realized. Mostprojects are entirely or partly built by their ownworkshop. They relate to a variety of scales: graph-ic design, lighting, furniture, interiors and build-ings. A key focus of theirs is to examine how local‘waste’ can be recycled as building material. Bywaste is meant materials and plant as well as emptybuildings and urban residual space. Their aim hereis to reuse this waste on site with a minimum ofadditional energy. This is why they established ‘Recyclicity’, a network organization whose mem-bers work together on practical solutions for re-using waste materials in the construction industry,developing new applications for the purpose.

In the context of Recyclicity, the concept of wastehas no limitations in scale. Empty buildings andnon-used urban space are therefore also con-sidered as waste. The characteristic qualities avail-able at these scales are often neglected or simply ignored. Appliances, refrigerators for example, arebeing dismantled and stored away or shredded.However, if the waste fridge were to be taken as thestarting point, it could lead to an alternative reusefor construction.Buildings due to be demolished can be consideredwaste as well. Sometimes whole neighbourhoodsare being torn down in order to rebuild so-calledenvironmentally-friendly dwellings in return. Bytaking the existing buildings as a starting point fordesigning, the same neighbourhood can be up-graded while saving a lot of energy and material.Unused urban space is often made inaccessible. By

making landscape architects and policy-makersconscious of this waste of space, new uses for it canbe stimulated.

Designing and building with locally availablewaste materials requires an innovative and funda-mentally different design approach. Recyclicitystimulates the architect to approach designingfrom a conceptual duality: the outcome of the de-sign is a result of both the principal’s programmeand the identity of the available waste. Designingbecomes a continuous process influenced by theenvironment for which the outcome will be an innovative and exciting architectural design – andtherefore a far more compatible product than atpresent.

RottepontThe ‘Rottepont’ is one of the first results of Recy-clicity. During the summer of 2001, in conjunctionwith an arts event in Rotterdam, this temporarycrossing for pedestrians operated between thebanks of the Rotte, the river that gave the city itsname. It may not be the most efficient way ofcrossing a river but certainly the most entertainingand it keeps you fit as well.

2012 architecten; Jan Jongert, Denis Oudendijkand Césare Peeren, Rotterdam.www.rchitecten.demon.nl

Rottepont, Rotterdam, 2001.Team: Jan Jongert, Denis Oudendijk and Césare Peeren.A building experiment for ‘Galerie op de Rotte’ by B.E.P..

Witgoedwoning, 1999.Design by Jan Jongert. A design and research projectfor the Academie van Bouw-kunst Rotterdam.

Recycle Valley, Beuningen,2002.‘Van Dirt tot Waste’, a research study into flows ofwaste material. Team: JanJongert, Denis Oudendijk andCésare Peeren. Research inassociation with Bureau Venhuizen.

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The Rottepont is a variant on the traditional pedes-trian ferry which is winched or hauled along a cable. The initial sketches brought its designers tothe idea of constructing a ferry that used a reel fora winch. A cable manufacturer in the Rotterdamarea throws away something like 75 wooden reelsof various sizes every month. These reels consist oftwo large wooden discs separated by a drum ofcurved staves clamped together with studs – theperfect starting point for a sturdy winch. Duringthe course of the project this winch, built up of fiveof these wooden reels, ended up as a boat. Walkingon the upper reel drives the four lower ones. Thesefour are filled with second-hand car inner tubesand act as floats. During operations the cable at-tached to the two quays is rolled on and off thesereels. Two sets of steps were added to bridge thedifference in height between the two quays. Theyare made from the curved staves of the woodendrums, hence their undulating form.

When the art event was over, the ferry’s components were transformed into a ‘play object’in Gerard Scholtenstraat in Rotterdam and partsof a work bike in The Hague.

Witgoedwoning Every year, some 10,000 refrigerators are thrownaway in the Rotterdam area. ‘Recyclicity Feyen-oord’, a research project done in 1999, produced a house built using the enormous quantity ofdiscarded fridges and other kitchen appliances.Something like 22 houses could in fact be builtevery year using this supply of discarded whitegoods. This ‘white goods house’ consists of a mainloadbearing structure of disused train rails, pairsof fridge sides for insulation (entire fridges on thenorth side of the house) and a cladding of stain-less steel draining boards. Washing machinedoors can be mounted as windows in the recessesfor kitchen sinks at places chosen by the occu-pants. As these products are standardized to anextreme, it is a simple matter assembling kits ofparts for this house.

Recycle Valley, BeuningenNear the Dutch town of Beuningen north-west ofNijmegen, there are enormous sand excavationsafoot for building activities and major infrastruc-ture works, including laying the tracks for thehigh-speed railway line to Paris. Interventions likethese transform the site during the course of theoperation into a lunar landscape which could conceivably be used to house a temporary pro-gramme. The departure-point of this project is tochallenge designers with proposals for temporaryprogrammes, to respect the received context asmuch as can be and not to use more materials andenergy flows than are strictly necessary. So 2012Architecten began by making a material inventoryof all the waste flows in the municipality of Beu-ningen. The result is a series of product sheets withdescriptions of the origin, material properties andpotential applications of the found waste. Thesemake a distinction between production waste, re-cycled materials and materials at the end of a lifecycle. The products and knowledge assembled inthe product sheets enable a great many waste

A predecessor of theMiele space station(see 1.10.)

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4.01.Lofvers van Bergen KolpaArchitecten

Lofvers van Bergen Kolpa Architecten is an archi-tectural practice based in Rotterdam. WillemijnLofvers, Jago van Bergen and Evert Kolpa special-ize in projects whose focus is a natural balance be-tween programme, landscape and forms of energy,often making inventive use of the seeming contra-dictions between design brief, technology andcontext. Their work (designing and realizingbuildings, developing scenarios and doing re-search) runs the gamut of scales. It includes devel-oping sustainable business parks and designing a150-metre-tall transmitter mast to be built in Amsterdam. Recently they began a three-year research project with students on the future ofutilitarian resources – agriculture, energy and water – in the Netherlands.

Delta-WorksThe élan of the high-speed rail connection in Eu-rope has a functional as well as a strongly symbol-ic meaning. It is a very adequate public transportsystem on a European scale, but also expresses themental and spatial connection between the differ-ent European cultures and types of landscape. TheDutch Delta-HSL will open up the northern flat-lands, recognizable from the well-known image ofthe man-made landscape gained from the water byusing wind. The theme of water and wind will bemade explicit in the design of the stations, trainsand the places left over after planning and con-struction. One of these, left over after completionof the railway track, will be a huge ground depotin the polderlands of Haarlemmermeer (NL) thatfacilitates the construction of the Delta-HSL. Howcan such a place become not just a landmark but

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products to be reused locally as building material –this way the excavation can become an inventiveRecycle Valley.

If a building material has lostits original function, i.e. hasbecome waste, there is stillplenty you can do with it. Theuppermost flows in the dia-gram have already beendeveloped and are working atmaximum efficiency; thosecoloured red still have anenormous untapped potentialopen to them.

Lofvers van Bergen Kolpa Architecten; Willemijn Lofvers,Jago van Bergen and EvertKolpa, Rotterdam.

Delta-Works, 2003.Team: Willemijn Lofvers, Jagovan Bergen, Evert Kolpa andLoic Fumeaux. Technical advice: Dike Board Rijnland.Design for a competition heldby Atelier HSL.

Groen Front!, 2002.Team: Willemijn Lofvers, Jagovan Bergen, Evert Kolpa andRemko Toonen. Design for thecompetition ‘Mix to the Max’,held by Bouwfonds Wonen.

IJ-Mast, Amsterdam, 2001.Team: Willemijn Lofvers, Jagovan Bergen, Evert Kolpa andRemko Toonen. Client: Nozema.

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Delta-Works is designed as a kinetic sculpture atthe juncture of four types of infrastructure. Thispiece of art is a small-scale hydraulic engineeringwork set on top of the old soil spill. It purifies wa-ter from the polder, at the same time functioningas water storage and generating extra capacity as apumping engine. Polder water, polluted by agri-culture, will be pumped up by an Archimedeanscrew to the level of the water basin. The basin hasenough capacity to function as water storage. Stepby step the water will enter the ‘helofytenfilters’ orreed fields for cleansing. Wind turbines at thesite’s highest point generate the required energy.Delta-Works is a contemporary self-supportinglow-tech water machine at a leftover place.

Groen Front!Groen Front! (Green front) is a design for a build-ing with a mixed programme of housing, officesand shops. A striking feature is the widerange of strong links it forges in a single complexbetween the live/work programme and such ele-ments of building performance as climate controland water management. Its location is strikingtoo, being right up against a large natural area, thelakes of Oostvaarderplassen near Almere (NL).The various programmes are strung together inand around the live/work building into a dynamicecology. Its climatological heart is an odd-shapedlobby which exchanges energy flows between thehomes and offices. A series of reed balconies ter-minating in a spiral serves to purify rain and in-ternal waste water. There are, in addition, basinsalongside vegetable gardens in the grounds of thecomplex, a natural swimming pool warmed by of-fice heat and a sauna under the solar boiler roof.Groen Front! is attractive not just because it placesshops and offices near housing but through thestrong ‘green’ identity woven into it. (see illustra-tion on the next page)

ground water and cause seep-age.

Pump capacityFour pumping engines bringthe water out of the polder in-to the Ringvaart. The con-struction of the Delta-HSLmakes extra capacity neces-sary, due to the fact that thewater system is cut into small-er fragments.

HelofytenfilterPolder water is mainly pol-luted by nitrogen, phosphorusand pesticide caused by agri-culture. Nitrogen and phos-phorus can be removed fromwater by a ‘helofytenfilter’, areed landscape in 1.5 metresof water.

Archimedean screw and wind turbineA wind turbine will drive theArchimedean screw. The Ar-chimedean screw is a provenpumping system, a compoundof a propeller shaft withblades. These are placed in aninclined trough, through whichthe water is propelled up-wards.

Construction and maintenanceThe raised plateau is easily realized with the available soiland simple ground shifting.The planting requires littlemaintenance; basic mowingand the yearly reed harvestingare sufficient. The wind tur-bines and the Archimedeanscrews are installed and main-tained by the dike board.

Ground depotThe soil, mainly clay and peat,will be processed in the bodyof the dikes. These are sealedoff with a layer of clay andovergrown with grass (localvegetation). Both water basinand filter are saved from thesoil.

WaterwayThe polder is situated at 4.4metres below sea level. Forrainwater to leave the polder ithas to be pumped to a higherlevel. A system of ditches andcanals brings the water to themain canal in the middle ofthe polder. A pumping enginethen pumps the water to ahigher level and into a subse-quent canal (Ringvaart) fromwhere it flows to the sea.

Water storageIn the Haarlemmermeer thereis a greater need for expan-sion basins on a higher level.This way, the stored water willnot put pressure on the

also contribute on different levels to its environ-ment?The famous image of the flat northern lowlands isdefined by the continuous struggle against the wa-ter. The ingenious hydraulic engineering works ofthe 19th century made it possible to retrieve landfor agricultural production, and created the mostimportant field of production of the Dutch econ-omy. However, intensive harvesting and the mechan-ical maintenance of the landscape by controlling thewater level, has its drawbacks. The soil is exhaustedand over-fertilized, the water balance disturbed andthe natural environment in the large-scale agrarianareas fragmented, slowly threatening the future ofthese landscapes and their engineering works.

Besides that, laying out vast infrastructure workslike the Delta-HSL disturbs the water balance ofthe surrounding areas in a dramatic way. There-fore, this project proposes an intervention in theform of this ground depot to restore the naturalbalance and even contribute to tackling some ofthe problems relating to the future of the man-made landscape.

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4.03.RUIMTELAB

The RUIMTELAB architectural practice is a laboratory for flexibility where the architects RenéHeijne and Jacques Vink liaise with a network ofexperts. Their stepping-off point is that you canonly achieve ground-breaking projects through acombination of research and design. RUIMTELABhas carried out studies commissioned by the gov-ernment into buildings that can be easily modi-fied: flex buildings. It is clear from this researchthat it takes more than civil engineering to suc-cessfully realize such buildings. Aspects of use andmanagement are at least as important. Besides, itrequires designers who are willing to let go of theirdesign. For the result is not a completed ‘architec-tural’ product but a continually changing object.At the time of going to press, RUIMTELAB isworking with an environmental psychologist, anarchitectural historian, a structural engineer and aproperty consultant on designs for soon-to-be-built flexible buildings.

Flex buildings are buildings which are literally de-signed to change. A flex building must be able toaccept different infills and its users must be able toeasily adapt their surroundings. The study intoflex buildings has elicited a number of design in-sights which are summarized below headed by arelevant key term. It should be stressed that theseare not hard-and-fast conclusions but more in theregion of statements and reminders for those in-volved with flex buildings.

1. Flexible is...Flexibility in a building is its capacity to undergomodifications and accept changes of function withlimited structural interventions. More than 40%

IJ-Mast television transmitter, AmsterdamThis 150-metre-tall television transmitter withnatural air-conditioning is being built in the northof Amsterdam for Nozema (the NetherlandsBroadcasting Transmission Company). Its aerialssit atop a massive concrete-clad foot with the ser-vices integrated into it. The concrete was pouredin place using ribbed formwork, giving a measureof aesthetic refinement to the facing. It also has apractical purpose internally. The horizontal ribsuse air from outside to cool the cooling water ofthe transmitting equipment in a natural process.This increases the building’s energy efficiency.

The whole is physically articulated to express theprogrammes and ranges of the various aerials. Italso takes account of its visibility from differentperspectives and at different times of the day. Atnight its top will glow like a magic wand in the skyabove North Amsterdam.

Green Front (previous page)

RUIMTELAB; René Heijne andJacques Vink, Rotterdam.www.ruimtelab.nl

Flex buildings, Study into flexibilityTeam: René Heijne, Jacques Vinkand others. Client: Rijksplanologische Dienst and Rijksgebouwen-dienst. With financial assistancefrom the Netherlands Foundationfor the Fine Arts, Design andArchitecture.

F.G. University, Wyong, Australia,1996 (see 1.02.).

Scouting Club, Reeuwijk nearGouda, 2001 (design).Team: René Heijne and Jacques Vink with Joris Ghyssaert. Client: Cornelis deHoutmangroep.

Student housing, Wageningen,2003. Team: René Heijne and JacquesVink. Client: Stichting SocialeHuisvesting Wageningen.

Townhouses, Amsterdam, 2000.Team René Heijne and JacquesVink with Guido Duba. Client:Houtman Radema Family.

Mixed-use building, Hoorn, 2003(design).Team: René Heijne and Jacques Vink with Dieter Dettling.Client: Municipality of Hoorn.

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is an urgent need for buildings that act as endur-ing landmarks in the city. Flex buildings have ananswer to this dilemma.

8. Cultural durabilityCultural durability can make a flex building ingood working order a major success, but it can al-so obstruct change, say if there is resistance to de-molishing a poorly functioning building.

9. SpontaneousSometimes buildings are flexible without this be-ing calculated beforehand. Many warehouses areable to accommodate different kinds of usesthrough the sturdiness of their architecture.

Farms and stables have alsoproved suitable for manykinds of use. The modernmodular construction used forthe agricultural industry seemsto have saved the day for ascouting club (Cornelis deHoutmangroep) in Reeuwijknear Gouda. Although it didn’thave enough money for a newclubhouse, it did have enoughenthusiastic and practically-minded members. So the clubcommissioned a constructioncompany to erect an inexpen-sive and roomy stable that itsmembers could fill in them-selves.

10. DesigningMany architects (certainly Dutch ones) have beentrained along functionalist lines. Functional de-sign assumes buildings with a clearly describedprogramme. In flexible buildings however boththe use and the future users are largely unknown.

11. Time horizonA time horizon is the span of time assumed in adesign brief: 20 years means making other deci-sions than when the horizon is 200 years. It’s notjust about what a design should do but also forhow long.

12. BandwidthA flex building need not necessarily be able to takeup every possible function. ‘Functional band-width’ is a current term: which functions are in-volved? You don’t always need flexibility.

13. Not everythingThe flex building concept suggests an oppositepole: a building made to measure. Not all functionsare suitable for inclusion in a flex building. A print-

of the activities housed in a flex building can con-tinue to function during modification.

This masterplan for a universi-ty campus in Wyong, Australiaanticipates shrinkage. The Internet enables edu-cation to reach the most inaccessible areas. For themoment a relatively largecomplex is still required but inthe future the university will beable to manage with far fewerbuildings.

2. An observationBuilding regulations are not geared to buildingsdeveloped without a pre-established programme.Thinking in terms of function begins with theland use plan.

3. IntensiveFlex buildings enlarge the dynamic of a city by enabling a more intensive land use.

4. VacancyA new development is to strategically reserve extraspace (oversize) to accommodate future growth,and to accept temporary vacancy to enhance abuilding’s flexibility. Until a few years ago it wascustomary to avoid leaving buildings vacant be-cause of the bad image. Times change.

5. NodesThe developments at nodes in the personal trans-port network are dynamic and difficult to predict.Flex buildings are able to take up these changes.

6. ShrinkageBuilding flexibly is not just about growing but alsoabout getting smaller.

A building’s flexibility isenhanced by oversize in struc-ture as well as space.

7. DilemmaBuildings should be able to change quickly to keepabreast of the city’s growth. At the same time there

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This mixed-use building inHoorn sports a double facade.This renders the activities in-side the building visible in theexterior. The facade works asa display window in whicheach of the companies canpresent itself.

combine as a single entity. They can always be recast as individuals at a later date.

18. Double facadeThe double facade is a promising concept that al-lows for expressive and/or open facades in flexiblebuildings. It can also help to reduce a building’senergy consumption.

19. EnergyIt is sensible to tailor the energy management ex-actly to the use. So in a flex building the energymanagement is flexible too.

20. Active managementFlex buildings require active management. Besidesthe day-to-day business of upkeep and repair, thereneeds to be a policy for the building’s infill. This in-cludes deciding which users and uses are desirableand in which proportions, and fixing the require-ments for user representation in the facade.

ing works for instance, with enormous floor loads,is better off with a building made to measure.

This student housing in Wage-ningen was designed to beable to change in the future.Not everything is possiblehowever. The construction issuch as to accept hybridforms of dwelling and work-ing. But you can’t park on theroof!

In the evening when the lightsgo on inside, the facade ofthese twin houses in Amster-dam becomes transparent.During the day, the position ofthe hatches makes for achanging image.

14. OversizeBy deliberately incorporating excessive space andconstruction a building has the necessary leewayto accommodate future developments.A building’s flexibility is enhanced by overmeas-ure in structure as well as space.

15. FacadeThe facade design figures prominently in design-ing flexible buildings. It makes special demands onthe design’s presentation during the design pro-cess, as the building can assume different appear-ances over time.

16. IntegrationIt can be advantageous financially to integrate andcombine layers in a building – such as the construc-tion and the frontage in a loadbearing facade. Thiscan be extremely impracticable however whereflexibility is concerned. Necessary changes can leadto the building being demolished prematurely.

17. CompartmentsFor big buildings erected in stages it is handy towork with compartments. Parts that are finished

Visiting the INIT-building inAmsterdam. Students areshown around by RUIMTELABand project architect Gert deGraaf of Groosman Partners.

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A healthy all-round food chain has predators atthe top and the food producers forming the baseof the food pyramid. And although it is not a nature reserve, the urban nature of IJburg can become at least as diverse. And in an urban envi-ronment of this order it is not just people whoought to benefit from a fast food counter; it cangive our feathered friends a welcome meal too.

Autarkic HouseThis Autarkic House is a self-supporting housewhose use of modern-day environmental tech-niques (notably without wiring, ducting and sew-erage) frees it from conventional infrastructure.Aided by wireless networks, the occupant can stillstay linked to the world outside. The house has nofoundations, is easily dismantled and can bemoved around. So it can be placed anywhere, alsoin extremely low-density areas. A self-supportinghouse enables a flexible and multifunctional use ofspace – even in what would normally be utterly un-economical densities, say one house per hectare.

4.04.Schie 2.0

The Rotterdam-based architectural practice Schie2.0 gives shape to the public realm with commis-sions that vary between art and urban design. Thefirm’s projects are linked by a conceptual agenda:giving form to the relationships between freedomand responsibility, sustainability and consumer-ism, and nature and urbanity. In doing so it setsout to answer posed and unposed questions fromthe perspective of the public realm in a continual-ly changing society. Individualization and globali-zation have changed the conditions in the publicrealm so much that there is no longer one but sev-eral public domains. It is these that the firm seeksto understand and intensify.

IJburg Snack CounterIJburg Snack Counter is a sort of fast-food vend-ing machine for birds. When landscaping Haven-eiland (one of the six islands comprising IJburg, aresidential area in the making east of Amsterdam)ecological advice based on the bird food pyramidelicited a number of conditions for the design.These in turn produced nine different biotopes at-tractive to various bird species.The more complete the structure’s compositionand variation, the more complete the food chain.

The Autarkic House is a prototype that is to be in-habited at three different sites during a nine-yearperiod. The first is on an unfinished stretch ofmotorway in the Rotterdam area (the A4). Thesecond is a scenic area in the municipality ofLingewaal in Gelderland (NL). The third and lastsite has an agricultural setting.

Schie 2.0; Jan Konings, GuidoMarsille and Claus Wiersma,Rotterdam.www.autarkischhuis.nl

IJburg Snack Counter, IJburg, Amsterdam, 1998.Team: Jan Konings, Ton Matton, Lucas Verweij, NadjaCasabella, Suzanne van Remmen with Hottonia – Vincent Kuypers. Client: de Architecten Cie,Amsterdam

The Autarkic House, Hoogvliet, Rotterdam 1999.Team: Jan Konings, Ton Matton, Lucas Verweij, GuidoMarsille, Claus Wiersma. Client: Foundation The Autar-kic House.

Seven street-pieces for Almere, Tussen de Vaarten,Almere, 2001.Team: Jan Konings, Ton Matton, Lucas Verweij, PeterZoderer, Tonnie van Beek. Client: De Paviljoens, AlmeersCentrum Hedendaagse Kunst, Almere.

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4.05.STEALTHgroup

STEALTHgroup, a research and design collectivebased in Rotterdam and Belgrade, originates fromthe field of architecture and deals with the dynamicsof contemporary urban changes. Its projects bringtogether concepts and expertise from very diversefields – architecture, urbanism, design, city manage-ment, artificial life, software development, media –so as to attune the different approaches. Throughexperimental work in Belgrade (the Wild City project) the collective has developed ways ofobserving and registering complex urban phenome-na, while in other projects (including Process-Matter) the translation into digital simulation environments has been made. In urban scenariosfor Amsterdam (AmsterdamNoord.tmp)STEALTHgroup explores the boundaries of emer-gent planning within the framework of large-scaleurban redevelopments. By crossing different areas ofexpertise, conceptual fields start amplifying eachother – with the aim of developing a feeling formore integrated and adaptive designs and provide anot-taken-for-granted way of looking at the city.

The Wild City > a laboratory of urban transformationThe project Wild City focuses on developing meth-odologies for seeing and understanding the forcesthat change cities nowadays. With the society andurban models of the ‘first modernity’ fading out andeconomies changing, the different positions ofpower structures and of individuals are altering theworking of urban systems and their dynamics. Theexample of Belgrade during the 1990s connects tothese large-scale processes. However, it is not a con-ventional example but a compressed and extremecase; an instance in the fall-off of the collateralevents of an evidently changing reality.Against the background of the disintegration of

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Seven street-pieces for AlmereThe uniformity of public open space evident inthe recent government-designated sites for urbanexpansion (so-called VINEX districts) is the after-math of too many conventions, too much fitnessfor purpose and too much legislation. Streets havebecome storage cupboards for essential urbancomponents and lack all flexibility. This projectfor an expansion area in Almere (NL) shows how astreet might look if the legislation and use with re-spect to street layout were to be interpreted differ-ently. The pieces of street become a orchard, aheath, a plaza, a copse; in other words a maturepublic space with its own dynamic and room forconflict.

STEALTHgroup; Ana Dzokic,Marc Neelen, Milica Topalovicand Ivan Kucina, Rotterdamand Belgrade. www.stealth-g.net

The Wild CityTeam: Ana Dzokic, Milica Topa-lovic, Marc Neelen, Ivan Kucina(STEALTHgroup), with RaoulBunschoten (Berlage InstituteRotterdam), and students of theFaculty of Architecture, Belgrade.www.archined.nl/wildcity

3/4 Process + 1/4 MatterTeam: Ana Dzokic, Marc Neelen, Milica Topalovic, IvanKucina (STEALTHgroup); MarioCampanella; Ivan Lazarevic(Omnicom), with Fareed Armalyand Milan Cirkovic. With finan-cial assistance from The DanielLanglois Foundation for Art,Science and Technology (Montreal, Canada) and TheForberg Schneider Foundation(Munich, Germany).photo credits p. 152: MilanBozic, Darko Radovanovic.www.processmatter.net

Amsterdam.North.tmpTeam: Milica Topalovic, MarcNeelen, Ana Dzokic (STEALTH-group) with Rob Vooren, ConVleugel and Ted Zwietering (CityAdministration, AmsterdamNorth) as part of the EU research programme ‘Urban Catalyst’.

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ment trajectory and the actors is stored (carried)in characteristic time sections. These mappings oftime/space phenomena are converted into a set ofbehaviours that show how in nearly all of theprocesses, from street trade to city transport, con-flict and negotiation between individual actorsand institutions give rise to unusual relations andurban typologies. This set of behaviours could beunderstood as ‘urban genes’. Comparing the over-all behaviour of all the processes observedbrought an exciting discovery: there is a pattern ofsimilarities in behaviour among sequences of‘urban genes’.

To capture the character and effects of these dynamic systems in the city, comparative studieswere made in fields from parallel computing to virology and biology to point out certain charac-teristics. Generally these systems are flexible, evolv-able, resilient, boundless and encourageinnovation. Of course, they also have drawbacksby being non-optimal, non-controllable, non-pre-dictable and non-immediate. Seen from a differentstandpoint, these drawbacks can be read as quali-ties, too. The city of Belgrade is not a designedmasterpiece – it is wild, alive and evolvable and it

former Yugoslavia and the subsequent UN em-bargo of 1992, the city of Belgrade faced a gradualerasure of its economy, governmental structuresand planning systems. Emergent processes startedto replace the city’s weakened primary systems inthe domains of trade, housing production andpublic services. What the ‘institutions’ no longerprovided was now compensated by countless in-dividual initiatives using improvisation, ad-hocinterventions and opportunistic solutions. In theresulting reconfiguration of the city tissue manyof Belgrade’s urban activities became displacedfrom their initial locations. New urban densitiesoccupied voids, open spaces and infrastructurelines. Nearly every programme, urban type andorganization has been altered and tested anew, of-fering a precise reading of the city’s contemporarypotentials and needs.

With this growing entropy in the urban environ-ment, the capacities of practices like architectureand planning remain an open question. It is pre-cisely here that this research looks for a differentperspective. It started with the assumption that ifthis seemingly ‘chaotic’ change to the city can bedescribed and visualized, then ultimately it canbecome accessible. It is an attempt to track downthe immanent logic of change.

To detect and register the changes taking place inBelgrade, a series of random probes along a tram-line, cutting through the city from one end to an-other, were gathered and processed using so-called‘identity cards’. With the next step in the analysis itbecame possible to describe the character, progres-sion and impact of particular non-regulated pro-cesses over time; for instance the way in whichwild street commerce overtakes and solidifies inurban public space.

The introduction of the time aspect prompted theidea of creating three-dimensional drawings ofboth the spatial and the organizational transform-ation of processes. Information about the develop-

3D sequential mapping trans-formation processes:

Department storechange from trade into management organization thatrents its space and shares itwith smaller private traders.

Green marketinversion of the space aroundand at the market by street-sellers.

Street tradeinitiated by selling from boxesand car-hoods, street tradeevolved to stands and kiosks.Kiosks became solidified andcombining it with housing created a new typology.

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more operative attitudes. It would be a move froma top-down, unilateral and project-based architec-ture toward a more open-ended approach, withemphasis not on singular projects, but on theprocess of creating environments and on means ofsteering their course.

Armed with the observations gathered from Bel-grade and the Wild City project (where an attemptwas made to interpret and describe the city assuch a large dispersed system), the sequences oftransformations found have been ‘ported’ to thecomputational realm, to experiment at the border-line between architecture and simulation softwaredesign. A team of architects, an expert in artificialintelligence, an astrophysicist and a group of pro-grammers have begun on this test.

Classic simulation models, like System Dynamics,have for the accuracy of the simulation a systemthat is as closed as possible and has a good set ofstatistical data. For urban environments theyprove of little value. Urban (and social) systemsare rarely closed while the feedback structures canbe very subjective. And importantly, they consistof a mix of fairly autonomous elements with onthe one hand its individual components and onthe other hand the overall planning systems withtheir own constraints and rules. Thus another approach is needed to translate the adaptation ofan urban environment over time.

The knowledge from Belgrade’s transformationprocesses brings in several topics that create inputfor simulation:* the multitude of actors – from individual traders * and suppliers to city authorities, administration,* financial inspection and police;* the level of control – processes start as ‘wild’, but* in the end reach a balance, as new actors meet * institutions ‘halfway’ to form coalitions;* the regulation level is dynamic throughout – in * observed processes, institutions have not been * the initiators of change but were forced to follow

shows a surprising agility in exploring opportuni-ties and possibilities.An integral topic in studying ‘urban evolution’concerns urban processes that create or breed in-novative outcomes. Belgrade was, for a decade,virtually a laboratory condition open to explora-tion. The city has acted as an incubator: one thatpermits and encourages the formation and devel-opment of new urban forms, present at all scalesand on all levels: spatial, physical, typological, pro-grammatic, organizational... As in the digital evo-lution model, these ‘species’ will often supersede adesigner’s imagination and sharply confront anyroutine solutions.

3/4 Process + 1/4 Matter > urban processes engineeringGradually, through different disciplines, an in-creasing amount of knowledge on the operating ofnetworked environments is becoming available. Inarchitecture, as a result of this, a shift is takingplace in the conceptualization of the role playedby the designer. The understanding of cities asadaptive and highly interrelated systems poses numerous questions: can architecture (and urbanplanning) be open to ‘spontaneous’ innovations?Can it be flexible in interaction with its environ-ment and better equipped as a component of theanimate urban network? In response to this, de-signers and planners might want to formulate

Through ‘urban genes’, themechanics of transformationprocesses, ranging from streettrade to city transport, are extracted. They resemble sys-tems, in which the small elements are in charge of pro-ducing newness and flexibility,while the large core maintainsthe minimum of stability.

The reconfiguration of publicspace by the appearance ofunregulated street commerce.The diagrams show the localforces that have been identi-fied.

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A planning framework has been set up to trans-form the area over a period of several decadesfrom its industrial function into an urban environment. Not an easy goal for a part of a citythat for decades has been considered an urbandump that could absorb unwanted programmeswhile the city centre developed its cultural andsocial profile.

* the pace dictated by individual initiatives;* the level of physical transformation – acting at * micro and macro scales (ranging from tempo-* rary to solid) with an effect on the total city * structure.

This input asked for another approach, Agent-Based Modelling grounded in the local actions ofindividuals, which in its pure form has scarcelyany top-down conventions. Transformed to simu-late an urban context, a unique mix of global andlocal rules is needed to blend the range of varia-tions in control that are crucial in a city.

To what kind of agents can we abstract, for in-stance, a street trade process? In this case actors(buyers), structures (shops) and a ‘controller’(government) and the specific interplay betweenthem are brought into the simulation as the mainsteering force. Starting from here, a basic simula-tion tool is then constructed.

When simulation steps are sequenced in time, it ispossible to determine the patterns of interactionbetween the different agents. In this way, theirphysical and organizational change can be traced,with sensitivity to speed, attraction, strength, suc-cess, failure etc.

Of course, it doesn’t stop here. The potential roleof architects/planners is not only in recognizingand extracting ‘spontaneous’ urban production,but possibly in influencing, designing and shiftingthe processes themselves – which means a move offocus from designing objects to designing process-es. It enables them to anticipate, involve with andthen navigate the possible outcomes within whatcan be called urban evolutionary design.

Amsterdam.North.tmp > try-out cityAmsterdam has recently embarked on develop-ing the vast, desolate terrains of the former ship-yards on the northern banks of the IJ.

‘Jump’ of urban programmesfrom central Amsterdam to theNorth Bank.

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came into focus. It involves the formation of anagency for temporary use. Both are planning toolsdesigned to moderate over time the ‘puzzle’ of al-ready numerous initiatives and spatial possibilitiesin the area. A variety of programmes will besought, in order to allow the area to function as a‘real’ city even before all planned structures areimplemented.

Planning with temporary uses is very differentfrom regular planning. The major distinction isthat it has to be sensitive to very diverse and spe-cific initiatives, generally ‘bottom-up’, as well asthe local dynamics of development at specificsites. Elements of surprise and the unexpectedcoming from the various proposals are an advan-tage and a strength of this approach.

In recent years however, the position of AmsterdamNorth has changed. After various rounds of gentri-fication during the 1990s, a flood of creative and innovative groups had to leave the city centre andbegan focusing on the Northern District. Would itbe possible to utilize their potential in shaping thetransformation of this industrial area? Experiencegained from setting up a large-scale cultural hotspot in a derelict wharf building (NDSM Wharf) inthe area had already shown a large number of pos-sibilities for unconventional solutions.

In the exploration undertaken, one question becameimmediately apparent: if the trajectory of the trans-formation of the Northern IJ embankment takes 25years, the development doesn’t happen at once but inphases (over a territory more than 5 kilometreslong); is it then possible to introduce temporarystructures and programmes as outposts in the time-space gap of this transition process? Such an ap-proach opens up a new perspective for AmsterdamNorth, as an urban area that can form a safe shore,an area where ideas, projects and programmes thatare too ‘fragile’ or too ‘young’ for the commercialcompetition of the central city will get grounding,time and space to develop in a vivid urban mix.These are people and programmes that take theroughness of the site not as a burden, but consider itrather as an opportunity and source of inspiration.These activities could pioneer the empty lands andpremises ahead of the main development process,and by testing the ground indicate possible di-rections for the future. During the redevelopmentprocess those programmes could weave into thestructure of the Masterplan (which regulates theoverall spatial development), complementing permanent programmes. Temporary programmescan bridge the gap in use in the development trajec-tory and respond flexibly to the dynamics oftransformation of each specific area/site.

To get a grip on the long-term transformationprocess, the development of a temporary manage-ment plan for the future of the vast dockland area

The time-space gap of the development available fortemporary use during the 25-year period.

Where next?Project indexCredits

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Where next?The authors present their personal selection of favourite books and manuals. It is a broad selection, rangingfrom ecological building, ecologicalproduct design and sustainable urban-ism to more conceptual approaches toeco-efficiency.

Bioclimatic ArchitectureKen YeangYeang developed his own theory of ecolog-ical building, which he named ‘bioclimaticarchitecture’. It includes a thorough under-standing of local climate and local buildingmethods. The book explains what biocli-matic architecture is and illustrates the newbuilding typologies and technologies thatevolve from Yeang’s theory. His buildingscombine energy efficiency with improvedworking and living conditions. Artemis, London, 1994, ISBN 1-874056-56-0

Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired By NatureJanine M. BenyusJanine Benyus offers us a glimpse of a sus-tainable future, one in which we imitate ortake inspiration from nature’s designs andprocesses to solve human problems.Among the cases she describes are a solarcell inspired by a leaf and a new agricultur-al model inspired by the American Prairies.Her book is positive, but not naive. Shecarefully describes the many obstacles thatprevent us from implementing these solu-tions in the near future.William Morrow & Company, New York,1997, ISBN 0-688-16099-9

Cities for a small planet Richard RogersThe architect Richard Rogers offers a radi-cal new blueprint for the future of our cities.Only through sustainable planning can weprotect the ecology of our planet. Sustaina-ble urban planning is a fundamentally democratic process, involving citizens indecision-making at every level. Faber and Faber Limited, 1997, ISBN 0-571-17993-2

Design Center Linz Thomas HerzogAn elaborate description of a truly smartbuilding: the Design Center in Linz by archi-tect Thomas Herzog.Verlag Gerd Hatje, 1994, ISBN 3-7757 0524-4

Emergence: The Connected Lives of Ants, Brains,Cities, and SoftwareSteven Johnson Makes connections between architectureand urban design and the latest ideas oncomplex systems and their behaviour.Penguin Books, London, 2002, ISBN 01-4028-7752

FARMAXExcursions on densityWiny Maas, Jacob van Rijs with RichardKoekProjects by MVRDV and studies into urbandensity, including Lite-Urbanism.010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, ISBN 90-6450-266-8

Futur Compost (Compound Future): Design in Barcelona for the next centuryInstitut de Cultura de BarcelonaCatalogue of a design exhibition entitled‘Futur Compost’. It shows classic exhibitsfrom the mid 1970s onwards, as well as re-cent conceptual proposals from a handfulof young designers, including Martí Guixé’sPharma Food project.Institut de Cultura de Barcelona, 1999,Spanish/English edition ISBN 84-8156-214-9

Future Systems: The Story of TomorrowMartin PawleyThe architectural consultancy Future Sys-tems, run by Jan Kaplicky and AmandaLevete, is known for its technologically creative design. This can mean transferringmodes of construction from the space in-dustry to provide shelters for communitiesin the developing world or simply selectingmaterials for their environmentally friendlymethods of manufacture. Phaidon PressLimited, London, 1993, ISBN 0-7148-2767-3

The Green Imperative: Ecology and Ethics in Design and ArchitectureVictor Papanek‘There are professions more harmful thanindustrial design, but only a very few ofthem’, was the opening line of Victor Pa-panek’s classic Design for the Real World,first published in 1970 in Sweden. In es-sence, The Green Imperative conveys thesame message: designers have a moral re-sponsibility to create products that are hu-man in scale, humane, ecologically benignand embedded in social responsibility. Thames and Hudson Ltd, London, 1995,ISBN 0-500-27846-6

Golden Thread: 2500 Years of Solar Architecture andTechnology Ken Butti and John PerlinA clear account of the 2500-year history ofa technology – solar energy – that manythought was purely a 20th-century develop-ment. With beautiful illustrations of historicuses of the sun’s energy, and a foreword byAmory Lovins. Cheshire Books, California, 1980, ISBN 0-917352-08-4

Grow Your Own House: Simón Vélez and Bamboo Architecture Alexander von Vegesack and Mateo Kreis (eds)Bamboo surpasses many a high-tech material. It is lightweight yet exceedinglystrong. This book is about bamboo architecture ingeneral and the work of Simón Vélez in par-ticular. Vélez has been described by someas the ‘bamboo Calatrava’. Vitra Design Museum, Weil am Rhein(BRD), 2000, ISBN 3-931936-25-2

How Buildings Learn: What happens after they’re builtStewart BrandBuildings have often been studied wholly inspace, but never before have they beenstudied wholly in time. Stewart Brand proposes that buildings adapt best whenconstantly refined and reshaped by theiroccupants, and that architects can maturefrom being artists of space to becomingartists of time. This book is a rich resource

as much for the general reader as for thebuilding professional. It is sure to provokedebate and generate ideas.Viking Penguin, New York, 1994, ISBN 0-670-83515-3

Keck & KeckRobert BoyceThe Keck brothers’ architectural practice islittle known, yet their work is both econom-ically conservative and ecologically con-scious. Historian Robert Boyce researchedtheir work and brings to light two long-overlooked but key figures in American architecture. Princeton Architectural Press, 1993, ISBN1-878271-17-2

=LANDSCHAPDirk Sijmons (ed.)H+N+S landschapsarchitectenWhat Dirk Sijmons thinks about living in thelandscape and about area planning, jumpsout of all 232 pages of the book =LAND-SCHAP that he put together and had pub-lished in 1998. A translated selection fromthe table of contents speaks for itself:‘Green heart? Green metropolis!’, ‘Rotter-dam vacation land’ and ‘Netherlands is anartwork again’. According to Sijmons na-ture and culture are a continuation of eachother in our country. ‘We must stop theeco-rhetoric from the environmental lobbythat preaches that being human you canonly cause damage.’Architectura et Natura, Amsterdam, 1998,ISBN 90 71570 81 9 (Dutch only)

Lightness: The inevitable renaissance of minimumenergy structuresAdriaan Beukers and Ed van HinteThe starting point of the book is that wehave to look for novel ways to make thingslighter. ‘This is simply inevitable, becauseotherwise the human race will no longer beable to afford mass transportation of goodsand people at increasing speeds’, accord-ing to Ed van Hinte. The book contains nu-merous examples of light structures and islavishly illustrated.010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1998, ISBN 90-6450-334-6

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Low-tech Light-tech High-tech: Building in the Information AgeKlaus DanielsThe book introduces in theory and practicewhat sustainable building means in the information age, namely integrated, high-quality, contextual, resource-conservingand efficient building in which ecologicalassessment and planning are critical. Themechanical engineer Klaus Daniels hasproduced an impressive, thoroughly re-searched book. Birkhäuser Publishers, Basle / Boston /Berlin, 1998, ISBN 0-8176-5861-0

On Growth and FormD’Arcy Thompson, ed. J.T. BonnerD’Arcy Thompson was a unique individual –a Greek scholar, a naturalist and a mathe-matician. He was the first biomathemati-cian. On Growth and Form is a genuineclassic on the mathematical and physicalaspects of biological form and processes.Cambridge University Press, Cambridge,1961(1917), ISBN 0-521-43776-8

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, SocialSystems, and the Economic World Kevin KellyStill one of the most inspirational books oncomplexity, new biology and technology,systems, artificial life and intelligence, andanything related.Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1994, ISBN 0-201-48340-8

R 128 by Werner SobekWerner Blaser and Frank HeinleinRömerstrasse 128 is an emission-freehouse which generates its own heating andis fully demountable. In short, a house builtwith state-of-the-art techniques and eulo-gized by the architectural press for that andother reasons. ‘Already an icon of modernarchitecture’ (Nikolaus Kuhnert in Arch+).Birkhäuser, Basle, 2001, ISBN 3-7643-6669-9

Rammed Earth / Terra Cruda / Lehm undArchitektur Martin Rauch and Otto KapfingerMartin Rauch’s great merit is to endowrammed earth construction a place in modern European architecture. Many of the projects he has collaborated on are

examples of structures that are not justuseful but look great as well. Birkhäuser, Basle, 2001, ISBN 3-7643-6461-0

ShelterWritten in 1973 and in no time a hippie-architect bible, Shelter gives an inventoryof hand-built housing and the buildingcrafts. Shelter Publications, 1973, ISBN 0-394-70991-8 (paperback)

Smart DesignEd van HinteAn inspiring report of the second workshopon Smart Materials and Systems, held atthe Netherlands Design Institute from February 28 to March 2, 1998. Netherlands Design Institute, no ISBN

Sol Power: The Evolution of Solar ArchitectureSophia and Stefan BehlingThe authors of this impressive book showhow, from the very earliest forms of con-structed dwellings, buildings have been de-signed to make maximum use of the powerof the sun. Sol Power is a READ publica-tion. READ (Renewable Energies in Archi-tecture and Design) is an internationalgroup of architects committed to incorpo-rating ecologically sound materials andpractices into the architecture of the future.Prestel, Munich / New York, 1996, ISBN 3-7913-1670-2

Sustainable Architecture Ed Melet Regulations aren’t a guarantee for sustain-able architecture, they can even frustratenew developments. Only by using a broad-er architectonic language, more experi-ments and by creating colourful livingenvironments can we arrive at a truly‘green’ architecture. Melet presents somethirty projects in the Netherlands andabroad.NAi Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999, Dutchversion ISBN 90-5662-089-4, English ver-sion ISBN 90-5662-118-1

Sustainable Architecture and Urbanism:Design, Construction, ExamplesDominique Gauzin-MüllerThis book includes descriptions of 26 ex-amples of recent ecological European ar-chitecture. Although it sets out to chart theentire European continent it is the German-speaking countries who get most of the attention. Its author has not opted for theshowpieces of internationally acclaimed architects for a change. For all that, the chosen examples are of a high architecturalquality and inspiring too in that the scale ofthe buildings and the construction budgetsare compatible with current practice amongarchitects. Birkhäuser, Basle, 2002, ISBN 3-7643-6659-1

The Technology of Ecological Building:Basic Principles and Measures, Examples and IdeasKlaus DanielsThe book presents the technology neededto integrate the supply of water, heat, cool-ing, electricity, natural ventilation and light-ing into the building’s structure and designfrom the start. Highly recommended refer-ence book. Birkhäuser Verlag, Basle, 1997, ISBN 3-7643-5461-5

TransPlant: Living Vegetation in Contem-porary ArtBarbara Nemitz (ed.)Explorations of the boundary between na-ture and culture. The book describes thework of artists for the project ‘Künstlergär-ten’ in the Weimar Ilmpark.Hatje Cantz Verlag, Stuttgart, 2000, ISBN 3-8932-971-X

Trespassers: Inspirations for eco-efficient designConny Bakker and Ed van HinteThis lavishly illustrated volume on eco-effi-cient design is a compilation of inspiringprojects and ideas, four of which were spe-cially done for the book.010 Publishers, Rotterdam, 1999, ISBN 90-6450-375-3

Vision of the FuturePhilips Corporate DesignThis book describes the results of a multi-million ECU project carried out by PhilipsDesign which explored life and technologyin the near future. Lots of ideas for soft-col-oured new products in different ‘domains’of life. Most charming from an ecologicalpoint of view are the hand-powered pro-ducts and the solar-powered garments. V+K Publishing, Bussum (NL), 1996, ISBN90-66115912

Xtreme HousesCourtenay Smith and Sean TophamThe cover suggests a book full of comput-er-generated house designs. Happily that isnot the case. Many of the houses havenothing to do with either computers or ar-chitects. They were largely built by DIYers,artists, developed by industrial designersor created out of sheer necessity. Prestel Verlag, Munich, 2002, ISBN 3-7913-2789-5

Your Private Sky: Buckminster Fuller, the Art of DesignScienceJoachim Krausse, Claude LichtensteinYour Private Sky has only just been pub-lished, but this book, which lovingly de-scribes the life and work of BuckminsterFuller is already a classic. Not to bemissed!Lars Müller Publishers / Birkhäuser Verlag,1999, ISBN 3-907044-88-6

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PrefaceprojectBuckminster Fuller, projectfor a geodesic dome overmidtown Manhattan (river toriver, 64th-22nd street), 1962source:Modern Architecture, a critical history, KennethFrampton, 1980

1.01.project:Ecokathedraalartist:Louis Le Royyear:1970-3000location:Mildam, the Netherlandssource: www.ecokathedraal.nlphoto credits:Peter Wouda

1.02.project:Future Generations Universityteam:Jacques Vink and Rhea Harbers (urban planning andarchitecture), Conny Bakker(information technology),Machiel van Dorst (environ-mental psychology) and At-ze Boerstra (ecology)year: 1996location:Wyong, Australiastatus:award winner and submis-sion second round (1996)

1.03.project:Dom Kommunaarchitect:M. Barshch and V. Vladimirov

year: 1929location: USSRsource:Town and Revolution, Anat-ole Kopp, 1970, New York

1.04.credits:Ruimtelab (diagram afterStewart Brand: How Build-ings Learn, what happensafter they’re built, Viking,1994, p.13)

1.05.project:Groothandelsgebouwarchitect: H.A. Maaskant and W. van Tijenyear: 1951location:Rotterdam, the Netherlands

1.06.project:housing Bo01architect:Gerd Wingårdhlocation: Malmö, Swedenyear:2001photo credits:Gerd Wingårdh

1.07.project:Crystalicarchitect:Gunnar Daan and Doekevan Wieren Architectenyear: 2002location:Leeuwarden, the Netherlands

source:www.ictcenter.nlphoto credits:GDA bv

1.08.project: de Meerpaalarchitect:Frank van Klingerenyear:1967location: Dronten, the Netherlandsphoto credits:Van Klingeren archive

1.09.project:sanatorium Zonnestraalarchitect:J. Duiker, B. Bijvoet and J.G. Wiebengayear:1931location:Hilversum, the Netherlandsphoto credits:E.J. Jelle archive

1.10.project: Miele Space Stationarchitects:Jan Jongert, Denis Ouden-dijk and Césare Peerenyear:2003

1.11.source:Shelter, 1973, California

1.12.product:Trabant 1.1.firm:IFA Sachsenring Trabantsource:home.clara.net/peter-frost/trabant.html

1.13.source:www.new.ox.ac.uk

1.14.product:AlphaWorldsource:www.activeworlds.com

1.15.project 1:Heliport, HankuChayamachi Building,Osaka, Japansource:AardbevingsbestendigBouwen (2), Cement nr. 8-2000, www.salvado-ri.org/aoc/9b.html project 2:‘Seirei’ Worship andVisitors Hallarchitect:Shin Takamatsu Architect &Associatesyear:1998location:Mount Myoken, Nose, Japansource:Prof. Ir. F. van Herwijnenphoto credits:F. van Herwijnen

1.16.project:Design Center Linzarchitect:Herzog + Partner,Architecten BDA, Münchenyear:1993location:Linz, Austrialighting:Christian Bartenbachsource:www.herzog-und-partner.dephoto credits:Peter Bartenbach

2.01.image credits:‘Stanford Torus’ 1975. FromRichard D. Johnson andCharles Holbrow, eds.,Space Settlements: A Design Study, 1977.

project:Bios 1, 2 and 3source:www.aibs.org/bioscienceli-brary/vol47/oct97.salis-bury.text.htmlFrank B. Salisbury, Josef I.Gitelson, and Genry M. Lisovsky in BioScience,Volume 47, Number 9 October 1997

2.02.project:Biosphere 2 and 3source:www.bio2.edu/www.desertusa.com/mag99/apr/stories/bios2.html

2.03.product: EcoSphere®

source:www.eco-sphere.com

2.04.project: Infra-Ecologieresearch and design:Willemijn Lofvers, Jago vanBergen and Duzan Doepelyear:1999location:the Netherlands

2.05.source:www.indigo-dev.com/Kal.htm2.06.

2.06.project:Wetlandarchitects:Tom Mossel, Esther Gonzalez Aurignac with Bert Frazayear:2000location: the Netherlands

2.07.project: R 128architect and engineer:Werner Sobekyear: 2000location:Stuttgart, Germanyphoto credits:Roland Halbe

2.08.project: Federation Square Labyrinthand Atriumarchitects: Lab Architecture Studio inassociation with Bates Smartdesign architects:Donald L. Bates and PeterDavidsonenvironmental engineers:Atelier Tenyear:2000location:Melbourne, Australiaphoto credits:Mark Ropersource:www.labarchitecture.com

2.09.project:Mewah Oils Headquartersarchitects: T.R. Hamzah & Yeang Sdn. year:2003location:Port Klang, Selangor,Malaysiaphoto credits:T.R. Hamzah & Yeang

2.10.project:City Fruitfularchitects: Kuiper Compagnons, KasOosterhuis Architekten et al.year:1992

Project index

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location: Dordrecht, the Netherlandssource: City Fruitful, 010 Publishers,Rotterdam, 1992photo credits:Kas Oosterhuis Architekten

2.11.diagram: The Three Magnetsarchitect: Ebenezer Howardyear:1898source:‘De ideale stad’, Ruth Eaton p. 147

2.12.landscape architect: Dirk Sijmons, H+N+SLandschapsarchitecten,Amsterdamyear:(project) 2003, proposed for 2005-2020location: Kamerik, Randstad, the Netherlands

2.13.researcher:Julian Vincent, Centre for Biomimetics at the Universityof Readingsource: Encyclopaedia BrittanicaYearbook of Science andthe Future: Borrowing thebest from nature, 1995

2.14.project:Feral Robotic Dogartist: Natalie Jeremijenkoproduct: fake Aibo (Sony)firm:unknown (Made in China)

2.15.source: Janine M. Benyus: Biomimicry, New York, 1997

2.16.project:Cloud 9architect:Enric Ruiz-Geliyear:2001location:Barcelona, Spainsource:www.e-cloud9.comphoto credits:Enric Ruiz-Geli

2.17.project: house in Cap Ferratarchitect:Anne Lacaton, Jean Philippe Vassalyear:1998location: Cap Ferrat, Francephoto credits:Philippe Ruault

2.18.project:rural holiday village, Jupillesarchitects:Edouard Francois & associès with Duncan Lewisyear:2000location:Jupilles, Francephoto credits: Edouard Francois & associès

2.19.project: shop, office and warehousearchitect: Osamu Ishii, Biken Architec-tural Design Officeyear:1982location: Okayama, Japan

photo credits:Process Architecture, Plea,

3.01. researcher:Jeroen van den Bergh, FreeUniversity in Amsterdamsource formula:RMNO, Meerjarenvisie1992; Programma van mi-lieu- en natuuronderzoekten behoeve van een duur-zame ontwikkeling, RMNOpublication nr.70, 1992www.shell.com

3.02.project: New Edenarchitect: Nicholas Grimshaw & Partners Ltd.year: 2001location:Bodelva, Cornwall, United Kingdomphoto credits:Vector Special Projects Ltd

3.03.project:cooling tower, nuclear plantat SchmehausenengineeringGünter Mayr, Jörg Schlaichlocation:Germanyphoto credits:l’art de l’ingenieur

3.04.project: Airquariumresearch and design:Axel Thallemerfirm: Festoyear:2000source:www.festo.com/pneumatic_structuresphoto credits: Festo AG & Co. KG

3.05.product: Drinkwaterboomdesign:Schie 2.0, Jan Konings,Claus Wiersma, Guido Masille and Joost van Alfen.year: 2002photo credits:Schie 2.0

3.06.product 1:Parasitesdesign:Michael Rakowitzyear:1998source:www.possibleuto-pia.com/mikeproject 2:Modular Architectureartist:Lucy Ortayear:1996source:www.studio-orta.comphoto credits:Galerie Anne de Villepoixproject 3:Superadobe Domesdesign:Nader Khaliliyear:1991source:www.callearth.org

3.07.project:archives of the NaturalHistory Museum Naturalisarchitect:Fons Verheijen, VVKH architectenengineering: Technical Managementyear: 1997location: Leiden, the Netherlands

source:‘Fossielen in een astronau-tenpak’, Architectuur &Bouwen no. 5, 1997.

3.08. product:EZEE(Equal Zero Emission Engine)firm: Enginion AG, Berlinsource:www.enginion.com

3.09.project: Green Buildingarchitect: Future Systemsyear: 1990location:Londonengineering:Ove Arup & Partnerssource:www.future-systems.comMartin Pawley, Future Sys-tems, London, 1993photo credits:Richard Davies

3.10.project 1:ING Housearchitects: Meyer en van Schooten Ar-chitectenyear: 2002location:Amsterdam, the Netherlandssource:www.meyer-vanschooten.nlphotocredits:Ruimtelabproject 2:Headquarters NMBarchitects: Ton Alberts & Max van Huutyear: 1987location: Amsterdam, the Netherlands

photo credits:Alberts & van Huut bv.

3.11.project: Umweltbundes Ambtarchitect:Sauerbruch Hutton Architekten, Berlinyear:2004location: Dessau, Germany

3.12.project: Bluewater shopping centrearchitect: Eric Kuhneengineering: Battle McCarthy year:2003location:Bluewater, Kent, UnitedKingdom

3.13.project: Akademie Mont-Cenisarchitects:Jourda & Perraudin Architectesyear: 1999location: Herne-Sodingen, Germanyphoto credits: Jourda Architectes

3.14.project: Made in Tokyoresearch: Bow-Wow, Momoyo Kaijima, Junzo Kuroda andYoshiharu Tsukamotoyear: 2001location: Tokyo, Japansource:Made in Tokyo, 2001, Tokyo

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3.15.project: visitor centre at Terrassonarchitect: Ian Ritchie Architectsyear: 1995location:Terrasson, Franceengineers: Ove Arup & Partnerslandscape design:Kathryn Gustafson, Paysage Landphoto credits:Ian Ritchie Architects

3.16.project: Broadacre Cityarchitect: Frank Lloyd Wrightyear:1932location: USAphoto credits:Arizona State University,College of Architecture andEnvironmental Design, lent by the Frank LloydWright Foundation

3.17.photographer:Bas Princenyear:2003location: the Netherlands

3.18.project: Lite Urbanismarchitect: MVRDV and Jón Kristinssonyear: 1996location: VINEX site Midden-IJssel-monde Rotterdam, the Netherlandssource: FARMAX, 1998, Rotterdam

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projectcover and insertsphotographer: Paulien Bremmerlocation: underground shelters inAmsterdam, the Netherlands.year: 2003

Credits

Smart Architecture was created in closecooperation between Ed van Hinte, Jacques Vink, Marc Neelen, Piet Vollaardand Erik Wong.Ed van Hinte is a freelance publicist whopublishes mainly on design. Erik Wong is agraphic designer. Jacques Vink is an archi-tect and co-founder of the Smart Architec-ture Foundation, like fellow architect andArchiNed director Piet Vollaard. Marc Neelen is an architect and a member of theFoundation since its inception.

This book has been made possible by:the Netherlands Architecture Fund andFoundation Prins Bernhard Cultuurfonds

Copy editor: John KirkpatrickPrinted by: Snoeck-Ducaju & zoon, Ghent

© 2003 The authors and 010 Publishers,Rotterdam (www.010publishers.nl)

ISBN 90 6450 490 3

About the Smart Architecture Foundation:

The mission of Stichting SL.A. is to createand discuss concepts and ideas for build-ings and cities that combine optimum performance with a minimal use of materi-als and energy.Many of the so-called ‘green architects’tend to look upon nature as a victim brutal-ized by the fierce attacks from ‘unnatural’technology. Others look upon environmen-tal issues as a nuisance, a complicatingfactor in the design process. StichtingSL.A. rejects both views. It is their beliefthat nature and technology should belooked upon as allies, not enemies or victims. Thus, truly sustainable, integral,SMART solutions can only be found by rethinking the starting points, conceptsand typologies of architecture and cityplanning itself. Stichting SL.A. searches forpowerful, green, smart ideas that deliverthe much needed innovations in architec-ture, design and urbanism.

Jacques Vink and Piet Vollaard are the co-founders of Stichting SL.A. (SLimme Archi-tectuur = Smart Architecture). They builtwww.smartarchitecture.org with Marc Neel-en, Yvo Zijlstra, Marcel van der Zwet andConny Bakker. Many others contributedwith ideas and publications.

Thanks to Machiel van Dorst as guidingspirit of the Foundation. Also to ThomasLinders, Jelle Zijlstra and Albert van Dorssen for chairing the Foundation.