PGA Prairie Hopper

This environmental education pavilion is a pre-fabricated, portable, off-grid, structure showcasing innovative green technology. The pavilion will fold-up, be transported as a shipping container and be re-deployed at a series of sports events, providing shade, two-story views, refreshments and environmental education for diverse public communities not ordinarily exposed to advanced green technology and education. The structure is intended to be fun, functional and educational and is constructed of re-used components, high-recycled content steel, recycled content shade cloth and modular, xeriscaped planting trays.  Protected within a limestone-composite thermal and evaporative-resistant mass, native prairie grasses, cactus and several hundred additional species thrive without regular irrigation. The project was deployed 55 days from napkin-sketch, through detailed design, fabrication, assembly, and delivery. Remote team collaboration was facilitated by a central BIM database and various social networking applications.  All professional services were pro-bono in the interest of advancing environmental education and construction prefabrication technologies. The shade screens variably articulate to provide optimized shading whatever the pavilion orientation, then fold flat for transport. Ganged, evacuated-tube solar thermal collectors provide potable, sanitary hot water. The pavilion is self-powered by building-scale wind turbines and high-efficiency photovoltaics.

269 Urban Water Seminar, Fall 2009, Mark Anderson
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Architecture

The business of architecture often attempts to justify its role in the economy by describing itself as a profession of efficient problem solvers. Although few clients believe this and actually bet their money on it, the concept still warps the profession in many ways. This is a complicated issue related to many questions of how to work as an architect in positive and meaningful ways. Designing our lives and working methods as creative architects is a much more complicated project than meets the eye. The real and perceived business role of the architect working within the construction economy is a background issue that haunts all architecture projects. We will not solve any of those questions in this seminar, but we will fight back against our powerlessness: we will build the biggest possible construction without spending a nickel, asking nobody for permission. According to popular economic theory, this will not do one good thing to help the economy—but we’re not buying that either.

EPRF
I have a plan. But since we are asking nobody’s permission, it also follows that you should feel free to deviate from my plan, or to throw it out altogether in favor of some more radical plan of your own making that is even more powerful and theatrical than every possibility that I am imagining. In either case our plan must be bold, spec¬tacular and effective. I would also like to stipulate that—fairly or unfairly—nobody gets hurt.

This is what I am thinking: EnormousPlasticRainFlower. We shall build an enormous plastic rain flower that will capture and purify drinking water from the sky. It will look ridiculous of course, and significantly so. Beautiful and grotesque, our flower will further serve as a wide-spreading public umbrella tree drawing people to gather under its shelter, protected from the sky’s harshness even while succored by its fruit. Like a flower blossoming from cow dung, this machine-flower of human sustenance will blos¬som from the fertile waste of excessive human consumption. Our flower will be constructed purely of plastic water bottles, sugared beverage containers, and other scrap plastic constructions, stitched together with screw-top cap bolts and structurally layered as translucent, crystalline pistils and petals funneling sunlight and rain drops into corded plastic stems of tuberous filtration drawing downward into threaded, clinging roots spitting small fountains of sweet rainwater sucked freely by passersby delighted by the novelty of drinking water cut free from intercontinental transport, commerce and cash. That’s it, simple and pure—one material, multi-purpose, full with questions and possibilities. How tall can this reach and how far can it spread? What will it look like and where might it grow? Did I mention that this is a seriously purposeful study in structure, construction and materials—EPRFTM, and all of that?

Bay Towers of Babel-On

In the year 2108, the City of San Francisco has become a hyper-dense metropolis with a modern sense of its unique history and destiny. This is a city preserving deep and unsentimental memory of celebrated and chastening moments of courage, imagination, and crime; a smart and happy city, surrounded by agriculture, wilderness, and clean, bounteous waters that have grown back onto its doorstep; an exuberant and spontaneously evolving invention for renewed creative life, offering greater treasure back into the surrounding environment and culture than was previously torn from its brittle crust of underlying earth and from the hopeful breasts of its immigrant engine of productivity. San Francisco blossoms as diverse communities of imagination, good health and global contribution, exporting invention, food, energy; powering world-wide renewal in art, industry, health, happiness, individual liberty, ecological rationality and communal good will. Architecture intertwines with all aspects of life, seamlessly providing infrastructure, energy, sustainable wealth and inspiration into the lives of its citizen builders.

Emergency Shelter Prototype
269 Urban Water Seminar, Spring 2006, Mark Anderson
University of California, Berkeley
Department of Architecture

The LifeBean is a rapidly deployable emergency shelter and life support system. It can be easily transported to disaster sites to offer immediate protection and longer-term support mechanisms for people caught in circumstances of infrastructural crisis. Partially pre-assembled, the LifeBean can be erected by users, and offers a base from which catastrophe victims can initiate the process of permanent rebuilding.

The Lifebean prototype was designed and executed BY focusing on the relationships between building systems, architects and fabricators. it includes a number of discrete but interdependent building systems- structure, skin, and plumbing. Project team members worked through a concentrated sequence of conceptual development, detail specification, bidding, fabrication, and installation. To coordinate the complex design process, team members derived the LifeBean’s systemic logic from the efficient, sophisticated clarity of a green bean’s structural, insulating, plumbing and enclosure mechanisms.

The LifeBean can be deployed in various climates, economies, and social environments. It can be transported and deployed using standard methods. Its components are sized to fit within trucks, planes, helicopters or cargo containers, and be carried by 2-3 people. Its function as an immediate shelter can adapt to encompass semi-permanent inhabitation. With simple material variations, it can adjust to local climatic requirements. Finally, the flexibility of its construction allows the LifeBean to reconfigure for individual isolated use, aggregated multi-unit formations, and to adapt to many topographical conditions.  Air bladders, anchored within the LifeBean’s double-layered skin, interlock with rigid bent-bamboo ribs. Additional, interchangeable bladders store and filter water for human needs and thermal comfort. This integrated system regulates light, insulation, ventilation, and access.

Notable Points:

An experiment in pro bono service to a public institution, integrating the services of architects and Bay Area manufacturers and fabricators who both donated services and included student volunteers as an educational process allowing real-world, full-scale design and building experience in a manufacturing environment.

An experiment in cad/cam fabrication technologies not typical in everyday building construction, with the parallel intention of making solar technology interesting to designers

Statement of Criteria and Design Solution:
Budget $15,000 in private donations, plus donated services

Contact:        Mark Anderson, AIA
(415)  243-9500
Relationship to Project:        Architect, design team leader

Project Information:      White Hot Orange
Wurster Hall
University of California, Berkeley
Berkeley, California
Size:        24’ diameter, 10’ height(closed), 452 square feet
Cost:        $13,000 total

Project Team:        Mark Anderson, AIA
Peter Anderson, AIA
Yuki Bowman
Grant Chang
Neil Dau
Bill Glauch
Emily Behoar Gosack
Christine Chang
Lamia Bensouda
Myrto Milliou
Chris May
Margaret Sledge
Joe Jacoby
Amy Van Nostrand
Kevin Markarian
Claudio Martonffy
Danny Lee
Cari Rosner
Nash Hurley
Ed Rendle
Natalie Kittner
Tzu-Tsen Kuo
Reiko Matsuo
Goran Wang
Toben Wyndahl
Byron Chang
New World Manufacturing

Architect:      Mark Anderson, AIA
Peter Anderson, AIA
Anderson Anderson Architecture
90 Tehama Street
San Francisco, CA  94105
office   (415)  243-9500
fax        (415)  243-9503
aaa@andersonanderson.com

Owners:      University Of California, Berkeley

Engineering consultant:      Terry Nettles, P.E.
7777   92nd Street
Gig Harbor, WA  98332
office   (253)  858-7777

General Contractor:    University of California, Berkeley

Photographer:    Anthony Vizzari
Photostruct
2131 N. Damen Avenue, Flr. #2
Chicago, IL  60647
office   (773)  806-9196

Working with Charles Anderson Landscape Architecture in Seattle, we designed four primary structures as interpretive centers and visitor facilities at various strategic points within the master plan for a new arboretum of native Northwest forestland. The nearby presence of a major highway, factory, and warehouse buildings caused us to suggest a revised theme to the arboretum’s educational mission and development plans. Although initially asked to create a space as natural and removed from human intervention as possible, we proposed to instead focus our design concept on the relationship between the built and natural environments, taking advantage of the positive aspect of the site’s easy access and visibility from the most highly traveled highway leading in and out of Seattle from the east. Rather than routing the arboretum entrance away from existing development and further encroaching on the forest, we repurposed the parking and other infrastructure of a defunct adjoining factory as a launching point at the edge of the forest from which to enter into an exploration of more appropriate examples of the interface between buildings and the natural environment. Wishing to demonstrate multiple strategies for buildings to relate sensitively to their sites, we designed all of the new structures, to be introduced into the forest itself, around a CNC-milled timber-frame system but deployed it in a different way for each interpretive center to create varying experiences: being underground with the roots of the trees, on the forest floor to focus on this habitat, and raised high on stilts up into the forest canopy itself. Instead of having a sharp contrast between the building and the surrounding landscape, the design concept is to provide a stepped progression of experience that is also a model and metaphor for the relationship between human intervention and the natural landscape.

The building is a completely foreign object within the natural landscape, but it is rendered in forms or materials taken from that landscape, successfully blending into a harmonious whole. This is juxtaposed with secondary “built” objects—trees planted in unnatural, buildinglike formations, showing human intervention in nature from another perspective.

CNC Timber Framing
Timber framing is a building system that has been used for thousands of years and is most often associated with the temple architecture of Japan, China, and Korea, as well as Northern European structures evolving from the building traditions of the Middle Ages. Traditional timber-framing techniques center around the intricate and often beautiful joinery work that connects the structural members, but these techniques are typically considered too labor-intensive and too weak for modern construction. With the advent of Computer Numeric Control (CNC) milling machines, however, much of the hand labor can be reduced, and exposed or concealed steel connectors can be used to make rigid connections. A resurgence of interest in timber-framing systems has contributed to a revival of historical forms, particularly in residential construction, but there has been relatively little use of this technology
in modern design.

Traditional timber framing is most often used as a post-and-beam structural system, where loads are transferred through a building on linear paths through massive timber elements. With the wall enclosure systems independent of the structure, there are many opportunities to develop dramatically open spaces with large openings of windows and interior or exterior walls that remain separate from the structure. Timber framing is compatible with other prefabricated building systems, such as panelized stud walls or SIPs panel systems, which can be used to form the non-load-bearing portions of a building.

Log buildings are a particular kind of prefabricated timber-framed system, typically incorporating load-bearing solid wood wall sections with more purely post-and-beam systems for their roof structures. The log home industry has introduced significant technological advances in log construction in recent years, and the production capability of working with these processes has progressed more quickly than has any design evolution to take advantage of it. Although working with logs is still a niche area of the construction industry, there are many interesting opportunities for expanding their use into more building types and directions.

As more and more timber-frame manufacturers invest in this new generation of CAD/CAM machinery, there exist a growing number of sources for this technology in all regions, although the factories tend to be most often located in the timber-producing regions of the United States and Canada, and in Northern Europe. It is interesting to note that the majority of the CAD/CAM milling machinery used in the North American timber-frame industry is designed and built in Germany.

1999
Detroit, MI
In collaboration with Andrew Zago
Recipient of the 48th Annual P/A Awards

DETROIT DENSE SPACE

CONTEXT
During the first half of the twentieth century, Detroit was among the fastest growing urban centers in America. Many of the city’s leading residents felt threatened by the rapidly increasing density of life and construction, and by the loss of open space, trees, and community gathering places. In response to this threat, community organizations developed to preserve open space, to plant trees, and to counter the developing density of urban construction. Since World War II, an entirely new condition has developed in the city. Massive shifts in the U.S. industrial economy have moved jobs and manufacturing facilities out of Detroit. The process of increasing density has radically reversed, with people and buildings apparently vaporizing into empty space. Unprogrammed open space-full of gradually enveloping plants and trees-has appeared like a cancer throughout the city. Civic groups which had previously focused on planting trees and creating parks and vegetated breathing space have failed to recognize that an entirely new spatial condition needs to be confronted from an entirely new point of view.

This design proposal for a modest community gathering space in an inner city neighborhood of rapidly receding density confronts the issues of density, open space, and community gathering in a type of post-density spatial condition that similarly confronts many other industrial age cities. The project is designed as a community gathering place for an area of typical blocks in Detroit’s inner east-side residential neighborhoods. A common pattern of disappearing buildings and uncontrolled vegetation has emerged in many of these blocks. A greatly reduced number of large single-family homes, small apartment blocks, and detached stores or small-scale fabrication shops remain scattered along blocks filled with vaguely defined lot-line divisions and evidence of past construction, yet currently left open with low grasses, stray trees and wild vegetation. Frequently there are recently burned, gutted, yet still intact buildings.

Covered in grass, there are stacks of brick, burned timber, and scattered building materials. Neat rectangles of empty basement foundations define the pattern of past occupation. There are broad, open vistas across the flat, building-dotted landscape, with the slightly faded towers of downtown Detroit visible in the near distance. Aside from the strangely looming towers, and the frequent small fires and pillars of smoke down the block, large sections of this area of inner Detroit feel almost (unsettlingly) rural.

CLIENT
It is possibly this rural image that has inspired some of the most interesting community responses to this new condition of burgeoning emptiness. Some of these blocks are being farmed. The farmers are urban activists ingeniously exploiting new ambiguities in the physical and legal landscape of these blocks. Maverick tractors-and even cows, pigs and chickens-are hidden away in abandoned houses and boarded-up grocery stores reoccupied as clandestine barns. Behind the trees and tall grass, fields of corn are being grown. Schools, learning gardens, ad hoc community museums, self-help institutions and radical social innovations are emerging. None of this is apparent to the casual observer, and none of it follows the expected patterns of land use and legal land ownership.

The main line civic organizations have themselves largely fled the city for the safety of the suburbs, and are frequently run by the very citizens who are involved in directing the flow of industrial production away from problematically organized northern labor centers such as Detroit to the fresh fields of newly industrial cities to the south. Turning a blind eye to the underlying forces of change, these groups have largely failed to recognize and engage with this new urban condition of physical and social density withering toward emptiness.

Alternative social forces have emerged, leading intriguing initiatives within the new emptiness. In collaboration with some of these social pioneers in the resettlement of Detroit’s empty space, this community meeting place is proposed as a practical seed project to help generate a new social and physical approach to city building in Detroit’s inner emptiness.

PROGRAM
In most blocks there is evidence of impromptu neighborhood gathering. It is not unusual to see an informal ring of bright orange plastic chairs ringed around the protective mass and spatial particularity of a stray shade tree on an otherwise empty and abandoned city block. These impromptu community centers facilitate a continued life in the unbuildinged but still populated community. Presumably, these natural tendencies toward the recondensation of clustered people may engender new ideas for the recondensation of an appropriate new architecture.

The program for this project is very simple. Following the concept of a massing of orange plastic chairs, a radically dense massing of material will be constructed as a natural gathering place in an otherwise frightening emptiness of urban space. Drawn to the density as to a campfire in the night, people will bring their chairs here, they will talk, and they will invent the new space that has been abandoned to them and they will invent a new way to inhabit it.

CONSTRUCTION
The pavilion is constructed from the scattered debris immediately available on the site. Although much material has been violently burned and vaporized as noxious gases floated off across the suburbs and onto the great plains, the burned and gutted previous construction of the site, and that of its immediate past neighbors, provide a mass of charred and sooty timbers and bricks, and twisted pastel yellow, pink, blue and white vinyl siding. The project is to gather this scattered material into a radical recondensation of constructed mass-a defiant density of material memory standing guard against the continued evaporation of a community.

The construction will follow this procedure: An existing concrete basement rectangle will be swept out and brushed clean. In successive 12″ deep lifts, a mat of dense material will be carefully laid out on the concrete floor. Bricks; concrete curbs; steel lolly columns; lead, steel and copper pipe; heavy blackened timbers; blistered noodles of vinyl siding-all will be carefully laid in orderly, parallel rows regularly spaced with several inches between major materials. A gap of 12″ will be left on all sides between the vertical concrete basement walls and the rising mat of material. After the first mat of parallel rows of stuff is completed, a second layer of material will be carefuly placed in rows perpendicular to the mat below. Successive mats are laid up in perpendicular levels, back and forth, until the first 12″ depth is achieved.

A concrete mixer truck will then back up to the foundation wall, and the first 12″ lift of an especially wet slump concrete will be directed into the center of the porous mat of material, oozing through and around the stacked materials, flowing towards but not quite reaching the edges of the mats.

This process of laying up orderly mats of heavy, odd-ball material cast into soupy lifts of concrete will be successively repeated until the heavy mass achieves a height equal to the top of the basement wall and the surrounding flat space of the site. The 12″ gap between the mass and the foundation wall will be carefully retained all the way up to preserve a visual record of the construction method employed to create this carefully ordered, rectangular yet softly fuzzy and pastel-flecked mass of identifiable matter.

During this foundation mass phase, after the second 12″ lift, a regular, closely spaced grid of vertical columns will be set into the mass, and built around. (The first two lifts of concrete and material will distribute the load and prevent the many legs from piercing through the basement floor once the full weight of the upper mass is stacked into the forest of legs. The legs themselves are built-up columns made from the collected 2×6 rafters of the previous buildings. These planks will be nailed up-with widely staggered laps and closely set 12d common nails-into 6×8 vertical columns, increasing in height as the project proceeds upward out of the basement hole and into the empty air of the community.

Once the foundation mass is even with the ground (this top level of material carefully laid as a milky terazzo of building matter and carefully troweled concrete bristling with a forest of thin black legs) a pavilion floor will have been achieved and construction on the dense mass above will begin.

The legs will continue to be lapped and nailed upward to the full anticipated height of the upper mass. Seven feet above the pavilion floor, the first row of double cross beams of charred timbers-parallel to the short ends and built-up studs of the pavilion-will be through-bolted onto the legs, the first row appearing to create a series of H-shaped football goal posts. Into this rack of beams, a new mass of charred studs, and thinner sticks of blackened wood will be carefully laid in closely set rows parallel with the long sides of the foundation. A gap of approximately 4″ will be left between each stick of material. After the first mat of sticks is laid in place, a more widely spaced mat of 4×4 timbers is set on top and perpendicular. Several alternating mats are built up to a height of two feet. At that point, another set of cross-beams is bolted onto the legs-to distribute the increasing vertical weight back onto the column grid-and the process of stacking up the alternating mats of airily massive black densities continues. The process of stacking studs and bolting cross-beams, lapping and extending legs, is continued until the mass of blackened sticks achieves a height just less than double the depth of the foundation hole, roughly equal in mass to the former house.

Having begun as a shaky forest of skinny legs, the massive weight and internal friction of the material stacked within the bolted frames creates a stiff, shear-resistant volume hovering weightily above the yet greater foundation mass set neatly into the ground. The pavilion will be neat, regular and orderly in its repetitive construction process, yet slight variations in the repetitive hand labor and roughly abused material will render the volume slightly hazy in its appearance. The massive black volume of charred sticks will absorb all light when viewed from certain angles, but, viewed from other angles, light will stream directly through the porous construction, like unexpected rays of light piercing through a thundercloud.

ARCHITECTURE OF RESISTANCE
For more than a century, American cities have been used as the raw material for ideological agendas. Cities have been molded to represent a single social philosophy, or to serve a single industry, or to perform a single dominant function. This overlay has suppressed the role of cities as venues for social and political freedom, and has collided with the intrinsically multifarious nature of urban life and construction. Schisms have formed in which wealthy urban enclaves exist in tandem with zones of large-scale calculated abandonment.

Architects have often served the bureaucrat-capitalist agents of urban crisis, helping to conceive and implement the projects that have destroyed vital cities. As a result of this misalliance, art and architecture have forfeited their constructive civic role, and the public has been denied the emancipating potential of urban space. Now architects must forge a new role for themselves. By enmeshing art and architecture into the political and social life of cities, by creating works in concert with the imagination and aspirations of communities, and by working against the deceptive logic of monolithic plans, they can create a new architecture of resistance.

An architecture of resistance works at the root of cities, within the varied and viable strands of existing communities. An architecture of resistance views cities as an ecosystem rather than a machine-an orchestration of a fluid and organic infrastructure. In this view, new projects are seen as catalysts rather than as ends in themselves. Art and architecture function as conduits for public imagination, allowing communities to create their own social and public space. An architecture of resistance promotes an urbanism that is liberating. It returns the maintenance and advancement of democracy to where it began: in the city.

Detroit demonstrates the terminal stages of twentieth century urbanism. Here, the city became factory, its workers brought in and housed like parts for the automobiles they assembled. Then, like a factory, Detroit became obsolete and was discarded in the perpetual and illusory American search for unsullied land and an unsullied work force. While Detroit starkly prefigures other cities now enjoying the fruits of economic expansion, it also potentially holds the future hope of urbanism. Detroit-a city whose scale of urban abandonment is unparalleled, a city which serves as a poster child for the legacy of slash and burn industrial production-is the city in which an architecture of resistance may logically emerge.