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.

The Alluvial Sponge Comb is the waterfront landscape element of our design proposal for New Orleans, mediating between the natural ebb and flow forces of water and the inhabitation of the site. The central design criteria for our building and landscape design focuses on adapting the human construction to harmonize with the cyclical flows and extremes of the natural site, absorbing and beneficially harnessing nature’s impact rather than resisting it. We feel that it is very important for the American Pavilion in Venice to not dwell on the disaster as an unfortunate freak occurrence of nature, but instead to focus on the opportunity to engage in design for alleviating a worldwide infrastructure concern, by proposing new modes of waterfront development that accommodate and celebrate natural extremes, avoiding human and ecological destruction with multi-functional systems that contribute to the quality of life each day rather than investing in single-purpose bulwarks that serve once in a lifetime yet stand as ungainly, inflexible and expensive barriers always in place. New Orleans and Venice are both remarkable works of unnatural environmental construction that have developed intriguingly similar cultures of black humor artifice and cyclical festival that experientially mediates the difficult, dangerous, and uncertain environments that both sustain and threaten them. For the courtyard of the American pavilion at the Venice Biennale, we will install a sample portion of the alluvial sponge comb as outlined in the following pages, proposing a constructed waterfront landscape that can be rich, accommodating and absorptive, and affirming of the hopeful logic of life in the nature and culture of unique waterfront cities like New Orleans and Venice.

In its proposed implementation at the edge of the Mississippi river, the Alluvial Sponge Comb performs several functions, including flood and erosion control, the slowing of water flow along the river bank in order to capture silt to aid in the build-up of the shoreline, and the sustenance of land and water life—human, plant and animal—by affording both habitat and unencumbered passage through the latent barrier system. In times of unusually high water levels, portions of the comb are designed to swell as they absorb the rising water, becoming a temporary levee to protect the land and buildings beyond it. When the flood waters subside, the swelling in the comb also diminishes and returns the structure to its original fingered form, allowing a high degree of porosity in the landscape. The ideas for this structure are based on considerable research and past prototyping of related systems. There are large industrial firms engaged in related product manufacture. Chemical companies such as BASF, DuPont, and Dow all produce superabsorbent products that swell to absorb water and then slowly respirate vapor back into the environment as they dry and return to their original composition. 95% of the superabsorbent market is for new throw-away diaper products. However, all of these firms are also engaged in construction products and environmental control products, and all are positioning themselves as leaders in innovative technology that can be in harmony with the environment. It is likely that there will be one or more companies that would be interested in sponsoring this project with expertise, materials and financial support, and we have prepared background research and strategies for approaching them. The stand-alone siting of the comb in the courtyard will allow a significantly market-related image for these companies that may help generate their enthusiasm for supporting the pavilion overall.

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

Prairie Ladder is an ongoing research project and site installation work exploring the physical and psychological meanings of human settlement on the archetypal American landscape of the western prairie. The project consists of five related structures, each dealing with primal aspects of human experience on the vast horizontal prairie, all related by the element of a ladder with its human scale and equally human defiance of the horizontal limitations of the earth.

The Prairie Ladder project began as a commission from the Connemara Conservancy, an organization with large land holdings in central Texas, with the stated purpose of preserving, protecting, and honoring the prairie landscape. Each year a few artists are selected and given funding to produce an installation on the land, which supports and brings attention to the foundation’s mission. We spent a great deal of time on the site, synthesizing our own experience of this place with the larger tradition of human settlement on the archetypal landscape of the western prairie.

As the project developed, we envisioned a series of big, ladder-related objects spread out all over a large swath of Texas, each focusing on a singular, pure experience of the prairie as a trinity of horizon, earth, and sky. We became intensely interested in this fundamentally American landscape in which human beings have no particular place, where physical and conceptual space can only be understood as a line between the sky, which is no home for human beings, and the below-ground, which is no home for human beings.

The selection of the ladder as an element common to each of the works introduces a vertical axis, marking a departure from the natural horizontal axis of the prairie. The ladder also provides a human scale, and proclaims human defiance of the horizontal limitations of the earth. This real or implied activity of vertical movement on the prairie, whether up into the sky or down into the earth, is the defining characteristic of placemaking—of human settlement or intervention in the existing primal environment.

In EarthPlane/SkyBarge, we dug down into the earth and built up into the sky and thought about the human ambition to penetrate and possess the earth and the sky and always to stare at and aspire towards the distant line in between. The transparent SkyBarge points into the wind and provides for the climber an oculus focused on the horizon from whence the winds of memory and aspiration blow. EarthPlane cuts open the freshness of the earth and places the inhabitant at eye level with the ground plane. Buried, the viewer is one with the horizon. These vehicles of imagined flight are arrested by the emphatic ladder, which interrupts their flowing motion across the placeless prairie. As always, we had a lot of fun with backhoes and cranes and steel and cable and fiberglass and perforated aluminum and lots of people scratching their heads and wondering what on earth we were doing as they cheerfully pitched in with hard work and all the experience and wisdom of their trades.

WeatherStation provides a pure and minimal focus on the rotation of the changing/changeless sky. Existing as an object when approached from the exterior, once entered, it becomes an instrument of observation, providing a vantage point and false horizon to facilitate the understanding of the sky as a separate element, without its earthbound delimitations.

SunCellar empties a vast cube of earth cut to just below the level of the groundwater. Human access is provided by a heavy lidded ramp and a ladder suspended by cable in a bottomless well. Angled lenses focus sunlight into the depths of the cube to reflect from the floor of water onto the steel-restrained earthen walls and ceiling. The inhabitant stands suspended on a catwalk in the center of this storehouse of aqueous, rippling light, blinded, following a dark descent away from the sky.

Terminus provides a rail-thin line across the prairie, turning upward to form a ladder cabled into the sky. Terminus refers to infinite passage across the prairie and to the nameless, placeless endpoint imagined only as a terminus to travel rather than as a place of arrival: the mythic railroad serving as a metaphor for life on the prairie.

WaterBridge brings the subterranean aquifer to the waterless surface of the prairie in the form of a horizontal bridge of suspended water. The span traverses at horizon level the full length of a narrow incision in the earth, with steel plate walls cutting down to the water table and the life blood of the prairie.