"What can architectural form learn from the concept of sustainability?"
PLACE + MATERIAL + FORM
COVER/DISCOVER
MASS/VOID
FOUND/IMPLANTED
DYNAMIC/STATIC
HORIZONTAL/VERTICAL
SHALLOW/DEEP
ROUGH/SMOOTH
LIGHT/SHADOW
ENHANCE/REDUCE
STIMULATING/COMMUNICATING
The first focus of the workshop was made on the critic of the Friland-ecovillage. Early impressions on the site arouse several doubts about the public space, community identification and the success of similar experiments to deal with our everyday problems and their application into bigger living areas. Sustainability turns to be therefore the art of getting more with less.
The workshop working area is situated along a segment of a path going into the forest near the EASA003 camp (European Architecture Students Assembly) in Kalø (Denmark). Two hillocks made out of piled stones (later found to be 5000-year-old burial places) situated next to this path define the limits of the space to be re-activated.
The forest has to be understood as a delicately articulated space with a complex coherent intertwine of endless spatial potentials, in a similar way to any architectural system, such as cities and entrances. Parameters such as textures of the ground, trunks and leaves, the directionality and density of the tree situation or the openings that allow the light income during the day, are meant to be some of the components to play a part in the process of definition of our workshop space.
The exercise focuses on one hand on the material definition of these two main spots as well as other smaller ones, and on the other hand on the creation of dynamic fields that will frame and give a common meaning to the whole spatial concept.
Finally we created some architectural samples on 1/1 scale grasping the inherent features of our piece of Danish forest in terms of place and local materials and bringing a coherent formal output linked to the triad PLACE+MATERIAL+FORM.
