Progressively Less

This post is about when the useful life of an existing structure, building element or building has had parts removed and, because of that, its working life extended. I could have titled this post Even Less is More but such wordplay dates badly. Negative Space was differently pretentious. Less Than Zero already done. New Minimalism simply wrong. Deconstruction ditto. Lessons in Less too bloggy. I settled on Progressively Less because it qualifies what kind of less. I’m reluctant to name this approach as that would make it a style. Calling anything an “-ism” is the kiss of death.

This progression I’m writing about began with a load of aesthetic baggage. My problem with Less is More was that it never was. The few joins of this famous kitchen counter were made possible by a highly contrived process of manufacture, yet the splashback is joined precisely where a join isn’t wanted. The countertop itself isn’t formed from a single piece because either the machines or the budget weren’t big enough. That insufficiently buffed join on the left of the cooker shows how futile it is to deny a process of construction. The same trick isn’t going to work on the cupboard and drawer surfaces because, if you take away the joins, you’re not going to have cupboards and drawers anymore. This is one of those problems architecture likes because, although no amount of money can solve it, you can still show how much was spent trying.

The kitchen sink is unlikely to have been pressed from the same sheet of stainless steel so this meant more welding, grinding and buffing. I’ve always wondered what Edith Farnsworth did for ice. A refrigerator must be concealed in that storage cupboard compressing the guest bathroom. The drawings are silent.

Denying a construction process by downplaying the number of joins is an expensive thing to do and used to be seen as a premium aesthetic. Later the same century, John Pawson designed and marketed kitchens with genuinely monolithic countertops and none of Mies’ untidy cupboard and drawer handles. Cupboard doors everywhere came to have shadow-gap pulls with either sprung hinges, or push-to-open or magnetic latches. Any beauty resided in showing how much thought and money could be spent showing something was made of fewer parts. What’s true for kitchen cabinetry was also true for building interiors and exteriors.

The lintel in the photograph on the right above isn’t new but has been left exposed to make a feature of it. What was once probably a barn is now on some very expensive real estate and an indicator of wealth. The formerly unpretentious lintel now speaks to us of the beauty of natural materials. That was Minimalism. Somewhere between the two was Brutalism that fetishized unfinished materials in its own way. Looking back, it seems precious. The idea that this was as basic as you could get now seems quaintly naïve.

Architects have been dancing around this idea of leaving materials in their raw state on and off for at least half a century and independently of style. [Refer to Raw! for a brief summary.] Remember MVRDV’s 1997 Double House? [Photos] Progressively lowly unfinished materials came to be appreciated for what they were, although imperfections such as manufacturers’ stamps were still taboo.

H Arquitectes were always skilled at leaving lowly materials unfinished in their new build work, but look at that third photograph below right. The blockwork and the layout of openings for various vents and sockets are impeccable. The design time is relatively cheap compared to the skilled labour and time required. Much as I hate to say anything critical of H Arquitectes, this blockwork is an expensive contrivance of process when compared with constructing it slapdash from seconds and plastering over the mess. This is where we are. Doing a job properly has come to be seen as craftsmanship and so we have a world where interior finishes are usually there for a reason. Again, we arrive at the same contradictory conclusion as with Mies and Minimalism. Visual simplicity of any kind costs money we’re less able or inclined to spend.

Lacaton and Vassal’s 2009 Nantes School of Architecture is representative of their approach to enclosing space as efficiently as possible. The building begins to resemble a factory and there’s nothing precious about it, the materials that construct it, or the elements that enable it to be used. Eschewing interior finishes is a positive development but what we’re seeing is the absence of further addition to a building that wasn’t already there to begin with

Lacaton & Vassal’s 2014 renovations to Paris’ Palais de Tokyo is a better example because subtraction is clearly the dominant approach for an existing building. [Photos] (Thanks Vincent for the additional reporting. 😃)

There’s no such thing as a lowly construction material anymore. Using or adding new resources for the sake of some transient aesthetic effect is wasteful for all the usual reasons. Wood is precious. Concrete has huge hidden costs, as does the production of steel and aluminium. Thinking intelligently about material usage begins with questioning whether a material or building element is even necessary or, in the case of an existing building, whether it’s still necessary. I think we’re at that stage now. Examples. Removing layers of previous interior finishes can reveal what was hidden even if it was never intended to be seen. Whether or not we think revealing something of the building’s history of construction and occupation isn’t the point. The cult of natural materials and workmanship belongs to a different era now.

This idea of giving something a new functional and/or aesthetic life by taking away from what already exists has been stewing for about three decades. I think it can be summarized as seeing beauty in ordinary and mundane things that never presented themselves as beautiful. According to Japanese architect Jo Nagasaka / Schemata architects [https://schemata.jp], ordinary things are things that haven’t been subject to the intentions of architects. I’m inclined to agree. In his 2008 Sayama Flat renovations, materials and elements were subtracted to create what we now see. [Photos: Takumi Ota] Prior to beginning the work, the architects thought they would be doing the usual stripping out and painting everything white but instead happened upon this approach (that happens to produce this “look”) almost by accident. The concrete beam has been revealed, patched, and given the same emphasis as the more consciously exposed concrete beams we’re used to. Conduits and cable runs are given the same importance as the consciously contrived colored ones of Hi-Tech. Resin has been used to seal a floor with former adhesive marks still showing. Unlike a floating house, a transparent house or a house that denies being a constructed object, renewal by subtraction alone is theoretically possible even if, in this example, the ceiling and floor have been tided up, exposed conduits re-taped, oshi-ire sliding doors repapered and everything else given a good clean.

The next example is by Belgian architects architecten de vylder vinck taillieu. Their website is one of the most impenetrable I’ve ever encountered. This first project is their 2017 PC Caritas in the town of Melle, Belgium. All you do is remove things such as, partitions, doors and windows to make new spaces if required, fix broken window cills etc., add as little new material as possible and, if anything new is added, then make sure it can be reused. That’s it. It doesn’t need books, interviews or a lecture tour to get the point across.

You can find other projects in a 2019 TOTO publication that, infuriatingly, groups project images together, and then project drawings and then project texts. I nevertheless saw many examples of this negative refurbishment – defurbishment? unfurbishment? The process seems to begin with questioning the value of every part of every construction element and if and how it contributes to the design intention.

This is their 2011 Haus Rot-Ellen-Berg. [Photos: Filip Dujardin] Same thing. There’s a new relationship with all construction materials, and not just the pretty or rare ones. Things have been added but they have the temporality of furniture.

This idea of removing building elements and adding only conceptually irrelevant elements to extend the useful life of a building is useful, relevant and hopefully something whose time has finally come. It can go in any one of at least five ways, and probably already has, all at once.

Artification

This is when the reason for the subtraction is vague. In this example, it’s obvious that part of a wall has been removed but it’s unclear why. It seems to be part of a design idea whereby what remains evokes ideas of what’s taken away, and vice-versa. [https://jotaillieu.com/projecten/verzameld-werk/] The danger here is making things strange for the sake of it and not because of any program imperative. Do these two spaces want to be one large space or two separate ones? I don’t know. There might be some reason I’m not seeing. It’s from 2020.

Representation

2013 House Kouter II is an example of another potential danger. A cut is made into a barn to provide access and light and to divide it into a house. I’m aware of the contradiction in adding materials to remove part of the building volume but what do we call this? A negative addition? I’d like to retire the word ‘intervention’ but this “removal” to extend the working life of the building is actually a significant addition that’s only perceived as a subtraction. Cutting through the ridge beam is major trauma for a building and for negligible program benefit. Representing the idea has become more important than doing the right thing by the building. This is probably as good a definition of architecture as any. [Photos: https://hicarquitectura.com/2023/02/de-vylder-vinck-taillieu-kouter-ii/].

Aestheticization

This can take many forms but all of them involve the addition of some kind of aesthetic. In one of the essays in the book When B side becomes A side (Kajima Publ. [鹿島出版], 2016), Jun Aoki writes that instead of juxtaposition being the theme of Jo Nagasaka + Schemata’s 2009 House in Okusawa, there’s a recurring ambivalence about whether something is new or old. This is certainly true of the (new) resin layer drawing attention to irregularities in the (existing) plywood floor, or the (existing) window frames that have been given a (new) mirror metallic coating [ ! ], or the pattern of the (existing) brick veneer that is first concealed and then allowed to partially show through the (new) coating, or the (new) concrete plinth that negates the (existing) relationship of the house to its surroundings [while also, it must be said, giving the house the “elevated” status of art – as plinths do]. All this is tricky ground. The plans below show that most internal walls of the house as found (right) were removed to create the new layout on the left.

Inside, House in Okusawa has moments of juxtaposition of existing and new but the exterior seems to be of a time that’s neither now nor past, but both at once. It’s not a case of simple subtraction, addition or any resulting juxtaposition. I agree with Aoki in that it’s not juxtaposition as in side-by-side, but I don’t think it’s ambivalence as Aoki does. I see it as conflating old and new into something new that’s not fully now or fully then (anymore). This is new ground and we don’t yet have the words, concepts or framework to talk about this properly. What’s certain is that it takes something existing and extends not only its working life but its aesthetic life as well. Whatever’s going on, I’m glad to see this happen in Japan where houses are habitually demolished and replaced well before the end of their working life. [Photos]

Unaffordability

This is always a danger, no matter how worthy an approach is in theory. Expensively decadent construction processes can easily substitute for expensive materials as an indicator of wealth. Removing building elements (or parts of them) isn’t always about saving money and resources because it’s possible to remove parts of a building using processes too expensive to consider using under normal circumstances. In this example, huge diamond-tipped circular saws were used to remove portions of the two-meter thick wall of this WWI above-ground air-raid shelter in Munich and convert it into luxury residences. Envelope material and partitions have been removed to give this building another working life but, despite the huge additional. cost, the numbers obviously stacked up. These residences are unique and were never going to be low-cost accommodation.

Commercialization

This is indistinguishable from late 20th century Minimalism with its selective retention and emphasis on white. This example is the recently completed Blue Bottle Coffee Shop in Shanghai’s Yutong Road. Apart from the windows and two concrete beams, not much of the original fabric remains to be seen. It’s well executed and tidy in all the conventional ways.

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The above five ways are all variations on the core approach of taking an existing building, selectively removing everything not of value, and adding elements (of little value) to enable it to be used and its useful life extended. Another Jo Nagasaka + Schemata project, the 2020 Musashino Art University Building No. 16 is a good reference for how to do it. [Photos: Kenta Hasegawa]

An editor at Shanghai People’s Fine Arts Publishing House suggested Semi-Architecture as the title of a publication of Jo Nagasaka’s work because it looks like some of the pieces and processes are missing. I can understand this, but I think what we’re really sensing is the absence of the aesthetic baggage those pieces and processes carried with them.

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• Making Strange
• Architecture Reductions
• Final Reductions
• Raw!