The Understory

The Understory

She managed to open the window silently in a single gesture that had taken many months to perfect. A firm pressure downwards just before turning the handle to avoid the screech of metal on metal which was always louder at night. With the stay locked in the second hole, she returned to bed. The nighttime summer breeze was never as cool as the other side of the pillow. She fell asleep wondering why she had agreed to move in.

The apartment was modern but it felt old. Not old like the trees in the square but at least twice her age. She liked thinking in multiples. Over the decades, multiple layers of paint had smoothed the sharp aluminium edges.

He was sceptical at first. His craft was in steel, a noble material directly descended from cast iron bridges and great railway stations. Cutting, welding, grinding steel felt close to the earth’s core. An extrusion could never match the power of a hot rolled steel section.

If anything, aluminium was easier to work but it didn’t have a soul. He took the job mainly because it came with a flat. You could make the future in aluminium they said. So, plenty of work. Soon he’d be making machine parts, aeroplane wings and hi-fis. For now though, it was all pressed panels, folded drips for windowsills and cover strips, clipped together on a construction site he knew not where.

Before retiring in the countryside, he had made thousands of windows. By the end they were pretty good, he thought, although never as charming as the old wooden windows of his cottage even when winter wind whistled through the frames.

But aluminium had never been as fun as when he'd worked in steel on the tower for the SAFFA exhibition in 1958. While his wife was working on the graphics she mentioned Annemarie Hubacher-Constam was looking for skilled fabricators. He only worked on it for a few months, slightly longer than the two months open to the public. Every time they passed the site by the lake in the following decades, they saw their young selves walking up the ramps.

She received the letter informing them of the refurbishment. All the windows would be replaced and walls would be insulated. They promised it would be more comfortable especially in the summer heatwaves and bills would be lower. It was part of their journey towards net zero. which she supported at the tenants’ AGM. Privately, she regretted the change. Their motivations were right and their architects were sensitive and professional. She knew she would never see her grandfather’s hands in the aluminium profiles smoothed by coloured layers of her grandmother’s paint. She felt guilty for not visiting.

This semester, we shall look again at building systems. Buildings from the 1970s, 80s and 90s are reaching the end of their first life-cycle and are most vulnerable to being replaced. Modern architecture of the post-war era struggles to be heard as industrial construction systems have silenced architecture to a series of abstract signs. Is it because the reflective surfaces of glass and metals reflect only images but leave no traces? Or is it simply because we are not literate in these architectures of our recent past? This semester, we shall look again at the lightweight aluminium assemblies that defined much of the architecture starting in the 1970s when aluminium production hugely increased for all areas of production from drink cans to aviation and of course façade systems.

We shall examine how these architectures can be rethought for the next generation without erasing the traces of previous events to accommodate a changing society and climate. Starting from a single façade component, we shall design the next.

Our method will follow two parallel tracks; making and writing. Making will engage with the specific material reality of these architectures, the processes that form the aluminium from extracted bauxite to 26 ton aluminium bars that get rolled and extruded to create building components, while writing (and reading) will document and imagine the lives of those who make, use and maintain the architecture of everyday life.

Architectural concepts will be replaced by narratives that stretch from the past into the future, that recognise contingency and the interconnectedness of our lives in the natural world. So we will start in the garden by restructuring the understory before turning to construction.

Alongside making, we will hold a weekly book club to explore the profound relationships between language and architecture. We will share two recent books; one fiction and one non-fiction that in there own way use spatial structures and constraints to build multiple narratives across time and space:

Scaffolding by Lauren Elkin (2024)

Sandfuture by Justin Beal (2022)

Guests will include Anne Hultzsch, Lauren Elkin, Justin Beal, Alexandre Theriot, and Nina Imert and Matthias Brenner from the chair of Prof Silke Langenberg.