(ZOOM) LECTURE
21 April, 2022,  17:30–18:30

At around 74 million tons per year, construction waste is the largest waste stream in Switzerland. How do you turn worthless waste into a valuable re-source? KLUTZ-designer Charly Blödel (Tutor at Willem de Kooning Academie and programme and exhibition producer at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Museum for Architecture, Design & e-Culture in Rotterdam, NL) talks about material culture, construction waste and its potential to return to the public sphere.

SIGN UP for the lecture via Eventbrite.

OPEN CALL
6/7 May, 2022

On 6 and 7 May, 2022, Team KLUTZ will set up the temporary urban furniture cluster KLUTZ in and around the Basel Pavillon at Dreispitz. We invite student volunteers to join the team in the performative build-up in preparation for the opening of the Architekturwoche Basel 2022. The Basel Pavillon is the main location of AWB 2022. Once completed, Klutz will become a meeting point and forum at Dreispitz during the opening on 10 May and the entire programme of AWB 2022. Team KLUTZ is looking forward to seeing you!

SIGN UP for the KLUTZ performative build-up during the (Zoom) Lecture on 21 April
or directly via mail to hello@charlybloedel.com.

How does worthless waste become a valuable resource? KLUTZ-designer Charly Blödel talks about urban material culture, construction waste and its potential to return into public space. At around 74 million tons per year, construction waste is the largest waste stream in Switzerland. As mixed construction waste, concrete, brick, tile and asphalt are not used to construct new buildings, but are used as secondary materials to fill depleted quarries and other landscape and infrastructure work. Thus, a material that was originally mined from the natural landscape as a valuable raw material now flows back into a man-made landscape as a worthless waste material. How can worthless waste become a valuable resource? This is the question posed by KLUTZ.

As a bag-module, KLUTZ will provide the context for panel discussions, interviews and lectures at the Basel Pavillon, the main location of the Architekturewoche Basel 2022.

KLUTZ is an urban furniture made of textile, on show for the first time during Architekturwoche Basel 2022. However KLUTZ only becomes a seat when it is filled with construction waste. As a bag module, KLUTZ is easy to transport, empty and refill. This is how KLUTZ travels through different urban contexts. “What’s in the bag?” is the recurring question. In a variety of spatial configurations and mixtures of filling materials, KLUTZ becomes a performative tool to engage with the changing value of the material that our built surroundings are made of.

KLUTZ is part of the object family Soft Rubble, a series of spatial constructs in which building rubble and textile find spatial expression sometimes as a wall segment, sometimes as urban furniture. In the project Soft Rubble, which Charly Blödel started during her master studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2020), she focuses on the social and ecological implications of spatial design and production systems with a special focus on waste and material culture in the context of the climate crisis.

For more information on KLUTZ at Architekturwoche Basel 2022 and the programme from 09–15 May, 2022, please visit architekturwochebasel.ch

KLUTZ is an urban seating furniture made of textile. But it is only by filling it with construction waste that KLUTZ becomes a seat. As a bag module, KLUTZ is easy to transport, empty and refill. This is how KLUTZ travels through different urban contexts. “What’s in the bag?” is a recurring question. In a variety of spatial configurations and mixtures of filling materials, KLUTZ becomes a performative tool to engage with the interplay of value and valuelessness in urban space.

KLUTZ is built by hand in a performative build-up the start of the architecture week.

As a cluster of bag-modules, KLUTZ will provide the context for panel discussions, interviews and lectures at the Basel Pavillon, the main location of the Architekturewoche Basel 2022.

As a bag-module, KLUTZ will provide the context for panel discussions, interviews and lectures at the Basel Pavillon, the main location of the Architekturewoche Basel 2022.

KLUTZ is part of the object family Soft Rubble, a series of spatial constructs in which building rubble and textile take the spatial form of wall segment or urban furnitures contextual to their immediate surroundings and material supply. In the project Soft Rubble, which Charly Blödel started during her master studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven (2020), she focuses on the social and ecological implications of spatial design and production systems with a special focus on waste and material culture in the context of the climate crisis.

KLUTZ will be on show for the first time at the Architekturwoche Basel 2022 from 09–15 May, 2022 as part of the Basel Pavillon, the main location of the event, hosting panel discussions, interviews and lectures during AWB 2022 and throughout the summer programme of 2022.

For more information on KLUTZ at Architekturwoche Basel 2022 and the programme from 09–15 May, 2022, please visit architekturwochebasel.ch

KLUTZ will be introduced at the (ZOOM) LECTURE: KLUTZ — What’s in the bag? (in German) on 21 April, 2022 at FHNW Basel. Sign up here.

The guided tour around KLUTZ (in German & English) during AWB 2022 will take place on Tuesday, 10 May, 2022 at 14:00–15:00 and 16:00–17:00. Sign up for the tour here.

Basel is recognized as Switzerland’s architectural capital. Hardly any other region is home to so many internationally active architectural offices. In order to showcase the highly diverse potential of building culture, expertise and enthusiasm in the city and surrounding area, Architektur Dialoge has initiated a new biennial platform for architecture and urban development: the Architekturwoche Basel (AWB). The first edition will be held from 9–15 May 2022.

Soft Rubble, wall segment with window and seat, built by Team KLUTZ (2020). Photo: Viktor Hübner

Workshop Emerging Paths in Matera [IT], 2019

The workshop Emerging Paths was directed to the Master students at DAE taking place in the summer break from Juli 06th–14th, 2019  at Open Design School Matera. The workshop was developed in collaboration with Roberta Di Cosmo, Edoardo Tedone and Matilde Losi and with participation of Alina Slup and Marek Glogowski.

Smails, A Ceramic Set
Part of the Letterhouse Series

»The writer has to write to himself simultaneously, as, through the letter, he will get acquainted with himself.«

Clemens Brentano

»The Shelter«, based on the jardinu pantescu, the typical enclosed dry-wall gardens for single trees in Sicily

»The Cooler«, based on the yakhchal, the ancient ice pit developed by the Persions 400 BC to store ice in the desert

»The Pod«, based on the Sassi di Matera, the cave dwellings still inhabited today in the Southern Italian city of Matera

»The Windbreaker«, based on the cabane de camargue, rounded, reet-thatched houses positioned in direction to withstand the strong Mistral winds in the Camargue region of France

Essay
The Contemporary Ruin — Material Frictions in Times of Flux

Material studies of material left-overs found in construction containers

WET WALLS

As fortunate as he was to work together with the grand master of modernism, Chilean painter Roberto Matta could not help but disagree with the principles of Le Corbusier. Working as a draftsman in Le Corbusier’s office, Matta rejected his idea of modern architecture as a fusion of the aspira­tions of classical renaissance architecture with the qualities of accelerating new technologies at the time. In the article of the surrealist magazine Minotaure¹ he describes his contrasting ideals as “walls ‘like wet sheets that change shape to fit our psychological fears’, furnished with biomorphic couches that appear in his illustrations to mould to and at the same time threaten to swallow the human body”². Matta describes his ideas of space as a flexible coat, almost fluid and imperceptible in its alignment with the human body. He portrays a synchronised relationship; two entities moving, intersecting, merging. An architecture rids itself from its material character, the essential “stuff it is made off” as opposed to the monumental and rigid qualities of Corbusier’s renaissance references. An architecture that shows no restraint in adjusting to the needs of its user producing the agility of different modes of usage.

Increasing shifts in the modes of usage of the built environment are a symptom of the continuous forward-facing motion of accelerating progress in our time. Socio-political and economic dynamics in society in the context of greater independence through digital connectivity fuel migra­tional movements around the globe. Yet, as bodies move at an increased rate, the spaces that they inhabit and leave behind accumulate in contrast to Matta’s scenario where they dematerialise and do not leave a trace³. In other words, the accelerated state of mind and body clash with the perceived ‘slowness’ of material which ultimately culminates in desertion and abandonment of buildings. In precisely this moment, the phenomenon of the contemporary ruin reveals itself. Our surroun­ding built environment expires much sooner⁴. It is continuously demolished, transformed, improved and readjusted, dressing the urban landscape in scaffolding. These disruptions tear the urban fabric and its interconnected social life that cannot be patched up as easily as it is dismantled. As these motions of building and removal accelerate, the term ‘ruin’ could receive new meanings: Can architecture only work or not work? Or could it actually be successful in its dysfunctionality? Put another way, could the ruin become productive?

This essay speculates on our relation to the contemporary ruin in the context of the accelerated times we find ourselves in. From the perspective of its static material presence in the fluid terrain of continuous progress it explores the productive potential and societal relevance of the friction that it carries. These accelerated times are what Hartmut Rosa identifies as conditions of ‘dynamic stabilisation’ through which we attempt to navigate the waves of progress.To achieve temporary stabilisation we feel required to push for constant growth, innovation and cultural reproduction of a status quo⁵. Upsurge of production and social change are the result. We experience these conditions as a feeling of accelerated time. This notion is vividly summarised by Douglas Coupland, co-author of The Age of Earthquakes: ‘The future for me, growing up, was always something that was ahead. In the distance–then it started to get closer. Then it was there, and now suddenly, right now actually is the future. What we’re inhabiting is no longer in the distance anymore but in this state of very, very profoundly accelerating flux.’⁶ With times in flux and progress inevitable, lifespans seem to become a questionable measurement, leaving the ruin in an ambiguous position.

Elaborating on the term ‘ruin’ words like “vestige”, “remnants”, “trace”, or “relic” come to mind, describing the idea of loss manifesting itself in the de­caying traces of a failed utopia. The mere word, ‘ruin’, triggers nostalgia instantly and provokes the unquestioned response of preservation. Walter Benjamin’s definition of the ruin aligns with this notion in the sense that it is an object-trace capturing ‘nature in a petrified state to nature in a permanent state of transition’⁷. Nonetheless, Benjamin limits the value of the ruin to its documenting, capturing capacity and implies a need for maintaining this ‘petrified state’ to secure its meaning. This makes Benjamin’s ruin inaccessible as we have to keep a secure distance. By extension, it leads to the problematics of preservation—as we cannot sustain everything, what is worth keeping and who decides such matters?

ENDING POINT: SYSTEM

Dutch architectural firm OMA thematises the proble­matics of preservation in their masterplan for La Deféncein Paris. La Défense is one of the main business areas in Paris, that was bound to be expanded in 1991. As a proposal for this undertaking, OMA produced a scheme, causing a stir at the time, that rather than imposing another superstructure onto the dense area to focus on what lies beneath⁸. From the point of view of statistics, most of the current buildings would reach the end of their life span within the coming 20 to 30 years which would bring to light very naturally a tabula rasa, a blank slate, free of contextual conditioning. In anticipation of this emergence, OMA planned for the continuous revealing of an underlying grid that is the basis for not only the existing but also the extended areal of La Défense. In their proposal, they criticise that in Europe as “the Old World, the ‘continent of history’, there is an unspoken assumption that all its substance–even the most mediocre–is historic, and therefore has the right to eternal life.”⁹ “Mediocre substance” is what OMA’s masterplan categorises as recently erected buildings, doomed to imminent expiration and demolition or in other words—the contemporary ruin to be.

La Défense is a celebrated example of city planning. The role of the architect: patience. The elegant removal or “unbuilding”, is what Keller Easterling calls ‘perhaps the only subtraction project in recent memory that is pro­minent enough to be awarded a Pritzker equivalent for building removal’¹⁰. What her evaluation alludes to is that the existing buildings are acknowledged in their life cycles. Progress is registered as the driving force behind expiry and translated into a system bringing forward the new. Nonetheless, this system maintains the ruin clearly as an ending point. It restricts its potential to removal in order to unlock the possibility of a fresh start hidden underneath.

While Benjamin sees the value of the ruin in its preservation and OMA in its removal, an alternative that mediates between the two becomes very interesting, as both options are questionable in the face of global resource shortage and current carbon footprint of the building industry. So, how can we not merely cope with but take advantage of the material qualities of the ruin? How could the friction between the physicality of the expired building and our mind be a fruitful one? Svetlana Boym provides an insightful view of possible scenarios in her analysis of ruins. In her opinion, ruins do not only portray “a romanticising notion of the past layered with a contemporary reflection of our inner landscapes” but prove to be “sites for a new exploration and production of meanings”¹¹. Boym lifts the heavy layer of dust. Interaction becomes possible and in this case crucial.

ENDING POINT: COMMUNITY

A project that makes use of building removal beyond the recovery of a blank slate, is A Way, Away [Listen While I Say]. The project taking place over several months in 2017 in St. Louis, Missouri, centred around the activation of an empty land plot and an adjoining building that would be demolished in the course of the project. Chicago-based artists Amanda Williams and Andres Hernandez choreographed the process of taking down the building as a community process in five phases of “Marking”, “Subtracting”, “Translating”, “Shaping”, and “Healing”¹². The process was initiated by painting the complete building with golden paint to articulate the focus of the conversation. Throughout the documentation and retrieval of building materials from the demolition, the community made proposals and guided their use in the transformation into a green space for the city.

A Way, Away demonstrates how the ruin, given the time, can be opened up to a civic process to evaluate and  formulate collective adaptation in a bottom-up manner when progress triggers urban transitioning and calls for new schemes. In engaging of the community throughout the process, Willians and Hernandez cultivated reflection and assessment of the life cycle of the urban landscape. However, in this case the developed conclusions were left without major impact on the previously planned park that eventually replaced the demolished building. The insights articulated meanwhile could not be channeled back into the planning process as the new plans had already been finalised.

Even though A Way, Away shows the potential of a ruin still in relation to its removal, it yields another insight. As a building is abandoned, it is removed from the market and the original financial envelope it initially emerged from. The ruin, as it has moved beyond the gaze of the market, does not have to function within its system of regulations anymore. In minimal periods of time, expired buildings can outline what is needed. Spaces are adjusted radically and rudimentarily to find quick solutions for temporary adjustments. In this sense, architecture takes the shape of a practice or performance as opposed to a scripted scheme. What seemingly lies in decay can become a 1:1 testing ground for conclusions such as the ones outlined by the community in St. Louis. This practice reminds of Matta’s image of ‘walls like wet sheets’ changing and morphing to the body’s motion With life re-entering into its deserted spaces, the ruin can be seen in a different light, posing the question: Could the ruin be reevaluated to be not seen as an ending point but become an actual starting point?

ENDING POINT: RUIN

Sans Souci Community Cinema in Soweto, South Africa shows what this notion could look like. In 1995, the Sans Souci Community Cinema was destroyed in a fire. In 2002, Lindsay Bremner and 26’10 South initiated its reconstruction through concept development from the spatiality of the ruin itself. Instead of speculating on the potential of the ruin, its capability to sustain a variety of functions was rendered tangible through open-air screenings, installations, performances, workshops and festivals¹³. This way the transformation was envisioned on-site, anchoring the future building at the heart of its community. Furthermore, the programme helped promote and raise a budget for reconstruction. Following a very successful campaign and further developments in the realisation of the generated proposal, heavy rainfalls led to the partial collapse of the remains of the building.

Nonetheless, the project is a strong case study for the ruin activated as a testing ground. In this sense, Sans Souci Cinema shows that the ruin today can exceed the role of “new exploration and production of meaning” (Boym) which remains on the theoretical level. It has the capacity to metamorph from an ending point of a life cycle into a starting point for the transformation of urban texture within specific local contexts.

RUIN AS NAVIGATION

OMA’s scheme for La Défense stopped at defining that buildings have shortening lifespans and applying this notion as a system. The project of A Way, Away shows how a community can be a driving force in the development of the built environment and foster a culture of engagement and initiative. Deconstruction becoming a civic process. Sans Souci Cinema develops this aspect further as the ruin then is transformed into a 1:1 testing ground to help reflect on past concepts to develop new ones. The ruin itself becomes a process. In this way, less defined areas in the regulated pattern of the urban landscape provide a fertile ground to become a thermometer of the relation between progress and inherent social change, emerging needs and necessary actions. Seeing the connections with buildings and how and why they do or do not work can let them have an influence and shape established architectural practices.

Now progress can be observed manifested on all scales throughout our daily paths and destinations. We see “with half-closed eyes, an accelerated time-lapse within which large swaths of building and landscape seem to be simultaneously cultivated and harvested or built and unbuilt”¹⁴, Keller Easterling describes. Yet buildings carry with them much more than the bare weight of their compiled building materials and are much harder to remove in concept as in practice. They do not decom­pose without a trace. They do not only answer to a grid that is drawn by an urban planner but also to the much more organic grid of appropriation by use of its community. Buildings, from their inception to their removal carry the stories that render the social tissue that holds and makes the built environment habitable.

The picture of ‘walls like wet sheets’ that Matta paints, seems to come very close to Easterling’s suggestion of ephemerality. Yet, the fluidity that he describes is of a different kind. It describes space that registers and is aware of the human being, is connected almost physically, lets itself be shaped and helps shape through productive friction. This fluidity asks for interaction, engagement and active shaping. From this perspective, the ruin moves beyond a mere milestone or an anchor point to navigate and position yourself against. The ruin is reconfigured from an endpoint into many possible new beginnings. As such, it can provide a fertile ground for cyclic motions of iteration, testing and evaluation on an urban scale. It can help form fluid, spatial narratives centered around an evolving ’social architecture’ as opposed to the remoteness and perceived slowness of conservative planning and construction practices. Positioned as such, the ruin gains a key role in the critical approach to, and navigation of continuous waves of progress in the extreme present.

Published in ‘The Possible Progress’ Issue 01 in Cartha Magazine

Terre Durable in Nîmes, a recycling facility, depo and supplier for crushed building waste

Hills of building waste integrating into the landscape

Part of the preliminary research was the mapping of building waste retrieved from one of the buildings part of the Luma Foundation that is currently under renovation.

The catalogue of quantified materials that are extracted during the renovation allows for the reemployment in custom-made materials for the new building.

Building rubble is a site-specific material that illustrates a local mixture of minerals. Due to Arles rich heritage as part of the Roman Empire, the local rubble contains a remarkable amounts of marble.

“Arles is the result of these early recycling patterns due to the nat- ural resource shortage inherent to Arles’s geographical location. It is a patchwork that has turned invisible on St. Trophine but certainly still recurs in the fragments of construc- tion waste that scarcely leave the historical centre yet present them- selves in pieces of marble among the common crushed concrete, clay tile and gravel on waste recycling sites such as the one of Terre Durable before they are filled back into the ground in road construction works or landscaping works.”

Excerpt from the essay ‘A Local Mixture’ in the publication

The Western city exists in a state of hyper-productivity resulting in an imminent reproduction of the urban built environment. As a new building is erected, the previous is rendered obsolete. This swift exchange generates swaths of building waste. In 2015 alone, the city of Rotterdam produced 394.000 tons of building rubble. After being transported to a recycling facility this mixed-mineral waste is crushed and downcycled to filler material in landscaping and backfilling processes. Soft Rubble investigates mechanisms of both production and loss of value in the context of the fragile existence of raw matter on the verge of becoming mineral waste. It does so in the form of a construction process that positions building waste as building material.

To build the first prototype of Soft Rubble, 5 people filled 12 tons of building rubble into 4 bags in 8 hours.

The building team including Lisa Machemer, Charlélie Flamant, Matilde Losi, Daniel Parnitzke and Charly Blödel built the first prototype at Van Berkel Bouwstoffen & Transport, a building rubble recycling facility in Eindhoven on June 13th, 2020.

Soft Rubble is a tarpaulin construction system comprised of differently shaped textile containers made of 250g Polyethylene sheet. In a manual process, these reusable textile elements are filled with crushed building rubble to form rigid yet flexible stone walls. Any number of these containers can be combined and filled to create a variety of spatial configurations site-specific to local context and materiality. Preserving the porous material state of building rubble, Soft Rubble becomes a tool of activation to engage in both a physical and abstract manner with the changing value of our material surroundings.

The three-metre tall bags were produced by hand at Zeilmakerij Van Doorn in the Rotterdam Harbour.

Soft Rubble bags are made out of 250g Polyethylene sheet with nylon seams, reinforced with a polyester strap.

»While construction industries extract natural resources from the existing natural landscape in a process of gradual depletion, man-made material conglomerates are simultaneously reverted to the same landscape. As they are filled back into the ground, the natural landscape we quarry turns into a man-made landscape that stays untouched. Why do we quarry one landscape, while we stay blind to the other?«

Soft Rubble is a master thesis project developed in the Social Design Department at the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2020 with the support of the mentors Brecht Duijf , Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nadine Botha and Henriëtte Waal under the former head of department Jan Boelen.

On Quarrying A Man-Made Landscape is the written master thesis that accompanies the thesis project Soft Rubble.

On Quarrying A Man-Made Landscape is the written master thesis that accompanies the thesis project Soft Rubble.

Abstract

The Western city portrays a state of hyper-productivity resulting in an imminent reproduction of the built environment that it inhabits. As a new building is erected, the previous is rendered obsolete. The swift exchange from use to disuse produces swaths of building debris that is being crushed and returned to the ground as a base layer in road construction or filler material for exhausted quarries and other landscaping purposes. While construction industries extract natural resources from the existing natural landscape in a process of gradual depletion, man-made material conglomerates are simultaneously reverted to the same landscape. As they are filled back into the ground, the natural landscape we quarry turns into a man-made landscape that stays untouched. What makes us avoid this other, man-made landscape is the mere ‘stuff’ that it is made of – waste.

How can we see this man-made landscape as a quarry and its material wealth as potential rather than waste? Tracing the condition under which raw matter can only become waste when framed as an industrial building material, waste is laid out as a social contract. Looking at the methodology of the three architectural practices of Rotor, BC Architects and Assemble, nostalgia is the strategy through which value is returned. Through the lens of the aforementioned practices, quarrying is outlined as a process of retrieval of raw matter, followed by the production of knowledge and affiliation with the local community, and eventually, its repeated usage becoming ritual. As such, the concept of quarrying reads as a local practice of creating value around the quarried matter rather than the industrial extraction of value as a pre-defined commodity.

The Western city exists in a state of hyper-productivity resulting in an imminent reproduction of the urban built environment. As a new building is erected, the previous is rendered obsolete. This swift exchange generates swaths of building waste. In 2015 alone, the city of Rotterdam produced 394.000 tons of building rubble. After being transported to a recycling facility this mixed-mineral waste is crushed and downcycled to filler material in landscaping and backfilling processes. Soft Rubble investigates mechanisms of both production and loss of value in the context of the fragile existence of raw matter on the verge of becoming mineral waste. It does so in the form of a construction process that positions building waste as building material.

To build the first prototype of Soft Rubble, 5 people filled 12 tons of building rubble into 4 bags in 8 hours.

The building team including Lisa Machemer, Charlélie Flamant, Matilde Losi, Daniel Parnitzke and Charly Blödel built the first prototype at Van Berkel Bouwstoffen & Transport, a building rubble recycling facility in Eindhoven on June 13th, 2020.

Soft Rubble is a tarpaulin construction system comprised of differently shaped textile containers made of 250g Polyethylene sheet. In a manual process, these reusable textile elements are filled with crushed building rubble to form rigid yet flexible stone walls. Any number of these containers can be combined and filled to create a variety of spatial configurations site-specific to local context and materiality. Preserving the porous material state of building rubble, Soft Rubble becomes a tool of activation to engage in both a physical and abstract manner with the changing value of our material surroundings.

The three-metre tall bags were produced by hand at Zeilmakerij Van Doorn in the Rotterdam Harbour.

Soft Rubble bags are made out of 250g Polyethylene sheet with nylon seams, reinforced with a polyester strap.

»While construction industries extract natural resources from the existing natural landscape in a process of gradual depletion, man-made material conglomerates are simultaneously reverted to the same landscape. As they are filled back into the ground, the natural landscape we quarry turns into a man-made landscape that stays untouched. Why do we quarry one landscape, while we stay blind to the other?«

Soft Rubble is a master thesis project developed in the Social Design Department at the Design Academy Eindhoven in 2020 with the support of the mentors Brecht Duijf , Stéphane Barbier Bouvet, Nadine Botha and Henriëtte Waal under the former head of department Jan Boelen.

On Quarrying A Man-Made Landscape is the written master thesis that accompanies the thesis project Soft Rubble.