Cork is getting a preview of the future of architecture in a month-long festival, writes Frank McDonald, Environment Editor
Architecture in the 21st century will be more sensual, more pre-occupied with place, more radical and challenging, more environmentally sustainable and, above all, more fun. And as technological possibilities expand, architects will collaborate more with artists, software programmers and others in creating new work.
These were the messages that came out of a wide-ranging symposium, New Trends of Architecture in Europe and Asia-Pacific, held at the weekend in Cork City Hall, which drew together architects from three continents to present their work under such esoteric headings as "Sensual Atmospheres" and "Fluctuating Scales".
What was being discussed, of course, was high architecture, which is as far removed from the general standard of building as haute couture is from pret-a-porter in the fashion world; as if to underline this point, what is in my view one of the worst new buildings in Cork is currently being completed just across the River Lee from the venue.
But New Trends is not about fashion, or "styles". It was set up in 2000 as an EU-Japan initiative using architecture to build bridges of understanding between "the Far East and the Far West of the great Eurasian land mass", according to Shane O'Toole, honorary committee member and curator of the new Irish Architecture Foundation.
Broadened out to embrace other Asian countries as well as Australia, participating architects at the cutting-edge of their profession - 10 from Europe and 10 from Asia-Pacific - were selected to present examples of their work at a series of symposiums in Lille (European City of Culture 2004), Hong Kong, Tokyo, Cork and Melbourne.
This travelling architectural circus also includes a major exhibition of drawings, photographs and models, now on view at the Crawford Gallery in Cork (until July 23rd). Designed by John Tuomey, a previous participant in New Trends, its inspirational gesture was to show all the models just below eye-level on a long white table, like a sushi bar.
"The idea is like a series of waves from the sea, what happens when they collide, when they can create something much bigger," O'Toole said. "It's not proposing solutions because the questions are not yet defined. But one thing is certain - the architecture of the 21st century will be as different from 20th century as the 20th was from the 19th."
He also suggested that architecture had "found its voice again, a voice it had lost through alienation in the 20th century", and it was now building bridges with the public. And what the new Irish Architecture Foundation aims to do is to broaden this "audience for architecture in Ireland at a time of rapid change", when so much is being built.
Certainly, architecture is something we all have in common because everyone needs somewhere to live. What divides Europe from Japan is an attitude to architecture; we see buildings as part of a future legacy whereas the Japanese seem to view them as ephemera, to be disposed of once they reach the end of an unnaturally short life.
Addressing the issue of sustainability, Japanese architect Kiyoshi Sey Takeyama told the symposium that the average life of new buildings in Japan is just 25 years. "Our cities are in the process of changing, every 10 years or so," he said. "We are interested in new things, in newness, and in pursuit of that we hope that we will find new beauty."
It is difficult to imagine that the clients for whom Takeyama designed beautiful houses in Nagoya, Osaka and Tokyo will be demolishing them anytime soon.
One is a gallery-like space to house an art collection, another has a timber-decked garden with a library tower at one end and a shallow pool featuring a circle in a square. Takeyama's version of making architecture is to "cut and fold and shape materials and then a place emerges".
That's also what dECOi's Mark Gouldthorpe does, using a "smart" sculpting machine to produce extraordinary shapes generated by mathematics; his specifications are often based on "curvilinear algorithms".
Projects by dECOi Architects "are not drawn as such, but scripted parametrically ... to accommodate the needs of numeric command machine protocols, the engineering and material constraints, and the budget". No wonder their re-working of a penthouse near the Tate Modern in London looks as if it landed from outer space.
Berlin-based Jurgen Mayer is interested in the potential of architecture and even furniture design as "a new way of communication". His "heat seats" react to body temperature, leaving imprints of human forms, and he has also defied convention by producing rubber objects clad in glass mosaic tiles that you could punch with a fist.
Light and water animations are integral parts of his Stadthaus (civic centre) in Ostfildern, near Stuttgart. Rainwater is collected on the building's flat roof and used to create "architectural rain" from the edges of its large canopy. This rain is computer-controlled, generating what he calls "pitter-patterns" that people love to walk through.
Architecture is about "making events", according to Franz Sumnitsch, of Vienna-based BKK-3. When their unconventional IP2 office building in the Austrian capital was under construction, it became a venue for performance art; its "urban grasshopper" bridge/stairway to a first-floor restaurant is also regularly used for fashion shoots.
For Sumnitsch, "architecture is like playing soccer, because it needs a lot of teamwork - and it depends on the quality of the team if you get good results". This was put differently by Mark Thompson, a young Irish architect working with RCR near Girona, in Spain; the way they work to generate form involves "creativity around a table".
For the tall, bearded Italian, Stefano Pujatti, architecture will always have an element of fun. With his colleagues in Elastico, based in Budoia, near Turin, he designed a curvy "Yuppie Ranch House" in the countryside for his older brother, with ramps inside and out so that Armando can ride his horse right up to the roof!
Pujatti believes in an architecture of surprises. Elastico's extension to Borgaretto cemetery consists of a massive podium with stacked concrete cubicles (the tombs) as its building blocks. Glazed openings amid the trees allow bereaved visitors to walk across the burial places "like floating angels from another world".
Tokyo-based Momoyo Kaijima, partner in the wonderfully-named "Atelier Bow-Wow", is interested in what she calls "pet architecture" - dealing with small, awkwardly-shaped gaps in the urban fabric left over by cutting through elevated freeways. The aim is to "open up the familiar and humdrum, making it new".
Kerstin Thompson, who mainly works in Melbourne, has also dealt with freeways, creating a marvellous series of sound barriers for its Hallam bypass; motorists on the new road are reminded that sheep once grazed there by big-lettered slogans saying BLEAT. Her houses, too, are equally witty in their designs.
Gráinne Hassett, the latest architect to represent Ireland in New Trends, sees architectural space as "an intellectual construct that's not necessarily possible to describe" in words. What Hassett Ducatez Architects sought to achieve with their Double Glass House in Clontarf was a sensation of "hyper-presence", she said.
Nobuaki Furuya's "Zig House/Zag House" in Tokyo, which we visited in the April symposium, also dealt with the issue of housing three generations by creating a pair of two-storey timber-framed glass boxes linked by a high pergola - one for himself, his wife and children, and the other for his parents.
Though he is concerned that the younger generation in Japan and elsewhere is losing a sense of cultural continuity, Furuya is not afraid to challenge perceptions; he proposed an extraordinary antidote to the anonymity of high-rise housing - a huge, swirling, double-helix "Hyper Spiral" raised on stilts for a site in Tokyo.
Other contributors included René van Zuuk, from The Netherlands, who has "a lot of fun making boxes"; Huat Lim, from ZLG in Kuala Lumpur, whose projects include a skate park; Bostjan Vuga, who likes to challenge smugness in Slovenia, and Tuuli Sotamaa, from Helsinki, who made the most ephemeral thing of all - a cylindrical ice house.
Mary McCarthy, programme director of Cork 2005, said she hoped the New Trends symposium and Ireland's first Festival of Architecture (sponsored by civil engineering contractors John F Supple Ltd) would raise questions about "what kind of city do we want to live in?". It is ironic, though, that Cork has been without a City Architect since the esteemed Neil Hegarty retired more than two years ago.
