The time of cons­truc­tion

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Prologue

At the end of the first quarter of the XXI century, thanks to projects, constructed works and writings of architects and collectives that began their careers during this period, at different times depending on their generation, it is possible to begin to trace the themes that define certain characteristics in progress in contemporary architectural project. In deliberately omitting the names of authors and buildings, the time of construction seeks to suggest a possible framework for a «de re aedificatoria» devoid of any heroic protagonists and without any definitive works, aspiring instead to distill, from the contemporary magma of research, principles and trajectories for the architectural project in times of crisis. Even the discipline of history, with its various branches, including that of construction, could apply its own analytical methods to dissect contemporary events, no longer relying on the expectation that a temporal distance could ever be guarantee of sound judgment. The time of research has contracted against the backdrop of digital systems. Moreover, owing to these systems, notions of archives and documentation, as well as the tools, methods and rhythms of historical inquiry have changed to the point of becoming unrecognizable, driven, as they are, by the demands of the project in the time of crisis.

Invisible work and conditions over time

Let us once again examine the perspective drawing of the skeleton  outlined against the backdrop of the First World War’s catastrophe. Let us re-evaluate its construction strategies in light of present conditions, of the expectations of participation in the making of one’s own habitat, and of the pressing need to specify the very foundations of design, for an architecture capable to navigate the urgencies and crises of our time, with the ultimate aim to regaining a secular measure to the unfolding of human existence. That skeleton envisioned a distinction of techniques, materials and labor, between the construction of the essential sheltering elements designed by the architect and executed by a contractor, and the completion of the worksite with the possibility of reusing rubble, allowing each person to use their own hands to build the walls of their home. The fact that all that remained of the architect-cum-builder’s hand was the skeleton itself, and that the components of that skeleton were arranged in such a way that the walls would protect them from the weather, causing them to disappear, resonates as the beginning of a political program that extends far beyond its moment of conception: the invisible work. 
One of the greatest builders of the last century translated into words what was enclosed in potential in the perspective drawing of the skeleton. On the horizon of the rubble left by the Second World War, the principle this builder had developed over decades of experience on worksites, and through a logical sequence of projects emerges: that a building should be articulated in parts clearly distinct for their capacity to last over time. Moreover, this capacity must be modulated though a construction method that allows for modifications required by changing conditions, while maintaining the permanence of the fundamental load-bearing features. The invisible work and the temporal conditions of construction are handed down as a legacy from the last century, to inform projects in times of crisis.

The collage

The generation of architects operating since the start of the new century has decided not to follow the trajectories of its authoritative masters, instead opening up to a cultural horizon where even millennia-old experiences have become materials of thought. Their approach to construction has returned to being based on technical substance and ideal measure, to get away from the technological marvels placed at the service of the elites of neo-liberalism.
If the perspective drawing of the skeleton indicated the horizon of an alternative construction system, at the start of the new century it is the constellation of digital collages that conveys a critical act aimed at suspending – if not entirely eliminating – the certainties driving the quest for permanent change of icons. The indifference to construction captures, through collage, the historical moment of detachment, and sanctions the deliberate embrace of an untimeliness that is in stark opposition to the skeleton’s declared intent to control the system. This detachment was strategic. It announced a reorganization of matter according to a temporality no longer subjugated to permanent change. The two essential forms of construction, the enclosure and the skeleton, chosen by the new generation of architects as the foundation of their cultural project of detachment, have not been invented. Rather, what happened to them altered their very substance: enclosure and skeleton were transformed into concepts, liberated from the materials that had once defined their existence so closely that a specific form implied a specific material, making them become synonyms. Elevated to concepts, the enclosure and the skeleton lent themselves to become tools for outlining a different idea of construction.

The enclosure

Over the centuries, the term enclosure has taken on different values, ultimately generating a true theory on the origins of architecture. Yet it was only in the early years of the new century that the enclosure revealed its capacity to indicate another outset – one expressed in fundamental acts and an essential geometry born from a desire to understand the space of the contemporary era. The form of the enclosure, encapsulated in just four walls, managed to crystallize the impulse toward a meek revolt against the prevailing icons in the architecture of permanent change. The discovery of the enclosure’s subversive power survived initial criticisms, bolstered by models that appeared in the last decades of the previous century. 
The know-how of construction, the technical understanding of materials and any other sort of scientific notion about the art of manipulating matter have been pushed aside in favor of the intention of offering a fragment of paradise. Initially appearing in the guise of an earthen partition transfigured by digital collage into a white barrier, the enclosure later took the image of the brick wall to represent – in the very substance of the material left exposed – a ruin returned to be inhabited by a community. Those bricks lend expressive substance to the feeling of protection; they possess a cultural aura and a theoretical dimension that transcend the literal truth of their bond; and they function as mnemonic devices, re-establishing affinities of ideas. The primary substance of matter is intellectual and has nothing of mere clay. Wood is incorporated into the brick enclosure, and it is protected by that screen, mirroring the relationships between the perspective drawing of the skeleton and its protecting wall. Beams and panels offer themselves as support for the vital activities of a community, taking the form of a large inhabitable furniture or a boiserie transformed into a spatial device. The fragment of nature preserved by the construction assumes the form of the hortus conclusus, which, since the turn of the new century, has reappeared in various forms, suggesting secret value of the enclosure. The materials used belong to the catalogue of those legitimized according to the growing environmental concerns; but they are set up to be arranged in primordial bonds as suggest a place enclosed for living together in simple ways. The theoretical intensity that emanated from the force of abstraction of analogous works in the last century has been dissolved into a palette of colors, textures and veins of matter arranged as to frame scenes of life and fragments of nature. The way materials are assembled–establishing relationships of evident contrast and without contaminations–ensures that the wall confirms the permanence of the enclosure, while the carpentry alludes to a provisional organization of the vital activities sheltered within that enclosure, reflecting the different times of the construction.

The room and the elements

Identical rooms are a result of the aspiration to eliminate any sort of housing normalization and types categorization, to reveal the essential particle of the space of the contemporary world. Their emergence parallels the rediscovery of the value of delimiting a place with an enclosure. Identical rooms appear to be the quintessence of the act of enclosing, transposed to the scale of community dwelling. Thanks to the identical room, the project is no longer constrained by codified rules found in manuals and building regulations regarding the correct functioning of each room and its most appropriate dimension in a given time span. Elevated to a theorem of life’s instability, and already verified in a series of works, the criterion of the identical room awaits a response to whether it can generate its own structural system, with materials suited to its quality, or whether it must rely on the skeleton, the wall and their logical variations.
Investigating the ideal construction for the theorem of the identical room, repeated on multiple levels, opens a catalogue of variable techniques for its structural system. What appear to be walls can be organized in fixed or modifiable sectors, with materials appropriate to convey the distinct characteristics of the sectors, from the pillars and portals in steel or reinforced concrete, to the panels in plywood or recycled materials. The flexibility once suggested by the perspective drawing of the skeleton can thus be reabsorbed in the arrangement of different materials for a new concept of wall, tailored to the system of identical rooms and a new temporal dimension of construction. While traditional walls could include cavities for the insertion of shelving closed by a boiserie, the emerging entity of the new century stems from a critical revision of the skeleton that, unlike in the first decades of the last century, is no longer limited to the inclusion of furniture-walls inside its spans to define different rooms. 
The dismantling of the conventional housing practices through the mechanics of the room leads to the invention of shared spaces that the finishing materials contribute to emphasize as collective places. Materials, techniques and structures can also be selected, proportioned and organized by starting from the collective place itself. This allows for growth over time, with the collective place serving as the epicenter, generating its own structural system, around which the other components crystallize. These components, can also vary in materials, according to the different types of shelter suited for differentiated social uses that are variable over time. 
The generation operating since the start of the new century has proposed various models for the collective space, which at times has taken on the form of a monumental atrium. Shortly before the appearance of the perspective drawing of the skeleton, a phased construction strategy for the collective workspaces–gathered in the epicenter of the building – had already been proposed.
Dividers, partitions, walls and pillars are all elements subjected to a critical reassessment of their status, to correspond to the new forms of enclosure and skeleton. That reassessment is a preliminary act necessary to define the material specification of the technical substance of the elements. Such substance, essential for a new, long-term environmental economy, cannot be determined without first clarifying the status of those elements within a comprehensive revision of the construction. The process of critical destruction of design conventions does not merely concern the identity – both material and formal – of what constitutes a divider, a partition, a wall or a pillar. This critical destruction extends to another fundamental element of construction, which in the terminology takes the name of slab. Over the centuries, the slab has resisted the transformations of its technique and its materials. At times, the modification of its identity has seemed possible, particularly when the term was accompanied by attributes suggesting the emergence of a slab capable of generating a space of its own, without however calling back into discussion the statute of continuity dictated by economic and market logic. It is possible that the term slab has been an obstacle to the technical developments necessary for the transformation of this element in the framework of a long-lasting construction, if that term is not combined with others, such as the platform, which implies a mobility and an instability of a different kind – ranging from rotating platforms or moveable bridges used for heavy machinery, to sliding platforms for rapid changes of theatrical sets, to temporary platforms for occasional works, aerial or mounted on carts or telescopic columns, some of which had already appeared in the construction of slabs towards the end of the last century. However, it is no longer the time for technical invention aimed at optimizing matter, speeding up its implementation, or creating architectural merveilles. The framework of horizontal reinforcement between the pillars leads to the suppression of material at the center of the slab, replaced by a void to be filled with mobile closures, modifiable at will over time. The provisional closures are fragments of platforms for the achievement of a transformability extended to the section of a structure. This allows for a  permanence over time defined by a few lines, increasingly open to variable functions, ultimately leading to the conquest of a new secular perspective.

Epicenters and orders

The construction achieved through a mix of different materials, chosen for their behavior over time, is emerging as an essential principle, replacing the monolith that had asserted itself due to the dominance of metal industries in the building market first, and reinforced concrete industries later. Such a construction had appeared during the crisis of the growth of the monolithic structure, when metal and concrete were combined to overcome static and financial resistance. The composite construction of the new century stems from the pressure of quite different trajectories, and against the backdrop of a search for design strategies aimed at long-term environmental economy. The composite capital arose from a mix of Ionic and Corinthian, to celebrate the advent of an imperial age. Composite construction stands on the threshold of the crisis of an empire that has resurrected in the guise of capitalism. It cannot be ruled out that, in the future global order, this type of construction may take on political forms similar to those that generated the composite capital (if this perspective is true, we would then be witnessing the rise of the first construction elements of ecological capitalism).
In the perspective of an increasingly composite construction, the mix of different materials is established according to various gradients, with the general dimension of the work playing a decisive role. 
In the most sophisticated composite construction, taking shape in recent years for vertical structure, materials are organized according to strategies that pursue opposing ideas in the definition of a general mechanics of the work. The pursuit of an open perimeter, in the fixity over time of all the components in different materials, produces a concentric sequence, identically repeated across various floors. The aim of building in a lasting way, according to the rhythms of transient way of living, generates an articulation of orders interlocking with each other, in vertical development. In various cases, the same materials obey cultural strategies that are independent of any technique, resulting in a mix obtained according to opposing logics, all within the shared search for answers to the new dilemmas of construction – answers that only design can provide.
The distribution of material in a concentric arrangement contemplates a solid epicenter that stabilizes and braces the overall system, culminating in the lighter layers along the perimeter. The sequence from the epicenter to the perimeter may include powerful reinforced concrete, sturdy wooden carpentry, thin metal rods, so as to protect the materials from weathering and to open the structure to light and the view. 
The sequence of materials in a composite construction, oriented to facilitate the removal of parts that can be modified over time, can lead to producing a permanent colossal order capable of making the components and their mixture visible. The idea and the characteristics of such an order had been demonstrated with the clarity of a theorem halfway through the last century, with the strategy of a construction over time. In the composite construction, the colossal order is erected for a duration of multiple centuries. The stratification of levels of a secondary order is assembled inside its spans, built with materials of shorter duration, therefore modifiable in the spatial arrangement according to their life cycle, without undermining the colossal order. Permanent conditions can be ensured by a reinforced concrete skeleton of columns and slabs, stiffened by a core of the same material that contains the vertical connections; the transient conditions can be translated into wooden carpentry or recycled materials. The material, when left exposed, does not simply correspond to the principle of honesty professed in the two previous centuries, but serves the task of transforming the lifespan of materials in the two structural orders into a form of expression. What is celebrated, in the new sense of monument stemming from the permanent order and the transient order, is time.

Self-construction

Once the principle of composite construction is embraced as the foundation for the long-term environmental economy, the interplay of materials begins to challenge the control traditionally exerted by design and the role of the architect in the specification of the work, in terms that are totally different from those of the past century. By following the entire process – from the cycle of operations, to the specific weight and conventional dimensions of the materials, to their unique manufacturing processes – and by observing the operations in the workshop, factory and the construction site, and even by evaluating the most suitable tools for joining pieces and completing finishes, it becomes possible to better understand the reasons behind the rise, in long-term construction, of a particular interest in the use of wood and its by-products and surrogates. This material has appeared to many as possessing the qualities necessary to reopen the entry of participation for those to whom the conception and execution of the work are carried out. The composite construction project returns to considering time and materials in the perspective of offering a general and collective system, built with the characteristics of permanence and with the machinery and craft of one or more contractor. In this way, everyone is empowered to exercise their constructive knowledge, freed from the constrains of being responsible only for the limited care of a property on a single plot of land alongside others. While there is no essential difference in the nature of the matter itself, nevertheless the materials of collective self-construction differ from those used for small group’s self-built shelters. This distinction arises precisely because they belong to a more general system of structure that embodies – in both material and features – the shared existence of a multitude of different lives. 
Composite construction, as interpreted through the lens of self-construction, shares characteristics not so much with constructions characterized by the distribution of material in a concentric arrangement, but rather with those with interlocking orders. Compared to the latter, self-construction is distinguished by the methods used to create the shelter, and by the duration of that shelter within the general organization of the community. The composite construction with interlocked orders obeys to the lifespan of the different materials and their degradation; that of self-construction obeys the life cycle of living beings, and can assembled and dismantled within the existential and unpredictable span between moving in and moving out. The project of a long-term architecture must inevitably consider, in its selection of materials, the cycles of time inherent to both construction and human existence – it is the project for an egalitarian construction within the contemporary multitude. One of the key challenges lies in reformulating the criteria of the project and the selection of its materials without any longer pretending, as has been done for market opportunism, that nomadism has disappeared from the so-called advanced civilizations. 
The manuals for self-build tables, wardrobes and other more complex furniture that began to surface in the latter decades of the last century bore witness to the emergence of an attitude that would reappear in the social condition of the new century. That same attitude, encapsulated within the pages of those manuals, has expanded to include the self-construction of furniture on a scale large enough to create entire habitats within a general structure.
The fact that the mix of different materials takes the form of a mechanism open to creative participation does not mean that this cultural and social perspective, of subdivision of labor and expertise, had not already appeared. It had been announced in vivid terms with the invisible work and the strategy of building in time.

Time

The secular perspective unveiled by projects based on composite construction, variably articulated in terms of the mix of the materials, and also interpreted in the form of self-construction, is the same as that conveyed by projects of enclosure in masonry or carpentry. It is characterized not so much by the technical properties  of each single material, as by a articulated concept of the construction’s time. Time becomes even more lasting when the construction proves capable of incorporating and enhancing existing structures, with a view to reuse aimed at perfecting its arrangement with new and variable parts over a different time span.
The material of long-term environmental economy is no longer the one described in construction manuals, cost estimations, or building regulations, which are all normative tools generated by the constructive mechanics prevailing in the two past centuries, employed in the service of the financial logic of a capitalism that has entered the worksite. Even the formulas for structural static calculations have increasingly closed themselves off in mathematical and geometric abstraction, adapting to industrial products. The science of construction, in seeking to optimize materials to allow for greater accumulation of capital, pursued its goal with military efficiency (it was born in the barracks), but only by eliminating  the parameter of resistance in time of material and structure. It should not be taken for granted that this secular scientific apparatus will lend itself to accommodating the new perspectives of design without resistance – long-term construction requires different scientific parameters.
Matter composed of concrete substances and distilled ideas take the form of a construction that should be designed for a time that transcends its concrete features, in a specific historical moment. Ultimately, the quintessence of architectural material can only be precisely that against which it has always had to be in confrontation and conflict: time. And the time of construction is rapidly changing its rhythms, imposing the necessity of a new secular perspective in the design of construction elements and the choice of materials. No ecological project can exist if it does not first take time as its foundation. The awareness of life cycles, differing for each single element in how they react to the changing conditions of lives in a multitude, will determine the choices of materials and the technique of their implementation, indicating the new truths of architecture in relation to the time of construction.