The article is from A&B issue 9|23
When we see a mountain of sand, we don't see the pit left behind when it was dug a few or hundreds of kilometers away. Every thing has a pit, a resource and an origin. "Nothing disappears, only changes place" is an installation that Ola Korbanska and I made for the 2022 Malta Festival. The object, erected from found soil in Wieniawski Park in Poznań, was a reflection on the circulation of matter, its constant movement. The installation was placed in an area carved out of public space - the brutality of this procedure was intended to expose the anthropocentric rules of the game and the way the earth is perceived as an infinite resource. More than 50 tons of earth excavated from the site and compacted into wooden forms were used to create the installation.
The site became an artist's residency and a space for conversation about land, property rights and resources. At the end of the festival, the walls were ceremonially turned over and both they and the pit disappeared, the initial state returned. This and other realizations I've been a part of make me reflect on the meaning of locality, the movement of matter, the consequences of its global circulation in environmental and cultural terms.
Nothing disappears, only changes place, installation, Poznań - authors: Iwo Borkowicz and Ola Korbanska
Photo: © Iwo Borkowicz, Ola Korbanska
The relationship between architecture and matter is clearly fundamental. For most of the development of construction, its nature was coupled directly to the types of locally available raw materials. With some notorious exceptions, centered around anomalously rich historical civilizations, this relationship shaped regional typologies across the globe until the 19th century. In an era of cultural, economic and technological globalization fueled by incredibly efficient transportation infrastructure, fueled by seemingly cheap fossil fuels, local materials no longer play so many roles. More often than not, they lose their economic advantages, ceasing to be the cheapest, and often the best technological solution. At the same time, through weaker standardization, they tend to be more labor-intensive. Cultural and identity meanings remain strong, but by flushing them out of their other responsibilities, their use loses weight and sincerity.
In designing and then building a school in a refugee camp in western Tanzania, we worked with the Wayair Foundation to find the right balance between local commitment and construction efficiency. We chose between existing construction knowledge and innovation (which we wanted to offer). With an additional consideration of the small budget, the required durability of the building and the needs and hopes of the local population, we decided to use three basic materials.
The structure and roofing is steel. It is imported to Tanzania mainly from China and India, and we bought it in Dar Es Salaam and transported it across the width of the country all the way to the construction site in Ulyankulu. An alternative to the steel structure would be local timber, the cutting of which is prohibited because the Ulyankulu region (which has already been extremely deforested for the past decades) is surrounded by forest reserves and reserves. For roofing alone, viable alternatives do not exist. Even the poorest clay huts are mostly covered with corrugated metal sheets. Individual buildings with leaf and grass roofs can be found, and while from our perspective they present both aesthetic and environmental advantages, they are now seen as a sign of poverty and temporariness. The school is destined to become one of the many arguments for local people, who have lived in fear of displacement for years, to stay in the area. For this reason, among others, we have avoided materials considered perishable.
School in Ulyankulu, Tanzania - proj.: JEJU.studio, Arh+
Photo: Iwo Borkowicz © JEJU.studio
The second material is hand-formed brick. We made it from two types of local clay. We mined the first, dark red, directly on the construction site, and the second, beige, in a valley two kilometers away. After being formed in wooden frames, the brick is dried in the sun. Subsequently, stacked in large piles with chambers for fuel, it is fired: it is itself both the kiln and its contents. The use of such a brick makes sense in this project, both economically, logistically and in terms of identity. In a tangible way, it makes the school, which is in many other ways different from the local development, more similar to the surrounding houses. The use of such bricks allowed us to employ eight local people for the duration of construction, who were responsible for its production. The aspect of stimulating the local economy through the use of locally produced services and materials is very important. Despite the ubiquity of brick in this project, its cost accounted for only 2.5 percent of the budget, and the additional spaces outside the classrooms produced using it gave the school the dimension of a public area, a place to meet and play.
The third material is reinforced concrete. It incorporates both reinforcement imported from outside Tanzania, cement produced in Tanzania but brought from a cement plant several hundred kilometers away, and local sand, crushed stone and water. It thus becomes a paradoxical material, combining absolute locality with extreme globality.
Using this project as an example, it is also easy to see the relationship between local matter and local workmanship. For molding bricks in Ulyankulu you can find workers on every corner (one of the three streets), for welding the roof structure we partly had to enlist help from a nearby town. With the implementation of more efficient and/or cheaper imported materials, the process of disappearance of local knowledge and workshop naturally proceeds.
Building with local materials intuitively seems right. Personally, I have an adversarial attitude towards the aesthetic and identity layers of this issue. On the one hand, I feel deeply disappointed by the mindless aesthetic globalization, for example, in the field of housing. The effectiveness of a few standard technical solutions that are replicated in huge numbers in a dynamically populating and urbanizing world has also largely monopolized aesthetics. Rather, changes in the expression of architecture of this type are divided into climatic regions and zones of prosperity or lack thereof, regardless of local identity or local materiality. At the same time confronted with attempts to modernize and defend existing regionalisms at new scales, I often feel just as much discomfort. The wound created between most vernacular typologies and contemporary building principles is deep. Patching it, especially in the context of new needs for scale and energy-efficient construction, will in many cases require the creation of new traditions or a profound reimagining of existing ones.
The lobby of the Shoplifter Höfuðstöðin gallery, Iceland - designed by Iwo Borkowicz, Björn Steinar
photo: © Björn Steiner
Another path, often taken by respected design studios, is to treat local materiality by making it abstract. This involves using it in isolation from local cultural identity, without replicating techniques previously associated with that materiality. Peter Zumthor's Vals thermal baths are a crowning example of this. The reinforced concrete building with steel roof supports was clad in gneiss from a nearby mine. It is undeniably a great building, praised for, among other things, the way it fits into the surrounding landscape. Despite the use of local material, it abstracts from local building methodology and does not reinforce the traditional identity of Vals. At the same time, however, by using the stone in question, in a way that is partly understandable from a regional perspective, it builds the potential for a new part of it. He rightly does so in a not entirely arbitrary way precisely because of the local material.
The second intuitive reason for building with local matter is the environmental context. Transportation is responsible for a non-trivial portion of the carbon footprint of construction. The embedded footprint is the sum of the carbon footprints that were emitted during the creation of the building (for example, through the production and transportation of materials, and the construction process itself). In modern construction, it comprises an increasingly large part of its overall carbon footprint. This is due both to significant improvements in the efficiency of buildings (which reduces their operational carbon footprint) and to the increased carbon footprint of construction - due to higher complexity and standards, resulting in greater material inputs. The sum of the carbon footprints of today's buildings per square meter is, of course, decreasing, but this does not change the fact that in terms of embedded carbon footprint, we need to look for many new solutions to help achieve climate goals. One of these methods could be the reintroduction of local matter in building processes. If we look at building with local materials in the Polish context, the options, depending on the regions, are many.
However, if we pair it with the desire to build buildings with a low embedded energy footprint, the range narrows significantly. Considering the structural layer of a building, a good one for our location and a commonly used alternative to brick, steel and reinforced concrete is wood. However, it is not wise to put all your eggs in one basket. That's why it's worth looking at less popular solutions: from hemp to earth structures.
One of the most popular and easily accessible materials globally is earth. It was even used during the construction of segments of the Chinese Wall and many cities in North Africa, South America and Europe. The modern theory of building with compacted earth, in an attempt to update its character to the maximum extent, faces an interesting challenge. While earth responds admirably to compressive forces, it is defenseless when confronted with tearing or diagonal forces. Walls in rammed earth techniques therefore need to be stabilized. At the architectural scale, the most common is chemical stabilization, that is, the addition of cement or quicklime to a mixture of sand, dust, clay and water. Depending on the quality of this mixture, the stabilizing component is from 10 to as little as 4 percent of its content. The holy grail of modern rammed earth construction is to achieve a precise mixture of different types of sand, dust and clay that will not require cement at all, in parallel guaranteeing durability. Rammed earth, however, needs care, protection and maintenance. In this way, it illustrates a common affliction of traditionally used local materials. Simpler technologies in their structure, such as thatch roofs or just earth, dictate many design and maintenance requirements, making them unable to realistically compete with the high-energy materials that have displaced them.
From an environmental perspective, any waste material, regardless of its original origin, is also becoming a local material. In 2022, together with Björn Steinar, we designed and made the interiors of Icelandic artist Hrafnhildur Arnardóttir's gallery in Reykjavík. We sourced and recycled more than 1,500 kilograms of local plastic waste, and furniture, finishes and lighting were created. However, this type of recycling is an imperfect operation; synthetic polymers lose quality and become dirty with each successive cycle of use, and it is very difficult to re-separate and purify them. The secondary use of building materials or the adaptation of non-construction waste in architecture, while not yet a significant component of the construction industry, is rightly becoming an important part of it, connecting architecture to issues of circular economy.
Taking this line of thinking further, even gaseous waste in the form of carbon dioxide is becoming local. It has the potential to be permanently mineralized and used in the form of aggregates, such as for concrete production. Pioneering this technology is the company Blue Planet, which markets aggregate produced by such a process. About 40 percent of the weight of this aggregate is mineralized carbon dioxide, trapped for thousands of years. This makes it possible to create concrete buildings with a negative carbon footprint. Blue Planet material has already been used in the expansion of San Francisco's airport, among other projects. The issue of locality in this approach is already becoming extremely fluid, which in my opinion gives it an interesting complexity. What would be the carbon dioxide mineralized in a Polish power plant created by burning Chinese coal? Are the shingles that adorned the facades of the People "s Pavillion at Dutch Design Week in 2017 (a project by Bureau SLA and Overtreders W), which were made from the plastic trash of Eindhoven residents, a use of local material? In an environmental sense yes, in a cultural sense - I don't know.
House under the Cancer - proj.: JEJU.studio, made with HBE wood construction
Photo: © Marcel Skrzywanek
The global circulation of matter, which we drive in solidarity, is omnipresent. It is easy to demonize it. Unhappily, for every complex problem there is a simple and understandable solution that is wrong. The overarching goal, a global homework assignment, is not necessarily to use local materials, but to decarbonize. Solutions such as adhesives, membranes, warm profiles, resins, polystyrene, polypropylene and many others, which now enable us to effectively reduce the energy intensity of construction on a global scale, in many cases have no viable local alternatives. The carbon footprint of the oil or gas imports from which they are produced is offset many times over by the reduced energy intensity of modern buildings. At the same time, working to maximize the localization of other building processes (particularly building construction) is equally important and contains the potential to further reduce the environmental footprint of construction. Finding the golden mean (which, in addition, is and will continue to be a moving measure) between local action and efficient action is our goal. Nothing disappears, only changes place.
