Extreme Architecture: Building for Challenging Environments

“The fascination of architecture in extreme environments is that it is so demanding technically, yet offers so much potential… the greatest constraint usually comes from the need not to spoil the natural environment, and that demands more judgment than the need to match the brickwork of an adjoining building.”

- From the book’s introduction

Edited by Ruth Slavid - Laurence King Publishing (2009)
Reviewed by Sean Ruthen

As we presently hear more and more each day about the environment and what design professionals can do to turn the tide on total systemic collapse, it may do us well to ponder the extreme scenarios that a designer could face, whether in a Kalahari summer or an Antarctic winter. Author and editor Ruth Slavid gives us forty-five instances of just such designs, along with their designers, in Extreme Architecture (Laurence King 2009), a formidable 208-page hard cover volume containing 296 awe-inspiring images of these ‘extreme’ visions. As presented in five categories – Hot, Cold, High, Wet, and Space – the editor features projects from all around the globe in as many different extreme sites, by the likes of Sir Norman Foster, Zaha Hadid, and Mario Botta, with more familiar and closer to home projects by Seattle-based Tom Kundig and Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden in Vancouver.

As a point of departure, the book’s introduction proposes the most extreme instance of ‘extreme architecture’ – a spaceport in New Mexico, providing the terminal for Virgin Group owner Sir Richard Branson and others who can afford the $200,000 ticket to take a ride into space. As the book’s editor explains, the building is both a means to an end for travelling to the extreme environment of space, as well as itself being able to withstand the extreme temperatures in the New Mexico desert. Similarly, another of Sir Norman Foster’s project in Abu Dhabi also inhabits the desert, with his solution being a city with a zero carbon output.

And so the first section of the book – ‘Hot’ – opens with Masdar City, a proposal to create a small city of 50,000 off the grid, producing zero waste and no carbon footprint (kind of Archigram meets Burning Man). With global warming and the rising temperatures an every day subject now, it is no surprise that the first fifty pages of the book are dedicated to the subject of heat, with extreme examples from Ariziona, the Canary Islands, Abu Dhabi, Australia, and even the interior of British Columbia. The editor makes the poignant observation that it is the air conditioner that has single-handedly made possible such cities as Dubai and Abu Dhabi, much as the tall buildings of New York and Chicago depended on Otis’ invention of the elevator.

But of all ten of the projects featured in this chapter, it is a school in Burkina Faso that most represents the editor’s intent to show how humanity may overcome the perils of extreme temperatures. In the case of Burkina Faso, this is portrayed by the architect Diébédo Francis Kéré, born in the small village of Gando, whereupon graduating from architecture school in Berlin, he returned to his village to build a better school for his childhood community - as well as other desperately needed infrastructure. The first from his village to go to university (let alone become an architect), Kéré set up the fund while in Berlin to build the school back home, with the resulting building being an ingenious display of local materials and craftsmanship married to a modern sensibility about environmental design. The editor points out how by simply using cross-ventilation, Kéré’s building creates a more comfortable environment without the need for HVAC, though by Western standards the air would probably seem noticeably warm.

Another of the ten projects representing ‘Hot’ is the Nk’Mip Desert Centre in Osoyoos, which itself has desert-like conditions. An award winning facility by Hotson Bakker Boniface Haden, its sustainability includes its use of a massive earth rammed wall to insulate the centre from the desert’s extreme summer heat. Intended as a demonstration centre for sustainable principles, the rammed wall and landscaping serve to show that a building can be restored to its environment by careful intervention, where the landscaped artifact becomes an artificial landscape.

The second section of the book – ‘Cold’ – looks at architectural design and its relation to winter conditions, whether the doldrums of the winters in our northern hemisphere or the technically savvy science facilities of the Antarctica. Represented by an odd cross-section of winter habitations, Slavid presents us with single habitations in the winter landscape such as Tom Kundig’s Delta Sheter in Washington (reviewed by re:place here), to survey station modules in the Antarctic, the stunning photography of which provides the images for the book’s cover. As well, the editor also features a storage facility in Norway – a seed ark – as well as various designs of ice hotels and bars by designers from Canada, the UK, and Sweden.

There are two projects in ‘Cold’ which represent the two poles of the editor’s intent to show extreme architecture in this category. The first is the Abisko Ark Hotel in Sweden, the setting which provides the clearest skies year -round to view the aurora borealis, as well as the option of modern fishing shacks from which to ice fish. This facility, for which the clientele spends large sums of money to spend one night on the edge of the Arctic Circle is in stark contrast to the second project – the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station – itself a scientific research outpost, wherein luxury is forsaken for necessity. Not unlike building a space station in outer space, the South Pole Station could not be further removed from the extreme tourism industry, which along with ice hotels and posh ski-chalets has necessitated creating architecture at higher elevations, the subject of the next chapter.

The introduction to ‘High’, the book’s third section, gives a brief history of mountaineering, and how this 18th century pastime in the Alps has ballooned into an industry of winter sports the world over. Most certainly we in Metro Vancouver are aware of the industry of skiing and snow-boarding, as well as the infrastructure necessary to get the winter hedonist to their final destination. In Extreme Architecture the same is represented by the Carmenna Chairlift Stations in Arosa, Switzerland and Galzigbahn in Austria. Competitive ski jumping has also provided the impetus for much in this chapter, and here is represented by the breathtaking Olympic ski jump in Garmisch-Partenkirchen, Germany. Slavid rounds out the chapter with an airship, as it represents now, as it did in the past, a new height for extreme architecture.

The two standouts in ‘High’ however are unquestionably the Nordpark Cable Railway by Zaha Hadid Architects and the Aurland Lookout in Norway. Both have received much praise and have been widely published, the former for its expressive and bold forms which frame the 1.8 kilometer cable car ride from Innsbruck to a nearby mountaintop, the latter for its daring engineering to thrust the observer away from the earth to become a part of the scenography itself. It is curious to point out that while parts of ‘Hot’ and ‘Cold’ involve extreme architecture for maintaining human comfort and survival, ‘High’ is simply about recreation, whether looking at a majestic view or partaking in a winter sport. Certainly there is no better example than Mario Botta’s Tschuggen Bergoase Spa as an example of a building that finds itself on the edge of civilization for its need to offer its clientele an escape from the world.

The fourth section of the book ‘Wet’ is very similar to ‘Hot’, in that both issues are of great concern to the world community as they relate to climate change. Anyone who has been to Venice knows that sea levels are rising at an alarming rate within our own lifetime and, as such, much of Slavid’s selection deals with this issue. While she points out that Katrina was a wake up call for the US in 2005, the Dutch have had to deal with flooding in urban areas since time immemorial, as 27 percent of its land is below sea level. The first five selected examples of wet architecture are hence floating houses, including a floating sauna, with a floating cruise ship terminal rounding out the bunch.

But yet again recreation makes an appearance in this category, as though the palm tree developments in Dubai have created a desire to be near the water’s edge despite rising sea levels. And going even one step further, underwater hotels have taken architecture to the extreme, as Dubai boasts one, as well as Fiji as represented in the book by the Poseidon Underwater Hotel. The rigours of designing an underwater structure, while more like naval architecture, is only a hop skip and jump from the concept-soon-to-be-reality Seaorbiter by Jacques Rougerie Architecte. A structure that the editor likens to something from a Jules Verne adventure, this diver’s platform and research station are intended to be half-above and half-below the ocean’s surface.

Such an extreme architecture as the Poseidon Hotel and Seaorbiter provide the perfect takeoff point for the final category in the book – ‘Space’. Given the same necessity of space restrictions for human comfort and off-grid self-sustainabillity, living in space has for the most part remained the stuff of science fiction. But with the reality of the aforementioned Spaceport America in New Mexico, one can only imagine the next wave of extreme tourism as being spending a weekend on the moon. The extreme architecture making up this final chapter certainly make it seem possible, as habitations and vehicles that are not necessarily tailored to NASA’s out-of-this-world budget become one step closer to reality by design. And Arthur C. Clarke would smile to see the Galactic Suite, which as envisioned by Barcelona architect Xavier Claramunt, is a scene right out of 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Overall, Extreme Architecture is an exhibition of humanity’s daring, and at times hubristic, preoccupation with living on the edge, i.e. inhabiting those places that we would be better off to avoid architecturally. Yet sitting uneasily in the background exists the notion that some of these intolerable sites for our buildings may shortly become reality.  As sea levels and temperatures rise around us, the book could have benefited from having included an essay to speak to such contradictions of human activities, specifically survival after a catastrophic weather event versus hedonism, as represented by so much of the recreational architecture in this book. Otherwise, the book is a thought-provoking look at some of architecture’s more curious designs, collected by the editor of such other Laurence King publications as Wood Architecture (2005) and Micro (2007).

By Sean Ruthen

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Sean Ruthen is an architect working, living, and writing in Vancouver.