The Architecture of Full-Scale Mock-Ups

From Representation to Reality

Nick Gelpi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781317487272
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Architecture Methods & Materials

The Architecture of Full-Scale Mock-Ups looks at the theory and contemporary practice of creating full-scale architectural mock-ups.

This book serves as an introduction to the various forms of full-scale mock-ups which occur today. To broaden the definition of mock-ups, Nick Gelpi dives deep into the use of mock-ups in seven high-profile and global contemporary case studies. Instead of the presentation drawings and final building photos, the documentation of case studies relies on process photos, interviews, and moments of tension in the execution of each building. With never-before-published content, case studies include buildings from all over the world, including the Quincho Tia Coral and Teleton Building, Copper House II, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, the Cité de l'Océan et du Surf Museum, and more.

Investigating unique case studies to answer how and when full-scale mock-ups occur today, this book is ideal for professionals and students of architecture studying materials and representation, design-build, and professional practice.

1 An Alchemy of Bricks

The Teletón Children’s Rehabilitation Center and Quincho Tía Coral, Asunción, Paraguay
Solano Benitez and Gabinete de Arquitectura

Figure 1.1 The surprisingly thin, triangulated brick canopy in the form of something constructed of steel. Gabinete de Arquitectura, Teletón Children’s Rehabilitation Center (Lambaré, Paraguay) 2010.

Courtesy of Gabinete de Arquitectura.

The Treachery of Form: Painting with Bricks

One of Rene Magritte’s best-known works is a painting of a tobacco pipe, with the statement painted below which states, Ceci n’est pas une pipe; or translated to English, This is not a pipe. The painting, titled “The Treachery of Images,” illustrates the paradox of representation, where a painting of a pipe will never be more than the painting itself, yet there exists an in-between state where one is realized in the form of the other. The physical materials which construct the pipe, wood and horn, are translated into constructive brushstrokes of paint.

And yet could you stuff my pipe? No, it’s just a representation, is it not? So if I had written on my picture “This is a pipe,” I’d have been lying!¹

Paraguayan architect Solano Benitez is renowned for his innovative and experimental approach toward building, and he creates structures that are consistently constructed out of surrealist arrangements of bricks. The forms of his buildings are surprising, more closely resembling steel or thin-shell structures despite their counterintuitive construction out of brick and mortar. It might be appropriate to consider each of Benitez’s buildings through the conceptual tensions of Magritte’s painting, because like the paradox of representation in Magritte’s pipe, one could argue that while each of Benitez’s buildings are actually constructed of bricks, they are representations of some other form of construction. These other forms are not simply constructed, but actually seem to be conceived of differently, not built, but painted from bricks. Saddled with the economic reality of the region where he practices, Benitez transforms these abundant and mundane elements from something pre-programmed, into arrangements of something suggestive, representative of other forms of possibility.

Brick Constraints

Brick and mortar may be considered the most primitive of construction materials. There is a clarity and an order to the way bricks ought to be assembled. In fact, Louis Kahn’s infamous observations from the perspective of the brick itself, aptly capture what is innate about their nature, which is that brick has a pre-programmed logic to it, suggesting how it ought to be used.

There are generally six ways to lay a brick based on its three sides: the face, the edge, or the end, combined with their orientations in space. A “stretcher” is a brick laid horizontally on its face with the edge exposed, while a “header” is laid horizontally on its face with the end exposed. A brick laid horizontally on its edge with the face exposed is a “shiner” or “bull-stretcher,” while laid horizontally on its edge with the end exposed is known as a “rowlock.” Two vertical orientations are called “soldier” and “sailor.” A “soldier” is a brick stood up vertically on its end with the narrow edge exposed, while a “sailor” is stood vertically with its wider face exposed.

These various orientations of brick are laid into repetitive patterns titled “bonds.” One of the most basic bond patterns is the “running bond” or “stretcher bond.” “Running” bond is a pattern of bricks laid horizontally on their face in rows called courses, which overlap the course below by half the dimension of the brick. If you add a course of headers after every five or six courses of stretchers, you get an arrangement knows as an “American bond” or “common bond.” Alternating headers and stretchers in the same course, with headers centered on stretchers above and below, are known as a “Flemish bonds.” There is an established set of brick-bond patterns, including “English,” “English cross,” “Dutch bonds,” “stack bonds,” and “vertical bonds.” There is also “corbelling,” which projects individual bricks beyond the flush face of the wall surface giving it a toothed appearance; if you add this, you have nearly the complete vocabulary of brick masonry construction. Solano Benitez uses none of these established configurations.

Beyond Constraints

Brick construction in Paraguay is common. While bricks are typically used for the construction of masonry walls, in Paraguay they are applied more widely because of their abundance, such as in the construction of floors and ceilings. The primary reason is economic. Because labor is cheap, and the cost of materials is high, there exists more opportunity to creatively invest in labor than in better materials. According to Benitez, in order to build in such a scarce environment, a tactic of austerity is required, focused on the essentials. This acceptance of reality is not a surrender of creative approach; paradoxically, these constraints serve as a catalyst for surprising inventiveness and experimentation.

Where there is not much, austerity is required, and the tactic to get it, is to operate only from the essential. Ceramic brick is the cheapest construction material in our country and it is used to the limits of its capacity as floors, walls, and even ceilings.²

Benitez has earned the regard of many of his contemporary colleagues who practice in more privileged settings. According to Brazilian colleague Angelo Bucci,

The early works by Solano Benitez … clearly announced that he could accept conditions and resources available in Paraguay as a point of departure, to achieve a result that didn’t seem possible given the circumstances. Since that time he has been creating a repertoire by building prototypes with bricks, load testing them and analyzing structural schemes by isolating the role of each resistant element.³

While consistently constructed of bricks, the various projects of Gabinete de Arquitectura are each unique in their construction. Taken as a body of work, the designs span the range of an unorthodox trial and error approach to building, each instance building upon the last, inventing new unexpected roles for the brick to play. This approach is not based on conventional norms, but grows out of empirical evidence and observation, only enabled by abandoning conventions. Freed from conventions, the architect begins anew with a single brick, imagining new configurations that defy its typical bonds, coursing, and orientations. It seems in this work that being constrained to an orchestra of only bricks has emboldened the architects to conduct new ways of playing the same instrument. These reconsiderations of instrumentation reveal an unexpected and surprisingly rich diversity of new sounds and qualities (Figure 1.1).

Experimental Approaches

Much of the way that we understand the role of the brick in construction is by applying it in ways that are pre-defined. But what occurs in the architecture of Solano Benitez, is that bricks are radically reconsidered, mortared end to end into linear elements, cast as broken fragments into thin-shell concrete structures, and stacked at rotated angles into toothed slabs of brick and mortar which seem to defy gravity and logic. These radical transformations emerge out of the particular combination of the architect’s creative approach against the backdrop of a constraining context. Out of this combination, two particular ambitions are formed: the desire to expand creativity, beyond the narrow window implied by the imposing constraints of brick; and to have a practice that is conceptually rooted in irreverent experimentation.

According to Benitez, “an architecture that is not experimental, is useless.”⁴ These motivations combine into surreal formations, by asking the brick to do something it does not seem to want. These projects enable bricks to do things we did not know they could do, often resulting in buildings which more closely resemble the forms of steel trussed structures, rather than the traditional forms of their actual brick construction.

Alchemical Reconsiderations

This depth of experimentation is surprisingly transformative, because despite being constrained to building with bricks, the architects still conceive of a wide range of structural types, abandoning the typical associations of materials and structures. Being constrained to masonry creates a consistency of materiality in their approach, allowing the differences between structural types to be observed in their distortions of the normative arrangements of brick. It is through this compelling consistency that brickwork seems capable of much more than we thought, seeming to defy expectations as they give form to the invisible d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Foreword
• Introduction
• 1. An Alchemy of Bricks
• 2. Drawing without Paper and Building without Buildings: Large Representations in the Field
• 3. The Impossibly Real: In Pursuit of New Translations
• 4. Unpredictable Petrifications: The Unnatural Forms and Transformations of a Concrete Museum
• 5. Massive Impressions: The Materials of Representation
• 6. Acclimated Transformations: The Surprising Materialities of the Harvard Art Museums and its Surroundings
• 7. Mocked-Illuminations: The Transformed Environments Refracted in the Complex Surfaces of 7 World Trade Center
• Index