Without the conditions to cut blocks of ice in the traditional manor it is decided that a mould would be required to generate building blocks of compacted snow. Adapting to their environment, the students set about sourcing the appropriate tools. Yards away from the site, a corner shop yields results in the form of a mop bucket and dustpan, tools that turn out to be highly suitable for adhoc, urban igloo construction.

Theorists among the group express concerns over the dislocated vernacular of the Igloo, answered by questions of the very definition of vernacular and whether it need be historical or even traditional at all, whether local materials, tools and craftsmanship are equally defining.

Following the successful casting of a test block, an area of snow is cleared and a rough circle is drawn with a diameter somewhere between an optimistic ten feet and a sceptical five.  The first block course acts as a calibrator for the block casting technique which quickly becomes the first skilled role on the build. Certain attributes of the process, including the several rounds of compacting during the bucket filling and the desired smooth finish to the base of the block become the coveted intricacies of that particular craft. The second skill to emerge is that of mortaring between blocks and preparing for the next course, something that requires patience and a gentle hand. Master builders start to emerge in the various trades just as team members begin to falter and retreat to the warmth of the hostel, in the fast paced training and handing over of tasks, the knowledge and experience of the craftsmen is apparent in their protectiveness of the correct technique.

As construction speed increases with the confidence of experience it becomes clear that brick production needs to be accelerated. Much to the dismay of the group’s would-be quantity surveyors, the decision is made to double the build cost to almost twenty five Romanian Leu (five pounds) with the purchase of a second bucket and dustpan.

With the height of the structure escalating there is growing concern over the prospect of angling the walls into a roof to complete the dome. The need to decrease the size of the blocks becomes apparent but without a smaller mould it is necessary to cut the blocks insitu, the process of resizing offers the opportunity to chamfer the top of each course providing the desired angle to start leading the walls inwards. As the overall shape of the structure changes from simple cylinder to something vaguely igloo-like, the most sceptical of the group begin to see the real promise of a completed dwelling.

Throughout the build passers-by are both mystified and enthusiastic. The Igloo becomes a temporary Bucharest celebrity as locals come to have their photographs taken with it, greeting the construction team with interest and encouragement.

Inevitably the onset of darkness increases the pressure to reach practical completion. As the temperature drops, fingers and joints become stiffer and dexterity is severely affected but the conditions are ideal for the construction material and bonding greatly improves as the most technically challenging stages of the construction begin. With an increase of pace problems arise, sub-standard building blocks are having to be rejected and inadequate mortaring culminates in a near wall collapse. The event only highlights the need for patience and respect for the materials. As the curvature of the walls intensifies one of the most overlooked trades begins to show its worth, the gentle methodical work of the external plasterer reveals itself as pivotal to the adhesion of the blocks.

Working above head height to install keystones is physically demanding and as staff turnover rapidly increases, the passing on of skills becomes a furiously intense process. The construction of an entrance arch tests patience and skill and the experience built-up over the course of the project is invaluable. The final task is to connect the arches with the main dome. Being over six foot tall becomes an essential trait as the constructors work shoulder to shoulder holding blocks in place while the mortar is teased into the joints. With completion in sight, the structure becomes ever more stable as every block placed seals out the wintery elements.

Twelve hours from conception, after eight and a half hours on site, the build is complete, a testament to local materials, the dedication and skill of true craftsmen and the questionable use of spare time by IARD students. On a freezing January night as snowfall continues in the darkness of Bucharest, an Igloo offers shelter.

Photography credit to Dhiren Patel and Nabilah Othman

The Neuse is a gracefully seductive host and on entering one is immediately captivated. But we’re not talking red lipstick and short skirts here, this is an old lady after all, so the lobby is respectably low key but it quietly establishes the presence of a successful marriage between new and old and sets a high standard for quality.

Standing amongst the columns of the lobby a not unfamiliar decision must be made; to turn to the side and start a slow, orderly progression through the halls, unravelling as you go, or, go straight for the central steps into the heart of the museum and dip in and out of rooms at will. If you decide to take on the promise offered by the stair, you’ll soon be rewarded as the stairs open up and climb towards the light into the most awe-inspiring event of the journey. The clean white polished concrete deposits you into a vast chamber of exposed brickwork, structure and light. The space speaks for itself and captures the life of the new-incarnation, a sensitive but assertive intervention.

I, however, turned aside and wanting to savour the experience, started the long walk around. The journey is marked quite traditionally with thick, fairly plain, Doric columns at ground floor level progressing up through Ionic to Corinthians on the upper story which are supplemented with new, pre-cast concrete and light-weight steel numbers, all of which reside over an atmospheric brick vaulted basement. It’s difficult to qualify what it is exactly that’s so successful about the place and, drifting around, I questioned the value of Chipperfield’s input and wondered whether it was simply the original building that I was really enjoying. After a while I realised that that question was of course part of the success; the sensitive touch, knowing when to restore, when to expose and when to intervene.

A fantastic material presence has been achieved here, which somehow warms the spirit. From the wonderfully romantic patches of brick revealed beneath crumbling plaster to the meeting of two fresh concrete finishes, one polished, one left rough, there is rich variety everywhere but an uncomplicated picture overall.

Many restoration projects tend to expel time itself whilst preserving a single image. In the case of the Neuse Museum time is allowed to remain inhabitant, and exists not only as now and then but as everything in-between, most notably the period of Berlin’s pounding during the Second World War. All the wear and tear of the last 150 years has contributed to the current building but the key aspect is the honesty with which the signs of this have been instated, surrounded by the latest work, each moment in time sits along side another in a comforting equilibrium.

The fire started at the End of the World. More specifically, at the Devil that resides over the entrance to the End of the World. As anarchy unfolds his grin betrays the knowledge of a well-timed short circuit, only weeks before the completion of a new super fire-fighting system that would draw directly from the Atlantic. There are resident fire-fighters in Dreamland, who successfully pacify a burning building every night of the week but the heroes of Fighting the Flames know there is no glory to be had tonight and flee. When the professionals arrive on Coney Island they are frustrated by the impotence of pathetic water pressure and can do little more that watch. Even in their fireboats, with the world’s water on tap, the heat prevents them from tackling the beast and they must patiently sit, bobbing at a safe distance. People run screaming to the exit. Animals run senselessly through the streets, eyes wild, fur aflame.

In 3 hours it’s all over. 100 years ago Dreamland burnt to the ground.

In a corner of the flat waste land of charred timber planks, that only hours ago was a prized escape of spires and fairly lights, nestled between the site of the Largest Ballroom in The World and The Fall of Pompeii are the remnants of Lilliputia. A half sized city modelled on 15^th century Nuremberg, Lilliputia was ‘home’ to 300 people who came from all corners of the United States, leaving fairs and travelling shows for a more permanent position. By today’s standards it already sounds a tad unethical but it gets more sinister yet. Midget city had all the key public buildings, a fire station, a town hall, parliament etc, even a section of beach but it’s not enough for the inhabitants to simply go about their  ‘everyday lives’, the experimental community were given grand titles such Baron and Count and dressed up in gaudy aristocratic dress and then ‘encouraged’ into what was then considered highly distasteful conduct; infidelity, homosexuality and general anti-social behaviour were all celebrated attributes of the show. The community existed out of hours too of course and what their relationships were like in reality one can only imagine.

When the fire took the fire crew of that half-sized town fought valiantly to save their lively hood, more successfully than anyone else in the park in fact, but alas the only building left standing in Dreamland was their own fire station.

As we strive to live our modern lives in equality, Lilliputia can never exist again and, along with the rest of Coney Island of a century ago, I’m sad that I didn’t get to meet those Midgets of Dreamland.

Willow has long been used for furniture and the like, its characteristic flexibility making it ideal for weaving among other things. Being a native tree here in Britain and remarkably fast growing, it is an obvious consideration for sustainable building, although it’s size tends to limit the application. One way to utilise willow is through ‘Living Willow Construction’, the ‘living’ element of which will quickly become clear as I talk through the process in the context of building a dome.

The willow we used is a hybrid variety that is coppiced every year, right down to a stump, providing these lengths. The smaller rods are a slower growing variety that have been dried and steamed and are used to lash the lengths together. One of the beautiful things about these structures is that these two elements are all that make up the construction.

Four extremes of a rough circle are marked at a distance that allows two opposing rods, at the desired curvature, to overlap enough to be lashed together at the centre. The first four rods go into the ground, about 10 inches deep (which in this case we pre-bored with stakes). Each pair of opposing rods creates an arch, these are then lashed together at the centre point.

In the spring the rods will put down new roots and hopefully start sprouting new growth, which will cover the dome.

Some of the thinner rods are used to create a kind of halo, reinforcing the structure. The circumference of the dome is then split into eighths with a new rod going into the ground between each of the original ones.

Each upright is then given a partner that is inserted right next to it and wound in up to the centre. In these and other places the rods will eventually merge together in pressure grafts.

At this early stage it is decided where any entrances will be placed and a third rod goes in at the either side of the proposed entrance but instead of following the others up to the centre they curve in towards each other and interlock, creating the outlined of an arched doorway.

The lashing is just done intuitively, in whichever way feels appropriate, generally criss-crossing and tucking away the end to avoid it unravelling works well. In the case of two rods running roughly parallel, such as where the entrance is established, a figure of eight technique can be employed.

More rings are added as the dome is further dissected into smaller segments.

Once the interval between uprights is down to around a foot, two holes are staked in each gap. Rods are then woven diagonally up into the dome and lashed at several points where they meet other pieces.

All that then remains is to wait for the new growth, continuously weave it in and maintain the shape with a hard autumn prune.

Living Willow Domes are blissfully simple to create and working with the single material and no tools (with the exception of something to sink holes) is remarkably satisfying. I do find myself wondering how this could be developed into a slightly more substantial building method and it will be interesting to see how successful a rain screen it is when fully covered. I wonder if it could be insulated somehow, maybe in combination with some daub, willow is often used in place of wattle. We’ll see. It’s a fantastically versatile material to experiment with anyway.

We (The Oxford Architecture Society or ‘OxArch’) made our dome with the help of experts Steve and Simone from Willowpool Designs who provided the willow and the know-how.

Abha is a special place and I could go on, but for now I just wanted to share some photographs from a research project into the local traditional architecture. We start with some ‘mud’ based two storey adobe houses near the centre of town. One is crumbling away as mud has a tendency to do when left to the elements, and presents a perfect opportunity to gain a good understanding of the building’s construction. For example, in the picture above; the slates, inserted to channel the rain away from the surface of the walls, are seen not to penetrate the full width of the wall so as to minimise disruption to the continuing makeup of the wall and the decorative capping of the roof reveals itself to be made of concrete in a further attempt to protect the earth construction.

Click to view slideshow.

The second study is a collection of houses nestled in a valley reachable via cable car or a great twisting plunge of road with no barriers and plenty of sheer drops. The Almah village buildings are multi-story dry stone buildings that have now been converted into a community-run museum.

For 99% of our history buildings have been designed and built by men. Only very recently, relatively speaking, have women been able to enter the fray. It’s perhaps natural that in the beginning they had to emulate men in order to gain the first tentative position of equal standing. The unfortunate thing is that, with that approach, you get yet more men, they just happen to be women. There is a famous picture of Denise Scott Brown, standing on an empty lot with her own critical project, Las Vegas, stretching out behind her. Her pose, hands on hips, legs shoulder width apart, feels rather forced. This squaring off of the human body presents the straight lines and sharp angles of the masculine form. No doubt in 70’s America, despite her skills and intelligence, Brown would have to have been forceful in life to hold her ground but it begs the question, does this approach still deny feminism access to the industry. Onwards to 1980’s Britain and Margaret Thatcher is prime minister, what an achievement, but is there something missing? Has something been sacrificed in order to play the part? Zaha Hadid is one of the most famous architects in the world and although it’s a stock topic for most interviewers, do we really regard her a women? Naturally, this is not to criticise the women who forged the way, it is merely a retrospective observation concerning how those first steps may have influenced where we now stand.

Denise Scott Brown

I’m interested to know how this translates into architecture. I feel that any review mentioning ‘soft lines’ is probably too literal and missing the point. The first image that google has to offer on the subject is of Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower in Chicago, presumably because it was both designed by a women and features ‘soft lines’, perhaps it is a case of literal physical interpretation. It’s possible of course that feminine/masculine architecture is independent of the architect’s gender. It may be that the whole concept simply doesn’t exist, I can see Zaha’s spectacular style falling in to support of this argument. But is it possible that we haven’t seen a true example of feminine architecture yet, or that we have but we are unable to recognise it?

The Aqua Tower, Chicago – Jeanne Gang

A nine year old boy behind the wheel of a big old Buick, not on his father’s knee this time but driving his mother to some unknown destination.

The low cresent moon does little to light the luna-esc terrain of its own image. The headlights search for tracks that were prominent during the day but the powerful modern lanterns struggle to penetrate the vastness. Rocks and mountains are all but part of the sky, their only distinction that they are not dotted with stars.

After hours of sleepy desert darkness, real darkness, the orange glow of Jeddah starts to light the horizon and in an instant the magical spell of the desert is broken. Hours, days, weeks and years separate once more and life resumes.

The doomed project was led by tradition techniques and cooperative building, attributes that are, certainly in this case, both economical and sustainable. The application of traditional techniques (the mud bricks used in both walling and roofing) led to beautiful, timeless architecture that clearly belongs to its landscape. The materials and techniques have their limitations of course and while ‘limitation’ may sound a negative force it can be an important, positive element of design, the handmade approach limits spans and stories, automatically maintaining the human scale that is integral to the beauty of these buildings.

I’ve found a lot of inspiration in Fathy’s approach that is applicable to my contemporary intentions for rural architecture in this country. Some obstacles that were troublesome to the New Gourna scheme I think would be less so in Britain, today. For example, one major problem lay in the relationship between architect and the villagers, when the project is to involve cooperative building this relationship is crucial. With less dramatic differences between classes and living conditions we should be able to overcome this communication problem (time will tell whether that is a naïve statement or not).

Money, the unavoidable, ever present bane of our modern society would be as much a priority now as it was then. In 40’s Egypt the project was dramatically less costly than the conventional approach and I’m afraid that to be taken seriously by authorities or developers a project is always going to have to offer a money saving/making opportunity. I suspect managing to convey any saving down to the occupants will be a real challenge of course but if a methodology can be illustrated to a level of comprehensiveness as to have at least matched the cost of conventional developments then it should stand a chance in our competitive climate.

My one reservation about the New Gourna project is the fact that the villagers didn’t actually want to be moved. The whole situation could easily start a raging moral debate I’m sure but it does seem an unlikely target for a cooperative building project. I think when embarking on this kind of development the new inhabitants must be involved to make it truly successful and I really think that in Britain we could make this work. Not all the time of course but there are a lot of people out there now entering the right frame of mind to get more involved and commit to such schemes. Perhaps the time is right to start our own revolution.

The New Gourna project is covered in Fathy’s book; Architecture For The Poor (1973)

Also, other human beings have the power to render perfectly good words unusable. I find it particularly annoying when society selects a word, apparently at random and over uses it, shoe-horns it into the most unlikely sentences. It’s behaviour that can best be described as abuse! The word ‘random’ is just such a word, a really good word that I thoroughly enjoyed using until about six years ago. Genius is another one, oh how the mighty fall….  Alternatively, a sure fire way of degrading a word is to attach it to a current fashion such as ‘vintage’. ‘Vintage’ used to have an air of sophistication about it, the suggestion of a quality no longer readily available. Now, the very utterance of the word ‘vintage’ makes me want to hurl large inanimate objects through windows.

Maybe it’s just me, and my low tolerance of humanity. It’s not altogether unlikely that I’m destined to spend my later days living in solitude in a cave somewhere.

A few weeks back I helped a friend construct a geodesic dome for an islamic art workshop at the V&A in London. There are various ways of triangulating a dome or sphere (I believe the Bucky method produced a dome entirely of equilaterals) and I was not responsible for the calculations in this instance but essentially we split the dome into six equal pentagons, five standing in a circle with outer most points touching (ala ring a ring o’ roses) and one on top connecting the top most points. All spaces between the pentagons are nice convenient equilateral triangles and the pentagons themselves can be triangulated into equal isosceles triangles.

Our dome was slightly squatty possibly due to the over engineering choice of material, namely some lengths of 4×2. This method can produce a much smoother, more spherical dome if using something light like bamboo but I rather like the more rugged, solid presence of this excursion.