"The Future of Comfort" became the main conference of the triennial (recall that this architectural festival included a total of 70 events - exhibitions, workshops and conferences of various sizes) and was timed to coincide with Architecture Day 2013. Obviously, in a consumer society, comfort is at the forefront, and maintaining a sense of contentment takes a lot of effort and money at all levels: from the activities of governments to striving for a pleasant and calm life of an individual citizen. But how does this endless waste of resources fit in with the “sustainable development” to which this triennial was dedicated? Is it not synonymous with moderation, if not asceticism, with the modern understanding of comfort, which is poorly compatible?
It was this question that the conference participants were asked to consider: is comfort possible in the "green" future, will it remain the same, or will it radically change its form under the influence of the harsh reality, disappear altogether as a concept? Comfort, to one degree or another, determines our life in all its spheres, and architecture is no exception. However, there is an obvious contradiction: “users” of buildings evaluate them primarily by the degree of comfort, but this problem is not touched upon in universities at all, and researchers of “architectural comfort” cannot be found.
In such a situation, the concept of comfort must at least be systematized, highlighting it as unimportant and even harmful hedonism without regard to the consequences. As his example, the president of the Norwegian Association of Architects (NAL) Kim Skore cited a typical phenomenon for the country - open terraces heated by a huge number of heaters, which cafes arrange for their smokers during the cold season. To separate the degrees of comfort at the conference, it was proposed to use something like a "Maslow pyramid": its base was expected to be physical comfort, practical is located higher, and psychological comfort formed the top.
Venezuelan architect and researcher Alfredo Brillembourg (Urban Think Tank) stressed that in third world countries it is only about basic comfort (freedom from thirst and hunger, safety and health), and this should become a common denominator for all countries. According to Brillemburg, what is good for the poor is good for the whole world.
His own projects are aimed at improving living conditions in the slums of Caracas (for example, the cable car, which allows you to quickly overcome the route that previously took hours up the slope - which is important, for example, for an urgent visit to the doctor) and thereby increase the level of comfort there.
Much more specific and original was the report by Katharina Gabrielson from the Faculty of Architecture at the Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm on the subjectivity of comfort and its spatial manifestations. In her opinion, comfort is now largely associated with the need for comfort and reassurance, which a modern person most often receives through excessive consumption of food and manufactured goods. This is a purely Western disease based on a subjective assessment of one's own needs - here Gabrielson agrees with Brillemburg - and it is very useful to think about what a person really needs, and what only seems to be.
Talking about the evolution of spatial comfort, Katarina Gabrielson compared the plan of the Antonini palazzo in Udine, built by Andrea Palladio in 1556, where all the rooms are walk-throughs, and therefore the owners, their children and servants move through a common "territory", but there is no personal space as such, with the project of the house of Alexander Klein in 1928, where the circulation is carried out along the corridor, and each family member has his own isolated room. As a result, noise, odors and any other sources of disturbance are minimized: children are placed in the nursery, and servants can disappear altogether - if there is a special corridor for them in the house.
In our time, the tendency to isolate the individual as a norm of comfort has even intensified: the number of houses with one tenant is constantly growing, but at the same time the problem of loneliness has become aggravated as a serious obstacle to all the same comfort. Personal space, increasingly fenced off from the public, implies greater freedom - but modern forms of control over citizens turn such a life into a kind of freak show prison, Gabrielson believes: everyone has their own "lone camera", but cannot know for sure whether they are being watched him or not.
According to the researcher, urban youth communes have become a kind of response to this dead-end situation, where participants manage to live practically without money, using an almost inexhaustible resource - the waste of a metropolis.
The famous Greenland geologist Minik Rosing,
the curator of the Danish pavilion at the last Venice Biennale, drew the attention of the audience to the fact that since the beginning of the century a couple of people have been working less and less, they are being replaced by machines, which became possible, first of all, thanks to cheap energy from minerals - and at the same moment a catastrophic growth of CO2 emissions. We use 20 times more energy than we could, because we do not want to lose the familiar level of comfort that cars provide us. Again, lifestyle changes are not that difficult, Rosnik argues, citing the example of the indigenous, Eskimo population of Greenland who readily moved into modern homes - but the problem is that it is easy to move only in the direction of increasing, not decreasing comfort.
However, luxury can also become the engine of progress, says the director of the Berlage Institute, the founder of the Powerhouse Company, the Dutchman Nanne de Rue: inventing something new for jaded loafers, you can make more than one or two interesting discoveries. As an example from his architectural practice, he cited a project for a villa in Cyprus, where the client wanted to make panoramic glazing. To accomplish this in a hot climate, it was necessary to partially place the building in an artificial recess, and also to use a roof with a large overhang.
However, almost all speakers agreed that unlimited consumption in a world of limited resources is a scenario with a near end, and even now, even in the countries of the “first world”, comfort is not always easy to achieve: just recall the research of the conference participant, British architect Caroline Steele on the influence food for the formation of cities and our way of life, in particular, about the problems that we face now and will have to solve in the future.
The main events of the Oslo Triennial were markedly international and Norway was represented on an equal basis with other countries. However, the Metropolitan School of Architecture and Design AHO dedicated its small exhibition to the Norwegian school of architecture as a phenomenon and its long-standing association with the concept of "sustainability". The exhibition “Made to Order: The Naturalization of Tradition” outlines the relationship of the national tradition with the concepts of nature and nature over the past 70 years. The idea of restrained, moderate architecture in a world of limited resources was put forward by Knut Knutsen in his 1961 essay, but this is not only about the practical side of the matter. Nature in Norwegian architecture is not only a physical limitation, but also a means of enhancing an architectural image, as well as a conceptual platform for creating these images.
All of these aspects are covered within two archetypal objects: "The Walls" (which shows the buildings of Norwegian architects from the 1960s to the present day, based on the idea of nature) and "Books" - 165,228 pages devoted to Norwegian architecture in Norwegian language from 1945 to 2013. But the curators - young teachers of the AHO - emphasize that this debriefing does not set itself the goal of forming a "canon." Rather, it is a demonstration of different, but always “tailor-made” approaches to ecology in Norwegian architecture, which can serve as a basis for further development.
