The Swiss company LafargeHolcim, the world's largest manufacturer of building materials, is funding sustainable development research. For this, the LafargeHolcim Foundation was established, which holds a forum and an architectural competition. This year the forum was held for the 6th time in Cairo. It announced an international architectural competition for sustainable construction projects with an impressive prize pool of US $ 2 million, no entry fee. Architects and students can participate, both with completed projects and visionary projects. The $ 300,000 awards are presented in five regions: Europe, North America, Latin America, North Africa and Asia Pacific. Russian architects can submit works for the competition of the European region. There are no age restrictions, in addition there is a competition for young people under 30 with a prize of $ 70,000.
The forum lasted four days and was attended by 2000 people, specialists from the best technological universities and the largest companies in the world, architects, engineers, inventors and architectural stars.
What do the greats say?
Lord Norman Foster, a former worker guy from Manchester and an aviator and now an architect of all time and the Baron of the Thames, impressed with his peach shirt, pink tie and beige suit. This is a sign that architects no longer wear black, the world has become colorful. Sporty and clear as usual, 84-year-old Foster spoke slowly, gravely, and again on the theme of "Old and New", as in the ever-memorable
Moscow lecture on Easter Day 2006 at Winzavod, which was attended by about 3,000 people. In addition to the super-green California Steve Jobs Theater in the Apple Park of polished concrete with a floating roof and the Mexican airport, Lord Foster showed a lot of wooden architecture in his speech, which is just right to be nominated for the Russian ARCHIWOOD award. In a Swiss village, so that young people would not leave, a community center was built using local technologies, by the hands of local builders, to develop local crafts and communicate with local residents. Shingles, glued shavings - that's where architecture is heading. Lord Foster called for learning from history, combining high-tech with traditional technologies, and everything will work out.
Christine Binswanger, partner of the Herzog & de Meuron bureau, also turned out to be a like-minded person of ARCHIWOOD. She showed her office buildings made of wood shavings, plywood and pressed grass (Kraeter Zentrum, 2014), all in Switzerland. And the main hit is a wooden public building on top of a mountain in Toggenburg. Several houses around the cable car cabin were covered with a common roof, a restaurant with a terrace on a concrete platform was added, and it turned out very atmospheric. And the concrete mixers were lifted up on a funicular, that is, the concrete was made on the spot, which is very environmentally friendly.
Then a panel discussion took place with the participation of Norman Foster, Christine Binswanger and Pritzker laureate Alejandro Aravena, who looks like a rock star Vyacheslav Butusov (also an architect, by the way). The 2016 Venice Biennale, where Aravena was curator, was remembered for his interest in tradition combined with modernity, including wood. During the discussion, Norman Foster was asked where he goes to rest. “To small historic towns where you can walk,” was the answer. "How to convince a client to build from wood?" - "Learn from the past, from traditional construction." The main idea of the lord was simple: "Architecture is easy, the main thing is political will."
Among the events of the first day, the bomb was the performance of Anna Lacaton, who figured out how to upgrade panel houses of the 1960s in Bordeaux. It costs 88 million to build a new panel house, and 33 million to build a new facade from loggias to the old one, and that says it all. And, of course, doing without demolition is the most environmentally friendly solution. Later project
received the Mies van der Rohe Prize.
Ridge hail and ecology in hell
The forum was held in Cairo on the campus of the American University (AUC), which contains all the signs of modern urbanism: cozy streets, coffee points and bookstores, solid buildings made of local sandstone with blue mosaics, with national Islamic motives. On the territory of the university, unlike the rest of the city, women can walk without security and without hats.
Cairo itself is striking in contrasts: it has old, almost Italian, classic quarters and paradise gardens on the hills, but to a large extent old Cairo consists of so-called informal settlements, in which 60% of the townspeople live, that is, 12 million people. These are buildings made of monolithic concrete with brick filling, unfinished by developers and occupied by residents who do not have electricity, water, sewerage, and do not pay rent. Therefore, garbage lies right on the streets in large quantities, recalling the essence of our civilization of consumption. These slums often grow around landfills with incinerators. Residents tend to work at sorting garbage and live nearby. Food supply and other regulation is carried out by local communities. People move on foot, on camels and donkeys - after all, they have everything they need within walking distance. Paradoxically, these are very stable communities, as they consume little energy and cost nothing to the state. The guests of the forum visited several of these settlements within the framework of the Novy Vernakular workshop, tying their noses with scarves so as not to inhale the toxic emissions of the incineration plant. It was impossible at that moment not to fall in love with Russia, which sweeps and washes the streets every day in all cities, in poor and rich regions. If this time in Egypt we were presented with a new image of ecology, then - thank you, no need.
There are, however, other districts in Cairo - business, wealthy, filled with concrete mansions built by developers from the United Arab Emirates for sale. There are many mansions, they are placed very closely, and their "classical" facades are made in the style of "inexpressible unprecedentedness", or "despicable foolish fool, soiling Raphael's Madonna." Still, a world without classical architects is doomed to illiteracy and headaches. It would be better if the Villa Rotonda was 3D printed. At the same time, rapid new construction is taking place in Cairo, New Cairo with skyscrapers is growing, decent multi-storey roads have been built. True, traffic is regulated spontaneously, and a horse with a cart can overtake a bus on the left high-speed lane, and pedestrians and goats cross the street wherever they want.
Sit on mushrooms and strengthen concrete with urine
The forum lasted four days. After the plenary sessions and discussions of the first day, the participants split into four mobile workshops. My workshop studied new and old vernacular. In addition to informal settlements, I managed to get acquainted with traditional crafts and building skills. The guests studied brick vaults, masonry of sandstone walls with cement plaster, traditional ceramic production, visited an art residence where children and students study sculpture.
On the third day, the forum was divided into four sections, from which I chose new materials and was not disappointed. Dutchman Leon van Paassen, professor at the University of Arizona, spoke about the self-reinforcing concrete invented by Basilisk. Microorganisms that form limestone are able to heal cracks in concrete. Ca CO3 crystals are extracted from urine, which stabilize the soil. Biostone can be useful in construction. Substances invented on this basis are added to concrete mixtures in the manufacture of concrete and to sealants for repairing existing concrete structures. If you add biomineralizing agents to sand, it turns into hard sandstone quickly, and not after thousands of years, as in nature. In short, a lot of new things await us in building materials.
American Phil Ross, founder of MycoWorks, showed armchairs made from woody mushrooms that can be grown to shape. Anything you want can be made of these mushrooms, including architectural details such as the arch that Phil Ross built for the exhibition. Moreover, they make shoes and bags. The chairs looked intimidating, and the bags were quite civilized. To defeat the public's prejudice towards mushrooms, Ross built a mushroom brick that already looks like a regular earthen brick.
Architect Marcella Hansch invented how garbage plastic floating in the world's oceans - which kills animals and knocks into 50-meter-high icebergs - can be caught in a special net, recycled and used as building material. When asked in the debate how much the project costs, she named a figure of 6 billion euros. She took out of her purse a reusable container for coffee and other drinks that she carried with her and urged everyone in the audience to do the same. Because the cups of coffee drunk by mankind every day can pave the road from the Earth to the Moon. Draft coffee machines already exist.
An exemplary culture of debate reigned in all sections: report, questions, debate, final declaration. On the last day, the declarations of the four sections were read out at the general meeting. There were some excesses. Anna Heringer, professor emeritus of the UNESCO department, who read a declaration from her section, suddenly turned to the audience, tearfully telling how children in 130 cities around the world come out to protest against the construction of concrete plants.
But Professor Werner Sobek replied that politicians want to build because voters want new housing (judging by the intentions of the state to build 120 million m2 housing by 2025, politicians and voters in Russia want the same). And forty million children in Africa need a million schools, so they will have to build. By the way, one of the winners of the LafargeHolcim Awards was a children's school in Burkina Faso, built by Francis Kere. It must be said that LafargeHolcim itself replaces fossil fuels with alternative types in the cement production process (mainly sorted municipal waste). In 2018, in Europe alone, the company processed 10 million tons of waste, which is equivalent to all waste in Switzerland in a year. Werner Sobek read out a message from our section. “The biggest mistake is to be afraid of a mistake,” he said, quoting Hegel. What has guided us for so long cannot lead us into the future. Among the goals of green building, he identified reuse, recycling, passive conditioning of materials, the possibility of dismantling the building, laid down in the project.
On the last day, the results of the student poster competition were summed up and a large architectural competition LafargeHolcim Foundation was announced, about which see the information at the beginning of the article. The result of the forum, which, by the way, was called "Re-materialization of construction", is that we will not stop using concrete, but will add innovative and traditional materials and construction methods to it, that is, we will use materials more wisely.
