Frans Drewniak

Planetary Boundaries -

Rethinking Architecture and Design

Royal Danish Academy

Better Building Blocks

How can we develop methods for building practices that will sufficiently impact the built environment?

Better Building Blocks is an umbrella of artistic research (KUV), scientific research and the integration of research and teaching carried out in a brick lab.

The brick industry is responsible for a significant proportion of the total carbon emissions and the industry is entering a minefield of conflicting interests where its activities are governed by legislation, market behaviour and end-user conduct.

This project aims to encourage a dialogue with the Danish brick industry and invites visitors to examine ongoing experiments involving more circular and healthy building practices:

• Few and healthy materials
• Focus on robustness and awareness of lifetime scenarios
• High generality
• Design for disassembly
  Conscious layering
• As well as investigation into lowering the level of embedded energy and minimising the use of virgin materials.

Columns Worth Stealing

Charlottenborgs Forårudstilling 2020

Spoliation: On an act, instance or the process of robbing, plundering . Latin spoliare (Concise Oxford English dictionary) 

From around the year 300 (A.D.) the reuse of materials, fragments, and elements such as pillars of antiquity was widespread in the construction of the early christian churches. The phenomenon has been named spolia. The latin word "spolium" originally meant the skins ripped off by an animal, but came in its plural form, spolia, to account for various forms of prey and stolen treasures. This spolia was since the common term for building parts or sculpture taken from one context and reused in a new place, and often in a new way *. The extraction, production and formation of virgin and non-renewable materials & resources threatens our existence, but also opens up new questions and aesthetic demands. When raw materials such as cement and clay are precious resources that also require a great deal of energy in the process and burning, and thus are a possible prime suspect as climate sinners, what does this mean for our “modus operandi”? With the right to use the earth's "material bank" could follow the obligation to value them equally high ! "Columns Worth Stealing" reflects on how to make structural columns of stacked brick elements. Made so venerable and beautiful, that they play a hoover role in space, will never be covered and that they will survive even demolition and thus live on as "spolia" for ever and ever. "Columns Worth Stealing" pursues some ideas from the vision “Når materialet svarer igen” (When the material answers back), supported with a grant by the Danish Art Foundation 2018-. After Three months of intense work in the clay workshop at the Danish Art Workshops 2019, 27 brick drums have been manufactured by an old technique called "kvætsning" (knock-in form) in a stainless steel mold.  New knowledge and aesthetic dimensions have been developed through the use of circular principles of resource consumption, recycling and design for disassembly as obstructions in an artistic process. In line with the vision many discoveries and enriching "mistakes" have been made in the work with the clay. 

THE DANISH ART WORKSHOPS

*(Hansen, M. F. (2015). The spolia churches of Rome: Recycling antiquity in the Middle Ages. Aarhus: Aarhus Universitety Press)

My works operates primarily within the realm of artistic research. In my case, this means drawing on empirical data from other scientific fields and, partly through my practical experience, developing experiments and installations that test alternative ways of building.

Is it a discovery of whether a magnificent, desirable, and meaningful world will emerge from the environmental challenges—a world we would not have accessed without the crisis?

Since the majority of what is currently being built is by no means durable, nor does it add sufficient lasting value, reality is not a model to be emulated, but a condition we must acquire the skills to navigate. Here, experimentation and artistic research present various spaces with statements that can challenge our perception of reality and offer alternative perspectives. It is precisely this understanding that Marianne Krogh applies to her description of the exhibition Reset Materials, in which I participated in 2023:

It will require all the dialogues, professional insights, cross-disciplinary collaborations, and creative processes that we can possibly mobilise. It will also require diplomacy and ongoing reflection if we are to navigate the stream of conflicts that will become highly visible with the paradigm shift. As Ursula K. Le Guin has noted, the situation calls for both the curiosity of science and the risk-taking of art. Our future task, therefore, becomes creating narratives and images of new, attractive futures, and communicating the necessity of all this through the protagonist of any form of settlement: materials.

Marianne Krogh, "Introduction," in Reset Materials: Towards Sustainable Architecture (Copenhagen: Arkitektens Forlag, 2023), 25.