Ad-hoc Architecture

adopting ephemerality for permanent infrastructural solutions

Honorable mention at the Architectural Affiliate Awards 2021 (by Silk Matters) in the Architectural Journalism category with Anuj Modi

Ever since, humans left the nomadic life to adopt and adapt to the model of permanent settlements, we have been prematurely preoccupied by the idea of permanence, especially when it comes to architecture. This idea of building of permanence or in some ways legacy lasts longer than most modern-day socio-political outlooks. It is possible that it is a structural manifestation of humanity’s sociological need to survive in the face of imminent death or perhaps it is our egoistic mindset that refuses to accept change. Perhaps it is both. This need for permanence is seen in the ruins and the rundown remains of built environments of people who thought they built them to last. Be it the Romans, the Egyptians of the Old Kingdom or the Soviet era housing in Berlin. They all thought that their buildings would last. So would their name, their civilisation, their way of life, their culture and people would last forever. As history and time tells us and again, this is folly. 

When it comes to specifically the act of building, there is a misinterpreted ideal of lasting a lifetime. Structures, back in the medieval times or today, are designed more often than not to last. Building codes and material norms dictate the life of structural components that architects and their clients happily sign off on. 50 years… 60 years… sometimes a hundred. Humans as builders put a time stamp on most of their creation. But the hope certainly is forever. Time in architectural manifestation plays clever tricks in cities and settlements that last over generations. As Aldo Rossi pointed out, buildings leave imprints of sorts. Unfortunately, this outlook has had an expected outcome. While we build to last, the unfortunate reality of constant change does not bode well with built structures that promise permanence. 

Buildings and city infrastructure by their very permanent nature serve the stoic purpose of supporting our urban life. Even before the 2020 coronavirus pandemic, discourse around urbanism and architectural interventions had been hinting on the futile nature of permanent infrastructure building—roads, bridges, large stadiums, plazas or malls, large-scale civic structures and olympic venues (both for the games and as an adjective). Come 2020, when the fortunate among us were shut indoors and those not so fortunate were left to fend off on the streets, the reality of our habitual infrastructural permanence was laid bare. Eight lane highways cutting through cities did not support ambulances in need of easy access. The lack of access to green and open spaces was a reason of the problematic mental state of indoor dwellers. Shortage of hospital beds. Lack of educational facilities. Lack of adequate housing. But there was of course supersized shopping centres and mobility infrastructure; all of which laid bare. The very cities and civic spaces supposedly designed to serve humanity and the urban being stood as stark reminders of their impracticality, preposterous economic incentives, unsustainable organisation, inhumane scale and most of their uselessness. This coupled with the looming environmental effects of climate change makes for a cataclysmic stalemate of the permanent built environment.

In this time of spectacular failure, the stakeholders — urban planners, architects, construction companies, legislative bodies and financial situations— must not overlook the information at their disposal to maintain the status quo of perpetual concrete building and profit making. The capitalist exercise is a vicious cycle not only for the ecology but the psychology of our cities. How can one address this mountain of failures?

When humanity left its nomadic way of life, it did bring along some of its adaptive and resourceful ways to life in permanence. If one is to reorganise the permanent, one may not look for and simply look to the temporary. In other words, the fundamental act of building need not be uprooted to make the cities work. There is potential in letting a flyover, a garbage gyre, a coal-burning plant, footpaths and leftover urban space to be connected in a lacework of ephemeral builds. In the design and architecture world, this practice of shifting to a built environment that is more disposable, adaptable and re-usable to emerging conditions while having a significantly smaller carbon footprint is referred to as ephemeral architecture. Ephemeral building can be traced back to the hunter-gatherer roots in fact, but recent decades have shown how temporary attachments and immediate solutions may be the easier way to alleviate systemic failures. It has the potential of mutating and morphing itself to adapt to the changing needs and be more efficient in providing quick solutions. 

This solution or building strategy may not in fact come from architects or designers at all. It may be born of ad-hoc solutions much like the nomads of old. The simplicity and sustainability that most makeshift solutions offer is unique to the resourceful values of an ad-hoc architecture. This fact has been enforced by the problems and stumbles we face during the pandemic. The tents and steel poles of a temporary hospital offer a better solution when compared to a brick-and-mortar hospital block that requires time and more money than the ad-hoc version. The architectural solutions offered by architects on a drawing board that an investor eventually signs off on and a government body approves is a process that does not offer any real solutions to a problem that would have risen two years before the plan would have been drawn. The eventual building turns into a catalogue of thus errors and the urban landscape, a graveyard with tombstones of misjudgements and designed deficiencies. However, this sentiment is not one of despair but hope. 

A kind guerrilla architecture inspired by the architecture of ad-hoc has been emerging in the last few decades. This kind of building exercise is more efficient and cost-effective than most conventional. Some people refer it to as ephemeral building or temporary structures but this kind solution building is something that predates formal permanent building itself. Most of the current architecture fails to adapt and transform to the need of society. There are several structures that are gathering dust and not proving themselves to be useful in the current conditions. Materiality is a way of showing a temporal change in architecture. While some materials express permanence & show ageing, other materials express lightness & deteriorate over time. Since there is abundance of the permanence, the focus for the upcoming architecture should be on the parasitic nature of the temporary ones. These materials can express the architecture in many ways. There have been the use of paper tubes as well as the use of marbles and concrete to define the monumentality of the structures. They tend to show the type of architecture they are offering. The quick deployment and ad-hoc nature of these materials enable the people to transform a given space in less time. This helps in minimising the footprint but also provides the advantage of having a portable architecture that can adapt itself to the given environmental conditions.

This ad-hoc building has been seen in the work of Colab-19 architects and most influentially the ModSkool by Social Design Collabrative. It is interesting to note that both offices have the word “collaboration” in their name. With ModSkool, SDC gives ad-hoc a legitimate application in urban landscapes with a school that can be assembled and dismantles in a matter of weeks to accommodate the floodwaters and land acquisition issues along the banks of the river Yamuna. This kind of building offers a mirror to architectural interventions and mega-budget builds undertaken by architects and developers with no regard to their environmental impact. While energy efficient on paper, these buildings add to the urban landscape of mistakes inadequate in their design and intention to positively affect the ecology or even the society. 

Our urban landscapes need a regeneration of sorts. Many of these spaces include the unused parking lots, dormant sidewalks to crippled public markets. The unused parking lots can be used for hosting many communal activities and social gatherings like theatre or providing shelters for the homeless by the night. There is a need to deploy additional elements which can be retrofitted to the existing infrastructure and create a more purposeful space throughout the changing times. There is a need for modular and fragmented elements to be focused on. Deconstructing will eventually result in process of decay and the disintegration of elements. This will lead to the fragmentation of the architecture which essentially is the by-product of deconstruction. It not only helps in reducing the carbon emissions and the footprint but also helps in providing for the mass with reduced costs.

A world changing at every tick of the clock ought to see human intervention arrayed in more of a period appropriate fashion, assessing the needs of the immediate and the future. An architectural infrastructure that can provide solutions and be repurposed once a new problem arises. An ad-hoc architecture.