The ballad of the flexible brick - MasD

Transcripción

REVISTA DIGITAL DE DISEÑO
Facultad de Diseño, Imagen y Comunicación
Universidad El Bosque
The ballad of the flexible brick
La balada del ladrillo flexible
Por: Juan Martín Piaggio
Abstract
Resumen
The industrialization of architecture is an old concern
that has never reached the magnitude and achievements
expected, although there are some prefabricated
systems of great interest. This article describes a
research on the industrialization of brick vaults, in the
course of which unexpected options are discovered,
resulting in an innovative product and, above all, a new
concept with multiple applications in architecture.
La industrialización de la arquitectura es una vieja
inquietud que no ha terminado de alcanzar la magnitud
y los logros que se preveían, a pesar de existir diversos
sistemas de prefabricación de gran interés. En este
artículo se presenta una investigación en torno a la
industrialización de bóvedas de ladrillo, en cuyo curso se
descubren nuevas opciones imprevistas, que dan como
resultado un producto innovador y, sobre todo, un nuevo
concepto con múltiples aplicaciones en arquitectura.
Keywords: Industrialized architecture, prefabricated
systems, brick vaults, ceramic fabric.
Palabras clave: Arquitectura industrializada, sistemas
prefabricados, bóvedas de ladrillo, tejido cerámico.
Architect, independent proffessional (Milano, Italy)
Revista MasD (ISSN 2027-095X) Nº 13, Vol. 7, Año 2013.
Investigación MasD
Diciembre de 2013
1
Introducción
The building process blends several different aspects:
technological, structural, environmental, economic,
planning, esthetic (artistic), in one word, cultural (which
is the reason why we architects see this job as the best in
the world). In most cases all aspects are knotted together,
and modifying one ends up changing all others. That is the
case with the example I am about to tell about: a study on
the technology of bricks, i.e. a product of industrial design,
allows for the growth of innovative shapes and concepts in
the field of construction and of architecture. It is a case, as
will be seen, in which the design of a small detail (the way
of binding together bricks by means of steel wires in order
to make flexible brick “rugs”) gives new possibilities to architecture, esthetic, technological and economic. And once
the idea of producing brick “rugs” or “rolls” is born, other
materials (wood, stone, etc.) may easily be employed, and
these products may be used in unforeseen ways. This is an
example of how industrial design, i.e. the design of products
and processes, is an open and unlimited creative task.
Brick, nowadays, is no longer the eponymous element of
the building trade, the piece which, designed to be lifted by
the bricklayer’s hand, has for thousands of years been the
constitutive element of walls. Nowadays walls are built (if
you wish to keep employing terracotta elements, being that
many other materials compete with it, such as wood, fibers,
special concretes, synthetic materials, etc.) with very large
blocks having remarkable thermal and acoustic qualities,
manufactured to millimetric precision, moved aroud by
large machines, and laid with thin layers of adhesive. These
bricks are no longer manufactured in the building site by
means of home-made kilns with moveable chimneys, but
come out of long tunnels, in ever-larger factories.
Figure 1: A girl manufacturing bricks manually, in India; a
rectified ceramic block, a great acoustic and thermal insulator.
Sección: Investigación MasD / Diseño U El Bosque / Tribuna (según proceda)
Juan Martín Piaggio
This story tells of how one of the most ancient techniques
known by the building man, that of brick vaults, was industrialized (employing highly industrialized elements such as
bricks and rolled Steel bars), and how the results came out
being very different from what was might have been supposed when the journey started.
First stanza – Dieste
The sequence which carries to the final product of this tale
of investigation curiously starts with an attempt to reverse
technological transfer: for over 200 years the north of the
world has transferred technologies (and products) which
had been developed there to the south of the world, whereas
the south transferred to the north only prime matters; you
may however find, in the south of the world, original developments, which the north ignores about. One of these is the
work of an engineer, Eladio Dieste, who was born, grew up
and lived in Uruguay, and who, in a poor environment such
as Uruguay, needing to make much with little (something
which is commonplace in the south of the world), developed
several brilliant technologies for the use of brick. Employing these he built several million square meters of all types
of buildings, but mainly industrial, that is to say a kind of
building in which the esthetic aspect is little considered.
His buildings are, however, and beyond all doubt, works of
art (Piaggio, 1996). His main contribution to architecture
are structural solutions, including anticatenary vaults1 and
beam-walls.
[1] La sección anticatenaria es la única que permite anular las flexiones, limitando los esfuerzos que atraviesan la estructura a la sola compresión. De esta manera se logran construir bóvedas increíblemente finas
(10-12 cm para 50 m de luz han sido construidas, pero Dieste sostenía,
cálculos a la mano, que no hubiera sido ninguna osadía, con espesores
semejantes, y con ladrillos huecos de los más comunes, llegar a 100 m de
luz). Lo que aumenta el ancho de las bóvedas (y de cualquier estructura)
son las ondulaciones de la curva de las presiones, del interior al exterior
(http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenaria). La construcción de bóvedas
con sección anticatenaria tiene el inconveniente que requiere cimbras
algo complejas.
Artículo cientifico
Diciembre de 2013
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covered pedestrian route linking Alcalá railway station to
the University Campus, made up of a long sequence of 30
m long vaults, each supported by a single pair of columns3.
Vicente Sarrablo followed a very different route: involving
industries in order to develop a process which, based on a
specific technology, could enter the European productive
system. We will see, after the first refrain, how this investigation started.
Refrain – Prefabrication
Figure 2: Eladio Dieste – Horizontal silo in Nueva Palmira (Uruguay)
His work has been rather celebrated among architects since
the 1960’s, but no one ever attempted, in the industrialized
world, to transfer the technologies which he developed.
Starting in the last decade of the 20th c. several people,
among which I had the privilege of finding myself, started
reasoning around the issue; in Germany, Scotland, the U.S.,
several researches were carried forward on anticatenary
vaults, inspired by the distant work of Dieste; Stanford
Anderson, professor in Princeton, published an important
Book on Dieste’s structures (Anderson, 2004). But the most
important achievements were doubtlessly reached in Spain.
Carlos Clemente, professor in Alcalá, talked Dieste into
travelling to Spain, where they built together several very
beautiful churches2, and designed and started building a
[2] This is another story which would deserve telling. Carlos Clemente,
with his partner Juan de Dios de la Hoz, designed with Dieste several
churches for the diocese of Alcalá. This diocese, recently formed, urgently needed 54 new churches, but was short on funds. Clemente saw that
Dieste’s techniques were the only ones which could allow to build cheaply
churches which were not just utilitarian, but beautiful as well. Initially,
they built replicas of churches which Dieste had already built, so as to
learn the ways; they then started developing original designs. The churches following the first were mainly built thanks to the offerings made
by parishoners, convinced by the beauty of what had already been built.
This ambitious program has unfortunately stopped long before reaching
the goal of 54 churches. See the article mentioned in the bibliography
(Piaggio, 1996).
If a car could be built as an automobile is, it would cost one
tenth of its current cost (I shhot the figure off my head, but
am willing and ready to discuss it and, eventually, to adjust
it). On the other hand, many people would be out of a job,
since construction has always been a source of employment
for unspecialized people. This is what allows many people,
all over the world, to build their own house with their very
own hands and little else. That is to say that what in certain
places is seen as progress, in other places may be something
socially harmful and economically unfeasible. The industrialization of Dieste’s techniques, which will be seen in the
next stanza, while it was reasonable in Europe, would have
been impossible there where Dieste built, since the industrial technologies required were not available, while cheap
manpower was easily at hand.
Figure 3: Richard Buckminster Fuller - Dymaxion
House (1929) and Dymaxion Car (1933)
Source: Wikipedia
[3] Only two of the vaults were built; the program was halted because
of an accident which happened on site, and which was due to a faulty interpretation of construction papers by the contractor.
Diciembre de 2013
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Figure 4: Mud house in Maranguape, Estado de Ceará, Brasil
(photograph by Eugenio Hansen, OFS); sun-dried brick
house in Mali (photograph by Mike Thibert). Architecture
being a highly circumstantial art, or trade, each of the
examples shown above is, in its context, perfect.
In the “first world” many parts of the building process have
been industrialized for a long time (Le Corbusier, back in
1925, defined the house as a “machine for living in” – one
of his most quoted, and most misunderstood, sentences),
achieving success especially as concerns semi-worked
materials (e.g. rolled steel for structures, bricks, cement) or
finishings (doors and windows) or plants. But the prefabrication of whole buildings, after a short success in the second
half of the past century, and excepting some still marginal
sectors [4], has been set aside. Many eminently intelligent
people spent time on this issue, especially after World War
II, when large parts of Europe were reduced to rubble, and
many people had to be quickly provided with shelter. Le
Corbusier set the theme very clearly with his celebrated
Unité d’Habitation in Marseille, dating rom 1946, which, in
theory, could have been partially prefabricated, at least as
concerns the “boxes” which make up each apartment. After
this, especially in countries behind the iron curtain (but
not just there) for many years houses were collective and
prefabricated (and usually horrible, badly placed and badly
finished, contributing to give prefabrication its bad name).
A special mention must be made, among those who tried
to industrialize the building process, of Jean Prouvé: the
attention which he gave to detail, and the lightness of the
solutions he studied, are remarkable (Huber & Steinegger,
1971). These themes, starting from very different premises,
are dealt with by the investigation here described.
[4] One exception: in Europe, in recent years, high quality wooden
houses, tailor made but industrialized, have met with a good success. Industrialization of wooden houses has a centuries-old tradition in the U.S.
Figure 5: Le Corbusier, Unité d’Habitation. Marseille, 1946
- A typical house-module (contemporary illustration)
Figure 6: Jean Prouvé – Light prefabrication system
(1945) structures made of folded sheet steel.
Right: Club des Espérances in Ermont,
France (1966). Source: Wikipedia.
Second stanza- ISO-Brick
In 1998 a young architect from Barcelona, Vicente Sarrablo,
passionate like me about Dieste’s architecture, asked me to
participate in an investigation on the industrialization of
reinforced brick vaults, which lasted six years, and which
involved Universities and Research Centers from several
European countries5. When the investigation ended, in
2004, the initial idea of building vaults without the aid of
[5] La investigación, bautizada “ISO-Brick” (Industrialized Solutions
for Construction of Reinforced Brick Masonry Shell Roofs – Proj. N°
CRAFT-1999-70420), fue desarrollada a beneficio de PYMEs (Pequeñas
y Medias Empresas), principalmente en Portugal, España e Italia, con el
apoyo económico de la Comisión Europea. Las empresas que participaron
fueron: Suceram s.a. (E), Cerámicas Palau Chiloeches (E), Incisión s.a.
(E), JMEF (P), Gruppo Stabila S.p.A. (I), ILA Valdadige (I), Mangiavacchi
R& C. s.p.a. (I), Krypton (B), GFM (D). Unidos, donde se venden casas de
madera, con terminaciones en varios “estilos” (colonial, moderno, gótico,
etc.), pero con plantas iguales, en general muy bien diseñadas.
Diciembre de 2013
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centering devices had been set aside, and a process for the
assembly of bricks and reinforcing steel had been developed, which allowed the construction of vaults of any span;
two prototypes may still be seen, the visible results of this
investigation, designed by the author of this article, one in
the north, the other in the south of Italy. Unfortunately,
almost none of the Industries for which the research was
performed saw a future in the results, ant the research was
sadly forgotten in a drawer, after having been exhibited, in
2004, as the centerpiece of Italy’s mos important building
fair, SAIE, in Bologna.
Figure 10: Components of the system: bricks, corrugated steel
rebars and “clips”. The 4,5cm-high bricks, purposely designed for
this research, rest on a sheet of adhesive paper to prevent mortar
from staining the underside of the bricks during joint filling.
Clips not only join bars and bricks, but also ensure stable joint
dimensions. Right: stacked sheets, ready to be transported to the
worksite, with interposed polyurethane sheets to protect bricks.
Figure 7: First model of the ISO-Brick research.
Figure 11: Finished prototype in Matera (Italy). The inverted
catenary section, which can transmit any uniform load as
simple compresion stresses, without any bending stress,
allows to substantially reduce vault thickness (less than 10
cm in this example). Right: two 6m-span prefabricated vaults
arrive to construction exhibition in Bologna (Italy).
Refrain – Industrialization
Figure 8: A promotional built example of the
procedure, designed by V. Sarrablo.
Figure 9: Laboratory test in UPC (10m span and stainless
steel sheet formwork); test of an asymmetric vault.
The prefabrication of large-scale buildings, as was stated in
the first refrain, has been all but abandoned for a number of
years. The building process, however, has not ceased to be
industrialized: the steel for structures, closures, anything
concerning plants and installations, the very bricks with
which walls, slabs ad rrofs are built, are all products of
sophisticated industrial processes.
Figure 12: Prefabricated elements: rolled steel profiles, PVC
windows; roof-window; a modern toilet: a little masterpiece.
Diciembre de 2013
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Third stanza – Flexbrick
Even though ISO-Brick seem to have suffered from cribdeath, Vicente Sarrablo kept pondering on this theme on his
own, and he saw that what was really new in the research
were not the vaults, but the brick and steel strips. He convinced a couple of industries to keep working on the issue,
notwithstanding the terrible crisis which was just then starting (and which in Spain was, and still is, among the worst
in the world), and he came up with something which was
aptly named “brick fabric”, and whose uses are amazingly
varied. The Flexbrick system permits the disposition, in the
cases of a tartan made up of very thin steel wires, bricks
of different sizes and colors. Brick “rugs” of any length are
thus obtained, of width modular with the size of bricks,
which may be laid down in many different ways: hanging,
simply spread on the ground, bound in mortar: you name it.
Figure 15: Joints in the top layer are free of mortar;
on the right, Flexbrick has been incorporated in
concrete panels to form a dividing wall.
Figure 16: Top: Bricks can be arranged in endless different
ways. Bottom: fixed, removable or draining floors.
Figure 13: Basic elements of the Flexbrick system.
The following pictures show the building of a Flexbrick
vault. The vault is made up of two layers of brick, each 4,5
cm thick. Only the inner one carries loads, while the outer
one serves only as a protection for the weatherproofing, and
as an elegant finishing layer.
Figure 14: “Ceramic fabric” rolls arrive to worksite; they
are unrolled on the workform; vault joints are filled with
pumped mortar; the second layer of bricks protects the
waterproof sheet and offers a beautiful finish to the roof.
Figure 17: Hanging cladding. Using Flexbrick Vicente Sarrablo
has already built a beautiful house not far from Barcelona,
while other Spanish and internationally renowned architects
are experimenting with it. Right: Casa Mingo, S. Martí de
Tous (Spain). Arq. Vicente Sarrablo & Jaume Colom. The
quality of light under the ceramic vault is remarkable.
Diciembre de 2013
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Moreover, and this justifies the apparent oxymoronic title,
we see how brick, which has always been synonymous with
rigidity and hardness, becomes, under Vicente’s inquisitive
eye, a flexible and ductile material, a thin fabric which gives
lightness to the entire building, and which drives the architect to retink the role played by the parts of the constructive
process. This is what industrial design, rightly understood,
should always endeavor for.
Figure 18: A renovation in La Rioja (Spain). Arq.
Octavio Pérez, BLUR arquitectura.
Finale – Brick and innovation
With the system developed by Vicente extremely light vaults
may be quickly built with very simple formwork. But the
system may be applied to many other uses: façades, floors,
roofs (flat or otherwise), gabions, lost coffering and others
yet to be imagined. As often happens, the product itself suggests new uses; a function leads to the development of an
organ, but afterwards it is the organ itself which generates
new functions. Brick, in all its many different varieties,
has been used for so many centuries, that it seems hard to
imagine ways of employing it which have not been tested
by tradition. Dieste showed how brick, even in the 20th c.,
still had unexplored uses as a structural element. Vicente
Sarrablo’s double investigation, which started where Dieste
had left off, gradually distanced itself from the master’s
path. It shows how the view may be shifted, imagining, even
through small fragments such as those here illustrated,
different universes.
FINAL NOTE
The title alludes to a famous Italian song from 1961, “Il Ballo
del Mattone”, by Rita Pavone. “The dance of brick” is the
term used, in Italy, to ironically refer to the ups and downs
(mainly the latter) of the building market since 2008, and to
which Vicente Sarrablo’s work seems at least to show there
might be hope in a better future.
Figure 19: The future: Renovation of the façade of Banco Caixa
General Headquarters, in Barcelona; Parking in Montpellier.
Diciembre de 2013
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References
Anderson, S. (ed.), (2004): Eladio Dieste. Innovation in
Structural Art, New York: Princeton University Press
Presentación Flexbrick en Cali:
http://tecnoconstruccion.com.co/content/wp-content/
uploads/pdf/13.Tejidos-Ceramicos-Vicente-Sarrablo.pdf
Huber, B., Steinegger, J.-C. (1971): Jean Prouvé. Une Architecture par l’Industrie. Zurich, Artemis Verlag.
Jeanneret, Ch. E. (Le Corbusier), (1923): Vers une Architecture. 1st ed. Paris: G. Crès ed.
López Almansa, F. (project coordinator), Da Porto, F.,
Lourenço, P, Piaggio, J.M., Roca, P., Sarrablo, V., (2004):
ISO-Brick Deliverable n° 20 (Task 1.7) – Technical Report
(N.P.)
Piaggio, J.M. (1996): “Eladio Dieste. L’ingegno e l’architettura”. Costruire in Laterizio n° 52-53, pp. 156-179
Piaggio, J.M. (1999): “Chiesa di San Juan de Avila ad Alcalá,
Madrid”. Costruire in Laterizio n° 71, pp. 18-25
Piaggio, J. M. (ed.) (2007): “Le Volte Laminari in Laterizio
Armato”. Costruire in Laterizio n° 107, pp.60-73
Piaggio, J.M. (2011): “La costruzione di Casa Mingo a S.
Martí de Tous”. Costruire in Laterizio n° 143, pp. 54-59
On-line resources
Curva catenaria: http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catenaria
Casa Dymaxion:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casa_Dymaxion
Auto Dymaxion:
http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coche_Dymaxion
Bóvedas de Jean Prouvé:
http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Club_des_Esp%C3%A9rances
Flexbrick: http://www.flexbrick.es
Diciembre de 2013
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The ballad of the flexible brick - MasD

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