Text total: 4837 words
Estimated reading time: 13 minutes
This spring, when the new crown epidemic rebounded in many provinces and cities across the country, the square cabin hospital that was once promoted to the world as an experience is ushering in the largest construction after the closure of the Wuhan square cabin.
The National Health Commission said that it is necessary to ensure that there are 2 to 3 cabin hospitals in each province, even if they have not yet been built, they must come up with a construction plan to ensure that when needed, the cabin hospital can be built and put into use within two days.
Jiao Yahui, director of the Medical Administration Bureau of the National Health commission, said at a press conference held by the joint prevention and control mechanism of the State Council that there are currently 33 square cabin hospitals that have been built or are under construction in the country, distributed in 19 prefectures and cities in 12 provinces, of which 20 have been built and 13 are under construction, with a total of 35,000 beds. These cabin hospitals are mainly concentrated in Jilin, Shandong, Yunnan, Hebei, Fujian, Liaoning and other places.
Changchun square cabin isolation point (source: China Construction Third Bureau official public number)
The Square Cabin Hospital is a fine example of temporary architecture. From design to final delivery, the construction period of the square cabin hospital generally does not exceed one week. Between home isolation and going to designated hospitals, the square cabin hospital has played a role as a bridge, avoiding the waste and run of medical resources.
In Wuhan in 2020, 16 cabin hospitals were built within 3 weeks, treating about 12,000 patients in a month's time, and achieving zero deaths of patients and zero infection of medical staff, these cabin hospitals were known as "Noah's Ark" at that time, and the experience of cabin hospitals was also brought to the United States, Germany, Italy, Spain and other countries.
The New York Convention center transformed into a square cabin hospital (Source: Dezeen)
Transformed into a square cabin hospital at Berlin Airport in Germany (Source: Dezeen)
From tents from the nomadic era to the ubiquitous slab houses to today's cabin hospitals, which play an important role in the city's critical junctures, temporary buildings have played an indispensable role in human history.
The representative work of the Industrial Revolution era, "London Crystal Palace", is the first temporary building with cross-era significance, the large temporary pavilion at the World Expo is all composed of steel and glass, it took less than 9 months to complete, and after the end of the Expo, it was disassembled and transported to a different place, and the reassembly was successfully realized.
Crystal Palace, UK (Source: Baidu Encyclopedia)
At the 1970 Osaka World Expo in Japan, the Takara Beautilion Pavilion, designed by Japanese architect Noriaki Kurokawa, placed square capsules in the cross metal skeleton, which could be flexibly disassembled or moved, marking a big step forward in the practice of temporary construction.
Takara Beautilion Pavilion (Source: Archdaily)
Today, temporary buildings that can be built quickly, from temporary installations to temporary stage sets, from emergency relief facilities, music venues to exhibition spaces, play an extremely important role in various fields.
01
When disaster strikes, temporary buildings are sanctuaries for body and mind
Severe natural disasters are often unpredictable, and people are inevitably displaced when they are hit. In the face of natural and man-made disasters, temporary buildings are not as simple as "emergency wisdom", from which we can see the wisdom of precautions and the sense of social responsibility and humanistic care behind the design.
Early in his career, Japanese architect Shigeru Ban has been working on temporary buildings, and he specializes in building temporary shelters out of paper tubes, which are both environmentally friendly and sturdy. Since the 1990s, his paper buildings can be seen after disasters such as the Rwandan Civil War in Africa, the Kobe earthquake in Japan, the Wenchuan earthquake in China, the Earthquake in Haiti, and the tsunami in northern Japan. In 2014, Ban received the Pritzker Architecture Prize.
Sri Lanka post-disaster temporary housing (Source: Ban Shigeru Architectural Design official website)
Chengdu Hualin Primary School Temporary School Building (Source: Ban Mao Architectural Design Official Website)
New Zealand Paper Church (Source: Ban Shigeru Architectural Design Official Website)
In the new crown epidemic, Ban Shigeru also brought excellent design, he can isolate the virus through the combination of paper and paper tube, quickly set up an isolation area, low cost, easy to recycle, easy to build, for exams and other scenes that need to be gathered, very practical. At present, the product has been used in many regions such as Ishikawa and Nara in Japan as a temporary vaccination center, temporary isolation, shelter, etc.
(Source: Ban Shigeru Architectural Design official website)
In addition to his expertise in using paper tubes, Ban often built buildings from ready-made containers, and he used several containers to build a temporary house for 188 families to live in for the Japanese disaster victims, which was an attempt to build temporary buildings using a large number of containers. Containers are placed in various positions by crane and connected by twist locks. Based on these industrialization measures, temporary housing can be built quickly in a short period of time and have good seismic performance.
Mainland architects have also made many attempts at temporary construction after the disaster.
After the "5.12" earthquake, architect Zhu Jingxiang rebuilt a primary school on the original site of the destroyed Sichuan Xiasi Primary School, the new school area is 450 square meters, built by the villagers of Xiasi and more than 30 volunteers, the main structure of the building is made of light steel keel, composite infill panels as a peripheral protective structure and plays a role in strengthening the overall structure, which can withstand 10-magnitude earthquakes. The building also adopts heat insulation and heat storage materials, with multi-storey structure and appropriate door and window positioning, to ensure that the building is warm in winter and cool in summer and has sufficient natural lighting. The school faced the dilemma of the need to dismantle the train track crossing shortly after use, and the mobility of the positioning at the beginning of the design ensured that the school could be rebuilt off-site without wasting anything.
(Source: Archdaily)
The "cooperation house" designed by architect Xie Yingjun uses all the resources that can be used around as building materials, such as branches, stones, plants, soil and other local materials, and organizes local residents to participate in the design and construction, hoping to achieve the harmonious unity of structure, materials, space, aesthetics and sustainable architectural concepts. This kind of temporary "co-working house" building has played a huge role in the emergency building after the earthquake.
(Source: Xie Yingjun Architects)
02
Temporary construction, the new force of sustainable construction
With the industrial revolution, the rapid development of modern architecture and the full arrival of the information age, a number of large and expensive permanent buildings have been built in a short period of time, resulting in a large amount of construction waste that cannot be recycled, resulting in a huge waste of resources, which makes people question the "permanence" of buildings today, and Japanese architect Toyo Ito once pointed out that buildings should be fickle and an instantaneous phenomenon.
At this time, the advantages of temporary buildings are revealed, and temporary buildings will not cause harm to the environment after completing its mission, which is in line with the requirements of environmental protection and sustainable urban development.
In 2000, the paper tube arch dome designed by Ban Shigeru and German architect Frei Otto for the Japan Pavilion at the Hannover World Expo in Germany attracted worldwide attention. Due to the temporary nature of the Expo pavilion, the Japan Pavilion will be demolished at the end of the five-month exhibition period, and the designers took into account the issue of material recycling at the beginning of the design.
As a result, the main body of the building uses paper tubes, paper films and other materials, which reduces the damage to the environment and facilitates recycling, which perfectly fits the theme of the Expo "Man, Nature and Technology".
Japan Pavilion at the Hannover World Expo, Germany (Source: Ban Shigeru Architectural Design Official Website)
In the process of planning a new temporary office area project for the national new area Xiong'an New Area, architect Cui Kai used container technology to meet the "rapid" and "temporary" construction needs, all the boxes are modularized to adapt to different spaces and recent use area requirements, and if there are other needs in the future, they can also be adjusted to adapt to different spaces. When the building completes its current functional mission, it can be simply dismantled and recycled, reassembled off-site and continued to be used.
Xiong'an New Area Enterprise Temporary Office Area Project (Source: School of Architecture, Tianjin University)
Since the beginning of the 21st century, with the release of Agenda 21 for the Olympic Movement: Sport for Sustainable Development, the Olympic Games have become increasingly closely linked to the concept of sustainable development, especially the Winter Olympics, which require the construction of ski resorts in the mountains. In order to ensure the sustainability of the Games, successive Winter Olympic Games have solved the space problem of auxiliary functions through a large number of temporary buildings.
At the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics, Cypress Built a large number of temporary tents around the original Ski Service Building; up to 90% of the temporary facilities were used in the snowboard and freestyle venues of the 2014 Winter Olympics in Sochi; and about 80% of the more than 20,000 square meters of indoor space in Phoenix Ski Park to ensure the operation of the event were temporary buildings at the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang.
In the 2022 Beijing Winter Olympics, The Genting Ski Park in Chongli, Zhangjiakou, hosted 20 sub-events of freestyle skiing and snowboarding, and 90% of the functional needs of the Winter Olympics depended on temporary buildings, with about 22,000 square meters of temporary space, almost reaching the level of small-scale urban blocks. These temporary buildings reduce the permanent footprint on the site and also reserve space for the continuously operating ski resort to continue to evolve.
Genting Ski Park (Source: Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee official website)
Temporary building of Genting Ski Park (Source: Beijing Winter Olympics Organizing Committee official website)
03
When architecture is free of constraints, there are more possibilities
The short life cycle of temporary buildings and the setting of fewer restrictions on space and materials will give architects more space to play and redefine the vitality and creativity of buildings.
The Serpentine Gallery in London, England, is one of the most iconic temporary buildings in the world. Since 2000, the Serpentine Gallery has commissioned a temporary summer pavilion or group of architects each year. How to find more possibilities in temporary buildings is the topic that the Serpentine Gallery gives to architects.
In 2000, the first designer invited by the Serpentine Gallery was Zaha Hadid, Zaha's design concept was to abandon the original tent shape and redefine the meaning and role of the tent, and it was such an avant-garde design idea that laid the foundation for the Serpentine Gallery as the organizer of the pursuit and goal for many years: "change and innovation".
The 2015 temporary pavilion of the Serpentine Gallery was completed by Spanish designers José Selgas and Lucía Cano, whose bold and childlike use of colours breaks the dull style of previous years and brings many surprises. Inspired by London's crowded underground, the architects designed the pavilion as a giant wormhole where people can feel the joy of childhood as they walk through the translucent plastic film structure.
In many activities, temporary buildings also have a special significance. On Burning Man's Day in the United States in August 2018, architect Arthur Mamou-Mani designed a temple called "Galaxia," which consists of 20 timber trusses in a spiral structure, resembling a galaxy in the vast universe. After the event, these temporary buildings will be demolished, like the sand paintings of the mandala in Tibetan Buddhism, reminding people to cherish the present.
In October 2020, the centers of Beijing, Wuhan and Xiamen built three small wooden houses in almost instantaneous time, which was the live broadcast of the CCTV "Readers" column group. During the three days of live broadcasting and the next two weeks of open days, a total of 672 people entered the reading space to read volumes, and the three cabins witnessed the moment they picked up the book and read their hearts, witnessing their pain, joy, courage and hope.
Although it takes less than two months from design, construction, to use and demolition, the humanistic significance of such temporary buildings is worth the architects' careful consideration.
(Source: "Readers" column group)
epilogue
After seeing these temporary buildings where warmth, radicalism and avant-garde coexist, do you have a new understanding of architecture?
The value of a building is not in the length of time it lasts, but in whether it is helpful and inspiring to people, and from this point of view, the temporary building conveys an eternal spirit.
Perhaps, a child who has been sheltered by a temporary building and wandered around in a serpentine gallery can become the winner of the next Pritzker Prize.
Resources:
Paper Architecture – What Can Architects Do for Society? (Author: [Japanese] Ban Mao, Translator: Wang Xingtian, Publisher: Jiangsu Science and Technology Press)
"Research on Temporary Building Design Methods Based on Rapid Construction" (Author: Peng Ze)
Temporary Heritage: Sustainable Design Strategies for Prefabricated Temporary Buildings for the Winter Olympics (Authors: Chen Rongqin, Li Shichong)
Serpentine Gallery 2022! First non-professional architect design, "Black Church" scheme announced (Archdaily)