Published in the MAJA Estonian architectural review 3-2015

Finnish architect and environmental artist Marco Casagrande participated in Tallinn Architecture Biennale with his experimental project “Paracity”. A few months before the biennale he had a conversation with the chairman of Estonian Centre of Architecture Raul Järg.

At first I would like to ask you about the beginning of your career. You said that the architect inside you committed hara-kiri. How did you become an environmental artist?

During my studies I had built so much belief in architecture that I somehow could not separate the idea of architecture and the architect. I saw them as one thing. When we set up the office and started working with clients, I thought that everybody would have the same idea about architecture – how great architecture is and how much it has to offer. I thought that the client would be totally aware of this and that they would come to have an architect help them with the processes so that these ideas could become true. But it was not like that at all. The clients were used to thinking that the architect is a tool, the guy who gets the permission, who makes the city allow them to do what they want to do. But that has nothing to do with architecture. They call it development, but usually it’s a kind of building pollution. Architects work together with money and so this bad development happens. And we were part of that. I started feeling sick of betraying my own dreams and beliefs so fast that in half a year I had become everything I always hated and then I wanted to kill this person.

How did you do it?

Now looking back it seems that I never lost my belief in architecture but only in the architect. Together with my friend Sami Rintala, with whom I was working at that time, we decided that we will do it in a very graceful way, honoring the big idea of architecture. In Japan this kind of suicide is called hara-kiri. So we tried to commit architectural hara-kiri. We put the little money that we owned into one project and decided that in this case there will be nobody else telling us what to do. We had to be the client to ourselves, make the design, get the permission and build it. Step by step we completed our first big architectural scale landscape installation in Savonlinna. It is amazing how much people believed in us. The construction workers were our friends; they volunteered to come in for weeks. The city gave permission immediately. There was no business, no speculations – people just helped us. It touched them and that was a big surprise for us. Then we did this big work and actually burnt it at the end – which was the hara-kiri. I guess some sort of honesty was so much around that this started our career.

You started to get invitations from different places.

Yes, and from places we were not even aware of. And that there were other layers in the architectural world, like biennales, magazines, some organizations that were actually working with the core of architecture. And it is pretty much the same idea we had in university.

You have done very different kinds of projects and art projects. What would you like to bring out yourself?

I have done maybe about 70 projects since 1999. Many of them are just opportunities that arose somewhere. Most of the cases are not financed. Those aren’t commissions in a sense that you are invited, how many square meters are needed, what is the budget and time-frame. They are more like opportunities where something good can be done. Sometimes I see an opportunity and have to find a client for myself – make someone else see this opportunity. Sometimes it’s like a Trojan horse – I’m doing something for the client, who is maybe even paying for it and getting what he wants, but besides that I’m doing something else too and that’s the real work. Sometimes the strategy works two ways. If the city doesn’t want to risk too much and commission me to do the real work, they ask me to do something else. And they know that I’m doing the “real” work too. If it becomes politically too risky for them, they will talk about only the work that they commissioned. But when the “real” work becomes good, they focus on it. Like in Treasure Hill.

Can you tell me some more about this project?

With Treasure Hill, I realized how windy the power structures are. Reality is total and it cannot be speculated. But when you deal with fictional power, it is always based on speculations. The city government had started destroying Treasure Hill, but when we started the counteraction and gained so much publicity that it started to gain political momentum, the same politicians changed completely. They saw that they can use it for their own good. If at the beginning they were 100% against Treasure Hill and wanted to destroy it, then after 3 weeks they forgot this completely. Before I used to think that destruction and construction are on opposite sides of an axis, but it’s more like a circle that is made up of both destruction and construction.

Was the name of the place also Treasure Hill before?

Yes, it was Treasure Hill. It used to be an anti-aircraft position for the Japanese army. After WW II, when Kuomintang was retreating from mainland China to Taiwan, they took over the Japanese army positions and Treasure Hill was one of those. When Kuomintang’s soldiers came to Treasure Hill there had already been civil war in China for 25 years. It’s a very long time. Then they came there, put up their anti-aircraft guns and were waiting for the Maoist planes from mainland China that never came. So it was boring. Then they started to find wives in Taiwan, got married and had children. The wives started complaining that living in the bunkers was ridiculous. So they started to decorate the bunkers and build houses on top of the bunkers. They became homes and when at some point Kuomintang said that Treasure Hill had lost its strategic value and they must move somewhere else, the soldiers refused. Treasure Hill became a slum, an unofficial settlement of soldiers and their families.

At one point the officials wanted to demolish the site.

Yes, in 2002 they started the demolition and in 2003 I was in Taiwan and started to stop it.

At the end of the day it became like a tourist attraction.

Yes, that’s a shame. I had a very idealistic view of it. The Treasure Hill community was old – 80 year-old war veterans. On one hand, it was a wonderful 3-dimensional settlement without any cars. But actually it needed quite a lot of physical effort to use it – carrying the water to the hill and the garbage down. There were many empty houses because people moved away or died. So I thought that for the continuity of Treasure Hill and this very nice community way of living they need a new plan. The empty houses can be used by students or artists and they don’t have to pay rent but instead serve the old people. That was the idea. When they started moving in, it turned out different. They got so much attention, because great artists were there. The focus shifted from Treasure Hill’s original community to the new community. It gave a totally new vibe to the place and in the eyes of the official city it was so sexy so they changed step-by-step the whole of Treasure Hill into a place for artists. And then the original community died.

But maybe it gave new life to it anyway?

Yeah, the officials probably think of it that way. And it is true that the old community was so old that they died naturally. But the continuity became something different, now it’s fully artistic.

It’s not only this place where artists have taken over.

Yeah, it’s kind of a normal thing to happen, I guess.

Let’s talk about your recent idea – Paracity. Tell me the story behind it.

Paracity was born because of Treasure Hill. After Treasure Hill I got a professorship in Taiwan for 5 years, and then I was researching all kinds of settlements and local knowledge and getting deeper into that. The city government and the JUT developers at some point asked me to think about the potential for building floodplains on the Taipei river systems. When typhoons are coming the rivers rise a lot. There is a lot of land that is not developed. And on the other hand, the city is totally disconnected from the river environment. They wanted me to think about structures that could both develop these river bank areas and floodplains in an ecological way but also reconnect the city with the river. It was kind of no man’s land we were operating with: an island – 1 km long and 300 metres wide – that always disappears when the river is flooded so there are no houses. The city wanted us to make an urban structure there for 15,000 to 25,000 people. From the beginning I wanted to do a modular platform for people to actually build their own homes. In Taiwan there is a really high number of illegal buildings and illegal building extensions. People take it for granted that if they get an apartment house and it’s 5 floors, for sure they can build 2 floors more just by themselves. The facades become humorous. So it’s always been. It’s the same thing with the unofficial communities, they are fantastic – totally self-built and self-organized. So I thought that I wouldn’t even try to do a city that is ready or totally controlled. Like in Treasure Hill, people will come and start building their homes, and communities will start coming organically.

The idea was very simple – we need to develop the primary structure of the city, kind of a scaffolding, where people can attach their communities. At the beginning I was thinking of steel because I admire the high-rise buildings in Taiwan when they are under construction: steel frames look really good and full of potential, but when the building is ready, it gets boring. Later I found out about this material CLT – cross laminated timber, and I got really interested in that because it would be ever more ecological if we could take this kind of wood from the Northern forest. In 2014 they opened the first CLT factory in Finland, so now we can get the material there. Now Paracity is a wooden structure. The dimensions of each module is 6x6x6 m and then put cubes on top of each other to make a village or a city. The wood element is 50 cm thick, which means it burns slowly. The charcoal surfaces take such a long time for the wood to burn so that it’s more or less fireproof and it has also excellent earthquake performance.

In what phase are you with this project?

I hope it’s going to be built. Taipei is the first case study and we start building earliest in 2016. Another interesting pile of projects has come from North Fukushima in Japan. I’m going there to see three different sites they are considering a Paracity to be built in the tsunami area. Then there are other calls from Jakarta, Rio de Janeiro and interestingly from Pakistan. But nothing is built yet. One to one scale we have already built one module in Finland to test how fast it is going to come together and that the wooden joints are working and so on. In Tallinn we are doing 15 modules. It will be the first in the biennale to serve the Paracity idea, but it will certainly have an afterlife, become a permanent structure for something.

So it’s a kind of platform for people to construct their own houses on.

My ideal is for it to become a slum but in a way that it’s both ecologically okay and healthy. To make that happen we have to put some environmental technology inside. Paracity becomes “positive cancer” in the city – receives the leftovers from the city, treat them and turn them into resources. Just what slums are actually doing right now. But we make it more efficient and for that the environmental technology is needed. We are just copying how the unofficial settlements are already living or how slums live in symbiosis with the city.

I studied for quite a long time a chain of slums with 700,000 people in Mumbai, settled along the river. There the waste that can be treated, turned into resources, but all the rest gets dumped into the river. Then they wait for the monsoon and it becomes like flushing the toilet of the city. But in Paracity we don’t have to flush the toilet.

Those concepts are more for cities in the East, or can they also be used for Northern or Western cities?

These concepts can also apply to Western cities. When you think of the method of Paracity, it is like urban acupuncture. Even in the West cities are a source of pollution. Small-scale interventions could also start affecting the cumulative development in Western cities. The biggest environmental questions are still in regard to emerging cities. In the West, the urbanization has already happened, but if you look at other places this is on a scale that it has never existed before. So Paracity could live together with the emerging city and act as the buffer zone.

This concept is connected with your idea of third generation cities.

I have made it very simple in my thinking. A first generation city is totally based on nature. A second generation city is an industrial city. A third generation city would be kind of a ruin of the industrial city. Identifying how an industrial city can become an organic machine. Ruin for me is when something manmade has become part of nature. In architecture it happens actually quite easily if you lose enough human control. On an urban scale the question is even more interesting. Paracity is kind of a method for ruining the industrial city. I would like it to grow into an industrial city from these acupuncture points and then start ruining the industrial city. And when this nowadays industrial core and these new organic layers find a certain balance, that is the third generation city.

Is that why you named one of your projects Ruin academy?

In Tamkang University I was studying the phenomenon of ruins and doing research on how nature is reading architecture. Then it just opened up more and more. Taiwan is easy because nature is so fast. There are trees that are growing on steps. Nature uses the man-made structures. I felt that I would like to move into a ruin and live there for a longer time, in order to have time to adjust my needs. So I informed the Tamkang University professor Chen who is the dean of the architectural department. We went to meet Mister Lee, who owns a small place half an hour from the university. There’s a river valley and rice farming. They had clean water coming from the mountains so they could make tea, a tea factory. But at one point it had burned so there was no roof, just the ruins. Also the rice factory was ruined.

I chose the rice factory, the tea factory I left for the students. So I didn’t go to the school any more but the students came there. First I had to decide where I can put my bed, but since there was no roof, I had to make it. And when I was building the roof I saw that below me there was a plant and it was growing there because there was no roof. So I fixed not all the roof, but kept a hole for the plant. Soon I took my wife Nikita there and then we stayed there for a couple of nights and finally she moved in too. Then I had to make ways to clean ourselves – there is a small river, so I can have cold water, but how to make hot water? How to make food? Like a civilization. It was of course very primitive but we stayed there. It was functional. I made the students live in the tea factory, not always, but they had to make shelters for themselves.

How long did you stay in the ruins?

One year, maybe a bit more.
In many cases rumors are powerful. The whole valley knew what I was doing. The rumors spread along the river so that one farmer from upstream came to me and said that we know why you are here and what you’re doing, so can you design us the house – we want to live in the ruin too. And I designed them the Chen house. It’s a designed ruin. After the Chen house one developer asked if I know some ruins in Taipei city and step by step it became a Ruin Academy.

I remember you once described the house as a boat.

Yes, the Chen House was also like that. It is like you have a site and it’s not just putting the building there but you somehow have to sail the building. You have to know where the big winds are coming from and how it’s changing. Also you find some natural shelters. So you consider these natural conditions and you sail this ship to the harbor.

In the beginning you talked about how you wanted to kill the architect, but the architect inside you is now reborn, you are getting commissions and real projects. So did you make the space around you, so the issues that bothered you before, are actual now?

No, they are not addressed so much any more. I’m getting a little bit freer. More and more people are starting to make apartment buildings out of wood. If I were making them out of concrete it would be a different story. Now everything out of the forest comes into the city.

You are working on “real” projects again.

Yes, we are doing quite large-scale CLT wooden apartment buildings in Finland.

There are not many environmental artists in Finland.

No, but I think that architecture is an environmental art.

Let’s finish the talk with another project. Did the Sandworm work come after the Ruin Academy? How did this idea come to your mind?

In 2009 I was working in Shenzhen with a project called Bug Dome. There I built a similar kind of structure out of bamboo. The migrating workers came from Guanxi province and I was asking them about their local knowledge. They said that they can do anything out of bamboo. You need just bamboo, water and fire. Then I improvised this building called Bug Dome. It’s very similar to the later one. Then I got an invitation from Belgium and I went to the site and I found that they are using willow a lot. Willow structures for canals are their local knowledge. Then I turned it upside down – used it above the ground.

It was a nice story, how people started to use it in different ways.

Yes, that is also something that quite often happens. You say form follows function. But I didn’t want to follow any function. The dunes are always the same shape because of the wind, so there already existed an architecture. This was actually just copying one dune.

But people afterwards find the function.

Yes, they called it the ‘willow cathedral’. Some people got married there, kids were playing, there were a lot of picnics – like they would use the beach anyhow. It was not an interior or exterior space, but just a space. It was still a beach.

It was there only for one summer. Are most of your artistic projects temporary?

Quite often yes. Some stay, but many of them are not even meant to stay.

Temporary is an interesting quality. It seems to allow architecture much more freedom and psyche than a totally controlled, a totally fixed building. Tarkovsky’s Stalker says that strength is death’s companion – whatever comes stiff and strong will die. In this sense architecture must be pliant and weak, like a willow. It doesn’t help much if you are meant to “last forever”, but you are dead from the beginning.

For example cities are alive, they are collective human organism and also expressions of collective mind. But we treat them as something designed, regulated and controlled – expressions of mechanical human control, industrial laziness. This is a fundamental mistake and the source of stress and pollution. As architects, we don´t know how to negotiate with the collective mind, and we definitely don’t try – we are cheap. We have shifted away from nature, including human nature. We have become pollution, death’s companions…

Text: Niilo Tenkanen

For Modernism the city is a machine – For biourbanism it is an organism. Modernism has been the dominant paradigm in urban planning for almost a hundred years. Still it has serious deficiencies for which biourbanism is able to respond. Paracity is a practical application of the biourbanistic approach to urban planning.

Until the 20th century cities developed organically. The task of urban planning (if there was any urban planning) was to define the structure of the city: streets, general rules and major public buildings. Within the structure, the city itself was able to grow relatively freely, following the architectural ideals of each era. For modernism an organically grown city was a crime. This lead to the era of “urban hygiene”. Modernistic urban planners wanted to hygienically separate working places, homes and public services. After that there were no more urban blocks and urban planning was no longer planning. Instead, planning became “zoning” and the city were separated into apartment blocks, service blocks, industrial blocks, public service blocks and recreational blocks. Not only the city but the human became a machine. Planners thought that the needs of people could be mapped and the correct form of city could be determined from the results.
As people of the 2010s we could laugh at the idea about man machine, but there is no reason for arrogance. Urban planning is still focused on prophesying the life of people in the future. The planned city is then a ready-made set-up based on a guess about the proposed state of peoples’ everyday lives. Some of the largest urban planning issues are still how much light from windows every people need, how many parking lots every citizen needs and what is the number of trees every person should be able to see from the window. Citizens do not have the power to affect the development of the city surrounding them. Self-driven attempts to create urban space are not welcome in the modern city.

For biourbanism a human is not a machine. A human is an organism, the city is an organism and the network of cities is a big ecosystem. The city is formed by dynamically linked layers and those layers are not linked straightforwardly. Due to the organic structure of the city, the development of the city and peoples’ activities in the city are not predictable. The city and city-dwellers are only partly rational and chance plays a prominent role. People’s needs and desires change over time and every citizen is a different story. We don’t know what kind of world we will have in the 2020s. How could we know how the people of the 2020s want to live?
Modernism made a big mistake when it tried to see and decide in advance how people will and should live. It is clear that this is much too difficult. The human being is too complex and erratic. When trying to plan a city for an erratic human, modernism ended up simplifying people’s needs and the human mind. Furthermore, modernism was confined to fulfill only a few needs: the need for an apartment, the need for basic services, the need for recreational areas near to the home and the need for a car storage. Many important needs were forgotten, the main ones being the need for creativity and for creating one’s own environment. In relation to their own environment, the citizens have become dumb. In a modernistic city the citizens are only a silhouette of themselves.
A biourban city (such as Paracity) offers the structure within which the city can grow. Paracity is the skeleton of the city and the backbone of life. It is not based on architects’ and urban planners’ ability to foresee the future. Instead, Paracity is based on local tradition and city-dwellers’ problem-solving abilities and creativity. For instance, in Taipei there is still a strong tradition of building and farming residual spaces. Every possible space will have (illegal) buildings or structures. Empty spaces waiting for planning permission will transform into community gardens. When designing a working eco-city, that tradition is a lot more usable than the fixed and stiff modernistic urban planning called “zoning”.

Biourbanism does not define what cities should look like. This separates it from architectural theories as functionalism. Neither does it define how people should live their everyday life in the city. Biourbanism is an attitude towards the city and city-dwellers. For biourbanism the human is a human again instead of being a machine. Less is more is false. Flesh (the human in all his or her complexity) is more. In a modern city the human is forced to live in a ready-made urban nightmare and his or her role is simply to attempt to integrate. Instead, we need cities built by their residents. We need biourban cities.

Interview by Mia Zhang for Pro Design Magazine, China 1/2014

Part 1 Career

MZ: What inspired you to get into architecture?

MC: I have always been drawing, playing in forest, building snow cave systems and imagining my own worlds, telling stories to myself. I didn’t choose architecture, I just ended up there.

MZ: What would you prefer to be called, architect, environmental artist, or social theorist?

MC: I would like to be called something that combines all of those three. Maybe Constructor or Insect.

MZ: You majored in architecture in college, how did you start with environmental artistic and social projects in the beginning?

MC: Our education was quite mixed with other disciplines of art and architecture was viewed as constructive art. I did the first real environmental art work in 1999 – “Land(e)scape”, but this was not connected with school, but our own work as Casagrande & Rintala. That was followed next year by the “60 Minute Man” in the Venice Biennale, “1000 White Flags” in Finland, “Convoy” in Finland and “Quetzalcoatlus” in Havana Biennale, Cuba. 2001 we did the “Bird Cage” in Yokohama Triennale and “Installation 1:2001” for Firenze Biennale. All these were done before my graduation in 2001, but had nothing to do with universities, except that we got help from other students. Land(e)scape was the beginning and everything else followed up by an accident.

MZ: Since 1999, you have created 65 cross-disciplinary, original and radical works within 14 years? It sounds quite a large number to me. How would you be so inspired a lot and complete so many projects?

MC: There is no limitation for inspiration. Limitation is a different thing. Life is unlimited inspiration. Inspiration is kind of a thought originating from nature, the life-providing system. This system is one big brain and if you connect with it, you are inspired. Nature thinks through you.

MZ: I saw a picture of you carrying stones during the construction of Bug Dome project in Shenzhen City. Are you always engaged yourself in the whole construction process?

MC: Being present is the key of all art. It is a blessing, not a burden. Architecture is not a remote control art, but it requires humane presence. I must be there in order to understand, what the architecture is trying to transmit, what it needs to become. I am a simple architect, not a fortune-teller…I need to be there.

MZ: You studio name is Casagrande lab. I mean, Casagrande is your name, of course, but why “lab”? Is experimentation your major focus? Then what do you experimenting on?

MC: We are working more like a laboratory than an office. All our work is project based and cross-disciplinary. Sometimes, when we are really good, you could call us a circus. Art is a constant experiment by its nature. Also the deepest nature of architecture is the unknown.

MZ: I see you used a lot of willow and wood. I mean, wood would be more acceptable than willow in modern city, right? And I have seen willow woven objects like basket. They are adorable, and because they are small they don’t seem to contrast drastically to the modern world. But a large project, like Cicada in Taipei, would contrast a lot to the surrounding, at least to me. So how do you see that contrast?

MC: Mixed feelings. It shows how brutal the surrounding city is, but same time offers an escape or retreat to the modern man. In some sense this kind of insect architecture is acting as a mediator between the modern man and nature. You can also see how totally the modern city is lacking local knowledge.

MZ: How would you describe your style?

MC: No trends, no style – just architecture. Later, when the transformation is complete, my way is insect architecture.

MZ: Do you have a dream project?

MC:
1. Mixture of a shopping center and jungle.

2. Nomad City.

3. Ruin of the Capital of the World.

4. Floating self-organizing city based on cargo ships out of duty.

5. Own cross-disciplinary architecture school focusing on Urban Acupuncture, Third Generation City, Ultra-Ruin, Urban Nomad and Local Knowledge.

6. Having a C-130 and putting our Laboratory in there.

7. Urban Acupuncture for slums, illegal communities and emerging cities of the world. Transforming them into future resource.

8. Learn how to use the Local Knowledge that is pouring into the Chinese cities from countryside with migrating workers and transforming an existing city into the Third Generation City.

9. Good houses for good people.

10. Building with nature as co-architect.

MZ: What do you enjoy most in your work?

MC: Seeing the unknown, forgotten and neglected. I enjoy the feeling of freedom and clarity, when you are truly working, when architecture is near.

MZ: What do you think is the most important quality of an architect?

MC: There are different ways, not only one. Some architects have the capacity of being a design shaman, interpreting what the bigger nature of collective mind or shared conscious if transmitting. This shamanism is close to nature.

MZ: What are the aspects of architecture you consider most important?

MC: Constructing human environment as a mediator between man and nature. This can be both practical and spiritual.

MZ: What do you think of the current situation of architecture?

MC: Boring.

MZ: Could you share with us briefly about what you are working on currently?

MC: I am setting up NOMAD – an environmental art and architecture school with architect Hans-Petter Bjørnådal in Hemnes, Norway and I am setting up Ruin Academy with architects Roan Chin-Yueh and Hsieh Ying-Chun in Taipei and with the International Society of Biourbanism in Artena, Italy. I am starting to design a new wooden house in Taidong, South-Taiwan. This house will be floating in jungle.

Part 2 Life

MZ: I saw you quoted Bertolt Brecht “In a dream last night, I saw a great storm. It seized the scaffolding….” So you read a lot of Bertolt Brecht? Which of his book do you like? What other writers do you like?

MC: I like Brecht poems. They are good for hang-over.

A. Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness

B. Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic

C. Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectics of Enlightment

D. Burgess: A Clockwork Organge

E. Claude Levi-Straus: The Savage Mind

F. Beckett: Waiting for Godot

G. Lao Tzu: Dao Te Qing

H. Kropotkin: The Spirit of Revolt

I. Kalevala

J. Tolstoy: War and Peace

But movies are equally important:

A. Tarkovsky: Stalker

B. Ford Coppola: Apocalypse NOW!

C. Lang: Metropolis

D. Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey

E. Eisenstein: Ivan the Terrible

F. Bergman: 7th Seal

G. Kurozawa: Dersu Uzala

H. Herzog: Fata Morgana

I. Kaurismäki: Man Withouth Past

J. Schlöndorff: The Tin Drum

MZ: What do you believe in?

MC:
– Life / Nature

– Accident

MZ: Is there any difference between the working you and the not working you?

MC: I am in the ruins, in the cross-roads, on river banks and garbage dumps. The office-me is nothing of this, but I am constantly aware of it and constantly escape to the jungle.

MZ: What kind of lifestyle do you prefer?

MC: Real Reality.

MZ: What do you love to do when you are not designing?

MC: Fishing. Boxing. Drinking. Sauna. Play with kids. Enduro. Watch movies. Pick mushrooms.

MZ: Do you like music/books? What is your favorite musician/book?

MC: Right now I enjoy to dance Greek Zorbas with my 9 months old son.

MZ: You have traveled to many cities. Which is your favorite? What is the most impressive journey you’ve ever had? (Could you please provide one piece of essay of your journey with pictures?)

Once I drove a car (Land Rover Defender) from Finland to Japan through all Russia and Siberia. Another time I drove a KTM enduro motorcycle from Finland to China through Russia and Kazakhstan. Third trip to mention was working as a commercial fisherman / deck-hand for red salmon in the Bering Sea, Alaska. This time my wife Nikita was a net-hanger in the Naknek net-hanging shop Watzituya.

Text Francois-Luc Giraldeau
Photos AdDa Zei
Published in MARK Magazine #50, June/July 2014

Early in his career, Finnish architect Marco Casagrande grasped the need to cut across disciplines – in the arts and applied sciences – to give form to his broad vision of the built environment. His current research involves the development of urban interventions on different scales, projects meat to shape and follow the shift towards a postindustrial city: an organic matrix lying in ruin, within which nature and man-made constructions are closely intertwined.

In the Taiwanese jungle, nestled amid a tangle of tropical vegetation, Ultra-Ruin is autonomous and off-grid. The single-family house was designed to give rise to unfettered interaction between natural processes and built form over time. It epitomizes Casagrande’s experimental take on architectural conservation and puts a spin on the established view of bioclimatic concepts employed in the design of residential projects. Here the architect shows his appreciation for the tectonic qualities and the promising adaptive possibilities of a decaying brick farmhouse, a building that had fallen into disrepair and that was – and is – exposed to the elements and to wildlife.

Its renovation appears to have come about both organically and fortuitously. The architect drew upon the existing structure, using only minimal methods and resources to achieve tremendous gains in terms of spatial adaptability and flexibility. Casagrande explains that a commission of this kind “usually starts out with rough sketches and goes forward to small-scale physical models”. The architect who immerses himself “in the physical and cultural context of the project”, he stresses, is “all the more qualified” to execute his plan properly.

Encompassing two levels, Ultra-Ruin is a free-flowing sequence of serene spaces that engender spiritual reflection while mediating the contrast between inside and outside, deftly allowing one to assert itself within the other. Evoking the building’s lush setting are several local timbers, such as mahogany, which was used to construct the walkway that leads to the entrance. Other materials, however, provide a crisp, contemporary counterpoint to nature and to the project’s rustic appeal.

Casagrande’s work seems to be driven by the desire – if not archaic, then at least unconventional – to build shelters, improvised structures that grow from the inside out to gradually shape and enhance the lives of his clients. Poised between construction and destruction, Ultra-Ruin is an emotional piece of architecture rather than a pragmatic piece of convenience.

Katie Donaghy

A paracity is an organic structure which can encompass a large number of human individuals. It has some things in common with our current urbanised areas however a paracity is not bound to space. It can live off a currently existing city and inhabit the same space. It can be seen as a second layer on top of a society. A paracity lives off another city like a parasite off its host.

How will a paracity affect the city it is leaching from? If you imagine an actual leech and how it sticks onto your leg and sucks from your body. Not only does it take away a resource from your body it can also pump actual parasites back into it which will harm your body. However, if you imagine it as a structure leeching onto the main city it will pull resources from the city but also provide to the city and will grow through these actions. Local knowledge can spread through the fabric and infiltrates the city. The resources it takes from the city will however depend more on what the city is able to provide rather than what the paracity wishes to take from it. This will then develop into an organic relationship providing a physical structure where a community may begin to form. The paracity would ideally be where old is combined perfectly with the new without having to be old but simply by acknowledging the old. The paracity can do this as it attaches onto it and takes from the city what is no longer desired.

The structure of a paracity is unique in its construction method but also in the way that it chooses to move away from conventional traditional planning and architecture. It offers a personalized architectural identity in which individuals may develop their own space and transform a structure into a place. The paracity as a space is interesting similar to nature which grows around what is built a paracity will grow according to what is already present and what can be found to add onto that. Where nature may struggle a paracity will find innovative solutions to incorporate something into the structure or simply build around or on top of it. It is this biourban approach to design which allows for the development of a unique structure in which individuals will form a community. These individuals will naturally come together as they have the will to create something which is their own, which they can appropriate and share with others. In a growing society one must also consider access, provision and capacity. How will the design of a space cope with something which is completely unpredictable. The answer is found in how nature copes with growth and change in provision. The paracity has no limits which are not defined by nature itself. The paracity offers a place with new aims and thoughts. With a new system of thought we can forge a new place which creates the space for a new society to combine with what already exists and the organic growth of nature.

The structure must offer organic growth and thereby give access to as much as it can. The structure may fold itself around what is currently present and thereby incorporate it in its design. How will individuals travel through this structure once it has become more than just a structure? The paracity seeks to be a point of play between the individual and the structure. As Foucault has said as humans we need this play to help us enhance who we are and what we deliver. This play will feed the structure as well as relationships between the individual and the structure and others living in the city. This play will form at the moment where the individual becomes a part of a greater picture, when an individual has invested in the city is the point where they will form a relationship which is constantly changing in order to accommodate others as well as the change in nature.

A crucial aspect for the success of a paracitic society in my view depends on how quickly a society will form and the pace at which it will grow. Societies and relationships form organically over time and are dependent on the detailed design of the structure. If one would put a very large number of strangers together the chance of success at forming a society will be lower than when a group naturally forms to subsequently slowly expands. This will be dependent on the initial structure present but also on what comes readily available from the city. If there is too much available for the paracity to leech on then there will be more chance for a fast growing structure which will not accommodate the natural growth we are seeking.

A place will also depend on growing organically in order to function as a society. Places have rules and community engagement. Elders often play an important role in being in charge and enabling a community to grow around them according to unwritten rules like in Treasure hill. In a paracity it is necessary for this hierarchy to form itself in order for the rest of the society to treacle down from this in such a way that there is no room for altruism and only co-dependencies. This allows a society to grow organically mimicking natural growth. Where in nature a tree will not grow under another tree or too near another tree because they would be fighting for each others light, ground and water in society we must live according to similar innate rules whereby we prove selfless and show an interest in the well-being of others. A paracity must therefore grow according to need rather than desire. When the city needs new labour or when relationships become complicated we must envisage that new people will come and help to form a greater community.

A community network often refers to an online form of community whereby individuals become linked through interest and other personality traits rather than according to location. This changes the way our day to day society works. If you think of a city no matter the scale we often do not interact with those in our close proximity. If we are lucky enough to live in an area where people spend a lot of time we may get to know some familiar faces however we still won’t often reach out for help or offer help as easily as we would if we were a part of a defined community network or living in a small village where everyone knows each other. As individuals we have the innate trait to want to help others whether it be because we care or simply because it makes us feel good. This gets lost in an individualistic city where we find it more difficult to extend help to a stranger but also where there is often no one to recognise and praise your efforts. The paracity offers a solution for this which is rooted in its design. The paracity offers a communication which lies beyond the current systems whereby the city itself becomes a form of communication. Those living in the paracity will communicate through the design and what they can offer to it.
The paracity defines itself in its origin as reliant on another living structure in order to forge its existence. Without another living structure it is unable to survive. It leaches off society in order to make its own. Through this act of leeching off another society it becomes to a certain extent dependent on it. This dependency is what creates a community network in the paractiy as individuals become reliant on one another to develop this complex structure. The structure of this paracity will depend on what is readily available and how different users come together and assemble these unique pieces. It is this act of coming together which will help different users to become more assimilated with one another and begin to develop a network. This network will then create a community with co-dependencies. In such a society where we are dependent on others it is more natural for individuals to form a society where they come in aid to one another. The society will then evolve naturally according to this pattern and what nature makes available to them. It is expected that the actual structure of the paracity will play a significant role in how the community interacts and creates links between one another. Dependent on the structure and how easy it is to create links between different sections will depend on how easy it becomes to forge relationships across different sections of the design.

Living in a close environment it becomes necessary to hold contact with one another as we are so dependent on what another individual chooses to do. How someone else chooses to expand or build their structure will directly affect those surrounding that structure. Whether it be through sound, changing of available daylight or access. All these things will come into play with the changing structure of the paracity. A strong community network will help individuals to form a social structure in which they aid one another to create a friendly more organic place to live. It is this friendly more organic structure which will then allows the community to continue to live according to paracitic rules and not to revert to the destructive ways of a traditional society.

Katie Donaghy is a biourban sociologist for Paracity / Casagrande Laboratory Center for Urban Research CURE and Programme Officer of Urban Design London.