INSECT ARCHITECT

Mia Zhang interviewing Marco Casagrande

PRO.DESIGN 01/2014 

ISBN 978-988-12438-8-1

Cicada, Taipei

Marco enjoys insect architecture construction, where the building parts are human scale --- fits a hand and the structure can be woven up together by small scale repetitions, like insect architecture. 

Pro. Design: What inspired you to get into architecture? 

Marco Casagrande (Marco for short): 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. 

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

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

T-Factory, Sanjhih, Taiwan

Pro. Design: Insect Architect?

Marco: I enjoy this kind of construction, where the building parts are human scale - fits a hand and the structure can be woven up together by small scale repetitions, like insect architecture. I got very curious about insects when fixing up a Fujian style brick roof in T-Factory, Sanjhih, North-Taiwan and a bee came to steal my cement from my red bucket. This big bee kept coming back and I wondered what he did with the cement --- could he digest it? (I had mixed some lime and sea-weed into the cement for flexibility.) After a couple of months I found the cocoon of the bee in the downstairs of our living ruin. He had mixed the concrete with mud and pieces of straw and wood in order to create a fantastic dome structure with natural ventilation for his offspring, which had flown away. I documented this cocoon and started imagining humans in insect scale and building these kinds of  cocoons and other insect architecture strictly tied with nature for us modern men as industrial insects. 

Wasp cocoon made out of weak concrete.

Pro. Design: Insect Architect? Since 1999, you have created 65 cross-disciplinary, original and radical works within 14 years? It sounds quite a large number. How could you be inspired so much?

Marco: 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.

Pro. Design: 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? 

Marco: 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. 

Bug Dome by WEAK! in Shenzhen, China. 

Pro. Design: Your 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?

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. 

Sandworm, Belgium

Sandworm, "Willow Cathedral", interior.

Pro. Design: You used a lot of willow. 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? 

Marco: 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.

Cicada, Taipei

Pro. Design: How would you describe your style?

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

Pro. Design: What do you enjoy most in your work?

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

Pro. Design: What do you think is the most important quality of an architect?

Marco: 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.

Chen House, Sanjhih, Taiwan

Pro. Design: What are the aspects of architecture you consider most important? 

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

Pro. Design: What do you think of the current situation of architecture? 

Marco: Boring. Modern architecture is dominated by industrialism and tries to compensate this trauma by flashy images and computer generated mutations. Architecture has become pornography for architects and kinky architecture hangs around politicians and businessmen, who get pleasure in dominating an architect to make their twisted orders come true. In this situation architect is a prostitute, which becomes boring after a while. We really have to focus on local knowledge and the possibilities of bio-urbanism together with normal people and get rid of the power-architecture. 

Ruin Academy in Artena, Italy

Pro. Design: Could you share with us briefly about what you are working on currently?

Marco: 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 Ching-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.

Pro. Design: 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 is your favourite? What other writers do you like?

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

    Joseph Conrad: Heart of Darkness 

    Arkady and Boris Strugatsky: Roadside Picnic 

    Adorno & Horkheimer: Dialectics of Enlightment 

    Burgess: A Clockwork Organge 

    Claude Levi-Straus: The Savage Mind 

    Beckett: Waiting for Godot 

    Lao Tzu: Dao Te Qing 

    Kropotkin: The Spirit of Revolt 

    Kalevala 

    Tolstoy: War and Peace 

But movies are equally important:

    Tarkovsky: Stalker

    Francis Ford Coppola: Apocalypse NOW!

    Fritz Lang: Metropolis

    Kubrick: 2001: A Space Odyssey 

    Eisenstein: Ivan the Terrible

    Bergman: 7th Seal

    Kurozawa: Dersu Uzala

    Herzog: Fata Morgana

    Kaurismäki: Man Withouth Past

    Schlöndorff: The Tin Drum

Pro. Design: What do you believe in?

Marco: Life / Nature, Accident

Pro. Design: Is there any difference between the working you and the not working you?

Marco: 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. 

Pro. Design: What kind of lifestyle do you prefer? 

Marco: Real Reality. 

Madam Chen at Chen House

Pro. Design: What do you love to do when you are not designing? 

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

Pro. Design: Do you like music? What is your favorite musician? 

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

Pro. Design: You have to expose yourself in nature so as to get inspired. But getting close to nature always reminds me of being wild and adventurous. Would the birth of your son change your way of approaching nature? Would you take a more reserved way?
Marco: Nature is about energy exchange. you have to input some of your own energy in order to receive reality. Other than that is just viewing of nature, which is kind of a fiction. Real nature demands your energy. Flesh is more. My son will not be "protected" from nature; on the contrary, the whole family will be fully sacrificed to nature. One has to die a bit to be re-born. 

[VIEW] Marco Casagrande – Rovine e Magia

Published in archiFETISH, Italy, Aug 2013

Incontriamo 1 Marco Casagrande in un cerchio totemico fatto di rovine, edifici bruciati e scheletri di antichi vermi della sabbia. Siamo all’interno del suo Laboratorio.

Sfacciato come mai in vita mia, mi faccio avanti, per conoscerlo. Mi presento, con il capo chino, ma con il cuore pieno di domande. Lui ci accetta, come potrebbe fare un bue, troppo poco disturbato dalle mosche per dar loro veramente peso.

In realtà non possiamo neanche dire di averlo incontrato; evocato2, al massimo.  Perché la sua figura sfuggevole è troppo complessa per essere riassunta in poche righe.

Potremmo dire che è un architetto antico 3. Un druido o uno stregone, se preferite. Ma sarebbe ancora riduttivo.

Qui sotto potete trovare la trascrizione della nostra piccola discussione. Spero la possiate trovare illuminante.

Buona lettura.

archiFETISH: Architect, sociologist, town planner.

In a world where the “BIG size” seems the most obvious way – just consider any project published in a magazine – you’ve decided to work about small, ephemeral and weak.

What are the differences, if any, between the design of a complex program and a handcrafted detail? Or better: do you believe your method and your work process are different from that of a large studio?

Marco Casagrande: There must be a strong bond between architecture and architect. Architecture must win architect ego and become itself. Architecture gives the commands and the architect listens. Architecture is not remote control. To be present is the key of all arts. If you remote control, you are possibly a designer, but never an architect. Are you ready to die on a construction site?

Construction workers are great. Industrialism is boring. Today’s architecture has become a fast food building pornography. Who remembers the buildings after a second?

aF: Seeing your work, I noticed two very interesting aspects.

The first is that, unlike the architects usually do, there is often a temporal component: the architecture becomes only the first phase of the project, as if at the moment of conception you also thought to the expiration date of your works.

Why do you find so fascinating producing ruins?

Marco Casagrande: Different works have different time-span what comes to energy. Drama requires the aspect of time. Time lives in architecture in many different layers.

The artificial time of industrial reality, the hacking rhythyms of non-organic fiction are the source of stress and prostitution. Ruin is beyond that. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature.

aF: The second thing I noticed is that some of your work could be associated with a ritual: they possess a magical and esoteric component such that the substance of the elements is of secondary importance compared to the positioning and their meaning.

Could you explain, in this sense, what is the concept of urban acupuncture? And how it can “cure” complex organisms such as contemporary cities?

Marco Casagrande: There is no other concept than nature. All the rest is fiction. Ritual means connecting man with nature. This can also be natural, every-day life without any ritual.

Urban Acupuncture is breaking the fictional layers of industrial corruption and patriarchal violence so that constructive organic reality can surface for people to attach to. People are breaking the city constantly. If they don’t, the city gets sterile and eventually nature will reject it.

aF: The city of Third Generation which images to the metropolis is a post-industrial city, in which ecology and sustainability seem to be our ultimate goal. In short, a return to the idea of bucolic and romantic agriculture. In this sense, it almost seems that in the future we expect a regression to the past, rather than a progress. 

As an architect, how do you solve what appears to be a major conflict? And what would be our role in a world where “build” could be obsolete?

Marco Casagrande: City is an extended market-place where people change goods and ideas – communicate and through the accellerated communication have a possibility of new knowledge building. Cities attract peole and cities will grow. Cities are the nests of industrial insects. Industrialism itself can only give a rather clumsy environment for the human nature to attach to. The city don’t actually fity to us perfectly. We are more nomads than fixed urban dwellers. This contradiction between our un-official nomadic nature and the official fixed city is causing the trauma of the modern man. Industrial city is the place for therapy. Third Generation City is balancing between industrialism and nature. It don’t claim to be independent from nature and it is much more physical than the urban reality today. Industrial ritual produces pollution, which is against the general life proving circles of nature. 3G city will attach again to these natural circles, but will not forget industrialism. Possibly cities will develop into hubs of urban superfarms and agri/agua culture. Maybe there will be only a few 3G cities in total. For example China may end up with only one nomadic urban ridge / river connected to some satellites. One man-made river.

aF: Finally, considering all this, can we say that your architecture is an anarchist? Could this be the reason for your success?

Marco Casagrande: I am more animist than anarchist. Anismist architecture where the built human environment works as a mediator between the man and nature. In this case architect is a shaman. Anarchism is politics – nature is reality. Don’t focus on the singing of the birds, but what is resonating behind the birds singing.

aF: Last question: you live in Finland, you have Italian origins, you have fought in Bosnia, you have an Asian partner, but you are very well-liked in the United States. Assuming that it is possible to identify a specific context, where do you think it’s more likely that this “Urban Revolution” could have origin?

Marco Casagrande: I come from Lapland. The revolution comes when you parachute a tundra-nigger into a modern metropolis. This revolution is my reaction to the alieantion of modern man from nature. Industrial city has claimed independence from nature, which is a lazy excuse for pushihg pollutino to nature, including human nature. Modern man in a box is doomed to dementia. This box must be ruined and modern man must be ruined. The industrial city must become an organic machine in straight interaction with the rest of nature. This organic ruin of the industrial city is the Third Generation City. Ruin is when man-made has become part of nature.

aF: Ok, thath’s all. Thank you for your kindness

Marco Casagrande: Thank you for these questions.

Change from organic city

Marco Casagrande

Article first published in International Society of Biourbanism, Jan 2013

The current massive urban immigration movement in China, brings people from every areas of the country to the megalomaniac cities, that all are the same. These farmers’ hands are constructing the new anonymous cities. The same hands that know the rural Local Knowledge through physical labor and passing of traditions through generations, are ending up to grease up “modernization” of China. I was working with a couple of illegal immigrant workers from Guanxi province in Shanghai, and asked them to build up fast a community center for migrant workers and this came up in a couple of days: http://bugdome.blogspot.fi/ (WEAK!)

I ask myself, if we really understand and utilize the potential of the movement from the Chinese countryside to the cities, and the local knowledge that is pouring into the cities right now. Can we interpret this volume of organic knowledge? What kind of cities could we really build, with the help of these people? Maybe we should build an illegal city?

Architects’ and designers’ position about organic knowledge is tricky. We are not the ones who carry this collective genetic memory on, but we are in a better position to interpret and negotiate with it, step by step, like a shaman getting answers from the organic side. This can easily go very wrong, when architect starts copyrighting fragments of local knowledge under his ego. I guess often it would be enough to create a platform of accidents for the organic knowledge to surface, start cooking, and finding its own forms and dynamics. Design is not necessarily needed in here, and design should not replace reality – while organic knowledge is close to reality, nature.

In the East Taiwanese town of Yilan there is a fantastic natural pond and cloth washing place, which has become a community center for women. They have developed this place into a roofing structure that grows into the water. All the pieces of the structure are very small, size of one woman to carry along with her cargo of dirty clothes. These small sticks are then tied together with stripes from worn out clothes, and this insect architecture has grown to be in lovely harmony with the site, the water, the sun circulation, and the trees.

A local architect spotted this, and built an “ecological cloth washing center” just 50 meters from the original women’s architecture. In fact, I was brought to admire this concrete and steel made washing station, and just incidentally I did found the original washing space. There were nobody on the architect designed place, whilst the women’s self-built structure was full of happily chatting ladies and their children.

Same kind of thing happened with Treasure Hill. First I was fighting alongside with the local community to avoid the destruction coming from the official city. When we succeeded, the place became a very famous reflection of organic knowledge and soon the city, after spotting this fame, sneaked in and gradually changed the whole real settlement into “Taipei Artist Village”, and the organic knowledge disappeared.

Has it all to do with abstraction in design? During the process, when the work is becoming itself, I need to create a kind of perimeter, or even a vacuum around it. Inside of such boundary I can nurture the kind of environment that starts up the composting process of the site. The work starts growing out of this compost. It can very likely be so, that the “smelliest” places of the city provide the most fertile top soil when composted.

Things are very simple and pleasing to work with when they are going towards nature. Other people, passers-by, and truck drivers instinctively also feel this kind of a level of energy and they don’t hesitate to get close to the work, the working process or the author – which is not necessarily the normal case with “fine-arts”. Nature is not considered as art for fine people. The barbarian savage, the “native” is closest to this art. Only the natives can use abstraction in the powerful way – all the others are just imitating. They don’t feel the general resonating behind the birds’ singing.

I was raised up in Finnish Lapland, in a small village called Ylitornio on the border between tundra and taiga. My father was the chief of police, my mother a teacher. Therefore we were living in the “official building” of the village, inside of which government officials, post-office, telephone center, fire brigade, police station, jail, and jail for escaped hunting dogs were settled as well. All the rest of the village was about modest farmers, fishermen and hunters. But nomadic Sami people were used to come to our one-street village to buy milk and beer, and the care taker of our house was a professional hunter. I started to go with him when I was 5 or 6 years old, and thus basically grew up both in the forest and in the government house. I was equally close to the Sami people as to the police officers. When I moved to Helsinki I didn’t feel much of this kind of connection anymore, but I strongly found it again in Taipei, when I found the urban nomads harvesting in the official city. They are the care-takers of the third generation city and we have to force the official city to contemplate this wisdom. Taipei has a change. Maybe even China has a change, but the feeling of the organic knowledge is the key to survive – in Lapland like in Shenzhen.

Images of Ylan’s women architecture, after Marco Casagrande & Tamkang University students, This is this and this ain’t something else but this is this (http://casagrandetext.blogspot.it/2009/01/taipei-was-ideal-place-to-build-up.html).

NOMAD CITY / AURORA OBERVATORY

Nomad City was a cross-disciplinary mix of environmental art, architecture, sociology and survival on top of the frozen Røssvatnet Lake (March 2012) up in the Scandinavian mountains near Mo i Rana in Norway. The nomad citizens come from the environmental art masters class of the Aalto University in Finland, from Lund University Department of Sustainable Urban Design in Sweden, from Madrid European University Department of Architecture, from Bauhaus University Department of Fine Arts in Germany and from Université Libre de Bruxelles Faculté d'architecture La Cambre–Horta in Belgium backed up with the local collage of construction experts from Mosjøen in Norway and the Varntresk community.

The students and professors represent all together 19 nationalities and were mostly urban nomads. They were driven to the frozen lake by determination of finding something primeval that can show them some new and fresh ropes within the disciplines of architecture, environmental art and urban design. After two weeks on the frozen lake they also got some fish.

Nomad Sauna on top of the frozen Røssvatnet Lake.

Fish is Real

Architecture is environmental art. The students were given a task to make a personal nomad shelter and collectively to build a movable Nomad Sauna on skies and an Aurora Observatory. Under the ice there were beautiful salmon related fishes - trout and arctic char. Local Knowledge was needed in order to get them up. The farmers around the lake were generous in helping the students and more than that curious to see if they could manage in the demanding Nordic winter conditions. For the course the survival was not enough - the students had to manage to construct in 1:1 scale and find beauty through their actions in the frozen environment. 

We had a cottage by the lake kindly supported by the Bjørnådal family. After opening up first time the cottage and building up the fire the students went in to dry their clothes and soaked souls and we realized that they will never come out. After that the cottage was highly regulated and the students had to rather do hard forestry work in small groups heating up the body to dry the clothes up from inside. There were partly two meters of snow and plenty of trees.

Nomad Sauna on skis.

After the daylight we got together at the Sæterstad farm which worked as our base camp to eat dinner and dry up clothes. This was also the natural time to talk and review their designs. To design is not enough. Design should not replace reality and there is only one real reality - nature. Step by step all the students were exposed to the elements and they started their modern archaeology towards the organic. Plans and design were changed; best of them were melted away. Some worked in the garage of the farmhouse, the most hard core students day after day on the frozen lake. They also got some fish and observed the aurora.

Without his Nomad Sauna modern man is just a common ape.

One evening we had a road kill ptarmigan for dinner. The students dried their socks hanging in the living room lamp. Young Agnes Born was singing us sensitive blues songs while the wings and legs of the ptarmigan were being frozen for her collection and getting rid of lice. Belgian guys made some Flemish pizza and the vegetarian students survived amazingly with muesli and risotto. At some point some of them were also reverted in eating raw meat. The Italian ladies made for us and the farmers tiramisu and chocolate cakes after Professor Bjørnådal corrected the group from selfish behaviour and advised that there existed also another kind of economy: giving.

Taking a healthy dip in the Nomad Sauna ice-hole corner.

The farmers accepted the students and the community took over the constructions. Now the Nomad Sauna is on skies during the winters and floating on the community's swimming beach during the summers. Ice fishers are using the Aurora Observatory which also has a fireplace to straight prepare the fresh fish. The individual structures are ending up around Varntresk tourist road as permanent works of environmental art. We got full support from the local people including fish and goat meat.

All in all the experience on the frozen lake was good. It was great to see the students from different disciplines working together and facing the same big voice of nature. Academic discipline means nothing. Nature means everything. Human nature as part of nature is the hardest discipline. 

Nomad Sauna. Marco Casagrande

LINK: VIDEO

This is how Lund University Department of Sustainable Urban Design students Guoda Bardauskaite and Suzanne van Niekerk review the experience in Norway:

SURVIVAL ARCHITECTURE WORKSHOP IN NORWAY

In the words of environmental architect and anarchist Marco Casagrande, ‘survival is just the first step in discovering true beauty.’ The Lapland native believes in an almost cruel method to his medium, where human intentions come naturally second to nature’s. It is with this in mind that one needs to approach his workshop on the frozen lake of Røssvatnet in subarctic Norway. Over the course of ten days, students were to join in on the creation of a nomadic city on the ice, both weathering and embracing the cold and wind, and alternating blizzards and slush.

Lund University Department of Sustainable Urban Design students with their nomad  shelter on the frozen lake.

There were twenty of us in total. In addition to Marco himself, his wife, Taiwanese journalist Nikita Wu, his long time friend, Norwegian architect Hans-Petter Bjørnådal, and Czech masters student and carpenter-extraordinaire, Jan Tyrpekl, made up the organizational team. The sixteen students, comprising of a whopping nineteen nationalities, came from four universities and four different artistic disciplines: Environmental Art students from Aalto University in Helsinki, Sustainable Urban Design students from Lund University in Sweden, Architecture students from UEM in Madrid, Spain and one Fine Art student from Bauhaus University in Weimar, Germany.

Kate Balcerowska' personal shaman symbols on the drum of the frozen lake.

Together we were going to create, explained Marco over generous helpings of Finnish vodka, a city of subtle proportions: a mobile city for nomads to respect and be humbled by nature. Individually, the students would make their own small ice fishing shelters come aurora observatories, but together we would create two key communal focal points: a large scale observatory and a sauna. As Marco liked to point out, a sauna is, simultaneously and contradictory, both an indicator of civilization and a chance for humans to return to a more bass nature.

Shaman drum playing in the Aurora Observatory.

Fish is Real. Aurora Observatory and a freshly caught arctic char.

From the beginning, the workshop was spontaneous and intuitive. The students were unaccustomed to each other, building process and materials were unsecured, and we camped in the local schoolhouse for the first two nights after our original accommodations fell through. Despite the circumstances though, there was an underlying sense of optimism present from day one. The workshop attracted a certain kind of spirit, and without complaint, we quickly came to appreciate the quirks of having road kill for dinner, wearing garbage bags as rain protection without the slightest sense of irony, and the joy of merely being out of the wind, even while being completely soaked to the core.

Shuchin Shen's dream storage. 

This was also a workshop about doing. We were encouraged to lay down our pencils and start experimenting with structures. It was about self-discovery, and Marco left us to our own devices. If we needed a consultation, he could be found on the ice, quietly fishing. There was no lack of inspiration, though. There is a rich heritage present in the Sami culture, and many of the citizens of Hattfjelldal were keen to talk with us. Every evening around a fire, Marco too would tell us tales of nomadic culture and myths and stories of his childhood. Perhaps the most prolific, though, nature affected both our design and our design implementation. 

Harri Piispanen building his Ice Sagcophagus / Anti-Sauna.

We experienced a massive range of weather conditions; from beautiful, clear sunny days with crisp snow underfoot, to sleet and hail, soggy snow, and powerful winds. With the former solid ice surface of the lake turning into a continuing series of thigh-high pools of slushy ice water, it took an afternoon to move the sauna the hundred or so metres from the shore on to the site. We had envisioned an easy and graceful move, hoping a helicopter pilot at the farm would transport it for us, dropping it into place without so much as a fuss. Of course, that was not to be, and instead it took the combined effort of ingenuity and raw strength of the entire group. And when it finally was settled, with the observatory in place next to it, we felt an overwhelming sense of accomplishment.

Georgia Psyrri's rocking chair and coffee. 

As the weather continued to worsen, Marco grew consistently cheerier. Keeping in line with his philosophy, it was almost as if the weather were conspiring with him to teach us the importance of survival. According to him, every architect needs the foundation of working with primitive tools under harsh conditions for their education. It should not be easy. But in truth, some things were made extremely convenient for us. The residents of Hattfjelldal treated us to their incredibly warm generosity. They taught us how to fish, provided us with materials, lent us tools, and avidly followed our progress by reporting on it in the local paper. Our hosts on the farm where we stayed organized a meeting with the local community where we had the opportunity to present our work and answer questions. 

The interest was so great that we learned that over 200 people, including the mayor, planned on attending the opening of our city. Which turned out to be an interesting, complicated day. From five in the morning, we were awake and on the ice, finishing our work in what can only be described as miserable weather. As midday – the scheduled opening time – approached, we sincerely wondered if all these people would still attend, in the gale force winds and relentless sleet. Yet they did come – some wading through the ice water, and some on snowmobiles and skis, and all with contagious good moods. Moss, a Greenlandic drummer, played while a young girl sang ritual Sami songs; the mayor, instead of opening the city with a ribbon cutting, drilled a hole in the ice, and we all indulged in the most exquisite local cuisine of hot fish soup and goat

sandwiches.

Lill Maria Hansen's lean-to.

In retrospect, it is tricky to evaluate the effectiveness of the workshop considering the prevailing chaos and not particularly polished final result. After such an inconsistent, unpredictable and uncontrollable process, it is not surprising that the nomadic city ended up looking like a haphazard collection of random shapes, reminiscent of ruins. But can one wish that a workshop centralized on survival be done in an orderly fashion? According to Marco’s philosophy, ruins are a tipping point when man-made becomes part of nature. Even the news that one student’s ice structure had melted into nothingness by the time of the opening was met with satisfaction – as we impose ourselves on nature, we have a responsibility to leave as small a trace as possible. Ultimately, it was about the process. Everyone had vastly different outcomes in their structures and artworks, but that is a positive thing. What this workshop really gave us was an opportunity to live and work for ten days in a place devoid of contrivances and ego, a “true reality”.

NOMAD CITY / AURORA OBSERVATORY

Site:

Røssvatnet Lake, Varntresk community, Norway

Participating universities:

Aalto University Environmental Art Master Program, Finland

Lund University Department of Sustainable Urban Design, Sweden

Madrid European University Department of Architecture, Spain

Bauhaus University Department of Fine Art, Germany

Université Libre de Bruxelles. Faculté d'architecture La Cambre -Horta, Belgium

Mosjøen College / Construction

Workshop leaders:

Marco Casagrande / Aalto University Environmental Art

Hans-Petter Bjørnådal / Bjørnådalarkitektstudio

Jan Tyrpekl, Assistant / Liberec University Faculty of Architecture

Kindly supported by: 

Sæterstad Gård

Varntresk Community

Hattfjelldal Munincipality

W H A T   I S   N O M A D ?

What is Nomad?

During the Nomad City / Aurora Observatory -workshop on frozen Røssvatnet Lake in Norway the students were asked to comment on What Is Nomad?

Photo: Greg Eeman

1.

State of the mind, never ending exploration of the space around us. Curiosity. Freedom of the choices. Everything and nothing. Sky and ground. Sound and silence. Light and darkness. Equality of days. Enjoying of time.

Photo: Ketil Born

2.

A nomad is in move.

• He carries all his life in:

- His body

- His backpack

- Something bigger

• The pattern of nomad’s constant movement can be:

a) Cycle based

b) Random

• A nomad whose movement is not cycle based is in constant discovery.

• Nomad’s connection to the environment is based on opposites:

- He is resistant ( A shell protecting from all unexpected and expected unpleasant conditions of the surrounding world.)

• But very depending:

- Climate

- Community

- Food

- Etc.

• A nomad can be lonely or not.

• A nomad can have a goal of his journey.

• A nomad can be a temporary condition.

• A nomad is me.

Photo: Guoda Bardauskaite

3.

Nomad lives without settling for set borders individually in a society connected in motion.

Photo: Valmar Valdmann

4.

A person wandering around installing his / her home to a place giving the best shelter, food etc. living conditions. He / she is constantly prepared to move the “home” in short time and live with the laws of nature.

Photo: Valmar Valdmann

5.

Native nomad populations were nomadic for survival purposes, primal survival. They were following herds and seasons by necessity. However, nowadays, my vision of what being a nomad is has greatly changed. It is an adopted lifestyle pushing us to follow our desires and curiosity. A “Neo-Nomad”, in my opinion, has an attach, an anchor … but escapes to discover, learn and try. Knowledge of yourself and your surroundings is what you have to gain and gather. It might also be a temporary lifestyle choice, like a backpack kind of hut, or some might chose a more permanent way to keep moving around. But in today’s world, there is something truly liberating in the possibility of escaping the ties of the modern world and start exploring.

Photo: Valmar Valdmann

6.

It seems that nomads have not local roots, maybe that is right, because they have the space to change – it is only a question of them where is the mental / spirit home of them.

They have another understanding of a family life; they have to live for each other, not only on birthday dates or Christmas time.

Nomads are the best human parasites in nature; they live with the nature besides for the nature. They are not asking them how achieve more than they needed in the past / not more than the other generations before.

Photo: Valmar Valdmann

7.

Nomads don’t live in a fixed place not because they can’t but because they want and need changing. Is also something that can be moved, small, comfortable, necessary. It can be also fixed but to welcome nomad people. (or not)

Nomad people are the ones who are travelling in a land and take all their belongings with them, even the house.

Photo: Valmar Valdmann

8.

To me, being a nomad is a way of life – on has a nomadic existence. It implies an understanding of the temporal nature of things. I feel it would be hard to live a nomadic life & to place value on permanence. Ones life would be in a constant state of flux as the living arrangement would always invariably change & it would be necessary to appreciate that if one were final happiness. There have been many cultures of nomadic peoples throughout history & of course it is very easy to romanticise such cultures. The constant changes can seem quite adventurous & while they very well may be, I think there also is steely determination behind it. It takes a great strength to believe that the weather will bring what you need where you are heading & also a great strength to believe in yourself & your family & your community that you are making the correct decisions. I think it would be quite hard.

Photo: Greg Eeman

9.

Nomad is a concept about travelling … The liberty to choose your environment., the people surrounding you. It’s something that makes you close to the person with who you are.

It’s a certain concept of liberty. Like a new kind of pirates free to go everywhere (without the stealing).

It’s also a way to be really close with the nature … to know how it works and live an experience in biosis.

Photo: Nikita Wu

10.

When I think of nomads I imagine a tribe of people travelling from one place and adjusting to another, for whatever reasons there may be. Even though they carry with them an air of temporarity, their culture and traditions are more than vivid and are enriched every time the tribe arrives and settles down to a new environment. To me not having a solid base is intriguing as it is very different from the society I was raised in. Through the presence of temporarity they seem have given up the security and developing options a solid base provides and gained a quality of life I admire.

Photo: Nikita Wu

11.

Waldo is nomad. No Made

- Following the game and the seasons to survive

- Change often of site

- Easy to build / deconstruct habitations

- Community / support / family

- Functions for / people different

For me, a nomad community is like a big family composed with people not only linked by blood, but by their ideals of an alternative life.

Photo: Raquel Pastel

12.

Nature. Togetherness. In a big “space”. Survival. Patience. Tranquility – thinking. Strong bonds. Family. Being together in a different way than we normally think people are “social” (being together). Since they are a smaller group of people (family, friends) than those you find in a city for example, they relate in a different way – their lifestyle makes them depending more on each other in order to survive and to have friendships. In this way you have to settle with your “neighbour”, even you like him or not – and you learn to be patient and to understand people. Another part is their relationship to nature – since they have to survive and find food, they need to know how “nature acts”, which also teaches them to respect nature. They depend on their knowledge of the environment and all aspects of nature and the earth. And they learn to respect it and its inhabitants.

Photo: Lill Maria Hansen

13.

Nomad is to live everyday life in accordance with the nature. It is the attitude towards the environment that you are in. For me, nomad people respect nature, they try to read carefully the messages sent to them by the mountains, the rivers, the trees, the animals, the sky, the sun, the moon … which are long forgotten by the modern people.

Nomad is also the attitude towards the changing of life, which is the biggest fear of the people in modern society. Nomad people accept changes and they choose to live their whole life with changes.

Photo: Lill Maria Hansen

14.

Most of people think that nomads have no culture. They move from one place to the next, leaving every time a background that does not belong to them, to reach another one that does not either.

We are used to think that each culture strictly belongs to the place where it was born and developed. It is difficult for us to imagine a culture that can flow and change itself always concerning the environment, different each time and each time dominating but controlled. Instead, that’s the power of nomads culture. It allows them to be challenging the environment and adapting to it, using both the old consistent culture and the really new skills.

Photo: Lill Maria Hansen

15.

Nomad is, I think, a priviledge.

It might be started by necessity in the search of basic resources for survival and become there after the only logical way of live.

It might be triggered by the alienation provoked by the routine of stably structure lives.

But in the end it is limited and controlled by states and borders. In the age of free trade, only money can move freely. People can not. The few that can (we sometimes) are the priviledged elite.

But are we nomads? I’m probably not, however much I might move. So there must be something else to nomadity than mobility … A way of thinking? Flexible adobtable, open? A way of living? Without attachement to material things, without striving for escalating in this hierarchical society? Without an end but with process as and end in itself?

NOMAD CITY / AURORA OBSERVATORY

Site:

Røssvatnet Lake, Varntresk community, Norway

Participating universities:

Aalto University Environmental Art Masters Program, Finland

Lund University Department of Sustainable Urban Design, Sweden

Madrid European University Department of Architecture, Spain

Bauhaus University Department of Fine Art, Germany

Université Libre de Bruxelles. Faculté d'architecture La Cambre - Horta, Belgium

Mosjøen College / Construction

Workshop leaders:

Marco Casagrande / Aalto University Environmental Art

Hans-Petter Bjørnådal / PIMP Post Industrial Meditation Platform

Jan Tyrpekl, Assistant / Liberec University Faculty of Architecture

V I D E O