Yantrasast: You are known as a lighting designer. So, we thought of the agricultural field almost as if it were a carpet draped over this archeological site. I was always moved by this Edward Hopper painting, where the field came right up to the edge of the house. Yantrasast: Yeah, in the last ten years, you know, people have dealt with quite a bit of that, because at the end of the day, you need a cavity, and you need the concrete to define that cavity.Īrbel: The house is on an agricultural field. As if I had arrived at the site and discovered these ruins of archeological remains that are sort of aggressive. Our approach to that architecture is to think of it almost as if they were found objects. Everything is organized in a radial pattern that flute up, in some instances as high as 30 ft.
#Omer arbel house series
It is essentially a series of geotextiles, which is a woven tarp stretched between plywood ribs. We developed a series of, what we call, the lily pads or the reverse trumpet forms. So there is kind of an intrinsic efficiency. In the experiments we also discovered that just naturally, because of the way a fabric stretches, it swells in exactly the places that you need it to be thicker from a structural perspective. And the thought we had was to pour it into fabrics instead of a wood framework, because fabrics stretch, and it responds to the weight of the material. Can you talk about that?Īrbel: So, the starting point, called 75, is this idea of trying to develop another way of forming concrete. When I saw your house, you seem to long for concrete to collaborate better with other materials. Yantrasast: It is a very classic ingredient, from Roman times even, but we haven’t evolved much from that in an age when you are 3D-printing buildings. Then, what are the formal implications of that? And I want to keep going, especially with this whole idea of thinking of it as an animal instead of a liquid stone, a living organism in some sense. So, we have worked with four or five different ways of trying to do that, developing a method of forming that allows the concrete to sort of express itself. Everything is rectangular, and I think that’s dishonest in the highest order to the material’s nature, on the one hand, but also super wasteful, and expensive. I have always been depressed by the fact that concrete’s liquidity or plasticity is not expressed in most constructions that you see. I am finding ways to work with it differently. Yantrasast: Yeah, like some kind of mushroom.Īrbel: It’s super great. Imagine, so your concrete is kind of alive, you have to feed it, water it. I even heard the other day that there is a biological one, like a bacteria, that replaces the cement. And there are, there are all these companies now using other kinds of binders. We just need to find replacements for cement. Yantrasast: Concrete needs a new binding agent.Īrbel: The only thing evil about it is cement. We should all stop using it, we should stop building things out of concrete, but my love for it is too great to stop. I have always loved concrete, concrete is the most amazing material, but it’s problematic because it produces almost ten percent of the carbon in the atmosphere.
Like cooking.Īrbel: I read the other day that concrete is the most abundant material on the planet other than water. Or I try to find this transformation on a molecular level, and then try to see if I could allow that transformation to express.Īrbel: Yes, exactly. But we have to take a step back and think about clay. Yantrasast: Isn’t that what Louis Kahn says, “You say to a brick, 'What do you want, brick?’”Īrbel: Yeah, exactly, but it’s already a brick. Yantrasast: So, a form flows from material kind of thing?Īrbel: No, I just kind of tease or encourage the materials to get formed. And that is the idea, that a material and its intrinsic properties, chemistry, the mechanics and the physics of a material, are the generating impetus for form. There is a philosophy that unites all the work. What I am trying to do is cross all the disciplines and knit together a way of working where it doesn’t matter if it’s a commercial item, or a one-off, or a piece of architecture. Omer Arbel: I love lighting, but in addition to an installation-based practice, where we do one-offs and very, very large monstrous, gigantic works that mostly have to do with light, I have returned to the architectural practice after a ten-year hiatus. Kulapat Yantrasast: Are you focusing on more installations these days? The Vancouver-based designer and founder of Bocci, and LA-based Thai starchitect discuss the violence of architecture, sustainability and evolving in the age of material technology.
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