sri lanka for me is a place of extremes
on one hand we have a natural landscape
of lush mountains and green valleys but
on the other hand that landscape is
increasingly threatened by urban
expansion and unplanned growth of
constructions most of our small towns
and cities are increasingly transforming
into environmentally detrimental and
spatially crowded commercial corridors
profit proliferated by substandard
concrete and glass building units we
boast of a history of building and
craftsmanship which produced
architectural monuments like brick
credits stupas and wood carved temples
but that history has always been
interrupted by internal conflicts and
natural disasters we are just coming out
of a thirty-year civil war which evoked
the worst of our communal and ethnic
sentiments the war is seemingly over but
the problems are not because problems
were political we have an urban building
environment which is growing vertically
responding to the needs of the
multinational companies and the urban
rich but right below the shadows of that
are the informal settlements and
unauthorized constructions of the urban
poor similarly the construction industry
is also fragmented into formal and
informal sectors where more than 80% of
the construction work forces informally
trained and informally organized so we
have a serious shortage of skilled labor
but a much larger problem related to
lack of skill building opportunities in
the industry and there is a reciprocal
connection between the poor quality of
workers and the poor quality of
buildings that are mushrooming in the
island and from a professional point of
view there also seems to be a kind of a
misallocation of intellectual energy in
the industry in dealing
these special technical cultural and
economic extremes in the social
landscape institutional and professional
responses to population pressures have
largely ignored the special needs of the
poor and allowed the proliferation of
informal settlements as a kind of a
social pressure releasing mechanism
urban housing which was traditionally
seen as the government responsibility
has not risin up to the challenge
market-based commercial development on
the other hand is highly supported by
governments through tax cuts land
concessions and and zoning and so on an
architectural design on its part is
highly limited to fill individual
buildings often identified by high
patronage and top in tourism so the real
question is this how much does
architecture matter in shaping the
future of a place like this which has
dramatic differences in social
conditions in spending capacities in
cultural applications and in
technological use you know each
architects merely an exclusive design
practice which caters to the cultural
and economic elites or can we also use
it as a you know catalyst for social and
industrial restructuring of the region’s
which it is part of is architecture of
victim of its affiliations with the
world of art and aesthetics or can it
also take up a policymaking role in
defining the way that we live and build
in the society but built not only spaces
and artifacts but can architecture build
capacities can architecture build new
cultures of production can architecture
build people’s lives but more
importantly can we bring these social
objectives as a part of the initial
design proposition not as an inevitable
outcome of an architectural process in
other words can be designed buildings to
support cultural change can we design
buildings to assist industrial
restructure it can we design buildings
to facilitate labor training the portion
I’m going to put forward to today argues
that perhaps we might be able to bring
these social objectives as a design
function
but only if you use a design and
technological vocabulary which is
inherently robust as supposed to be
precise and and sensitive you know of a
framework with plenty of tolerances and
latitude for errors a framework which
can withstand different pressures and an
extremes of building production I will
come back and define this idea for a
business later on but first let me use
some examples this is a community
library project which was built by a
group of Army soldiers for the use of
the soldiers as well as for the
community specialist school children the
youth soldiers partly to support the
need of retraining them in alternative
trade skills so that they can use these
skills to build careers in their post
military life but also to support the
need of demilitarizing the army in the
aftermath of the Civil War but the thing
is soldiers are not trained craftsmen so
we had to first train them in
construction skills and then use them in
the building but we also didn’t have
money to train them first and build a
building so that the training had to
happen during the construction process
itself and this had to plan at a very
early stage of the design process so
these are some of the diagrams that we
did to organize the training
interventions so we had to design the
building systems the joints and the
tolerances we had to plan the training
grounds minimum working modules and
labor structures for training
interventions we had to identify the
fabrication processes which eventually
became the training steps and then we
defined building techniques with
different complexities and incorporated
these techniques within the building
itself so that an unskilled worker can
start building the simplest technique
and then move up the complexities they
were used in the building process as a
kind of a you know a social skill
building ladder but the critical thing
means that if you use real building
projects for training purposes then the
building systems that you use should
have latitude for errors and capacity
for non of
application that this should be
inherently robust as opposed to being
precise in this roof system for example
the roof cladding and the ceiling and
the roof truss are not lining up with
each other because lining up is
difficult when you use an essentially
unskilled labor gang if they make any
dimensional error in placing or in
sizing of any of these components then
that will be visible but once you start
to move them away from each other then
you know one failure will not lead into
a chain of failures but at the same time
we like the fact how the building sort
of peels into different layers as it
moved from its body towards outside so
these details are exactly pragmatic but
they also can be poetic but
accommodating tolerances does not mean
that you have to compromise performance
and performance when it comes to this
type of construction activities it’s all
about common sense you know it’s common
sense to design buildings as narrow
floor plates in the tropics so that you
can have plenty of cross ventilation
it’s common sense to design buildings
around quarters and around trees so that
the trees can shape the building it’s
common sense to use a thermal mass like
rammed earth so that the interior can be
cooler it common sense to bring light
and ventilation from wind scoops and
light waves it’s common sense to elevate
the building from the ground plane so
that natural drainage paths are not
obstructed and if you want the building
can be still about its colors its
textures it’s light its shadows it can
be about the way that the building sits
in the landscape and how it creates
indoor and outdoor rooms in and around
the building it can be about the idea of
building as a journey framing of views
and framing of courtyards it can be
about the scale and proportion of
internal volumes and how you frame
outside from inside but it can be about
people you know people who build a
building as well as people who use the
building so the idea here was to create
a social capital which is the trained
workforce and a physical capital which
is the kit of Pardons
system and use this social capital and
physical capital to build similar work
elsewhere and it was indeed this social
capital which we used to build this
prototype cost-effective houses for war
widows and their families and the
soldiers that we trained in the library
project in turn trained local builders
in construction techniques like rammed
earth and Latin plaster and so on
another house but built in a totally
different construction and cultural
context where the contract of this
project was also the unit a user and an
owner of the of the building and one of
the things that he told us at a very
early stage of the design process was
that he didn’t have very good carpenters
and welders but he had very good masons
so we decided to use brick as the main
material but we also wanted to have this
exposed furfest
brick wall but the thing is that even
though the Masons had been in the
industry for 15-20 years they had never
done a fair face brick world all what
they have been doing was to build
masonry walls and then they would
plaster it so once you ask them to do an
exposed brickwork wall that required a
totally different set of skills so like
the library project we incorporated
different complexities of brick laying
techniques to the facade so that the
building of the facade would eventually
become a training opportunity so the
formal patterns in the facade are more
or less about the training aspirations
and also kind of an attempt to revive
the brick craftsmanship as much as
they’re about the formal and aesthetic
expectations of the building in this
Chalet that will be asked to build in a
tea plantation in the hill country we
wanted to come up with a building system
which is essentially lightweight and
prefabricated so that it would be easy
to carry easy to build and easy to
dismantle because we had to respond to
few important conditions one was that
the access to the site was difficult and
people had to carry materials through
this narrow
pathways of the tea plantation but more
importantly we wanted to design the
building in such a way that once the
tourism related activities are
terminated we can dismantle the building
so that the plantation can grow back but
the problem is that in Sri Lanka we
don’t have an industry which produce
such prefabricated components especially
in those remote parts of the country so
we got a local welder design the
building in such a way that more than
75% of components can be fabricated in
his backyard size the component is such
a way that two people can carry them and
then build the building but there was
also an industrial aspiration behind
this process you know most of these
welders the kind of the welder that we
use for this project they’re the ones
that we call journeyman of tradesman
they move from site to site and along
with that they take the entire workforce
tools and plants with them the problem
is that when you work this site-specific
it will be difficult for you to do
multiple work but if you can produce
most of the components in a workshop
then you can seek the economic and
cultural benefits of multiple work so on
one hand while we were trying to respond
to a specific brief acquired a place and
a program we were also trying to explore
how the building process can organize
the labor component and the fabrication
process in a certain part of the
industry so from a community library to
a house to a chalet to a small array of
buildings that we have been building in
Sri Lanka for the last six seven years
we were trying to do buildings which are
different to each other different in
terms of their programme different in
terms of the use of materials different
in terms of their formal attributes as
well as different in terms of the
construction and cultural markets that
they serve in this diagram in the y-axis
we have the cost per square meter for
projects and in the x-axis we have the
building markets and we prefer building
marks as sort of cultural and economic
Assemblies of labour resources
and capital which are different to each
other depending on the project context
for example in the lower end of the
industry the capacity and availability
of labor and resources are different to
the higher end so the building’s
themselves and the construction markets
are different to each other but if
there’s anything that ties them together
we like to believe that it’s our attempt
to understand and respond to the context
and conditions of labor and the
subsequent exploration of how
architecture can be used as a catalyst
for social and industrial restructuring
of the region so the idea here is not to
create a recognizable style for the
practice or to create a niche market for
the practice to thrive commercially but
what is important here is to develop a
design vocabulary that allows the
practice to travel across markets and
function within different social
technical cultural and economic
conditions but traveling across market
will only be possible if you have a
technological framework which can
tolerate the building’s economic
variables on one hand and its cultural
and technical complexities on the other
hand in other words a technological
framework which can adapt to the level
of complexity required and the
expenditure possible without penalizing
the performance of the building within
the definition in that context you could
call a technology robust when it loves
permutations between different products
and process so that specific procedures
can lead to diverse solutions when it
tolerates errors to a degree so that
failure of one system would not lead
into a chain of failures when it
accommodates social innovations and
acknowledge that building is essentially
a social process it’s not an outcome of
a singular author when it inhabits a
self-learning capacity in building
systems so that real building projects
can be used as training grounds when it
avoids excessive craftsmanship to
achieve clarity of design and
technological performance when it used
resources strategically and acknowledge
that the function of sustainability is
not only to be
environmental but also to be economic
not only to be technological but also to
be social and when it built organic
links between different social and
industrial actors of the building
process so that interventions like labor
training can be possible so the bottom
line is that if architects are serious
about building and rebuilding this place
a place with such dramatic differences
in terms of spatial conditions cultural
conditions technical conditions and
economic conditions then architects will
have to come up with new strategies and
new forms of architecture which does not
only produce spaces and artifacts but
architecture that can build capacities
build for diversity and build people’s
lives and I would even say that
architects will have to define the
industry that they work for rather than
become blind servants of an industry
which is already defined by others and
by the market thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
you [Music]
on one hand we have a natural landscape
of lush mountains and green valleys but
on the other hand that landscape is
increasingly threatened by urban
expansion and unplanned growth of
constructions most of our small towns
and cities are increasingly transforming
into environmentally detrimental and
spatially crowded commercial corridors
profit proliferated by substandard
concrete and glass building units we
boast of a history of building and
craftsmanship which produced
architectural monuments like brick
credits stupas and wood carved temples
but that history has always been
interrupted by internal conflicts and
natural disasters we are just coming out
of a thirty-year civil war which evoked
the worst of our communal and ethnic
sentiments the war is seemingly over but
the problems are not because problems
were political we have an urban building
environment which is growing vertically
responding to the needs of the
multinational companies and the urban
rich but right below the shadows of that
are the informal settlements and
unauthorized constructions of the urban
poor similarly the construction industry
is also fragmented into formal and
informal sectors where more than 80% of
the construction work forces informally
trained and informally organized so we
have a serious shortage of skilled labor
but a much larger problem related to
lack of skill building opportunities in
the industry and there is a reciprocal
connection between the poor quality of
workers and the poor quality of
buildings that are mushrooming in the
island and from a professional point of
view there also seems to be a kind of a
misallocation of intellectual energy in
the industry in dealing
these special technical cultural and
economic extremes in the social
landscape institutional and professional
responses to population pressures have
largely ignored the special needs of the
poor and allowed the proliferation of
informal settlements as a kind of a
social pressure releasing mechanism
urban housing which was traditionally
seen as the government responsibility
has not risin up to the challenge
market-based commercial development on
the other hand is highly supported by
governments through tax cuts land
concessions and and zoning and so on an
architectural design on its part is
highly limited to fill individual
buildings often identified by high
patronage and top in tourism so the real
question is this how much does
architecture matter in shaping the
future of a place like this which has
dramatic differences in social
conditions in spending capacities in
cultural applications and in
technological use you know each
architects merely an exclusive design
practice which caters to the cultural
and economic elites or can we also use
it as a you know catalyst for social and
industrial restructuring of the region’s
which it is part of is architecture of
victim of its affiliations with the
world of art and aesthetics or can it
also take up a policymaking role in
defining the way that we live and build
in the society but built not only spaces
and artifacts but can architecture build
capacities can architecture build new
cultures of production can architecture
build people’s lives but more
importantly can we bring these social
objectives as a part of the initial
design proposition not as an inevitable
outcome of an architectural process in
other words can be designed buildings to
support cultural change can we design
buildings to assist industrial
restructure it can we design buildings
to facilitate labor training the portion
I’m going to put forward to today argues
that perhaps we might be able to bring
these social objectives as a design
function
but only if you use a design and
technological vocabulary which is
inherently robust as supposed to be
precise and and sensitive you know of a
framework with plenty of tolerances and
latitude for errors a framework which
can withstand different pressures and an
extremes of building production I will
come back and define this idea for a
business later on but first let me use
some examples this is a community
library project which was built by a
group of Army soldiers for the use of
the soldiers as well as for the
community specialist school children the
youth soldiers partly to support the
need of retraining them in alternative
trade skills so that they can use these
skills to build careers in their post
military life but also to support the
need of demilitarizing the army in the
aftermath of the Civil War but the thing
is soldiers are not trained craftsmen so
we had to first train them in
construction skills and then use them in
the building but we also didn’t have
money to train them first and build a
building so that the training had to
happen during the construction process
itself and this had to plan at a very
early stage of the design process so
these are some of the diagrams that we
did to organize the training
interventions so we had to design the
building systems the joints and the
tolerances we had to plan the training
grounds minimum working modules and
labor structures for training
interventions we had to identify the
fabrication processes which eventually
became the training steps and then we
defined building techniques with
different complexities and incorporated
these techniques within the building
itself so that an unskilled worker can
start building the simplest technique
and then move up the complexities they
were used in the building process as a
kind of a you know a social skill
building ladder but the critical thing
means that if you use real building
projects for training purposes then the
building systems that you use should
have latitude for errors and capacity
for non of
application that this should be
inherently robust as opposed to being
precise in this roof system for example
the roof cladding and the ceiling and
the roof truss are not lining up with
each other because lining up is
difficult when you use an essentially
unskilled labor gang if they make any
dimensional error in placing or in
sizing of any of these components then
that will be visible but once you start
to move them away from each other then
you know one failure will not lead into
a chain of failures but at the same time
we like the fact how the building sort
of peels into different layers as it
moved from its body towards outside so
these details are exactly pragmatic but
they also can be poetic but
accommodating tolerances does not mean
that you have to compromise performance
and performance when it comes to this
type of construction activities it’s all
about common sense you know it’s common
sense to design buildings as narrow
floor plates in the tropics so that you
can have plenty of cross ventilation
it’s common sense to design buildings
around quarters and around trees so that
the trees can shape the building it’s
common sense to use a thermal mass like
rammed earth so that the interior can be
cooler it common sense to bring light
and ventilation from wind scoops and
light waves it’s common sense to elevate
the building from the ground plane so
that natural drainage paths are not
obstructed and if you want the building
can be still about its colors its
textures it’s light its shadows it can
be about the way that the building sits
in the landscape and how it creates
indoor and outdoor rooms in and around
the building it can be about the idea of
building as a journey framing of views
and framing of courtyards it can be
about the scale and proportion of
internal volumes and how you frame
outside from inside but it can be about
people you know people who build a
building as well as people who use the
building so the idea here was to create
a social capital which is the trained
workforce and a physical capital which
is the kit of Pardons
system and use this social capital and
physical capital to build similar work
elsewhere and it was indeed this social
capital which we used to build this
prototype cost-effective houses for war
widows and their families and the
soldiers that we trained in the library
project in turn trained local builders
in construction techniques like rammed
earth and Latin plaster and so on
another house but built in a totally
different construction and cultural
context where the contract of this
project was also the unit a user and an
owner of the of the building and one of
the things that he told us at a very
early stage of the design process was
that he didn’t have very good carpenters
and welders but he had very good masons
so we decided to use brick as the main
material but we also wanted to have this
exposed furfest
brick wall but the thing is that even
though the Masons had been in the
industry for 15-20 years they had never
done a fair face brick world all what
they have been doing was to build
masonry walls and then they would
plaster it so once you ask them to do an
exposed brickwork wall that required a
totally different set of skills so like
the library project we incorporated
different complexities of brick laying
techniques to the facade so that the
building of the facade would eventually
become a training opportunity so the
formal patterns in the facade are more
or less about the training aspirations
and also kind of an attempt to revive
the brick craftsmanship as much as
they’re about the formal and aesthetic
expectations of the building in this
Chalet that will be asked to build in a
tea plantation in the hill country we
wanted to come up with a building system
which is essentially lightweight and
prefabricated so that it would be easy
to carry easy to build and easy to
dismantle because we had to respond to
few important conditions one was that
the access to the site was difficult and
people had to carry materials through
this narrow
pathways of the tea plantation but more
importantly we wanted to design the
building in such a way that once the
tourism related activities are
terminated we can dismantle the building
so that the plantation can grow back but
the problem is that in Sri Lanka we
don’t have an industry which produce
such prefabricated components especially
in those remote parts of the country so
we got a local welder design the
building in such a way that more than
75% of components can be fabricated in
his backyard size the component is such
a way that two people can carry them and
then build the building but there was
also an industrial aspiration behind
this process you know most of these
welders the kind of the welder that we
use for this project they’re the ones
that we call journeyman of tradesman
they move from site to site and along
with that they take the entire workforce
tools and plants with them the problem
is that when you work this site-specific
it will be difficult for you to do
multiple work but if you can produce
most of the components in a workshop
then you can seek the economic and
cultural benefits of multiple work so on
one hand while we were trying to respond
to a specific brief acquired a place and
a program we were also trying to explore
how the building process can organize
the labor component and the fabrication
process in a certain part of the
industry so from a community library to
a house to a chalet to a small array of
buildings that we have been building in
Sri Lanka for the last six seven years
we were trying to do buildings which are
different to each other different in
terms of their programme different in
terms of the use of materials different
in terms of their formal attributes as
well as different in terms of the
construction and cultural markets that
they serve in this diagram in the y-axis
we have the cost per square meter for
projects and in the x-axis we have the
building markets and we prefer building
marks as sort of cultural and economic
Assemblies of labour resources
and capital which are different to each
other depending on the project context
for example in the lower end of the
industry the capacity and availability
of labor and resources are different to
the higher end so the building’s
themselves and the construction markets
are different to each other but if
there’s anything that ties them together
we like to believe that it’s our attempt
to understand and respond to the context
and conditions of labor and the
subsequent exploration of how
architecture can be used as a catalyst
for social and industrial restructuring
of the region so the idea here is not to
create a recognizable style for the
practice or to create a niche market for
the practice to thrive commercially but
what is important here is to develop a
design vocabulary that allows the
practice to travel across markets and
function within different social
technical cultural and economic
conditions but traveling across market
will only be possible if you have a
technological framework which can
tolerate the building’s economic
variables on one hand and its cultural
and technical complexities on the other
hand in other words a technological
framework which can adapt to the level
of complexity required and the
expenditure possible without penalizing
the performance of the building within
the definition in that context you could
call a technology robust when it loves
permutations between different products
and process so that specific procedures
can lead to diverse solutions when it
tolerates errors to a degree so that
failure of one system would not lead
into a chain of failures when it
accommodates social innovations and
acknowledge that building is essentially
a social process it’s not an outcome of
a singular author when it inhabits a
self-learning capacity in building
systems so that real building projects
can be used as training grounds when it
avoids excessive craftsmanship to
achieve clarity of design and
technological performance when it used
resources strategically and acknowledge
that the function of sustainability is
not only to be
environmental but also to be economic
not only to be technological but also to
be social and when it built organic
links between different social and
industrial actors of the building
process so that interventions like labor
training can be possible so the bottom
line is that if architects are serious
about building and rebuilding this place
a place with such dramatic differences
in terms of spatial conditions cultural
conditions technical conditions and
economic conditions then architects will
have to come up with new strategies and
new forms of architecture which does not
only produce spaces and artifacts but
architecture that can build capacities
build for diversity and build people’s
lives and I would even say that
architects will have to define the
industry that they work for rather than
become blind servants of an industry
which is already defined by others and
by the market thank you
[Applause]
[Music]
[Applause]
you [Music]
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