The World`s First Festival of Transitional Architecture

The World’s First
Festival of Transitional Architecture
Barnaby Bennett, May 2013
“Crises are ultimately productive. They force invention. Breakdowns incubate breakthroughs.
Radical destruction gives way to new forms of production.” - Mark Wigley
The world’s first and only Festival of Transitional
Architecture has boldly emerged from the flattened
cityscape of Christchurch. With over 80% of the
earthquake-affected city now demolished and with
a rebuild time frame being measured in decades, a
unique situation to experiment with new forms of
urbanism has arisen. As an increasingly urbanised
humanity deals with multiple and overlapping
crises, there is need for new and creative modes
of engaging with the city. Through the Festival
of Transitional Architecture (FESTA) and
other associated projects, Christchurch has what
Festival Director Jessica Halliday identifies as ‘an
unparalleled opportunity to be a global epicentre
for creative urban renewal through transitional and
experimental architecture, art and performance’.
Through the vast damage to housing and
infrastructure and the seemingly endless government
attempts to control the rolling crisis (crisis is
inevitable after such a significant series of events),
new formations of peoples have emerged in response
to the quakes. FESTA works with existing networks
and these new groups to express the reconfiguration
of the city after the deadly series of earthquakes that
occurred from September 2010 till the end of 2011.
Archrobatics, Unitec, LUXCity, FESTA 2012.
Image: Kalana Dayaratne
FESTA itself evolved from a new formation of
people. A group of architects, performers, designers
and artists formed around the idea of engaging
with Christchurch as a transitional city – a place
of transformational, liminal, inevitable and perhaps
radical change – and thus brought about the inaugural
ten day-long FESTA in 2012. As New Yorkbased New Zealander Mark Wigley says, ‘Crises
are ultimately productive. They force invention.
Breakdowns incubate breakthroughs.
Radical
In Your Face, University of Auckland, LUXCity, FESTA 2012.
Image: Brigit Anderson
destruction gives way to new forms of production.’
In a city overtaken by engineers, planners and a
thousand different types of necessary experts, a
festival such as this is an outlet for less determined
and more experimental modes of city-building.
FESTA favours a tactical approach over a strategic
one. Architect and Politician Jaime Lerner states
that ‘The idea that action should only be taken
after having all the answers and all the resources
is a sure recipe for paralysis. The lack of resources
cannot be an excuse not to act. The planning of a
city is a process that allows for corrections, always.’
Acting with incomplete knowledge is sometimes
necessary but comes with risk. FESTA presents
projects that engage with alternative forms of
urbanism and involve a diversity of stakeholders
who make small or relatively cheap interventions.
Through these moves risk is understood
and shared, rather than hidden and shifted.
FESTA 2012 and LUXCITY: A City of Light
FESTA profiles new and visionary ways of
interacting with the city and expresses both local
and international visions of urbanism, architecture
and performance. LUXCITY, the opening night of
FESTA, illustrated the scope and breadth of this
vision. Over 350 architecture students from around
the country worked with dozens of local businesses,
and scores of musicians and performers to produce a
temporary city of light for one night only. LUXCITY
was a collaboration between FESTA, Life in Vacant
Spaces, the School of Architectural Studies at
CPIT, the School of Architecture and the School
of Design at Victoria University of Wellington, the
Architecture Department at Unitec, the Spatial
Design Department at Auckland University of
Technology, and the School of Architecture and
Planning at The University of Auckland. Sixteen
Summer Pallet Pavilion, Gap Filler, 2012.
Image: Nick Sargent
large-scale installations illuminated two central
red-zoned city streets, bringing light and life
to a part of the city previously lost amongst
the gradual demolitions of 1200 buildings.
Around 20,000 people flooded into the city, many
for the first time since the February 2011 earthquake.
The innovative use of cranes from demolition
contractors as a kind of sky-hook enabled the light
sculptures to rise as high as buildings. The event
showcased creative and exciting ways of enlivening
public space, but also acted as part of the profoundly
difficult yet important process of reintroducing
Christchurch’s fractured urban environment to its
citizens as the army-controlled cordon slowly receded.
The 2012 FESTA programme presented a variety
of public talks and workshops including: a citizen
engaged workshop to reconfigure temporary street
furniture commissioned by the Christchurch City
Council and designed and constructed by local
design firm F3, designer-led tours of large scale
temporary projects such as the Re:START shopping
mall and the $30 million dollar temporary Stadium,
and public lectures by national and international
speakers in a variety of make-shift venues including
a bus and a partially completed pallet pavilion.
A Global Epicentre of Transitional Urbanism
A book launched on the closing weekend was
specially produced for the festival. Christchurch:
The Transitional City Pt IV documents over
150 transitional projects that have emerged
in Christchurch since the first earthquake in
September 2010 and profiles the public response to
the destruction caused. Its success in telling the story
of Christchurch illustrates that in the depiction of a
specific time and place there are global elements. The
issues faced in Christchurch, while particular, are
not unique. As the climate changes and humanity
moves to increasingly perilous places for survival,
the number of manmade and natural disasters will
continue to increase. We are now an urbanised
species. Our relationships with the land and each
other are increasingly played out in dense, busy, and
predominantly artificial environments. Christchurch
offers important lessons for future urban disasters,
and how to intelligently respond to them.
The transitional approach that FESTA explores
creates opportunity by avoiding the risk of massive
capital investment without insurance, by developing
small, cheap projects and engaging with other risks
such as weather, arson, and theft. These projects
sidestep the heavy capital expenditure normally
associated with urban development; the transitional
moves in units of tens of thousands of dollars rather
than hundreds of millions. This challenges traditional
roles and expectations within urban development
and finance in the city. Furthermore it designates
citizens as the drivers of urban change. This provides
for better use of our precious resources and a
more sophisticated feedback system for planning.
The projects, books, exhibitions and festivals
emerging from post-quake Christchurch speak
to a very specific and difficult time in a city’s
history. 80% of the urban centre is now empty and
dominated by flat sites, and 8000 residential houses
are to be demolished. The city’s infrastructure
is still on expensive life support and the people while resilient - endure constant reminders of
lives lost and places erased by our limited capacity
to resist nature’s forceful ways. In consideration
of this (crisis situation?), the transitional response
is not an intellectually isolated one.It looks less
towards the rare and exceptional capital explosions
of New York, Dubai or London and rather
seeks lessons from other places of rupture and
crisis such as Detroit, Newcastle or Berlin.
The new new urbanist approaches of guerrilla
urbanism, tactical urbanism, improvised planning
DIY urbanism, participatory processes and texts
such as the Right to the City (David Harvey) that
are emerging from the dominant centres of discourse
in Europe, Australia, and coastal United States are
tested in local spatial and temporal contexts. By
confronting the illusion of permanence that most of
the architecture and design fields assume, the creators
of the projects are forced to critically engage with
different types of problems. While safety always
remains paramount, long-term concerns with issues
like weather tightness, reliability and maintenance
are replaced by problems such as material re-use
and efficacy of programming. The attention to the
immediacy of the use of a space creates promising
architectures of events and constructed performances.
FESTA 2013: The City within the City
In response to a rise in temporary urban interventions
in current global city planning and design practice,
FESTA seeks to explore the possibilities of
transitional design through its temporary city
located within the city of Christchurch. From
Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City to Le Corbusier’s
Villa Radieuse and Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre
City, twentieth century urban planning was largely a
clean-slate process, or as the Academy of Urbanism
puts it, it was ‘conceived of as beginning afresh
through comprehensive development and guided
by big visions’(2012, para. 8). This type of thinking
has driven the Government led Christchurch City
Development Unit’s Blueprint. However, as the
Academy of Urbanism also suggests, in light of
the 21st century’s contracting economies, major
environmental challenges and climate change, the
global trend for urban planning and design could
be driven more by transitional or temporary urban
interventions that may or may not permanently
transform a city. Through this transitional
thinking, identities of place will be shaped in
a more open-ended and incremental fashion.
The main event in the programme for FESTA
2013 (25-28 October) is a large-scale urban
project inspired by the carnivalesque of Chaucer’s
Canterbury Tales. This integration of performance,
art, architecture and urbanism is a three-night
processional exploration of the city at a unique time
- Christchurch is nearing the end of its demolition
programme just as large scale schemes for the
city begin to be rolled out. FESTA’s ‘Canterbury
Tales’ is an opportunity to reflect on changing
identities of place as expressed in the planning,
fabric, use and experience of Christchurch.
The earthquakes have forced a consideration of
many things previously unexamined, and the group
behind FESTA remains aware of the ephemerality
of the festival, performances, buildings, cities, and
people’s lives. As Manuel DeLanda aptly puts it,
all things are ‘born at a particular time, live a life,
and then die’. These realisations are difficult but
force a certain creative response. In 2013 FESTA
will embark on another brave and adventurous
programme for its second year, extending and
exploring the notion of the transitional, and
continuing to engage in a very immediate way
with the ever-strange and compelling context
of post-quake Christchurch. The team behind
FESTA are a committed bunch and will continue
to offer new spaces and places for the people of
Christchurch to rediscover their city while also
pushing the city to create world-class and globally
relevant works of art, architecture, and performance.
Works Cited
The Arcades Project, 2013
Image: Nick Sargent
Academy of Urbanism. (2012). From Transitional to
Transformative Urbanism. Retrieved 16 April, 2013, from
Academy of Urbanism website: http://www.academyofurbanism.
org.uk/from-transitional-to-transformative-urbanism/
Mark Wigley. Space in Crisis. Volume Magazine. Bootleg Edition
Urban China (C-Lab). 2009.
Manuel De Landa. The Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. Public
Open Video Lecture at European Graduate School EGS, Media
and Communication Studies department program. Saas-Fee,
Switzerland 2007.
David Harvey. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the
Urban Revolution. 2012.
Jaime Lerner. From the forward to the report: State of the World
2007: Our Urban Future. 2007.
The Scholar, Canterbury Tales Puppet, FESTA 2013.
Image: Ed Lust