1:1 (Dis)section ‐ Learning through Full‐Scale Dissection and Transformations of Abandoned Buildings

About: This article is published in International Journal of Art and Design Education.The article was published on 2019-05-01 and is currently open access. It has received 1 citations till now. The article focuses on the topics: Experiential learning & Section (archaeology).

Summary

Introduction

• The section is an essential tool for understanding, exploring, representing and communicating spatial relations, structure and materiality in architecture, design and engineering, and therefore a recurring topic in the curricula.
• The section itself is destructive of nature and incompatible with a built environment in use or under construction.
• The aim was to provide firstyear students with an experience of the relation between the section as a diagrammatic representation and the materiality, structure and spatial relations of a concrete building.
• The climax of each workshop was a full-scale dissection and transformation of an abandoned house.

Dissection and environment

• Due to its brutal nature, full-scale dissections must be carried out on buildings, which are permanently emptied of function.
• The authors find these regions mostly on the many small islands and in what is known as the ‘rotten banana’.
• The latter refers, by virtue of the shape, to the western regions of Denmark from Thisted in the North to Lolland in the South.
• Similar to Denmark, the rural areas of many other countries experience severe demographical changes.
• In some areas, the municipalities have taken initiative to tear down some of the most decrepit and unsightly houses.

Workshop design

• The overall design was common to all of the four workshops, but was continuously improved.
• The educational purpose was to teach students how to plan an investigation and documentation of temporary matters in architectural practice.
• The learning experiences in the vertical full-scale dissection were linked to the ongoing exposure of the structure of the building as well as to the end result of the completed section.
• Cinder is not a common material for a capillary break layer, but the building itself did not provide any information about the reason for this.
• But maybe more important, it gave the locals an unique opportunity to revisit and share the collective memory of the village (Halbwachs and Coser, 1992).

The reconstruction phase

• The aim of the re-construction phase was to urge to students revisit and reflect upon the achieved material- and spatial experiences in a situation, which not constantly required immediate decisions and actions, and to introduce an artistic mode of expression in the curriculum.
• Also a broad variety of processed collections of narratives as well as selections of unfolded individual probes of investigations were exhibited into a range of physical biopsies, excavations, contextual documentations, interviews and cast latex imprints.
• All the exhibitions were held in public areas, mainly in the exhibition areas at the school, but in one case as a re-constructed grocery store in the city hall of Aarhus.
• Firstly, the deconstruction and the reconstruction represent the student’s interpretations of the building before, during and after the dissection respectively.

The didactic rationale

• The authors discuss the didactic principles behind the workshops.
• Hence, despite the flamboyant cases, the workshop design has several similarities with well-known didactic principles and can be used in various learning contexts aiming at higher order learning such as development and application of analytical strategies and abstract generalisation of observations (e.g. Kolb, 1984; Fraser, 2014; Schön, 1984).
• The act of dissecting itself engaged the surrounding community and catalysed a local exchange of narratives of the building and the place.
• The assumption is that the ‘controlled ruin’ represents a prototype of a radical preservation strategy concerning possible ways of maintaining local identity, building density and preserving cultural heritage in depopulating rural villages.
• The horizontal split-level section was then all that remained of the building, which now gained the status of prototype of a ‘controlled ruin’ and became a part of the research project .

The ‘controlled ruin’ strategy

• The ‘controlled ruin’ constitutes through partial demolition an attempt to compress and subsequently stretch the inherent matter of time in the natural decay process.
• It made a common ground providing a mutual understanding between researcher and students.
• This was particularly evident in the dissection phase.
• Subsequent decay of the ‘controlled ruin’ proved to influence the feeling of the local community.

Students’ experiences and learning outcome

• The workshops revealed that the physical dissection of a building has several educative potentials.
• Besides the practical and safety aspects, the thorough planning in the iteration phase, forced the students to reactivate and use general structural principles to analyse the structure of a real building and to develop and collectively evaluate different approaches to the fullscale section.
• Translated into the language of taxonomies, the iteration phase increased the complexity of knowledge from basic knowledge to application and evaluation (Bloom 1956).
• One of these students reflected on his learning as follows: ‘I was very skeptical.
• In most cases, the probes unfolded well on site and despite the complexity of the task, some probes so well designed that they directly displayed the results of the sub-investigation in the subsequent reconstruction phase.

A link to professional identity

• Finally, the authors will discuss learning outcome relating to persistent changes in the understanding of what architecture is about and its societal role.
• First year students are in general fascinated by and introduced to outstanding and iconic architects and architecture (Steinø & Özkar, 2012).
• The relevance of the problem becomes visible in a report made by The Danish Town Planning institute, which estimates volume of 60.000- 100.000 abandoned buildings for demolition in Denmark alone.
• The authors do however see that the firsthand experience with the abandoned buildings and the interaction with the habitants of the villages influence students’ professional engagement in a way that reaches beyond the workshops.
• Learning related to personal values and acting consistently in accordance with the values the individual has internalized lies at the highest level of what Krathwohl et al (1964) calls the affective domain for learning.

Conclusion

• The initial goals of the transformation workshops was to give students a genuine, experience based understanding of the structure and materiality of a building behind the section as a diagrammatic representation.
• Besides an increased understanding of the structure of a building and relation between elements and a bodily impression of scale, spatiality and materiality, the students get a direct impression of how materials age in different ways and how spaces and materials are historical phenomena.
• This became an unforeseen asset in the students’ education, as they in their early studies experienced that architectural intervention can be utilized to influence public discourse.
• If the change of the built environment in the rural areas shall be more than a result of depopulation, decay and demolition, the situations of these areas must be handled with the same architectural engagement as new development.
• Firstly, some students catch a genuine interest in the problem and makes it parts of their professional identify.

Figures

Figure 3. Students work, village house, Sundby, 2014, section collage; cinder from the neighboring cast iron factory used as insulation underneath the concrete floor, marked with circle. (Photograph by author).

Figure 7. An example of ‘Probe of investigation’ unfolded in the ‘Re-construction phase’ (2013) (Photograph by author).

Figure 5. Students work, Villerslev, 2013, ‘section collages’ as digital reconstructions in the ‘Re-construction phase’ (Photograph by author).

Figure 2. Students work, Villerslev, 2013, the cross section was separating the school in two (Photograph by author).

Figure 1. Students work, single-family house, Snedsted, 2014, work in progress; the horizontal intervention is visible on the left, whereas the cross section is visible on the right.

Figure 4. Students work, vernacular farmhouse, Sundby, 2012, example of an intervention: a cylindrical subtraction (Photograph by author).

Figure 6. Single family house, Snedsted, 2014, The ‘horizontal intervention’ changed its status to the ‘controlled ruin’ and the educational project became a research prototype (Photograph by author).

Full text

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How to cite this publication
Please cite the final published version:
Krag, M. M. S., & Keiding, T. B. (2018). 1:1 (dis)section - Learning through full-scale dissection and
transformations of abandoned buildings. The International Journal of Art & Design Education.
https://doi.org/10.1111/jade.12184
Publication metadata
Title:
1:1 (dis)section - Learning through full-scale dissection and
transformations of abandoned buildings
Author(s):
Tina Bering Keiding & Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag
Journal:
The International Journal of Art & Design Education
DOI/Link:
10.1111/jade.12184
Document version:
Accepted manuscript (post-print)

1
1:1 (Dis)section – Learning through Full-Scale Dissection and
Transformations of Abandoned Buildings
Mo Michelsen Stochholm Krag and Tina Bering Keiding
Abstract
The section is an essential tool for understanding, exploring, representing and communicating
spatial relations, structure and materiality in architecture, design and engineering, and
therefore a recurring topic in the curricula. The section itself is destructive of nature and
incompatible with a built environment in use or under construction. Hence, students
throughout their education meet the section in the form of diagrammatic representations, that
is, as forms of meaning emptied from scale, spatiality and materiality.
This article reports on a series of four workshops, held in the spring semesters from 2011 to
2014 for first-year students at Aarhus School of Architecture. The aim was to provide first-
year students with an experience of the relation between the section as a diagrammatic
representation and the materiality, structure and spatial relations of a concrete building. The
climax of each workshop was a full-scale dissection and transformation of an abandoned
house. As we shall see, the workshops fulfilled not only the intended learning goals, but
created an initially unforeseen and unique context for learning about the relations between
building and place and introduced the question regarding depopulation of rural areas as a
pertinent processional challenge. Beyond an educational value, the research project
‘Transformation on abandonment, a new critical practice?’ transpired from the workshops.
This research project and the interplay between teaching and research are discussed in the last
part of the article.

2
Keywords full-scale dissection, transformation, progressive education, research-based
teaching, hands-on, preservation
Dissection and environment
Due to its brutal nature, full-scale dissections must be carried out on buildings, which are
permanently emptied of function. Denmark witnesses a depopulation of rural areas and
villages in the so called ‘peripheral regions’. We find these regions mostly on the many small
islands and in what is known as the ‘rotten banana’. The latter refers, by virtue of the shape,
to the western regions of Denmark from Thisted in the North to Lolland in the South. Similar
to Denmark, the rural areas of many other countries experience severe demographical
changes. The population of the rural areas are abandoning their home villages and move to
the larger cities. Actually, the majority of the world’s population is now living in cities
(OECD, 2013; UN, 2014; Thorbeck, 2012; Woods, 2011). Rural depopulation is globally
contested in diverse ways (Versteegh and Meeres; 2015). In Denmark social migration
towards the cities is mainly caused by a decline in employment in food production based on
farming and the associated industries. Furthermore, a political tendency to centralize public
institutions has challenged the rural population during decades. The overall demography is
changing in the rural areas; the average age increases, as younger people seek educational or
occupational opportunities in the larger cities. The depopulation has led to a rapid drop in the
market value of houses, which causes solvency problems for property owners, as it is hard to
obtain loans to pay for even essential maintenance of buildings. One consequence of this
trend is an increasing number of abandoned houses, which gradually go from being
uninhabited to be uninhabitable. In some areas, the municipalities have taken initiative to tear
down some of the most decrepit and unsightly houses. A report by The Danish Town

3
Planning Institute estimated a volume of 60.000-100.0000 abandoned houses for demolition
in Denmark alone (The Danish Town Planning Institute, 2014).
This has given unique opportunities for the introduction of full-scale dissection in the
curriculum for first-year students at Aarhus School of Architecture (Figure 1). All workshops
and the research project take place in Thisted Municipality in the North Western, which
contains several small communities in varied stages of depopulation.
Figure 1. Students work, single-family house, Snedsted, 2014, work in progress; the horizontal intervention is
visible on the left, whereas the cross section is visible on the right.
Workshop design
The overall design was common to all of the four workshops, but was continuously
improved. All workshops extended over a period at five to six weeks. They were divided into
four phases: Introduction, iteration, dissection and reconstruction. The article focuses on the
dissection and reconstruction phase, but to give a better understanding of the context, all four
phases are briefly introduced.

4
Phase 1: Introduction
The opening lecture started with an introduction to the section as a tool for professional
investigation and communication of the structure of a building. To facilitate students
understanding of the section as a generic principle, the lecture drew parallels between the
section as a professional tool in architecture, design and engineering and dissection in the
world of medicine. The latter was illustrated with the baroque dissection theatre of the 17
th
century, because the upcoming public full-scale dissection of a building has several features
in common with the dissection theatre in the sense that concealed scale, materiality and
spatiality are exposed in front of an audience. Demolition processes from the built
environment exemplified the rare opportunities for professional real life experience of
sections at building scale, where full-scale sections occasionally occur as temporary
phenomena.
Besides exposing structures and materials, the dissection has the potential to reveal
the history and evolution of the building. The full-scale section can reveal a buildings private
history through stratification of the built layers. However, the section must be undertaken in
respect to the laws of structure. Therefore, the workshop included a number of smaller sub-
investigations in which the impact on structural and material matters was less critical. These
sub-investigations, called ‘probes of investigations’, could display the material history of the
building, e.g. layers of paint, wallpaper or flooring, were uncovered with surgical precision.
Many of the probes of investigation took the form of plots such as work plans, drawings and
description of procedures. Other probes included physical toolboxes designed to be used in
both the investigation and reconstruction phase.
The opening lecture illustrated the learning potential of these smaller investigations
by cut-outs from ice core drilling. Similar to the revealed layers in a building, the layers of an

Frequently asked questions

Q1. What are the contributions in this paper?

This article reports on a series of four workshops, held in the spring semesters from 2011 to 2014 for first-year students at Aarhus School of Architecture. The aim was to provide firstyear students with an experience of the relation between the section as a diagrammatic representation and the materiality, structure and spatial relations of a concrete building. As the authors shall see, the workshops fulfilled not only the intended learning goals, but created an initially unforeseen and unique context for learning about the relations between building and place and introduced the question regarding depopulation of rural areas as a pertinent processional challenge. Beyond an educational value, the research project ‘ Transformation on abandonment, a new critical practice ? ’ transpired from the workshops. This research project and the interplay between teaching and research are discussed in the last part of the article.