Page 116 - Sharp: The Book For Men SS21

Under construction since 2017, House 75.9 sits partially buried under the soil of a hay farm south of Vancouver, in Surrey. It centres on 10 concrete columns. They resemble trumpets, although Arbel calls them “lily pads.” It’s easy to see why. They stretch upward, some 30 feet high, merging into the house’s ceiling as if they had reached the water’s surface in search of sunlight. The forms themselves are remarkable, but as is typical of Arbel’s work, the real magic lies in their construction.
Each lily pad was created by slowly pouring concrete into a breathable fabric form stretched around tall plywood ribs. Traditional concrete construction requires concrete to be poured in stages, one layer on top of another. The result is a surface marred by horizontal cold joints, the fossilized evidence of concrete’s linear, step-by-step construction — which, according to Arbel, is antithetical to concrete’s liquid nature. Arbel’s fabric forms, however, let concrete breathe while curing. Consequently, each lily pad is the result of one long, continuous pour of concrete. The result is a seamless, sculptural form that Arbel feels better communicates concrete’s fluidity. But most importantly, it’s more efficient. “Usually, when I have my ideas, they’re way more expensive than conventional methods, and not because they’re crazy, but because they require so much R&D,” says Arbel. “But in this case, it was kind of amazing: it’s actually less expensive. It’s less wasteful. It’s less labour. It’s faster. And certainly, with any kind of industrial approach, it would be even better and even more effective.”
Much like Arbel’s lights, House 75.9 is an expression of a material’s capa- bilities, perhaps even at the expense of its domestic function. “I don’t see these lily pads as beautiful, necessarily,” he says. “They’re quite aggressive. They’re strange. They ask weird questions. And to have them in a home is a balancing act. Because a home, above all else, has to be a warm and comfortable place — for a family, in this case. So how do you cohabit with these sorts of aggressive things?” While the house’s inhabitants may not yet have an answer to that question, Arbel made sense of the lily pads’ presence by imagining them as freshly discovered archaeological relics. As as a young design student, Arbel once studied in Rome. There, he observed how the city’s architects incorporated fragments of the ancient city, often uncovered when excavating a building’s foundations or an underground parking garage, into otherwise banal office buildings. Today, the tension that found objects create within spaces fascinates him. “I want that sort of uncomfortable feeling of the human experience to be present within a domestic environment,” he adds.
In this context, House 75.9 is an inversion of what we typically ask of our homes — especially in a pandemic. People have coped with the past year by trying to insulate themselves from its discomfort. Lockdowns and stay-at- home orders have reaffirmed the importance of our domestic spaces, and we’ve furnished them with bouclé sofas and warm lighting in turn. For Bocci, that means business is booming. The flip side though, says Arbel, is that much of the joy of making is lost without the type of direct collaboration that he enjoys.
Thankfully, vaccines appear to offer a return to some sort of normalcy, and Arbel explains that the vaccine development process is like printing. “It’s much more complex than that. But basically, they just mapped the genetic code, tweaked it, and printed it. It’s astonishing,” he says. “We’re [entering] into this era of human history where all we have to do is imagine it and we can manufacture it. On the computer, we can form anything, and now there are the tools to actually print it with great finality out of many different materials.” A world so limitless creates questions: what holds meaning when anything can be created, often without evidence of the human touch? “And my answer is to celebrate the kind of constraints involved in materials and in fabrication methods. Those are things I celebrate and find meaning in: the built-in imperfections of every single thing we make,” says Arbel.
Before House 75.9 is completed, a crane will lift tree bulbs into the hollow tops of the concrete lily pads. Arbel’s plan was for magnolias. Come spring, they’d erupt in a three-week bloom of pink, peach, or white, a respite from not only the house’s concrete and cedar facade, but also the unrelenting grey of a Vancouver winter. Alas, the building’s site is windy, not ideal for magnolias. Arbel is considering other trees. “[That pop of colour] could happen with a maple in the fall, when it goes bright red and catches the sunset,” Arbel muses. It’s not exactly what he’d envisioned, but he doesn’t seem miffed. For Arbel, listening has always been the way to uncover beauty in the unexpected.
116 BFM / SS21 FEATURES / PERFECTLY IMPERFECT
PHOTO BY FAHIM KASSAM