ARC3020Y F
Instructor(s): Carol Moukheiber
Meeting Section: L0108
Tuesday, 9:00am - 1:00pm, 2:00pm - 6:00pm

“Questions… Morphology? Longevity? Incept dates?”
Roy Batty, Replicant – Blade Runner

What happens the day after a building is built? or years, decades, or even centuries after?

Within the context of a circular economy, the concept of durability, as opposed to early/planned obsolescence, is key in that it implies an extended lifespan (100+ years) with minimum capital cost and energy expenditure during its duration. However, as the vagaries of history demonstrate with mutating contexts and social practices, building uses change over time. Durability can then perhaps be understood as the ability to eschew obsolescence, even facilitate change in use while limiting material waste and day to day disruption. This pursuit of durability, far from resulting in a nondescript structure posits that spatial, structural, and infrastructural specificities are critical in enabling the durable.

The research studio will engage in typological research and speculation into low carbon, functionally indeterminate forms, or anexact typologies that can anticipate change. Although uncertain in their programmatic destinies, these building morphologies will be quite certain in their spatial/formal/material inventions while remaining open ended in their social performance. An understanding of buildings as containing multiple “shearing layers,” with each layer being governed by its own entropic timescale will serve as a springboard from which to rethink a building’s layer alignments and temporalities.¹

The studio will document and study buildings from various periods that have accommodated or can facilitate significant transitions and transformations over time. Forms will be analyzed structurally, materially, and socially. The research will attempt to understand energy expenditures in parallel with programmatic, thermal, material, and formal organizations. Lessons drawn will be concretized into speculations on uncertain forms. These models will in turn serve as formal and conceptual guides for each student’s unique thesis proposal.

Emerging individual thesis projects are expected to expand on the studio’s research by understanding time (and lifecycles) as dominant design parameters in the selection of site(s), program(s), and form(s).

The studio consists of 2 main parts:

P1 – wk1-5:
(a)Defining Terms
The purpose of this exercise is to develop a collective understanding of what constitutes typological durability. Through a series of readings and discussions, we will identify and distill principles that will serve as guideposts for the term.

(b) Analysis
The purpose of this exercise is to develop and formulate strategies for adaptation and durability in buildings. A series of case studies will be analyzed collectively. This will necessitate investigations into the circularity of a building’s economy, along with its potential for social, political, and environmental adaptation over time.

P2 – wk6-12:
Model Building + Thesis Statement
The purpose of this exercise is to experiment with structural models and drawings that explore the concepts and knowledge gained from P1 and P2. These physical models will embody strategies that carefully consider open ended structures with low operational and embodied energy.

¹ Brand, Stewart. How Buildings Learn: What Happens After They’re Built? New York: Penguin Books, 1995.

For additional information, please click here.