Lara Almarcegui, Construction Materials of Exhibition Room, FRAC Bourgogne, Dijon, 2003. Photo: André Morin.

ARC3018HF (LEC0107) 
Instructor: Ang Li

Is a building worth more than the sum of its parts? The concept of embodied energy has risen in popularity over the past decade as a universal standard for describing the immense labor and energy required to extract, process, transport, and assemble raw material into built form. But the problem of how to quantify architecture’s material footprints remains a subject of endless debate within the design and construction industries, raising fundamental questions about how we define the spatial and temporal boundaries of an architectural project.

To begin, how do we trace the footprints of modern materials whose supply chains and production networks are often obscure and boundless? Should our evaluation extend past the point of construction to consider the long-term costs of maintenance, repair, and eventual demolition that add up throughout a building’s life span? And how can we account for the intangible and immeasurable forces that keep materials in circulation—from human labor to geological time?

These questions reveal the limits of metrics alone to capture the full extent of architecture’s material entanglements. At the same time, they point to the need for alternative tools and narrative frameworks that allow us to look beyond the confines of the building envelope to engage an expanded network of sites, actors, practices and values that unfold before, during and after the service life of a project.

In place of fixed definitions, this thesis seminar will explore a range of qualitative and trans-scalar approaches for thinking about building footprints that draw connections between physical material practices and the wider ecosystems that they operate within. During the fall semester, we will work together as a studio to develop a collective value system that moves away from the status quo of new construction, towards alternative cultures of building and unbuilding centered around the repair, reuse and recirculation of existing building stock and material resources.

Using the concept of “taking stock” as both a research framework and a design ethos, we will begin the semester by situating our work within a series of wider contexts. Through weekly reading discussions and case studies, we will align ourselves with current debates around waste and value from architecture, anthropology, discard studies, and environmental art practices. These conversations will be coupled with fieldwork and workshops where students will engage first-hand with material networks and reuse ecosystems in the Toronto area. Together this work will provide the common ground for a series of independent thesis investigations where students will consider how they will intervene within existing sites, networks, and cycles of construction and demolition that have shaped the built environments around them.

Fall semester research may include, but are not limited to: fieldwork into the supply chains and waste streams of familiar building materials; surveys and inventories that unpack the potential of obsolete sites and architectural typologies; ethnographic accounts of informal cultures of exchange, renovation or repair; or macro-scale analyses of municipal reuse ecosystems and policy landscapes. Towards the end of the fall semester, we will reconvene to consider the interconnectedness between individual projects through the creation of a class-wide repair manual that will serve as a collective resource for the winter semester.