The last 5 years have seen a pronounced increase in excitement around so-called biomaterials for various industries. As people consider their environmental and social impacts, along with rising ethical concerns from consumers, the search for more “sustainable” alternatives is driving innovation of new bio-sourced materials.

This workshop considers the place of biomaterials in the modern world. Biomaterials require new ways of making and new manufacturing processes, but they also reveal our need to think of the end-user (needs) and consumer’s (or designer’s) understanding of how these materials can function in harmony with the environment. In design, we have a responsibility to understand how these materials fit within our existing systems. What changes are needed to better accommodate these bio-innovations?

This week we will learn about the new biomaterials that have been created looking at processes of Growth, Waste and Recycling. We will discuss how they are already being implemented in our design system but most importantly focusing on being transparent about where our materials come from. Each student will learn the basics of bioplastics making. Students will look at how they can create their own properties and aesthetics in these materials, with the aim of applying bioplastics into their practices. Students will make and collect samples throughout the week. Samples and recipes will be recorded, documented, exhibited and donated at the end of the workshop.

Across the land, across all sites, soil varies significantly. One soil extracted on a construction site will differ from the soil at a neighboring site. This variability is what makes soil such a standardization challenge, making soil an inherently non-commodified building material. Indeed, the emergence of standard materials from soils is hindered by their high variability and their reliance on local additives and traditional construction methods.

Earth materials are minimally processed, uncooked, unbaked, untreated, raw. Materials are locally sourced and often processed or mixed on-site. The degree to which end-use construction products are engineered from soil varies although the soil remains the ‘feedstock’. How do we find the common ground, the prescribed and characterized soil optimal for buildings? What is the mineralogical classification of clays most suitable, the grain distribution, and optimal mix design?

In this workshop, we will collaboratively build a rammed-earth wall, comprised of the collection of soils of participants - who vary in diversity very much like their soils - to create a “common ground”.

This workshop will meld digital and analog modes of fabrication, exploring the potential for custom CNC-molded modular systems, experimenting with material processes, and designing for water.

The material research will focus on experimentation with a traditional rammed-earth construction process, exploring variations in material consistency, composition, mixture, and packing techniques. This builds upon practices of earthen construction to consider modular masonry components as an alternative to massive monolithic concrete surfaces. Students will explore how the process of creating rammed earth informs materiality, and experiment with bio-based, recycled, or collected materials and how they impact material performance, aesthetics, surface geometries, and water flows.

Students will learn how to generate surface patterns by producing variable toolpaths using Grasshopper and RhinoCAM that aim to manipulate water flows. These toolpaths will be used to fabricate CNC-routed components that will be incorporated into molds for casting the earthen modules.

Driving the research will be an understanding of how customized surface geometries might manipulate water flows by channeling, infiltrating, and collecting water in different ways. The work will consider the material’s interaction with water, including decay, growth, permeability, and filtration. Individual cast modules will be assembled together at the conclusion of the workshop in a collective installation.

Combining JXTA’s Tactical Urbanism to engage communities in design decision-making, with the language of street art, projection, illumination and words, students will create space with pandemic waste.

Every aspect of our life has been affected by the pandemic, from how we perceive space to how we use it to distance from each other as virus hosts and connect with each other as social beings. Even as we try to create hybrid realities our physical spaces no longer meet our hybrid needs. The pandemic has also resulted in extensive material waste which is headed to landfills, such as acrylic (plexiglas) to create covid separation barriers. These cannot be readily recycled, but may be manipulated,formed and imagined for new uses through an understanding of material properties. Can we, however, increase the material’s lifespan by combining acrylic elements? How can we tell stories about our shared experiences and the emergence of environmental challenges relating to the materials that we use?

Using discarded acrylic panels, we will create installations that shape space for new normals that provide individuals and groups ways to connect and separate. Rooted in the instructors’ individual and collective social practices, students will project onto the installations a series of narratives using graffiti, light and words, affirmation and contradiction with a bit of antagonism.

What architects define as “good” is open for debate. Good evolves. Good follows fashion. Good follows commerce. Good adapts to circumstance and context. We are currently reassessing celebrated people, things, objects, systems, and policies that have to date been accepted as “good” (or at minimum acceptable as such by the status quo). Society is tearing down its monuments. Perhaps architects should strongly question their own.

Social upheaval is not our only challenge. We are also at a juncture environmentally. A precipice if we are being truthful. It is difficult to argue against the fact that our approach to making buildings, our value systems, and our investment in material, energy, and commodity must and will change in the very near future. The consequence of a building, assessed in carbon and energy, is (or should be) as important or more important than its fashionability. What should we offer the generation who will practice in this newly emerging and uncertain world? In this context, we are going to conduct an exercise in speculative architectural history, told through the perspective of materials and energy. unprecedented will require you to select and research an iconic building that is considered a significant architectural precedent. You will examine it through the lenses of energy, material, and carbon.

So, some questions to consider:

What are better precedents? Which buildings hold ideas that should be emulated, imitated, and copied if we are to meet the challenges of all that comes next?

Process:

Step one | Pick a project from a list of icons

Step two | Research why is the project important, how was it constructed?

Step three | Forensic Accounting through deconstruction into constituent parts

Step four | Switcheroo! Change one aspect to create an improvement.