Dimensions 16
- Price: $15.00
- Paperback—192 pages
- ISBN: 1-891197-24-X
- Dimensions:
0.5" x 8" x 10" - © 2002 The University of Michigan College of Architecture + Urban Planning
Editors/Designers/Staff:
- Yumi Aoki
- Tony Loicano
- Peter Messina
- Nicole Milliff
- Denise Ng
- Wairimu Njuguna
- Damian Petrescu
- Nikki Ross
- Sloan Schaffer
- Danny Welch
Faculty Advisor:
- Caroline Constant
Sustaining Material Practice
Since 1997 students in their final semester of the undergraduate design studio sequence have competted in the Wallenberg Competition. The Bernard Maas Foundation endowed this initiative in honor of Raoul Wallenberg, a University of Michigan architecture alumnus who wnet on to save thousands of Hungarian Jews from nazi extermination. The endowment also enabled Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning to sponsor a series of lectures to complement the student work.
This semester the students engagged in design as a form of research as a foundation for an ethical practice. Over the course of the semester we struggled with issues associated with ecological design, questioning how to define it and how architects might engage it critically. To focus this broad are of study, the studios explored what we came to call "sustainable material Practices." Each studio focused on a single material or material process. They explored themes such as permanence, ephemerality, ritual and practice and their respective spatial iimplications. In this way each studio sought to engage broader cultural issues, as well as quantitative issues associated with the technological aspects of ecological design.
For the lecture series we invited an educator, a philosopher and a practitioner to share ideas and inform our investigations. Michelle Addington, who is both a mechanical engineer and an architect, began the series by speaking about small-scale issues that can have large consequences. Nest, Manual DeLanda, a philosopher and computer hacker, went cosmic on us with a discussion of genetically generated architecture and Deleuzian ontology. Louisa Hutton, an architect practicing in London and Berlin with her partner Matthias Sauerbruch, concluded the seris. Thw work of Sauerbruch Hutton deals with ecology and sustainability not simply in a quantitative and technical manner, but also in a qualitative and sensual way. Shw spoke of ecology at three scales: the ecology of the city and the ability to harness its energies and intensities; the ecology of the building and its ability to exploit the wind and sun; finally, the ecology of space itself.
While the work of the individual studios ranged in scale from that of the city to that of a project's material components, all five studios embraced technology not as an end in itself, but in service to architecture—to the production of meaningful provocative spaces.
Craig Borum, Coordinator