Open Thermodynamic Design: Exploring Dialectic Design Processes Through Mass Timber

This paper examines a pedagogy that seeks to resist conventional approaches to the relationship between design and energy in architecture and instead advance our ability to address environmental concerns as designers through a dialogue with material utilizing criteria such as its material sourcing, carbon footprint, and microclimate as drivers of design. This dialogue welcomes material agency as an active and critical participant in establishing the form and performance relationship. This paper articulates the process utilized in a three-credit seminar that asked students to design a mass timber cabin sited on a tree farm. The material for that cabin must be harvested from the site. This process asks the students to consider a series of dialectic relationships between the material, the site, the form, and the microclimate of their cabin. This reciprocal design process that repeatedly changes scales allows the students to engage environmental design as a systematic dialogue at multiple scales of time, space, and energy establishing an interconnected relationship between form and performance. This paper articulates the process by which students were given a site in which they harvest a set amount of timber and then use that material for the construction of a small mass timber cabin located on the very same site. Each iteration involved tumbling the cabin into different positions and asking the students to account for a new seasonal criterion. Each tumble reterritorializes earlier design decisions and requires the students to reevaluate those decisions under new material and climatological conditions. The cabin has three positions, summer, fall, and winter. Each position requires the students to address climate issues such as buoyancy ventilation, cross-ventilation, and the stratification of air. As the students make design changes, they harvest more lumber from the site. This creates a series of dialectic relationships at multiple temporal and spatial scales. Key issues, such as the number of trees cut down and the scale of their cabins, are tempered by discussions around embodied and sequestered carbon. This paper examines how these speculative projects ask students to consider design as part of an open thermodynamic system in which the building is a momentary physical manifestation of larger energy and material flows by speeding up certain.

https://doi.org/10.35483/ACSA.Teach.2021.20

Volume Editors
Jonathan A. Scelsa & Jørgen Johan Tandberg

ISBN
978-1-944214-38-8