Student Research - Architectural Ecologies Lab

Raising a (RESILIENT) Barn

Guest User — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 20:15:50 +0000

by Amalia Pulgar, M.Arch 2022
Advisors: Thom Faulders & Neal Schwartz

Resilience is the ability of architecture to prevent and recover from damage. This research explores architecture as a system that can live, decay, die, and regenerate; one that embraces environmental precarity as a means toward a new form of resilience.

The hypothesis is that a framework of smaller components working in concert could provide a scaffold for a living architecture that supports infill materials, such as mycelium, whose own state changes as it lives and dies. Given the realities of of climate change, architects need to embrace resilience as something more than protecting our work from destruction; we need to re-imagine our work to allow for it.

The Red Round Barn in the Fountaingrove community in Santa Rosa was burned during the Tubbs Fire in 2017. Rooted in a rich cultural history of cults and cultivation dating back to the 19th century, the Red Round Barn stood out as a symbol of Northern California utopianism.

This project reimagines the Red Round Barn as a placeholder for space, challenging the idea of architectural death after fire destruction.

The research explores architecture as a system that can live, decay, die, and regenerate; a scaffold for a living architecture that supports infill materials, such as mycelium whose own state changes as it lives and dies.

Arctic Pioneertown

Guest User — Thu, 01 Sep 2022 20:18:00 +0000

by Shih Ting Huang, M.Arch 2021

The arctic ice will melt in the future due to changing weather. The thesis proposal is to take advantage of the newly opened shipping lanes and occupy the arctic frontier. There is the potential to form a network of shipping routes that will connect to different continents making arctic travel much easier. It will still be possible to be a pioneer on the planet earth with 7 billion people. To do so, architecture plays an important role in supporting pioneers in the arctic. This project explores possible pioneer development in the part of the world that is previously uninhabitable.

Aligned along these new shipping routes, the design concept will establish multiple hubs for ‘climate-change pioneers’ who take advantage of these new settlement opportunities. Future scenarios will include adventure traveling, international tax-free trading, scientific research, hitchhiking, or nomadic living experience for this proposal. The arctic Pioneertown will start at a smaller scale. Eventually, the arctic Pioneertown will grow over the years to form an archipelago larger scale of settlements. In the future, the Arctic Pioneertown will be one of the dream places to live due to the changing climate and it is going to form its own self-sustaining system and provide a tranquil living environment.

Counter Maintenance

Guest User — Tue, 16 Nov 2021 22:23:41 +0000

by Jennifer Jimenez, M.Arch 2021
Advisors: Thom Faulders (spring) & Brian Price (fall)

The hostile border between the US and Mexico uses tall metal fences as a fortification technique that not only symbolizes “de-fence,” it is also associated with violence, death, and separation. The never ending construction and reconstruction of the wall endangers wildlife, natural landscapes, and cultural ties between the two nations. Instead of maintaining these destructive traits, we need to think of the border as an attractor point—a place of shared communal exchange—not as a separator.

This thesis advocates for ways in which a feminist perspective can introduce a different take on the border—one where both nations can create a separate, but inclusive, binational space from these invisible systems that promotes transborder unity. According to Towards a Feminist Theory of Caring, by Berenice Fisher and Joan Tronto, caring should be view as, “a species activity that includes everything that we do to maintain, continue, and repair our ‘world’ so that we can live in it as well as possible. That world includes our bodies, our selves, and our environment, all of which we seek to interweave in a complex, life-sustaining web.”

Through methods of community stewardship, and ongoing cultivation, the border becomes a connective interface between occupants of a shared background. The people’s engagement is what sustains the architecture. The more care that each nation puts in will determine the vibrant interactivity of the border.

Disaster Collectivism / Infrastructural System

Guest User — Wed, 27 Oct 2021 19:20:31 +0000

by Daniel Ramirez, M.Arch 2021

Currently, the Mission Bay neighborhood has the ambition of addressing the urgent issue of subsidence. The buildings themselves are safe and supported, but the sidewalks/streets are not. The sidewalks are separating from the buildings at a rapid rate, and this will worsen as the sea level rises. Consequently, this will compromise the sidewalks as public space, storefronts, and most importantly the wellbeing of those low-income families that depend on the public good.

Generally, these disaster events/disaster conditions allow the private sector, venture capitalists, and speculative developers to exacerbate the original conditions by exploiting underprivileged people through the form of austerity, privatization, and policing. What if architectural opportunities could be developed that would allow a change in that balance, an opportunity for capitalism to invest in community building? This project explores the co-opting of the lost sidewalk and the storefront due to the sinking sidewalks. Funded by the capitalist model, it suggests an alternative situation in which the community can engage with this new circulation layer. This work can contribute to the necessary dismantling of the ongoing exploitation of the urban context.

“Through Architecture there is a possibility of turning the tables and allowing the low-income community (bottom-up) to take advantage of the private sector (top-down) by partially taking over the structure and allocating new community engagement spaces.”

These series of events and structural conditions begin to catalyze opportunities to not merely preserve the steward public access but also preserve the steward public space through the elevated infrastructural system. Community accountability is enabled during the process of merging what comes from the top-down (Capitalism) with the bottom-up (Community). Therefore, this proposal can contribute to the necessary dismantling of the ongoing exploitation of the urban context.

Dwelling in the Anthropocene

Guest User — Tue, 02 Jun 2020 01:07:28 +0000

by Vishnu Balunsat, M.Arch 2020
Advisors: Nataly Gattegno (primary) and Chris Falliers (secondary)

Abstract

In an era of rapid environmental and ecological change due to the collective human behavior of modernized societies, our way of finding shelter must adapt if we are to stay with the trouble. The increase in frequency and severity of wildfires in California alone are creating precarious environments to live in, yet according to studies, 80% of development is happening in wildland urban interfaces, the places most at risk of these catastrophes. This thesis is interested in how human beings can continue to survive in a landscape that is seeing rapid change and how a building’s life can learn from the successive cycles in nature to evolve over time. The project is not a solution to ecological crises, but a provocation to reassess how we play string figure games with ecology, multispecies, and collectivity.

The Cycles of Architecture

A dwelling in the Anthropocene reflects changes in its environment across four different phases and timescales. ['Desolation', days post-fire; 'Propagation', months post-fire; 'Evolution', years post-fire; 'Decomposition', decades post-fire]. These phases and successive cycles reflect phenomena like post-fire mushroom and super-blooms, but also reflect developing practices of forest maintenance that provide lumber for mass timber construction.

The dwelling co-op implies strength in community and identifies how our relationship to shelter changes throughout each phase and cycle. After fires, ‘Desolation’ is a period of recovery. The hearth is revealed as a stone monument that endures. ‘Propagation’ is a moment of reclamation. Shelter is constructed with little resources and humans begin multispecies collaborations. ‘Evolution’, when productivity is at its highest, supports artisanal food production; highlighting a mushroom farm, beekeeper workshop, smokehouse, bakery, and herbalist kitchen. In the final phase of 'Decomposition', the collective retreats into the underground fire refuge that was previously used to propagate mushrooms.

A New Collective Form

The Forest of the Anthropocene is an ontological map of Quincy California that measures the cycles in days, months, years, and decades. It theorizes that a new form of urban development will be much more vested in the way buildings evolve in a changing landscape, but also how humans might think of nature's entanglement in our built environments.

The City of Ko-Living

Guest User — Thu, 28 May 2020 07:26:09 +0000

by Hardik Bhimani, M.Arch 2020
Advisors: Chris Falliers and Nataly Gattegno

Mumbai formerly called Bombay is a melting pot of cultures. It is the capital city of the Indian State of Maharashtra on the west coast of India. The mesmerizing metropolitan is a cluster of seven islands with a population density of 73000 people per square mile. Slowly people made way to the city lured by the promise of business opportunities and religious freedom. Due to this increasing density, acres of mangroves and wetlands have been reclaimed over the years starting from 1671 till the day. Over the years the migrant population prospered, therefore land was reclaimed, and thus began transformation into the industrial hub and bustling metropolis.

This project envisages Mumbai which is at the risk of sea level rise returning to its original archipelago with strategic planning. By 2050, due to sea level rise there would be flooding resulting to shortage of land where this project imagines Mumbai transforming back to the archipelago with a population of 24 million.

Worli Koliwada is one of the earliest fishing villages in Mumbai that stretches along the Worli coastline which is one of the original 7 island. The goal of the project is to strategically accommodate 1 million people on the Worli Island of Mumbai over time, which is predicted to have 100 storeys through a hierarchy of open spaces and spatial organization. This new of city of cohabitation, infrastructure and civic spaces will also extend surrounding the island in the waters and along the Sea link bridge.

The design tries to address the question: How to preserve the local life and the city fabric and make it continue? It combines houses of different sizes that is derived from the local house unit trying to make it compact, intimate and memorable neighborhood. The design is developed through community-oriented spaces and different typologies with areas of pause, encouraging social interaction. The ground level consists of existing public spaces mainly the market and various vendor stalls which connects to the housing units from the ground itself. It will create opportunities for retail space and allow the Koli community to teach about and sell their product. Different levels of ground are being re-created, creating an atmosphere that was present on the ground level like social interaction, various activities for children and the openness. The shared open spaces and the range of scale lend dynamism and activation to these ‘in-between’ spaces. They provide various opportunities of group study areas, outdoor classrooms, play area, areas of gathering for performances, games, and festivals similar to that on the ground. The different typologies are arranged around a central core that cater to different family sizes. The arrangement of the units help create different grounds and open spaces that serve well for light and ventilation.

This project is a typology of one island which will be constructed on all 7 islands that acts as hyper-dense micro-cities in anticipation of inevitable sea level rise.

Local TECH

Guest User — Fri, 22 May 2020 21:49:47 +0000

by Vaidehi Davda, M.Arch 2020
Advisors: Chris Falliers and Nataly Gattegno

Local TECH (Territorial, Environmental, Cultural, Habitation)

This exploration is a critique of the even grid which is the western organization of space to the use of the Mandala (the ancient Hindu pattern of the 9 square) as an organizing device. This focuses on the architecture of reconfigured ground and the design of community in low lying areas which together allow for forms and autonomies at different scales.

Here, the 9 square is seen as a model of the universe, but the thesis tries to explore how the 9 square could also be used in a way to think about ecological form, environmental and social form? It addresses: With low lying lands being more precarious, why and how do people still live on this land? They will, both for economic reasons, and for cultural and social reasons that have to do with that land.

The design at a formal scale explores the range of architecture and territorial form within the larger Mandala in the low lying yet productive land of Gujarat on the west coast of India. Thus, it becomes necessary to explore new relationship between development and two forms of environment: Harnessing of the productive land and the Adaptive responsive to precarious lands.

This thesis project is designing a new set of communities and territories around the Mandala as an environmental form and not a closed form. It tries to show the grids relationship to growth, and its relationship to different environmental conditions of agriculture, salt, marshy lands, terrain and low-lying lands.

The different scales of autonomies and versions of thickening the gridlines become part of the architecture. For example, the Rice field community here is a thickened line, so the town becomes a line and the rice paddy wall has underlying infrastructure to carry water. A thickened line in the Mangrove community becomes a place to dry wet fabrics. It produces a new figure of center and a framing of space that happens at every scale where the thickening of the line becomes architectural. At every scale the Mandala allows to emphasize on these two forms of architectural features and ideas of centers and ideas of linear forms. The center can be social and small or landscape and large.

It is an exploration of the relationship between habitation form, agricultural from and form of precarious land and how we organize and inhabit them. It tries to show how the Mandala and the territorial conditions can co-exist by tying together where people live and their economic resource which the modern grid tended to separate like the courtyard community’s proximity to its economic source. It produces closer relationships between people and environment to promote environmental characteristics of form and not just human growth. In conclusion, The Mandala as a model for universe now becomes a Mandala as a model for equalizing environmental form, habitation form and agricultural form.

Stranded Strata

Guest User — Sun, 14 Jul 2019 19:00:54 +0000

by Eric Soifer, M.Arch 2019
Advisors: Chris Falliers and Thom Faulders

Stranded Strata: 3D-Printed Non-Efficient Architecture for Extreme Environments

Traditional construction techniques in extreme or remote environments necessitate massive human oversight and thus are impractical or impossible. Architecture and construction must embrace new technologies to build in these environments. This thesis asks: how can integrity emerge from imprecision in additive manufacturing? This project has been situated on Meridiani Planum slightly north of the Martian equator, an area rich in topographic features such as craters. Abundant local regolith is used as the building material and the site’s topography is the formwork.

A Potterbot was used to simulate extrusion printing with local materials. A significant hurdle in this project was development a method to print over a surface that isn’t flat. The toolpath was designed in 2D then projected onto a 3D surface. Height was achieved by expanding the Z-axis. There are 2 generations of evolution on this project. The first generation was an exploration of material formation. A wide variety of toolpaths were used and the results analyzed for density, gradation, organization, and disturbance. Generation two took one toolpath from generation one that provided the most architectural opportunity and manipulated it to achieve a new set of criteria. Structural continuity, enclosure, spatial definition, detail/anomaly.

Once the clay prints were fired in the kiln they were rigid enough to experiment with their interaction with the topography, inspired by the variations in form that emerged during the printing process. Based on the analysis for a given criteria or potential program, the print was left in place, flipped over, or excavated around or beneath. Based on topography and orientation, prints that emerged from the same toolpath expressed many different architectural forms and features.

Mars is the most extreme example of an environment where this manufacturing process would have a lot of advantages over traditional methods. But all those advantages are also relevant on earth, such as the use of in-situ forms, local material, and less need for oversight.

Typical 3D printing relies on layer perfection. This project embraces the inevitability in layer failures by designing forms that rely on redundancy of line to create structure. This allows a reevaluation of the parameters of construction: time, efficiency, labor, and material. Imposing old construction techniques onto our new reality is a form of imperialism. This project breaks free of imported thinking by amplifying the local.

Fluid Ground

Guest User — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 03:48:12 +0000

by Isha Fathmath, M.Arch 2019
Advisors: Chris Falliers and Thom Faulders

Fluid Ground presents a conceptual framework to re-imagine the formal, material, territorial, and architectural performance of supporting human inhabitation in precarious lands. It opens new possibilities to rethink and explore how to engage with the instability of the physical ground. The speculation of ground includes various scales and aspects of constructed environments and architecture in dynamic response to environmental forces.

The project asks: How can an architecture build its own ground?

Sited at Kan’dholhudhoo Maldives, one of the islands that was destroyed by the 2004 Tsunami, this thesis proposes to explore ways in which architecture can create new landforms and domains where the ground is conceptually and physically in continuous decay. Through the reformation of land, the reestablishment of solid ground by using the leftover construction/ruins as armatures and the resettlement of the neighborhood, the human habitation, ecology, and architecture continues to evolve with the fluid nature of the site.

Situated in the year 2060 in a time where people continue to stay post sea level rise, the project operates on housing an extended family at a neighborhood scale.

The first design approach is to create micro-islands, through reformation of land by cut and fill strategy that would translate the site from a single designed island to its own archipelago — in turn, forming mini lagoons for water to pass through within the islands. The micro-islands are maintained to protect from daily and seasonal changes and allows for ecological and landform dynamism within the site.

The reestablishment of concrete ground and infrastructure is achieved by using the leftover construction/ruins as armatures and leveraging them as a foundation to build on. This way the ground grows higher and allowing the formation of a new typology for habitation that changes overtime. The new typology becomes an armature that choregraphs and gives potential to future dynamism.

After the resettlement of people and programs within the framework, creating new territories and domains, the project continues to evolve. The dwelling of a house gets replaced by a compound that could provide land for farming or agriculture while ecological growth continues to cultivate around the lagoon. The human habitation, environmental growth, and architecture continue to evolve with the fluid nature of the site.

Salt Bonds

Guest User — Wed, 12 Jun 2019 19:09:33 +0000

Photo by Nicholas Bruno

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by Jane Gitschier, M.Arch 2019
Advisors: Nataly Gattegno and Hugh Hynes

Architecture, by its very nature, sets up a physical boundary between humans and the environment. It defends us against the forces of nature, yet divorces us from nature’s power for wonder and refreshment. This thesis explores possible approaches for reconnection in the context of the salt evaporation ponds of San Francisco Bay. In this enormous complex, seawater is allowed to evaporate in stages, leaving behind crystalized salt called “halite”. A variety of ancient, salt-loving microorganisms, known as “halophiles”, also inhabit salt ponds, imbuing vibrant hues that can be experienced only from above. How can this dynamic system be commandeered for the purpose of architecture? How might inherent geometric, chemical, or biological aspects of this dynamic system be abstracted in the design of architectural elements themselves?

TOXI CITY: Urbanism in the Anthropocene

Guest User — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 21:18:24 +0000

by Sabari Gopakumar, M.Arch 2018
Advisor: Adam Marcus

This project proposes a new architecture and urbanism for the polluted Bellandur lake, in the city of Bangalore, India. The Bellandur lake is the largest of a network of lakes that supplies fresh water to the city. Due to rapid expansion, many of these lakes are paved over or polluted by untreated sewage and industrial waste. The condition of the lake periodically manifests as white, toxic, and carcinogenic foam that blows over the city. Remediation efforts are too slow, expensive, and ineffective, and the lake continues to be a threat to the city which faces drought conditions every year. Questioning the tendency to marginalize these unnatural and toxic environments of industrial urban life, this project proposes a series of elevated platforms and urban corridors that utilize a tensegrity structural system to protect from the toxic environment yet also reveal its sublime nature. The structures create protected lagoons that help remediate the water crisis by collecting fresh water. It explores the architectural opportunities of quarantine and proposes a new model for urbanism in extreme environments where architecture allows the city to reconnect with the lake.

Wastescape

Guest User — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 21:05:57 +0000

by Eric Fura, M.Arch 2018
Advisor: Adam Marcus

Wastescape reclaims some of the most public territory of San Francisco—the Southeast Wastewater Treatment Plant—as public-occupied space through architectural intervention and addition. Eighty percent of the city’s sewage and storm water drain to and are treated at this facility before being released back into our shared resource, the San Francisco Bay. Wastescape connects neighborhoods and creates wildlife habitat in a territory of infrastructure previously impervious to the surrounding communities, operating as public asset rather than nuisance. The project questions our current understanding of what constitutes “nature” in an urban context, substituting traditional forms of ecology with constructed and purpose-built ecologies. Questions of acceptable risk are juxtaposed with issues of gentrification as visitors are exposed to the processes of water treatment. This new access corridor of walkways, bird canopies, and public space provokes alternative usage opportunities at the intersection of infrastructure and urbanism.

If a Mine Collapses and Nobody is Around, Does it Make a Sound?

Guest User — Sun, 02 Sep 2018 20:59:50 +0000

by Patrick Monte, M.Arch 2018
Advisor: Adam Marcus

If a mine... is a series of spherical observatories located on the site of a cataclysmic landslide that occurred at Utah’s Bingham Canyon Copper Mine in 2013. The mine, notably the largest human excavation, is considered as a site for speculating upon architecture and architectural experience that traverses human, industrial, and geological scales. In particular, the project is conceived as a cultural form for reclaiming the mine and a monument to the impacts of human terraforming and resource extraction. Spherical observatories connected by traversing walkways frame and curate a landscape that scales the industrial and geological and creates an experience of the site that may last several hours, days, or even a week. Each observatory isolates and synthesizes an element of the historic 2013 landslide as a cultural artifact, positioned in relation to each other and the landscape in ways which seek to challenge environmental aesthetics.

Plume & Poche

Guest User — Wed, 02 May 2018 20:47:00 +0000

by Carlos Sabogal, M.Arch 2018
Advisor: Adam Marcus

This project reimagines the typology of the house by speculating how material performance can provide variable qualities of thermal experience. Thermal gradients of intensity emit from the building, shaping qualitative boundaries that change the way we live at home. The poche of the wall is multiplied from single to double poche to spatial plume, amplifying programmatic thermal conditions within the home. Conditions change from sunrise to sunset, providing new opportunities for other programs. The house is designed through the manipulation of mass and form of robotically applied concrete, creating a variable spectrum of climate environments. The form is derived from airflows and thermal studies and references traditional vernacular typologies of adobe or mud-brick dwellings. The house is formally and programmatically optimized through thermal simulation and live thermal analysis. The house is a genotype that can be placed in different climate scenarios and reprogrammed to adapt to the environment.

City of Disassembly

Guest User — Wed, 02 May 2018 20:15:00 +0000

by Georine Pierre, M.Arch 2018
Advisor: Thom Faulders

Our contemporary capitalist world is composed of distributed territories of production, consumption, and waste. Sites of consumption dominate first-world cities, while sites of production and waste are increasingly offshored to the developing world. This thesis asks: What is architecture’s capacity to intervene in such mechanisms, re-integrating these disparate streams into a closed system, a “factory without a factory”? By exploiting the potential links between domestic and industrial processes, could new qualities of life arise in an industrial machine-city, in which production, consumption and waste activities are co-mingled?

The thesis offers a potential site of experimentation within the communities and informal settlements that have emerged within e-waste dump sites in developing countries—specifically, Agbogbloshie, an e-waste recovery district near Accra, Ghana. By examining landscapes formed from e-waste disposal, the project provides new extraction and disassembly-based templates for architecture and urbanism that aim for a symbiosis of economic, political, and social systems.