Material Embodiment: Logics for Post-Carbon Architectures

“So great are the changes required to alter humankind’s dealings with the physical world that only this sense of displacement and estrangement can drive the actual practices of change and reduce our consuming desires”- Richard Sennett

This studio explores biogenic and geogenic material strategies as catalysts that inspire us to reimagine our relationships with material culture and technology. We will investigate and seek to position frameworks toward robust architecture across scales–spanning material, building, and landscape to reveal the imaginative potential of post-carbon material practices.

Directing attention to one of the most fundamental yet complex architectural elements, the wall, the studio pursues materiality that informs a range of concerns from the performative to the expressive. We will develop durable material strategies in the context of architectural envelopes to understand their capacities as contingent and dissipative systems. In examining materials such as loam and hempcrete, the studio prioritizes wallness and solidity as performative necessities, spatial affordances, and atmospheres.

Situated along the Monongahela River in Pittsburgh’s Hazelwood Green, the studio operates within a transforming post-industrial landscape that reveals the complicated reciprocities between historical landscapes of labor and local communities. A defining feature of Hazelwood Green is Mill-19, an existing quarter-mile long structure that serves as a striking reminder of prior industrialization. Partially deconstructed into an exoskeleton that envelops newly constructed labs, offices, and research institutes, the adaptively repurposed Mill-19 houses organizations that support the growth of regional advanced manufacturing and skilled workforce development.

We will develop material strategies through the design of a hybrid facility that condenses workforce training, research, and exhibition to merge efforts underway at Mill-19 with community-based workforce development endeavors across the city. Situated adjacent to Mill-19, a structure that exemplifies the carbon-intensive, trabeated logic of steel, the studio considers: What new logics and expressions might emerge from robust, harvested, and earthen materiality?

What are the cultural, environmental, and spatial opportunities of a thickened architectural boundary? In what ways can the layered histories of labor, industry, and environmental transformation at Hazelwood Green be revealed? Considering the labor-intensive nature of many bio- and geogenic techniques, how can technology enhance their scalability? How can notions of precision and control be reimagined to embrace the inherent variability of material resolutions? Given the natural weathering tendencies of these materials, how should we approach finishing, durability, and maintenance to align with their inherent characteristics?

Juney Lee, the T. David Fitz-Gibbon Assistant Professor of Architecture and Director, of the Regenerative Structures Laboratory at Carnegie Mellon Architecture will consult the studio. The studio will meet regularly on Thursdays and Fridays. Travel to Pittsburgh will include visits to industrial heritage sites, the Heinz Architectural Center, and design workshops.