Abstract
Climate change makes the world a curious place. The earth is getting ‘dimmer’ and ‘wobblier’. The tectonic plates are ‘dancing’ an unprecedented dance. The arctic has become ‘wavier,’ and these waves are creating ‘microscopic creature clouds’ in the sky. While there is scientific evidence supporting these emergent conditions, they are causally complex, with temporal and spatial boundaries that are difficult to demarcate. This paper posits there is pedagogical merit in embracing the curious nature of climactic conditions and in conceiving of the entanglements between buildings, materials, natural scientific processes, and energetic exchanges together as assemblages. The pedagogical research presents a series of workshops in a comprehensive design building studio that the authors taught at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. Deliberately scale-less and without specific application, the material constructions and their associated qualitative tests were designed to elicit curiosity about the material-energetic workings of the world. Students each designed and fabricated five specific material artefacts (over 200 in total as a cohort) and correspondingly tested them within five different custom-made qualitative heuristic devices. Observations gleaned through the material explorations informed development of the building design proposals that students designed in tandem. The material studies led to a conception of buildings and landscapes less as assemblies of discrete material elements and more as complex assemblages of material-energetic phenomena enmeshed in wider ecologies and energetic systems. Overall, the studio traded metric-based and longevity-centric construction conventions for open-ended, curious learning methods inspired by the ‘stranger than fiction’ geophysical conditions previously noted.
Presenters
Jerry HackerAssistant Professor of Architecture, Azrieli School of Architecture and Urbanism, Carleton University, Ontario, Canada Lisa Moffitt
Associate Professor, Architecture, Carleton University , Ontario, Canada
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Design Pedagogy, Climate Change, Material Tests, Assemblage, Vibrant Matter
