Rethinking Approaches
Mimicking Nature to Produce Renewable, Low-Carbon Construction Materials
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Jason Carley
An expanding global population has led to skyrocketing demand for construction materials, a trend that is colliding with scarcity in once-abundant natural resources like cement and timber. Designers and engineers have been tasked with “doing more with less” and are looking to the natural world for inspiration. Biomimetic design, or biomimicry, is an approach that leverages the systems, processes, and structures of nature to make designs that are more efficient, sustainable, and resilient. In this project, this approach is used to design composite bio-materials for architectural applications as a promising alternative to traditional building materials. Inspired by the forms of natural structures and derived from upcycled agricultural waste and renewable bioplastics, these materials possess a low energy intensity and environmental footprint. Through material science and industrial design, prototypes are manufactured and tested to assess commonly-cited limitations of natural materials - durability, performance, scalability, and validation of environmental benefit. Specifically, the project explores the carbon storage capacity of bio-based building products, offering a more robust and quantitative understanding of how these materials can contribute to achieving net-zero carbon goals by 2050. This paper discusses challenges and opportunities in transitioning to bioplastics in the building trades and share methodology for developing and evaluating prototype composites. Results are shared from early sample testing and life cycle assessments, and applications proposed for future industrial expansion.
Space, Memory, and Society: Theoretical Discourse in Giancarlo De Carlo's Ca' Romanino
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Mark Blizard
This paper presents a series of lessons that unfold from a close-reading of the percorso narrativo in Giancarlo De Carlo's Ca' Romanino. Its focus is on one of the only houses designed by the renowned Italian architect who is better known for his participation in Team 10, his advocacy and practice of participatory design as well as his analytical approach to design, "reading the territory." This diminutive work may be understood as a complex examination of De Carlo's fundamental approach to architectural design on par with Le Corbusier's Villa Savoy, Adolf Loos's Steiner or Müller houses, or Robert Venturi's house for his mother. While it is a relatively early work in De Carlo's oeuvre, it is, nonetheless, a definitive statement. This paper is structured around the unfolding of Ca' Romanino's architectural discourse on the elements, principles, and place-based approach to spatial organization. The sequence of carefully articulated elements and spaces form into a narrative that weaves the inhabitants into larger cultural and social discourses while placing them in the mountainous environment of the countryside outside of Urbino, Italy. Although De Carlo was also a prolific writer and as well as an educator, his concern was in the realm of practice, not theory. In Ca' Romanino, however, we discover an emerging theoretical discourse between architecture, society, place, and memory.
Using Artificial Intelligence in the Design Studio: Humans Are Not Obsolete. Yet.
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Andrew Brody
Artificial Intelligence (AI) software has made dramatic improvements in the last few years, going from handy spelling and grammar checking and disturbingly accurate shopping recommendations, to something which can parse large amounts of information and generate reasonable and valuable analysis. Can architects and designers make use of these new tools? As an experiment, students were given a new, generally unfamiliar project type, and tasked with using AI to assist in developing pre-design research, analysis, and concept formation. Students were encouraged to have a “conversation” with the different AI interfaces in order to refine the results, and also to adapt those results using their own judgement. Primarily verbal tasks such as asking what sorts of spaces and activities are typically associated with their project type were accomplished quite successfully using ChatGPT. Students were able to develop their architectural programs easily and probably more thoroughly than if they’d worked on their own. Other activities, such as developing a visual concept using Adobe Firefly, were less successful, with results more unpredictable and difficult to manipulate. Analysis of student surveys and also the work produced leads to the conclusion that AI is a valuable tool for verbal design problems, but less useful for developing design solutions, even at the conceptual phase. This is probably due to the majority of sources used in AI “training” are verbal in nature. The design process, however, often takes verbal instructions to generate 2- and 3-dimensional elements, and relies strongly on aesthetic judgment and spatial ordering.
