Reconsiderations (Asynchronous Session)
Workaday Housing: Argonne Building Rehabilitation View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Peter P. Goché
This paper focuses on a post-industrial residential building rehabilitation project. The process of re-conceptualizing the purpose of this spatial configuration is articulated through a photo-essay and technical drawing submission. The existing building, originally built in 1915, has been re-conceptualized as a four-story State Historic rehabilitation project located at 1723 Grand Avenue in Des Moines, Iowa. The apartment building was originally constructed to accommodate the folks who worked at the Albert Khan Ford assembly plant within one block of the site. Level one is remodeled as residential apartments plus retail space. Level two-four have been remodeled to respect the original spatial configuration of the set of residential apartments. Delving into the issue of atmospheric aesthetics, I discuss the historic characteristics in the context of the new material insertions. Additionally, the building supports an existing billboard armature that has been repurposed as art installation. The work (workaday ghosts) would consist of a series of staggered galvanized conduit and a historic flywheel from the original Argonne elevator. The flywheel represents the industrial age and is a reference to the folks who lived in the Argonne and worked at the Ford assembly plant. The galvanized rods would create a dynamic ghosting effect with respect to reflecting the sky and sun differently throughout the day/year.
Building Terroir in Idaho: Hat Ranch Winery Design Build View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Scott Lawrence
This paper is an exploration of research into the relationship between the concept of terroir and winery architecture, and its application to a design-build studio project. It includes analysis of the concept of terroir, notable precedents in its translation to design, and the role it might play role in shaping visitor experience. Common design strategies are presented and critically analyzed. The paper documents the application of this research to a live design build studio project; a retail tasting room and outdoor pavilion at a 5 ½ acre winery in an emerging winegrowing region. It presents an analysis of how ideals that emerged from the research are applied to the project at all levels; from the origination of project-level concepts in close consultation with the clients through construction and fabrication at the detail-level.
Cyborg Homeostasis: Thinking Architectures through Anthropocene Worlds View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Aaron Tobey
Burj Khalifa sweats so you don’t have to. To achieve this feat requires extreme technical measures. Understood as a life-support system or a collection of socio-technical prostheses, the intersecting systems that coalesce to form and circulate Burj Khalifa render themselves as well as those bodies that move through and around them as networked cyborg entities. Extending through Burj Khalifa’s thermal enclosure and the skins of its inhabitants, this assemblage of systems and elements fleshes out a world as it draws spatially and temporally distant entities and events into contingent, mobile, and potentially unmappable relations with one another. Despite mounting evidence of such spatial and temporal contingency, the figures of the coherently, singular, bounded building and the human subject persist in the mainstream discourse of contemporary architecture and history. Such material-discursive horizons and limitations, compounded by their intersections with the nebulous term “anthropocene,” call for multiple, different, and expanded vocabularies to describe fundamentally irreducible and unequal conditions. For architects and historians, this means that the figures of the building and human subject are no longer sufficient conceptual tools. Attempting to glimpse beyond this terminological horizon, this paper asks, what happens when we take the provocation of Burj Khalifa sweating seriously.
Far Eastern Thought, Materiality and Built Form View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Kevin Nute, Charissa Yamada
This paper examines how a group of Zen principles was expressed in a range of traditional East Asian art forms, why these ideas appear to resonate across time and culture, and how they might be manifested in everyday built environments today. The paper argues that these ideas resonate because they reflect the way we are accustomed to seeing materiality manifested in the natural world around us, and it suggests that they can also be effectively expressed in built environments—where most people in the industrialized world now spend the majority of their lives—primarily in the form of incompleteness, economy, continuity, flaw, overlap, aging, and change.
Critical Environmental Design Approach of Maya Stingless Beekeeping in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico : Facing the Frame of Current Mega Development Projects View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Veronica Briseño Castrejon
Maya stingless beekeeping is an ancient practice that has been intrinsically linked to Maya dwellings, the diversity of their crops, and the native tropical forest in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. This legacy continues to represent a vital and interdependent balance between cultural norms and local biodiversity that has defined the configuration of the Maya landscape and space in this region for more than two centuries. Diverse socio-economic, historical, and political factors due to the globalization process have impacted lifestyle, and thus, the constructed environment, including Maya stingless beekeeping practice and territories. This paper focuses on a critical environmental design approach to Maya stingless beekeeping in the frame of some current megadevelopments.
