The Lean Years Exhibition Opens 3.11
The exhibit opens March 11, 2011 and will run through the conference, which takes place at The University of Michigan campus on March 18-19, 2011. The exhibit is open during business hours M-F, and is located in the Architecture Gallery on the second floor of the Art+Architecture Building. Click here to see more details about the installation.
Conference Schedule Posted
Please see here for Saturday Conference Schedule with links to paper session descriptions.
Also, we have set up a Facebook event page that you can use to RVSP (to show support!) and spread the word to others.
Plastic Mechanics
Presentation by Brian Trump, cofounder of ReFab and Project Consultant for Gehry Technologies, Mexico City.
As many have observed, the analytical capacity of technology has advanced to such a state that “humans have become capable of exceeding their own intellect.” [1] In architecture, this potential has largely manifested itself in the refinement of building performance standards and the development of new fabrication technologies. Designers have honed their approach to natural materials to such a degree that, given a stock of virgin materials, they can produce virtually any form at any scale with a degree of precision unimaginable only a few decades prior. Once these materials are rendered as building components, however, they become incomprehensible for any purpose beyond the original design, and as a result, they are discarded once the building is deemed obsolete. As these peculiar artifacts accrue, they produce a man-made wilderness that today is as wild and un-orderable as nature once seemed centuries ago.
These scrap landscapes are a consequence of a design paradigm that has informed much of the built environment over the last century, perhaps best expressed by Swiss architect Le Corbusier in his 1923 manifesto Vers une Architecture. In the text, for example, in a caption under a photograph of a 1921 DeLage luxury automobile, he writes:
If the problem of housing, of the apartment, were studied like a chassis, we would see our houses rapidly transformed and improved. If houses were built industrially, mass produced like chassis, we would soon see forms emerge that, while unexpected, were sound, tenable and an aesthetic would be formulated with surprising precision.[2]
Corbusier was advocating for a realignment of architectural design with industrial production. He argued that buildings should be produced as automobiles are produced, with the development of a standard that can be technically refined with subsequent iterations toward an ideal of perfection. Appealing to classical architecture, he relates this process to the steady refinement of temple design, a process he argues resulted in the production of the Parthenon. Conspicuously absent from his strategy, however, is how to address a structure after its inevitable dissolution into its constituent parts. Rather, his design process is derived from the abstract notion of the performative refinement of a building operating indefinitely at an optimal level, and fueled by the assumption of limitless natural resources.
In an effort to address this deficiency in contemporary design, and to capitalize on the resources of southeastern Michigan’s post-industrial landscape, ReFab selected an object from the local waste stream (the car hood), and employed digital methods to “repurpose” it as a building component. This research ultimately resulted in a commission by a local family to build three woodsheds from the recovered stock, structures which have been affectionately dubbed “Hoodsheds.” As a project, the Hoodsheds are not meant to suggest that all buildings should be made from salvaged car hoods; rather they are meant to acknowledge that every structure will one day be scrap. Computers, so often conceived as an engine for the optimization of performance and production, are at their core an analytical tool. While this analysis can be directed toward the linear logic of iterative refinement, it can also be utilized to make sense of what has already been produced; in this case, to translate the complex geometries of discarded materials into legible commodities for construction. For the conference Brian Trump will deliver a short presentation on the technical and theoretical underpinnings of the Hoodsheds and the group’s accompanying gallery exhibit “Plastic Mechanics.”
Breakout Conversation on Post-oil Scholarship
The goal of this conversation is to start with a primer on peaking natural resources and spark a round of conversations about scholarship in a drastically different energy paradigm, and particularly in the United States or affluent west. As designers, architects, planners, how can we make sense of our work amidst an uncertain energy future – a likely group of wicked problems that sit in uncomfortable company with formidable economic and climate predictions. How can this information, taken together, point the emerging scholar toward constructive post-modern scholarship[1]?
The objective is not to state an obvious future, as there is not one, but to offer compelling research that suggests that Americans in particular might be “sleepwalking” into a future[2] of business as unusual, and into scenarios that would likely leave few lifestyles untouched. Current thinking in the areas of localization theory, specifically energy descent scenario planning, will be offered as adaptive solutions that cut across a broad range of environmental and social issues.
Given prospects of resource constraint (understood broadly),what will designers, architects and planners wish we had thought about in advance? This session is designed to be a condensed thought experiment on both the disciplinary and individual levels. A facilitated discussion will follow the brief introduction to energy descent scenarios.
A Systems Perspective on Community Transformation
Paper by Alan Bush, PhD Pre-Candidate, University of Texas, Austin, Community and Regional Planning
From one perspective, the contemporary American landscape have been transformed by the meta-pressures of complexification: glocalization combined with the shift towards the networked society. These coupled pressures have produced a society that has a greater capacity for transformation and adaptation, but is also more rigid and fragile to unexpected shocks. Given the reasonable likelihood that societal metabolic contraction will an increasingly dominant meta-pressure in the mid to long term future, a key focus of research and practice should be to harness this increased adaptive capacity complexification has generated.
Many of the critical services to human welfare and community resilience are provided by complex systems. Complex systems also circumscribe the critical social functions of society, such as education, the arts, technological production, and the economy. We can think of these social, ecological, economic and spaces as nested complex systems; these nested complex systems are the backbone of the socio-ecological realms that define modern society. Using this language of complex systems, the goal of this paper is offer a new frame through which to look at the complex system that compose our communities.
The goal of this paper is to: (1) introduce a simple conceptual framework for complex systems by identifying the key aspects of these vernacular complex systems that are most important to understanding how we might usefully engage with and steward the systems that establish the landscape of modern life. (2) To operationalize the theory for practitioners by connecting it to empirical research on the stewardship of common property resources, making an argument for how we can steward the Emergent Common Property Resources (ECPR) from vernacular complex systems. (3) To offer some preliminary design principles for ECPR stewardship regimes, and (4) to establish some lines of inquiry that might lead to a more usable and robust concept of emergent common property resource stewardship.
<Dwelling on the Social Paper Session, 9:15-10:45am>
WATERSHED (or) Wrapping Sheds with Water
Paper by Jen Maigret and Maria Arquero, Assitant Professors, University of Michigan, Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Thunderstorms in the Great Lakes deliver a level of intensity that is surprising. Aside from experiential power, each storm’s impact reverberates long after the thunder has subsided when considered through the nested scales of storm water. From a climatic point of view, the summer jet stream contributes up to 10% of the region’s annual precipitation by way of large thunderstorm areas known as mesoscale convective complexes. At a regional level, the combination of climatic characteristics and precipitation distribution has fostered agricultural production, accounting for nearly 25% of Canada’s entire production, the world’s largest concentration of pulp and paper mills, found in the Fox River Valley of Lake Michigan, among other important economic drivers such as fisheries, mining and manufacturing industries. Locally, the impact of thunderstorms on water infrastructure,
and ultimately water quality, throughout the watershed is directly tied to and magnified by construction practices within urbanized developments. It is here, within the daily practices of building, that the designers, planners and policy makers of this complex, inter-related, constructed environment must forgo myopic approaches to site and enlist storm chasers.
Breakout Discussion on Sustainability
Hosted by Richard Norton, Associate Professor, Urban & Regional Planning, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
The term “sustainable development” has become prominent in popular and academic debates over the past decade. A good case can be made that we are not living sustainably, or alternatively that we face a real decline in social and environmental welfare and well-being in the foreseeable future, as the result of current development trends and patterns. In turn, this impending decline suggests that we need to change our lifestyles in ways that will be sustainable into the future—that is, sustainable lifestyles we prefer to live—before natural and social forces out of our control compel us to become more “sustainable” in not-so-pleasant ways. But does the notion of sustainable development itself offer any useful content or guidance for making public policy and planning decisions, or is it merely an attractive oxymoron on which different interests can agree only in the abstract?
<Break-out Conversations 10:45am-12:00pm>
