Author(s): Samuel Maddox
Though the time-honored cube project may offer first-year students the opportunity to explore architectural operations, their formal and spatial results, and the terminology necessary for communicating these discoveries, this classic introduction to design fundamentals fails to engage with increasingly critical and complex concerns related to social and the environmental systems. Systemic issues related to carbon intensity, anthropogenic climate change, and ecological stewardship鈥攁s well as concomitant and corol卢lary issues of social inequity鈥攁re all inextricably entangled with the design of the built environment. Thus, it is not only reasonable but realistic to assume that the development of a systems-thinking approach to architectural design will be crucial in the future careers of today鈥檚 architecture students. To that end, the architecture faculty at Wentworth Institute of Technology have spent the last five years reorienting the stan卢dard cube project to privilege performance over form-making. This work has yielded evidence-based iterations that guide students toward progressively more precise and intentional interactions between the cube and its immediate environ卢ment, specifically light, air, and structural stress. In the fall of 2023, the studio pushed this exploration one step further in the final project by asking students to explicitly engage their building-scale designs with archetypical landscapes鈥攅.g., tidal estuary, riparian edge, shortgrass prairie, etc.鈥攁nd the ecological networks that define them. As a result, the studio produced a series of environmentally responsive 鈥渁rchitec卢tural interfaces,鈥 each designed to measure, record, and interpret the dynamism of its landscape for the human user and to advocate for its preservation.
Volume Editors
ISBN
978-1-944214-49-4