Design-Build Studio Syallabus and Project Outcomes Design Feedback: a trans-scalar inquiry into the production of forests and fiber + TIMBER (intensive + Extensive): design | build | test | measure | report Arch 5250, Spring 2017 - Syllabus Module 1 – Background The trans-scalar topics of this inaugural lab are Forests and Fiber. Our collective research will focus on the performative feedback loops embodied in tree|timber|wood that necessarily connect forested landscapes to wood fiber buildings across space and time. What are the performative variables attached to Minnesota’s forested landscapes and how can their design positively impact the buildings whose materials are sourced from them? How can material specification and construction impact the management regimes of forested landscapes and the design of rural economies and communities that live in them? This Lab is open to architecture and landscape architecture students and will ask both to carefully reconsider the appropriate systems’ boundaries for their design interventions. Module 2 - Background Building on the outcomes of DDL1 (spring 2017 module 1), we will design and build a series of prototype structures at the Anoka Heritage Lab. Our design interventions will critically explore the extensive properties of timber (which are divisible and dependent on construction unit size and configuration), and intensive properties of timber (which are indivisible and inherent to the material itself properties of timber). Students will work in teams to design a pair of pavilions that meet a prescribed set of program needs for the Heritage Lab as well as provide our own lab with an experimental armature to test a set of inquiries initially established by DDL1. This Lab is open to Architecture students – it is not required that students enroll in DDL1 to enroll in DDL2. PROGRAM This year’s Minnesota Decentralized Design Lab will focus on understanding the system dynamics attached to Wood. Minnesota boasts over 15.5 million acres of timberland, covering over a quarter of the state’s total area. Timberland is considered forest land that is productive enough to produce a commercial crop of trees and is not reserved from harvesting by policy or law. Minnesota’s timber resources are incredibly heterogeneous, characterized by the USDA through sixteen distinguishable forest types.i The economic development of the state was founded on the timber industry, and the current condition of Minnesota’s vast timber holdings is in large part the result of a collection of historical decisions made around the economy of wood products. Minneapolis is actually sited on the first sawmill in the state constructed at St. Anthony Falls in 1821 to supply timbers for the construction of Fort Snelling; presenting a historical twist on the urban forestry movement.ii This laboratory’s research seeks provocations that act as catalysts, affecting change beyond their immediate circumstances and stimulating paths for growth along sustainable trajectories. These inaugural modules will form the foundation of a body of work that will be created to probe large-scale architectural, landscape, cultural, and economic questions through discrete physical and theoretical interventions. Our research and design efforts this year will focus on the questions: 1) Given the rate of change, and the pervasiveness of change - all inputs are both fluid and dynamic - what ‘formations’ of wood should we pursue in Minnesota, why? 2) Can the intervention of ‘a wood building’ or ‘a timber harvest’ become the basis for a self-sustaining process of economic or environmental regeneration? 3) How can we position the management of timber resources to build connections across Greater Minnesota in order dismiss the polarizing dichotomy simplistically characterized as the “urban/rural divide”? The theme for the research phase of our design-build lab was Forests and Fiber. The research focused on the performative feed- back loops embodied in tree|timber|wood that necessarily connect forested land- scapes to wood fiber buildings across space and time. Exploratory research models the studio used to initiate the research – the model- ling exercise made wood a tacit material while still allowing for scales of design inquiry. SCREEN LAYER Designed Construction Logic – 1. rain screen - outside envelope layer 2. formal varia�on layer Mock-up 3. primary ac�va�on layer 4. so�wood (red pine, spruce, tamarack The final design logic leveraged LIGHT WOOD LAYER 1. screen structure cross-laminated �mber (CLT) enclo- 2. triabiated tectonic logic 3. metal Fasteners sures mounted on steel trailers to 4. so�wood (red pine, spruce, tamarack) provide a lateral support system for a set of framed construc�on logics HEAVY TIMBER LAYER 1. light wood structure that subsequently support each other. 2. rigidly a�ached to CLT layer 3. in-plane construc�on The interior frame layer consists of 4. all wood joints 5. hardwood (black ash) heavy-�mber members that support a balloon framed roof system that in turn supports an exterior layer of charred wood screens that define the CLT LAYER buildings’ overall geometries. 1. primary lateral structure 2. bolted to trailer, heavy �mber bolted to CLT 3. in-plane construc�on 4. prefabricated w/ metal fasteners 5. secondary ac�va�on 6. so�wood (SPFs) TRAILER 1. founda�on LEARNING STATION 2. earth screw anchors - if permanently located 3. mobile CONSTRUCTION LOGIC 4. prefabricated steel structure LEARNING STATION VARIATIONS D D D A A A BB B B C3 C2 C1 STATION 1 STATION 2 STATION 3 D D D D LINKED A A A BB A BB B B C3 C C AGGREGATIONS 2 2 C1 3 2 C C D A A B B BB A D D C BUTTED 1 D 3 D C A BB AGGREGATIONS A A B B D C2 C1 B A B C D D C C D 3 1 3 PERPENDICULAR B B AGGREGATIONS A D D D A BB A BB A A C2 C2 C1 Milling The project worked with materials milled in three different ways. Students and faculty using a portable chainsaw to mill the bulk of the heavy timber framing material. The material that went into the screens was milled and kilned dried by a local band sawyer from a company called Wood From the Hood that makes lumber and wood furniture from fallen street trees. The lumber that went into the roof frame was processed at the Potlatch mill in Bemidji, MN - the state’s largest commercial mill. All three processes yielded vastly different materials and were attached to vastly different logistical streams. Through this pro- cess students were able to develop a critical position what using “local” materials really entail – both on the positive and negative side, from their own personal experience. Wood Logics The project exposed students to a range of wood construction logistics. • Mortise and tenon framing green timbers • Lightweight wood framing • CLT rigging and assembly • Prefabricated panel design and assembly Lecture Course Syallabus UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE | COLLEGE OF DESIGN FALL 2018 Building Technology and Making: Matter, Energy and Inquiry ARCH 5562 Instructor Jacob Mans COURSE SUMMARY This course introduces ways of seeing and comprehending architecture and the factors that contribute to its continuous emergence. It introduces students to the topics of energy and materials as they relate to architecture and technology. The course frames technology as a kind of designed construct, organized to collect, channel and distribute energy and matter to meet particular design goals for a question under consideration. These “constructs” are systems whose “organization” is defined by a particular logic. while these systems pertain to technology, they are not technologically isolated; they are socio-technical systems intractably nested within some of society’s most wicked and conflicted issues. More important than the limited material and technological facts that students will pick up from this class are the frameworks taught to help students develop their own critical questions, design or identify methodologies for probing these questions, and learning to identify actionable linkages between researching socio-technical inquiries and designing architectural interventions that positively affect them. In this way, this course is at least as focused on “Inquiry” as it is focused on “materials” and/or “energy”. The reality is that the factual content embedded in the current discourse on materials and energy so thoroughly out paces our ability to effectively memorize and recall rote facts that it is more for you to learn “how to learn” about materials and energy. In the context of this course, “Material Logic” is defined as a broadly adopted technical and cultural system of reasoning prescribing a material’s order and arrangement toward a purpose. This essential definition challenges designers to eschew a tendency to consider material systems as fully formed and deployable. Instead, they should consider such systems as “open systems”, open to other forms of reasoning as well as being changeable, mutable and novel through the discovery of all factors at play. This course asks you to take a position on both the material logics we study as well as the media we use to inquire and represent them. The ability to articulate a position on the technical description of material systems, their in- situ applications, and whether or not their qualities intractable or mutable will serve you well when arguing for a particular approach toward the instantiation of architecture. Revised, 09.01.18 1 UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE | COLLEGE OF DESIGN FALL 2018 Building Technology and Making: Matter, Energy and Inquiry ARCH 5562 COURSE WORKING METHODS As inferred earlier, this course is rooted in inquiries of architectures that are, as of yet, un-formed. Students will adopt a structured systems approach to inquiry, carefully developing the questions we set out to answer as well as openly acknowledging the boundaries we place on our research.