AT V Urban Systems Integration

How might we account for building transformations, exchanges, and cycles through methods that include and externalize data on emissions, health, and costs? How do these methods influence our understanding of the social, ecological, and financial dimensions of built environments amidst shifting policies, changing practices, and the indelible impacts of climate change? How should designers converge such building analyses while thinking about the “how” in addition to “what” is being built? And lastly, how might designers more cogently conceptualize and visualize design processes and acts of construction through a materialized and actualized project?

This class asks students to navigate the dissection of a single case study building through material geographies, environmental and social life cycles, construction sequences, project management, and interrelationships between them. Students will study, document, and compare competing metrics of these different lenses and propose how they impact design and construction in contemporary architecture. Furthermore, students will study and materialize the connections between analysis and documentation through full scale construction. As a final deliverable, students will produce a large-scale technical mock-up of a selected detail, while making sensitive choices on the materials, and fabrication for assembly / disassembly, informed by their analyses.

The course is divided into two modules as outlined in the course schedule. During the first module, students will work in assigned groups to identify a portion of a chosen case study, previously modeled during Tech Ill and/or Tech IV. Students will create multiple forms of analysis in this module including material properties and geographies, supply/donor chains of procurement and extraction as well as processing, as well as environmental and social life cycle assessments of embodied carbon and labor quality.

Within the second module, student groups will create shop drawings, bills of materials, construction sequence diagrams, and a physical four-dimensional mock-up that will showcase the assembly and disassembly of building conditions within the chosen case study. This module will also require students to engage methods of project management that include ordering and organizing materials to be used in construction.

Each module will be facilitated by a separate group of mentors who constitute a cohort of industry professionals and consultants engaged in the topics of architectural design analysis and construction that define the course. The mentors will review student teamwork on a weekly basis, as per the course schedule, to provide feedback and guidance.

Each module will conclude with a review, during which students will present their collaborative documentation and construction deliverables in teams to juries of the module mentors and invited guests.

Learning Objectives & Topics: • Material properties and geographies of extraction and production • Supply/donor-chains and qualities of human labor • Environmental life cycle assessment (LCA) • Social life cycle assessment (SLCA) • Roles and responsibilities of architects / designers, and contractors / fabricators • Detailing of shop drawings and construction documents • Construction sequencing and material procurement • Fabrication and construction of mock-ups