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Transitional Spaces: Blurring the Line Between Interior and Exterior
No full textThis paper examines the transition spaces for homes between inside and outside designed by architects during the early twentieth century in the United States. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, the plan book became a readily available option for those wishing to build their own home in the U.S. Following a shortage of single-family houses after World War I, the design of small, single-family houses were distributed primarily through the plan book vehicle. One such plan book-producing group was the Architects' Small House Service Bureau (ASHSB). The bureau was composed entirely of registered architects and produced multiple folios of small house plans between 1914 and 1942. This paper focuses specifically on the relationship between the interior spaces and outdoors through the use of loggias, pergolas, sun porches, bay windows and other devices. The ASHSB was unique in that they promoted customization of their mass-produced house plan designs to each individual site. Thus, unlike many other plan book creators, ASHSB members determined that the relationship to the site was important to the overall design and the use of these transitional indoor/outdoor spaces, a necessity. The plans designed by ASHSB members fell into one of three sizes ” four-room, five-room or six-room plan types. The maximum number of principal rooms was six. All small house designs were presented within a rendered landscaped setting showing trees, bushes, benches and other landscaping features. At least one of the following -- porticoes, porches, dormers, bay windows, picture windows, port coheres, and sun porches”was used in every design produced by the ASHSB architect members. This work examines the range and type of spaces as well as the written recommendations and specifications that accompanied plan sets distributed by the ASHSB across the U.S and Canada during the early twentieth century
Between Analogue and Digital Diagrams
Get PDFThis essay is about the interstitial. About how the diagram, as a method of design, has lead fromthe analogue deconstruction of the eighties to the digital processes of the turn of the millennium.Specifically, the main topic of the text is the interpretation and the critique of folding (as a diagram)in the beginning of the nineties. It is necessary then to unfold its relationship with immediatelypreceding and following architectural trends, that is to say we have to look both backwards andforwards by about a decade. The question is the context of folding, the exchange of the analogueworld for the digital. To understand the process it is easier to investigate from the fields of artand culture, rather than from the intentionally perplicated1 thoughts of Gilles Deleuze. Both fieldsare relevant here because they can similarly be used as the yardstick against which the era itselfit measured. The cultural scene of the eighties and nineties, including performing arts, movies,literature and philosophy, is a wide milieu of architecture. Architecture responds parallel to itsera; it reacts to it, and changes with it and within it. Architecture is a medium, it has always beena medium, yet the relations are transformed. That's not to say that technical progress, for exampleusing CAD-software and CNC-s, has led to the digital thinking of certain movements ofarchitecture, (it is at most an indirect tool). But the ‘up-to-dateness' of the discipline, however,a kind of non-servile reading of an ‘applied culture' or ‘used philosophy'2 could be the key.(We might recall here, parenthetically, the fortunes of the artistic in contemporary mass society.The proliferation of museums, the magnification of the figure of the artist, the existence of amassive consumption of printed and televised artistic images, the widespread appetite for informationabout the arts, all reflect, of course, an increasingly leisured society, but also relateprecisely to the fact that, faced with the tedium of everyday, real, lived experience, of the scientificillusion, of work and production, the world of art appears as a kind of last preserve of reality,where human beings can still find sustenance. Art is understood as being a space in whichthe fatigue of the contemporary subject can be salved away.)
Performative Computation-aided Design Optimization
Get PDFThis article discusses a collaborative research and teaching project between the University of Cincinnati, Perkins+Will's Tech Lab, and the University of North Carolina Greensboro. The primary investigation focuses on the simulation, optimization, and generation of architectural designs using performance-based computational design approaches. The projects examine various design methods, including relationships between building form, performance and the use of proprietary software tools for parametric design
The low-income single-family house and the effectiveness of architects in affecting affordability
Get PDFArchitects are increasingly engaged in efforts to provide affordable, owner-occupied housing in the United States. Yet architects' roles in broadly addressing affordable housing remain marginal as was anecdotally evident by the absence of architects at a recent university-sponsored affordable housing workshop. Apparently, the potential contributions of architects in "the development of innovative approaches and best practices” related to affordable, owner-occupied housing is not always valued to housing policymakers and planners such as those who organized this workshop. This paper speculatively explores the gap between the potential value of architects and their actual effectiveness at realizing widespread relevancy, innovation, and change in improving the quality and attainability of affordable, owner occupied housing and how this gap may contribute to the undervaluation and marginalization of architects' efforts to address affordable housing needs in the United States. Case studies of several recent U.S. house design competitions exemplify these gaps. Potential strategies for closing these gaps and thus appreciating the value of architects' efforts in this endeavor are identified.To become central in providing much-needed affordable, owner-occupied housing, architects must make the value of their potential contributions evident. This requires a clear definition of design goals, a rigorous assessment of built projects, and the thorough dissemination of findings and methodologies. Architects must engage those fields to which they have, in the U.S., long relinquished affordable, single-family housing. Architects must demonstrate that qualitative design improvements are not just possible within the frameworks and agendas of those other fields but that good design will better enable the achievement of those extra-disciplinary goals
Agility, Adaptability + Appropriateness: Conceiving, Crafting & Constructing an Architecture of the 21st Century
Get PDFArchitectural design in our current times has tended to generate buildings which, despite their aesthetic qualities, frequently prove static, rigid and intractable. The intense and significant production of architecture around the planet has created a situation whereby modification of the existing building stock is costly, difficult and at times implausible. Beginning in the mid-twentieth century architects began to more seriously question narrow design approaches and in response explored more open, mutable and responsive ways of building. Architects such as Kisho Kurokawa and Cedric Price, in an effort to envision more resilient & robust solutions, explored methods of design and construction which afforded greater user control, modification and customization of environments. As opposed to buildings in which users needed to adapt to environmental constraints, these progressive designers imagined spaces that adjusted to user needs. A significant challenge to these visionaries was a lag between thinking and technology – quite simply construction proved unable to fully address concept. Today the world has changed in dramatic ways, with advancements in technology, expectations of society, and a quest for greater sustainability all driving a push for more agile, adaptable and appropriate Architecture. The present paper critically contemplates the condition of contemporary building design, examines emerging trends, and postulates an innovative model & philosophy for realizing a more responsive, responsible and fitting Architecture for the 21st Century. While considering historical initiatives, theories and practices, the paper also examines contemporary applications and future possibilities, arguing that many forces hold promise to align in ways before unimaginable. Advancing from the established foundation of Open Building (OB) research and practice, and building upon a holistic and inter-connected strategy (Sinclair 2009) for environmental design, the new model places emphasis and effort on heightened agility, adaptability and appropriateness – all urgently needed in our current, uncertain and tumultuous times
Architecture, Structure, and Loads: A Moment of Change?
Get PDFArchitecture and building structure have a unique, complicated, and intertwined history. Architectural innovations can drive the development of structural systems and structural advancements can push architecture forward. Rem Koolhaas, writing about one of his primary engineering collaborators in 2002, stated that this collaborator "almost single"handedly shifted the ground in engineering ” a domain which the earth moves very rarely ” and therefore enabled architecture to be imagined differently.”1 There are two ideas embedded in this quote. The first is that building structure and those who design it are entrenched in a way of practice that seldom varies. The second is that the view of structure is changing and this change has the potential to allow architecture to make a significant transformation. Ten years later, the question remains, is structure changing, and if so, how and what metrics can be used to establish this? Digital technology and fabrication advancements have led to an exploration of building structure and material. Architects are creating buildings once thought impossible to build. Through experimentation, new forms and roof systems are being created. Does this form creation have a larger meaning? One indicator of this might be found in the way loads and load paths are conceived. When starting a project, the primary determinants are the understanding of the loads created by the engineer and the selection of a structural system to support them. Can an examination of loads be used to evaluate change in structure? This investigation will begin with a brief discussion of loads and will analyze two recently constructed works as case studies. The structural systems in these buildings will be examined to see if the conception of loads and the philosophy behind the system is evolving
Sensory-Based Design & Epilepsy: Analyzing effects of design innovations on patient treatment and recovery
Get PDFThe patient room has more influence on neurological, physiological and biological responses than any other area within a healthcare environment. When it comes to the treatment of epilepsy, the patient room often acts as a refuge from and instigator of seizure activity, depending on patient condition or status. Inspired by this dichotomy, this research report explores specific design parameters that affect the spectrum of epileptic treatment, from instigation to recovery. At its core, this research identifies specific environmental elements that can assist in instigating an episode and recovery post seizure.Inclusions: Patients between the ages of 18 and 65 who are admitted for monitoring purposes only.Exclusions: Post-surgical procedure patients. Patients who are admitted for any type of pre-surgical procedure. Patients who are admitted less than two days.Limitations: The Epilepsy Monitoring Unit was designed as a Medical Surgical Unit
Harm A. Weber academic center, post-occupancy building performance and comfort perceptions
Get PDFThe Weber Center at Judson University, a mixed mode, naturally ventilated building in a continental climate, has been in operation for just over a year, with initial occupancy in August 2007. This paper compares the design objectives and building performance expectations against the first yearof actual energy consumption in a first of a series of post-occupancy evaluations. The paper contrasts the building performance with general user satisfaction and perceptions of comfort through a post occupancy evaluation of user surveys and interviews. The innovations involved in this building, particularly mechanical strategies atypical in contemporary practice within this climate and region, have introduced some interesting problems that have been documented in the post-occupancy evaluation process, while confirming many of the original intentions of the design
Water and identity: an urban case study for densification along Los Angeles River's Rio Hondo Confluence
Get PDFWhen Los Angeles was founded in 1781, the mountains, river and shore formed the landscape. Today, street grids and a superimposed network of meandering freeways blanket the valleys while clusters of high-rises emerge periodically to provide underpinnings of the city's identifiable neighborhoods. Only the Los Angeles River is invisible, reduced to concrete-lined drainage channels, denuded of riparian vegetation, bounded by rail lines, hidden behind industrial plants and beneathfreeways. What is a river without water? Throughout landscapes, urban and rural alike, rivers and infrastructure intertwine like tendons to connect cities to natural resources and each other. This dance is particularly evident in an 11-mile stretch of the 51-mile river referred to as Reach 2 where the 710 Long Beach Freeway parallels, elevates, and hurdles the concrete-lined depression of the barren riverbed. Ten cities comprise Reach2, which fail to garner the attention of Downtown Los Angeles to the north and the Long Beach estuary to the south. As a result of this intermittency, these cities suffer from social and infrastructural neglect, while struggling to develop positive community identity. In modern multi-city metropolitan areas, governmental centers dominate the political infrastructure. Meanwhile, physical infrastructures, such as freeways, often divide these cities. This research seeks to invert these paradigms in an effort to celebrate city identity at political borders, and transform physical divisions into cultural connections. Research and a design prototype were developed in a unique multi-disciplinary graduate studio environment. Reach 2 is compared to Tokyo to extract potential community identities to support dense and vibrant future development. Additionally, an innovative four-dimensional land-use analysis is conducted across the region to identify voids/opportunities for optimal multi-use development. These investigations culminate in a design prototype at the Rio Hondo Confluence
Changes in Climate Driving Changes in Architectural Education
Get PDFoai:ojs.www.arcc-journal.org/arcc-new:article/1Sustainability issues, in particular climate change, have become significant drivers of change in architectural education. It is posited that engaging in the reduction and offsetting of greenhouse gas emissions in academic institutions, particularly those responsible for the education of new generations of built environment professionals, could become an important part of creating built environments that can more effectively contribute to mitigating the causes of climate change