November 13, 2024
These University Labs Expand the Agency for Future Architects
“Through design, how can we be agents of change, and how do we use that agency?” — DK Osseo-Asare, director of HUMATLAB
HUMATLAB
Pennsylvania State University
DK Osseo-Asare, director
Investment in materials research goes back decades at the Pennsylvania State University, beginning in 1907 with the establishment of its engineering science and mechanics program. Today, Penn State’s Materials Research Institute (MRI) is an interdisciplinary research institute.
In 2017, MRI’s director, Clive Randall, initiated a new laboratory at the university devoted to developing “humanitarian materials.” “It’s deliberately not about a preexisting field,” says the HuMatLab’s director, DK Osseo-Asare, a dual U.S. and Ghanaian citizen and a Harvard-trained architect with a background in engineering. The HuMatLab is affiliated with various research clusters at Penn State’s College of Arts and Architecture.
One of Osseo-Asare’s first mandates was to determine what exactly “humanitarian” materials are. “Through design, how can we be agents of change, and how do we use that agency? How can we use these materials at our disposal in the physical world to address basic human needs?” he asks. “If you ask that question, it doesn’t necessarily lead to architecture or engineering. This is why the lab outputs have almost been at the level of philosophy and ontology.”
This is heady stuff. In practice, Osseo-Asare and the HuMatLab are developing a massive, integrated kit of parts that can be used at the architectural scale for a variety of needs and functions, such as mobile, deployable pop-up kiosks made of waste materials in Ghana, and living and biomaterial building systems. “Architecture is not fixed in place, but is mobile and eventually living,” says Osseo- Asare. “What are the technical systems we must have in place to support that?”
TALLWOOD DESIGN INSTITUTE
Oregon State University and University of Oregon
Judith Sheine, director of design
The TallWood Design Institute (TDI), a partnership between the Colleges of Forestry and Engineering at Oregon State University (OSU) and the College of Design at the University of Oregon, is housed in a purpose-built facility in Corvallis, Oregon. Designed by Vancouver’s MGA and completed in 2019, the A.A. “Red” Emmerson Advanced Wood Products Laboratory allows TDI to conduct applied research, product development and advanced timber manufacturing, large-scale structural testing, and education.
TDI was established in 2017 by the late Thomas Maness, then dean of OSU’s College of Forestry and a widely respected leader in natural resource conservation and forestry. TDI was an early champion of mass timber’s ability to address social and environmental challenges in the construction industry, and its cutting-edge research projects touch on every aspect of building performance, from structural and seismic engineering to fire performance and acoustics.
“Eight years in, people are more interested in the ‘how’ than the ‘why,’” says Judith Sheine, TDI’s director of design, of mass timber’s relevance and its ability to replace the use of concrete and steel in multistory buildings. “That’s been reflected in research topics.” The institute aims to help Oregon focus on mass timber as an economic driver in the state—one that can help combat job loss and the consequences of forest fires and climate change.
BEFORE BUILDING
University of Virginia
Katie MacDonald, director
Kyle Schumann, director
In August of 2020, Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann launched the Before Building Laboratory at the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture. The grant-funded materials and fabrication research lab focuses on renewable biomaterials such as wood, bamboo, hemp, grass, and invasive plant species.
Before Building’s paid student researchers get to prototype full-scale projects and see their immediate impacts. Some of the lab’s recent work has focused on developing uses for wood outside of the lumber pipeline, including invasive tree species, those felled by disease, or timber geometries unsuited to lumber.
One project, “Tangential Timber,” defines a methodology in which curved, irregular, or otherwise unfit-for-lumber logs are cut into cross sections, or “cookies.” A low-tech, parametric digital imaging workflow allows the architects to translate the slices into 3D models, sort, and fabricate with them using a five-axis water jet and CNC routing. The resulting structural blocks are joined with minimal hardware, allowing for assembly, disassembly, and reuse.
As part of this, Schumann and MacDonald developed a robotic saw that can be easily transported to a job site, has a low barrier to entry, and doesn’t require the structural foundation that a robotic arm might. “It could allow people to work with different wood at scale,” notes MacDonald. She and Schumann filed a provisional patent for the saw and are looking for an industry partner to expand its applications. “We have to design tools for natural materials for them to be more widely adopted,” says Schumann.
THE PLACE, MEMORY, AND CULTURE INCUBATOR
City College of New York
Marta Gutman, dean, professor, and codirector
Jerome Haferd, codirector and assistant professor
The Place, Memory, and Culture Incubator (PMCI) provides students at the City College of New York’s Bernard and Anne Spitzer School of Architecture an opportunity for experimentation, observation, and immersion in a hyper-specific subject—the neighborhood of Harlem. The initiative has a three-pronged approach, according to Spitzer dean Marta Gutman, the PMCI’s codirector: to advance ties to the community by working with those already engaged in Harlem, serving as a conduit for resources; to diversify Spitzer’s faculty and projects; and to embed its studios with the values of humanistic practice to provoke curricular change.
For Gutman and codirector Jerome Haferd, a project dedicated to advancing racial and economic justice in architectural education was a no-brainer. “To do preservation and new construction in a rapidly changing built environment and community with tangible and intangible heritage, you need to celebrate its historically less privileged identities,” says Haferd. The PMCI is funded by a $1.5 million grant from the Mellon Foundation, which also funds a digital archive of the PMCI’s work and assets from community partners. “The kind of record we’re making—how important will that be 10, 20, 30 years down the line? It’s crucial,” says Haferd.
SHARE LAB
University of Florida
Karla Saldaña Ochoa, director and assistant professor
At the SHARE Lab, an AI-focused research center housed within the School of Architecture at the University of Florida, assistant professor Karla Saldaña Ochoa and her students stress the importance of human involvement in the machine learning process, emphasizing the role of AI as a tool or an instrument to assist multidisciplinary design challenges, rather than as a replacement human in decision-making. Through SHARE (Spatial Human- Centered Artificial Intelligence Research & Experimentation), Ochoa helps students use AI to empower their creativity and design for social good. “AI will help us see things we can’t see. It could help us find solutions, but we are the ones deciding whether that solution makes sense,” she says.
One project focused on 30 Gulf of Mexico universities that may be particularly vulnerable to flooding, using a dual-scale approach to automatically identify vulnerabilities in campus facilities through street and aerial built environment imagery. Aerial and satellite images and GIS maps highlight flood-prone areas, while simultaneous street-view imagery is captured from corresponding locations. Data collection using the OpenStreetMap API results in a dataset of 675,486 images.
Through the SHARE Lab’s studios and seminars, students learn to define tasks in a design process that should take advantage of the agility of artificial intelligence. “AI can answer any question; therefore our role right now is to ask the right question,” says Ochoa.
THE SHELTER CONSTRUCTION PROGRAM
The School of Architecture
Stephanie Lin, dean
When Frank Lloyd Wright founded what is now known as The School of Architecture (TSOA) in 1932 at his homes Taliesin and Taliesin West in Spring Green, Wisconsin, and Scottsdale, Arizona, the intimate program was known for its focus on material and pedagogical experimentation with an apprenticeship-style training that emphasized learning (and living) by doing.
TSOA has evolved and formalized in many ways. After five bumpy years that included the threat of closure and two campus moves, TSOA’s dean Stephanie Lin has breathed a sigh of relief since TSOA moved to a new permanent home last year at Cattle Track Arts Compound in Scottsdale.
Lin has also helped to expand and deepen the school’s iconic Shelter Construction Program, which recently became integrated into the thesis curricula of the three-year MArch. The program asks thesis students to design, build, and live in a structure they have created. Lin stresses the direct correlations between the school and the place: “The desert is a big source of knowledge for our students. It is an extreme climate, so confronting the environment as our climate is changing and our resources are threatened is really unavoidable. It is built into every shelter project in some way or another.”
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- City College of New York
- Higher Education
- Laura Raskin
- Oregon State University
- Taliesin
- The School of Architecture
- University of Florida
- University of Oregon
- University of Virginia
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