M.Arch Praxis II: Transition + Repair of Construction Ecologies

Architecture shapes relations between individuals, communities, cultures, and environments. Praxis 1 introduces architecture as a broad framework for remaking the world within its political, social, and ecological context through infrastructural intervention and community building. Praxis 2 continues to understand architecture as a modulator of complex cultural, eco-geological, and historical flows, but aims to do so by intensively exploring the ways in which construction and material systems are situated in and shape landscapes, especially those emerging from forest systems and their associated modes of architectural expression, as well as regenerative material ecologies that seek to repair and reconnect damaged ecological communities. Closely linked with corequisite courses on material and construction systems (MCS) and structural design (CSD), we place particular emphasis on integrating structural and envelope systems informed by their thermodynamic performance, and their role in the vast socio-ecological-technical systems that make up material extraction and production.

While the course embraces the carbon conscious logics championed by advocates of mass timber, it exercise caution and criticality towards the tendency of mass timber assemblies to over-utilize timber volume and to promote extractive relationships to monocultures of fir, yellow pine, and spruce. Rather, we will look to the ethic, cosmology, and silvicutlural management practices of the Menominee Tribal Forest in Wisconsin as a model for sustaining timber yields while increasing living biomass, bolstering ecosystem resilience, fostering critical habitat, and preserving a cultural landscape with respect for diverse agencies. We will seek to learn from Menominee conceptualizations of relationality, gift giving, and learning-from-nature to heal and reimagine our relationship to forests and forest products.

Through a non-linear, multi-scalar, iterative design process, small teams will develop and refine detailed architectural assemblies conceived as acts of “sympoesis” or cooperative design between the agency of the species, geologies, and ecosystems from which materials are drawn and the human methods of management, construction, craft, and innovation that alter and assemble them. Students begin by drawing transects through local patchworks of current and historical habitat types, noting interactions between plant communities and soil, sun, and moisture, as well as human interventions and cultivation. They work to understand how selection and innovation within material assemblies can enhance circular and equitable economies rather than extractive ones. The studio engages The Menominee Theoretical Model of Sustainability, a framework that prompts students to think about sustainability as a dynamic process that navigates multiple dimensions, including human perception, economy, technology, institutions, tribal sovereignty, and the natural world.

The current project is collaborating with a non-profit, Medicine Fish, to develop a building that supports the group’s mission to repair relationships between indigenous communities, especially youth, and traditional practices, including land management. The project site sits on a reclaimed farmstead in northern Wisconsin where relationships with native prairie grasses and with a herd of bison are being reintroduced.

Students enhance old and develop new design skills while negotiating these complex issues. Students are introduced to a range of technologies and analysis techniques, such as daylighting and solar radiation simulation, thermal analysis, energy modeling, and Life Cycle Assessment to aid in making decisions about building performance. We strive to make decisions through processes that meld western scientific knowledge, especially computation, with traditional forms of indigenous knowledge.  Studio design projects are expected to comprehensively articulate concepts and develop designs with more precision and in greater detail than done in previous studios and courses. Cultures of technical drawing are entangled with methods that seek broader timescales. Students will use both established disciplinary standards of communication to describe building assemblies and experiment with techniques of representation that communicate multiple points of view, interacting influences, empirical and poetic, qualitative and quantitative understandings of projects. In this studio, we will pay special attention to the role that representational modes play in “worlding,” or formulating cosmologies or world-pictures that help us understand architecture’s relationship to broader systems by critiquing normative colonial and administrative visualizations of timber, space, energy, and time.

This studio is the primary mode through which the M.Arch program meets Integrated Design Criteria for NAAB evaluation. We will design systems for passively and actively heating and cooling buildings through conventional, technical regimes of understanding and planning, but also by embracing the Menominee conception of energy ‘ as not simply the ability to do work but [...] that which imbues all beings with life and entangles living beings into a constitutive web of reciprocal relationships.”

1. Hitch, Gregory, and Marcus Grignon. “A Forest of Energy: Settler Colonialism, Knowledge Production, and Sugar Maple Kinship in the Menominee Community.” American quarterly 75.2 (2023): 251–277. Web.