M.Arch Studio: Praxis II — Transitioning Material Ecologies: Towards Silvi-Technical Systems
This studio introduces architecture as a broad framework for remaking the world within its political, social, and ecological context through infrastructural intervention and community building.
Coursework by Andrew Long, Rupal Singh and Joanne Zeng, Spring 2025.
Architecture shapes relations between individuals, communities, objects and environments. This course introduces architecture as a broad framework for remaking the world within its political, social, and ecological context through infrastructural intervention and community building. The studio continues to understand architecture as a modulator of complex cultural, eco-geological and historical flows, but aims to do so by intensively exploring, evaluating, and expanding the role that tectonic cultures, especially those emerging from forest products and their associated modes of architectural expression, play in shaping our world and the picture we form of it. Closely linked with corequisite courses on materials and assembly (MCS) and structures (CSD), we place particular emphasis on biogenic and low- to negative-carbon material ecologies. We also strive to embrace the idea that designing a building means participating in, altering, and to some degree designing, the vast socio-ecological-technical systems that enmesh material extraction and production.