23–01–23
Collaborators:
Juliana Berglund-Brown
Kiley Feickert
Keith J Lee
Instead of forcing unconventional building materials into status-quo forms and assemblies, Make/Shift proposes a system that takes advantage of the non-standard lengths of the recovered stock to defy orthogonal norms and create a structural system that embraces variability and flexibility, enclosing a space for storing second-life materials and hosting educational workshops.
To minimize waste and maximize the structural and spatial utility of the existing stock, the design process is preceded by the development of a cutting logic to extend the available inventory, creating thinner and lighter wood elements. The inventory is transformed into studs, battens, and shingles, allowing the originally homogeneous stock to serve diverse architectural purposes. To form the building structure and envelope, we break from the standards of conventional stick-framing: multi-part “stud” frames are nailed together and transformed into arches, battens are forced out of horizontal alignment due to the set lengths of the stock pieces, and shingles register the underlying variation on the exterior.
Walls become roofs, corners are rounded, and the resulting structure is characterized by natural variation, representing a design ethos for the circular economy that does not rely on standardized materials. With an expanded inventory comes a significant increase in ways to use these elements; to address the exploding number of options, we develop a computational sampling, assignment, and analysis methodology to effectively traverse, cull, and extract from the design space.
Through the nature of the design sampling process, any selected geometry is guaranteed to be structurally efficient for point loads acting at the joints of the frame. The assigned frames generate natural corrugation, stiffening the global structure as it curves in plan. A new design ethos for the circular economy also requires reversibility, materializing in simple moment connections that can be disassembled to allow the structure to be moved, repaired, and reconfigured.
Projects, Timber, Salvage Reuse