Hydrophobic Paper Architecture: Studies in the Sustainability of Impermanent Structures

“The problem with a tent is that when you use it you throw it away, so it’s money that melts.”–Alejandro Aravena The social project of architecture has long been fascinated with emergency and refugee housing as a primary unit of architectural and urban development. For decades, architects have proposed alternatives to the United Nations’ blue tent cities that are the principal image associated with humanitarian aid and its resulting urbanism. During the 2016 Venice Biennale Reporting from the Front, curator Alejandro Aravena challenges architects to reconsider the discipline’s relationship to society’s most urgent challenges. The ongoing European refugee crisis is one such ‘Front’ and this research examines the viability of an alternative to the polyvinylchloride (PVC) tarp as the default condition of emergency and refugee housing. The authors propose that waterproof paper surfaces and members, treated with a proprietary nano-coating can perform as well as traditional materials, but with reduced environmental impact and improved user comfort. A collaboration between researchers in Material Science and Architecture combines ongoing scientific research with digital design tools and methods. Following is a brief history of building with paper, an introduction to hydrophobic nano-coatings, and several fabricated prototypes. This project expands upon initial applications from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2012) where researchers successfully prepared paper surfaces with a nanoparticle coating, repelling water and maintaining structural integrity

Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice

This is a call for the development of a more robust theoretical position about the gender implications of advanced parametric design and the use of machines to design and fabricate architecture. As digital fabrication has made material the network conditions of cyberfeminism, it is time to revisit the relationships between feminism, architecture, and technology. We propose a framework that relies upon intellectual traditions of feminism and deliberately focuses on developing technologies as a locus of power and influence in architecture. Architecture has been slow to fully acknowledge, incorporate, and integrate women into its practices.3 Within the building profession, digital technology has emerged—and in many ways, is still emerging—as a site of architectural influence: those who control the process of design through technology control architecture. CNC fabrication and robotic construction are cultivating new cultures of digital craft, and in searching for future opportunities, we would do well to recall the long history that links craft and feminine labor. By looking again at the often-neglected contributions of Ada Lovelace and the Jacquard loom to computation and digital fabrication in the nineteenth century or a more recent project such as the Elytra Filament Pavilion, we might see how this digital moment has been framed by feminist craft rather than the more familiar origin stories that surround computation

Parametric Modeling of the Church in the Studenica Monastery in Serbia

This project reveals surveying data and architectural design of the major church in the Studenica monastery complex in Serbia reflected in a variety of 3D models and the analysis of the church interior and exterior. Architecture-driven computational parametric modeling was done by using two types of data: close range photogrammetry and high precision laser scanning. The modeling, based on geometric parameters and other planimetric and volumetric analysis, is devised during the four-year study as part of the project Parametric Research of the Studenica Church, a UNESCO Heritage Site, as a Model for Advanced Studies of Medieval Architecture. These models allow for better understanding and representation of the proportional, aesthetic and illumination qualities of the Studenica church and for prototyping procedures for examining other medieval domed churches where we lack more detailed references about their architectural design

Modeling the illumination of the church at Studenica monastery during evening services

This paper presents an analytical model to analyze illumination of the church interior during the evening service. The focus is on the artificial light achieved using church lighting fixtures known as polycandela, which are suspended directly below the church dome. The analysis focuses on the main church (katholikon) at Studenica Monastery, built in Serbia sometime before 1208/9. By using a computer-generated model of the Studenica church derived from high-precision laser scanning and close-range photogrammetry rather than from more conventional architectural drawings of the church, we recreate the actual three-dimensional space of the church interior. Our model allows for a quantitative calculation and analysis of the amount of artificial light that could have been achieved inside medieval churches. We apply this model for the church at Studenica to better understand the lighting of medieval structures as well as more abstract and diagrammatic qualities of the sacred space of the church manifested by light conditions.Radovi sa radionice će biti publikovni u tematskom zborniku pod istim nazivom u izdanju poznatog izdavača akademskih radova - Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, Netherlands

Biennale Sessions

Reporting from the Front is the celebrated theme of the 2016 Venice Biennale of Architecture curated by Chilean architect Alejandro Aravena of Elemental. Arevena states that there are several battles that need to be won and several frontiers that need to be expanded in order to improve the quality of the built environment and consequently people’s quality of life. The theme aims to focus on architecture which works within the constraints presented by a lack of resources, and those designs which subvert the status quo to produce architecture for the common good - no matter how small the success.</p

Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice

This is a call for the development of a more robust theoretical position about the gender implications of advanced parametric design and the use of machines to design and fabricate architecture. As digital fabrication has made material the network conditions of cyberfeminism, it is time to revisit the relationships between feminism, architecture, and technology. We propose a framework that relies upon intellectual traditions of feminism and deliberately focuses on developing technologies as a locus of power and influence in architecture. Architecture has been slow to fully acknowledge, incorporate, and integrate women into its practices.3 Within the building profession, digital technology has emerged—and in many ways, is still emerging—as a site of architectural influence: those who control the process of design through technology control architecture. CNC fabrication and robotic construction are cultivating new cultures of digital craft, and in searching for future opportunities, we would do well to recall the long history that links craft and feminine labor. By looking again at the often-neglected contributions of Ada Lovelace and the Jacquard loom to computation and digital fabrication in the nineteenth century or a more recent project such as the Elytra Filament Pavilion, we might see how this digital moment has been framed by feminist craft rather than the more familiar origin stories that surround computation.This article is published as Doyle, Shelby, and Leslie Forehand. “Fabricating Architecture: Digital Craft as Feminist Practice,” Avery Review 25 (2017). Posted with permission.</p

Hydrophobic Paper Architecture: Studies in the Sustainability of Impermanent Structures

“The problem with a tent is that when you use it you throw it away, so it’s money that melts.”–Alejandro Aravena The social project of architecture has long been fascinated with emergency and refugee housing as a primary unit of architectural and urban development. For decades, architects have proposed alternatives to the United Nations’ blue tent cities that are the principal image associated with humanitarian aid and its resulting urbanism. During the 2016 Venice Biennale Reporting from the Front, curator Alejandro Aravena challenges architects to reconsider the discipline’s relationship to society’s most urgent challenges. The ongoing European refugee crisis is one such ‘Front’ and this research examines the viability of an alternative to the polyvinylchloride (PVC) tarp as the default condition of emergency and refugee housing. The authors propose that waterproof paper surfaces and members, treated with a proprietary nano-coating can perform as well as traditional materials, but with reduced environmental impact and improved user comfort. A collaboration between researchers in Material Science and Architecture combines ongoing scientific research with digital design tools and methods. Following is a brief history of building with paper, an introduction to hydrophobic nano-coatings, and several fabricated prototypes. This project expands upon initial applications from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2012) where researchers successfully prepared paper surfaces with a nanoparticle coating, repelling water and maintaining structural integrity.</p

Modeling the Sunlight Illumination of the Church at Studenica Monastery

The Church of the Mother of God at Studenica Monastery in Serbia was estab- lished by the medieval Serbian ruler and founder of his own dynasty, Stefan Nemanja (r. 1169–1196).1 The church is finely proportioned. Sophisticated treatment of wall surfaces additionally enriches the high-quality construc- tion in stone (figure 10.1). Nicely carved architectural sculpture enlivens the church exterior while extensive fresco decoration adorns the interior walls. The building is a single-nave structure, with a dominant square-based domical core and a tripartite sanctuary, typical for Byzantine-rite churches (figure 10.2). Architecturally and structurally speaking, this design is essentially a condensed form of a typical Middle Byzantine church, known as an atrophied Greek-cross church.2 In such churches, as in Studenica church, the lateral arms of the cross are reduced to narrow barrel vaults. Thus, these vaults effectively become mas- sive arches that project from structural piers; the same piers that carry trans- versal arches, which support the domical core of the structure.Part 2 Lighting Sacred Spaces Chapter 10 Modeling the Sunlight Illumination of the Church at Studenica Monastery In: Natural Light in Medieval Churches, Series: East Central and Eastern Europe in the Middle Ages, 450-1450, Volume 88 Volume Editors: Vladimir Ivanovici and Alice Isabella Sullivan https://brill.com/display/title/6361