The carbon research seminar traces the story of carbon, a chemical element essential to the form and function of the contemporary built environment and a photosynthetic building block in the growth of forests and the formation of the fossil energy sources that fuel current building production and operation. As levels of atmospheric carbon climb past sustainable thresholds, its role as a dangerous pollutant has become a focus of climate science and environmental policy. Efforts to mitigate anthropogenic climate change through technological refinements within the building sector have centered until very recently on reductions in energy consumption in building operation. Today, however, the economic management of carbon pathways through the entire building lifecycle has become a topic of scientific scrutiny and assessment, a driver in the development of new construction technologies and an impetus to reshape our buildings and cities.
The Timber and High Performance Wood Technology seminar explores recent innovations in forest management and timber construction technology and considers their implications for architectural technique and building morphology.By traversing scale from the engineering of wood fiber in structural members to the development of a timber-structured high-density high-rise urbanism; by spanning the material lifecycle of wood from silvicultural practice to the disassembly and reuse of timber buildings, students will investigate newfound capacities and applications of wood as a high performance construction material and assess its impact to both the local and global ecologies.