Category: Ecology
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Dwelling on Climate: Using Comparative Design Methodologies to Develop Responsive Architectures in Hot and Cold Climates
Bradley Walters and Chang He “A well-designed house not only fits its context well but also illuminates the problem of just what the context is, and thereby clarifies the life which it accommodates.”1 In his Notes on the Synthesis of Form, Christopher Alexander frames the work of design as moving beyond solutions, allowing us to…
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Rituals of Place: Measure and Meaning in Ephemeral Landscapes
Carley Rynar, Bradley Walters, and Adeline Hofer When we engage the physical world outside the studio, site and landscape become more than passive tableaus or inert media within which we operate. The lands within which we work are, in fact, complex and nuanced fields marked by overlapping and competing systems. When we consider the human condition within these natural…
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Urban Seams and Sutures: Strategies for Intervening in Pre-Industrial Urban Landscapes
The urban condition has become “a space of spontaneous self-organization and emergence, it is inherently dynamic, connected, interactive, a messy assemblage of networks, systems, ecologies, all competing with and contaminating, each other” (Furján 2008, 52). While these conditions and phenomena are experienced by many, they pose particularly acute problems for those in the design fields…
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Figures and Fields
Figures and Fields: A Lecture by Bradley Walters This lecture weaves together professional work, research, and student work within a narrative that engages space, field theories, surface, landscape, environment, and ecology. Poster background image: Mapping of bee movements, responding to specific environmental conditions. Student work from Architectural Design 5, ARC 3320, Fall 2009. Instructor: Bradley Walters. Univerza…
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Out of Thin Air
We cannot expect to extract ideas and schemes from the student without first feeding his mind and imagination. Bernhard Hoesli and Colin Rowe, 1954 (1) As informational networks bind us ever more tightly together, they also introduce unseen gaps and fissures within fields of knowledge. While in some cases, these are the product of distraction…
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Materialisms and Excess
Waste not, want not.1 Austerity is in the air. Excess is out; efficiency is in. Quantitative measures supercede the qualitative just as performative and operative strategies displace poetics and play. And in these historical moments, the serious obligations of professional practice are often drawn into the academy. The balance shifts from open-ended speculation to applied,…
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Instrumental Lines and Productive Paths
The territories of contemporary cultural production are marked by those at the extremes. On the one hand, we find a sustained fascination with celebrity and stardom; on the other is an enduring pursuit of the commonplace and/or normative. While seeking the extraordinary, it is often the anonymity of the everyday—the automobile, big-box retailer, or matching…
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