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School of Architecture Symposia

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 66
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    Konrad Wachsmann’s Research Methodology: Designing a Contemporary Clip System
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Andrzejewski, Elizabeth
    As an architect and educator, Konrad Wachsmann’s life’s work demonstrates an architectural research methodology that uses prototyping and building as a means for testing ideas and theories in both his practice and teaching. In this paper, the author presents a methodological approach used to study the historical significance of Wachsmann’s work from the 1940s-1950s and apply the results to contemporary architectural developments. To construct this dialogue with Wachsmann’s work the author analyzed the Packaged House System and his theory of universality first in theoretical and historical context and then reconstructed the technical parameters that informed Wachsmann’s’ design process. Acting as the first part of a dialogue, this analysis of Wachsmann then informed the second part of the dialog where the author’s developed a new building system that made use of contemporary tools and fabrication technologies. prefabrication problems addressed by Wachsmann in his work, and then re-examine their potentials through the application of contemporary tools and fabrication technologies. Through building—as an active research methodology of discovery, analysis, articulation, and re-application—lessons learned from Wachsmann’s work create new scholarship, and can simultaneously be applied to prefabrication, building technologies, and systematic construction today. The essential dialog connecting historical search/analysis to informed making illustrates a methodology with the potential to further articulate and re-engage historical architectural works and practices through models/prototypes and simulations in ways that result in tactile and intellectual insight into contemporary architectural research projects.
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    Responsive Building Performance: A Case Study of Electrochromic Building Envelopes
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Sun, Qingqing ; Blouin, Vincent
    Building envelopes play an important role in the building performance of energy efficiency, thermal insulation, and visual comfort. Controlling solar radiation and daylight through responsive building envelope systems is an emerging sustainable strategy to improve building performance. The effectiveness of responsive building envelopes depends on the dynamic properties of building envelope materials and control algorithms. Architects and researchers are exploring possible ways to integrate responsive electrochromic (EC) glazing materials in building envelopes and testing the dynamic impacts on building performance (DeForest et al. 2013; Hamidpour and Blouin 2018; Eleanor S. Lee et al. 2013). Up to now, the research has tended to focus on control logic, rather than on the responsiveness of the building envelope itself. The modeling of responsive behaviors of an electrochromic building envelope system is challenging due to the dynamic properties of the electrochromic materials and unpredictable behaviors. In this paper, we proposed a case study using four different electrochromic glazing materials to test the impacts of responsiveness on building performance in terms of visual comfort and energy saving for the climate conditions in Tampa, FL. We developed a novel approach, Dynamic Sequence Modeling (DSM), by which these responsive EC building envelope behaviors can be simulated. The simulation results are then used to feed our Supervised Machine Learning (SML) algorithms to enable prediction under changing weather conditions. The SML algorithms are promising avenues to solve this type of predictive learning problem (Murphy 2012). Our SML algorithms seek to optimize performance with altered responsiveness of our EC building envelopes, as a generally capable agent to predict effective responses given similar weather conditions to the learned representation of the climate model. We find that all three responsive building envelope variants demonstrate large improvements in both energy and visual comfort performance compared to the static building envelope. In three EC alternatives, where each has different tint responsiveness, the cooling and heating energy loads were reduced by 54.36% on average, and the illuminance measures had almost the same mean values close to the visual comfort threshold. The most responsive 4-mode EC had the least absolute deviations. On the other hand, the prediction accuracy of supervised machine learning models decreases as the complexity of tint responsiveness (tint mode) increases in electrochromic building envelopes. Our study demonstrates the impacts of responsive electrochromic materials on building performance. Moreover, we show that the complexity of responsiveness decreases the prediction accuracy for SML-based building control of dynamic materials.
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    Sympoietic Pleksis: Theoretical and Practical Approaches from Textiles to Architecture
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Karastathi, Nikoleta
    In the past decades, due to advancements in digital technologies, digital fabrication, and material sciences, there has been a theoretical and design shift. Prior to this, architectural discourse tended to prioritize and segregate form over its materiality, as matter followed the design, creating a clear distinction between design and making. In comparison, craft lies upon the idea of the applied skill and mastery of the material. In craft, matter and its properties are the progenitors of the form alongside the methods of fabrication and forces applied to it. Neri Oxman uses the term material ecology to describe the shift towards new material-based design processes and looks at how craft processes can inform current manufacturing methods. The proposed practice-based research sets out to develop and examine forms of architectural craft alongside fabricating prototypes. It uses textiles as a medium to explore how craft techniques can be re-interpreted to inform our current design and material processes. Textile making is a craft known from prehistoric times. It is a performative action of construction and deconstruction that could be considered the first architecture. Thus, the first known architects can be identified as weavers with the skills to produce structurally complex enclosures. Also, textiles can be seen as a medium to express stories transferred from one generation to another and can indicate aesthetic values, technological advancements, and sociocultural characteristics. The key scope of this paper is to establish the theoretical background that contributes to the conceptual framework of my research. Firstly, it examines the dynamic relations between the maker, materials, and tools. This is followed by an exploration of how such interconnected relationships can be translated to creating design principles and methodologies. Additionally, it includes an overview of textiles in architecture and how they can be used as a fabrication method and as a theoretical metaphor. The process can be seen as ‘re-coding’ the textiles through material choices, pattern creation, computation, and fabrication methods. The paper aims to provide an overview of the ideas leading to creating a dynamic methodological framework, exploring how textile craft can be applied and re-interpreted in an architectural context by emphasizing material programmability and computation.
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    Divergence in Architectural Research: ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2022
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Dortdivanlioglu, Hayri ; Panagoulia, Eleanna ; Oh, Yienn
    This second volume of Divergence in Architectural Research brings together nineteen papers presented at the ConCave Ph.D. Symposium 2022, which took place at the Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, Georgia on April 7-8, 2022. This international doctorate symposium was organized by the ConCave Ph.D. Student Group under the auspices of the School of Architecture and the College of Design at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The symposium sought to create a platform for sharing current research in architecture, with invited scholars and other doctoral students from architecture and allied fields. It was our desire to create an opportunity to gather, exchange formal, as well as spontaneous conversations in research, and explore possibilities of collaboration.
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    Pakistani Housing Sector: Evolution of Spatial Layout and Energy Consumption
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Aman, Maryam
    Pakistan is facing the issue of energy shortage in the housing sector for the past two decades, with power outages throughout the country all year long. Increased rate of population growth and increased urbanization rate are the factors responsible for this issue, regarding the future of the energy supply in the urbanized regions of Pakistan.The urban housing sector has also emerged as one of the main sources of carbon emissions in the country and has become a serious concern from an environmental point of view. The housing sector is projected to becomethe biggest consumer of the two main energy sources (electricity and gas). The main objective of this paper is to carry out a review of literature focusing on the housing sector, in terms of energy consumption and coevolution of the spatial layout of the residential sector in Pakistan. As the paper is part of an ongoing Ph.D. research; therefore, the outcome of the paper was highlighting the issue of excessive use of energy in the single-family housing sector of Pakistani urban areas for building a foundation for further investigation of the reason behind excessive use of energy in this housing sector.
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    The Control, Communication and Fuzzy Logic of Architectural Production
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) King, Paul
    Situated at the nexus of the environments of architectural design and architectural construction, this paper explores the relationship architects have with the building site. An architect’s primary output is the drawing, but in order to become an “expressive instruction” during its use at the building site, architectural drawings are augmented and/or subverted via a connected system of control, communication(s) and fuzzy logic during the translation to construction. The paper will therefore answer the question: How does an Architect adopt notions of control, communication and fuzzy logic during the construction of an architectural project? Three historical examples are used as vehicles to probe the meanings of control, communication and fuzzy logic in architectural production.
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    From Physiocracy to a New Productive Rural China
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Zhang, Boya
    This paper examines the reception and impacts of Western ideas of the “agrarian” in China. In particular, it traces how the agrarian philosophy of the Physiocrats traveled across space and time and how this line of thinking influenced the Chinese urban-rural transformation at the turn of the twentieth century. The paper examines Adam Smith’s interpretation of the Physiocracy, and how the agrarian idea was embedded in the liberal school of political economy. By tracing the significant role of Fukuzawa Yukichi and Liang Qichao in cross-cultural borrowing, the paper reveals the Western “agrarian” roots within the concept of “local self-government.” As the paper suggests, it was this line of thought that influenced the state regeneration in early modern China. As a representative case, Zhang Jian’s village-ism and his agrarian practice in Nantong are presented as the epitome of the local self-government movement in the early twentieth century, which marked one of the first rural modernization efforts in China. By tracing the intellectual transmission of the idea of the “agrarian,” the paper aims to unpack the connotation of the “agrarian modern” as an alternative to the mainstream model of high-dense cities and depopulated countryside. This paper offers a perspective to situate the urban-rural transformation in early modern China in a global context without the conventional West-East divide.
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    African Architecture and Identity: The Nineteenth Century Asante Palace of Kumase, Ghana
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Edwards, Amie
    Architecture and ritual interconnect to define cultural identity. In the traditional procession ritual of the Asantehene, the Asante king, into the palace, the Golden Stool, Kente cloth, and Adinkra symbols are a part of the space and place narrative. These narratives encompass symbolic cultural habitation and the geographical landscape. This dissertation examines as a case study the nineteenth century Asante palace in the traditional city of Kumase, Ghana, Africa, to reveal the cultural and material connections to the identity of the Asante. In the nineteenth century, missionaries and European officials collected ethnographic surveys of the Asante palace before it was destroyed by the British during the colonial period. The existing ethnographic survey archives of Thomas Bowdich, a European official, explain the Asante Architecture and the palace from a European hegemonic perspective. Bowdich states that the construction of the ornamental architecture of “Coomassie” reminded him forcibly of Sir James Hall’s essay, the Edinburgh Philosophical Transactions, that Asante Architecture was the tracing of the Gothic order to an architectural imitation of wickerwork. The records proclaim the architectural ornament on the Asante buildings was adopted from interior countries and did not originate with the Asante.1 The findings in the survey do not address the phenomenological experience, ritual practice, holistic architectonic structure, and sociocultural expression of the Asante Palace according to the nation of the Asante. This research aims to materialize and define the connection between the nineteenth century Asante palace of Kumase and the socio-cultural identity of the Asante to ameliorate the damaging effects of colonization on traditional structures. This research works between architecture and anthropology to reveal the ontological association of the Asante cultural elements, the Golden Stool, Kente cloth, and Adinkra symbols and their ritual significance to the Asante palace. From an anthropological point of view, collective memory, ritual praxis, and political and social organization explain the embodied meaning of Asante culture identity. The palace’s architecture defines traditional construction methods, sustainable practices, structural phenomenological experience, and spatial narratives to interpret the social context. This research includes archival work of ethnographic records of the Asante palace, Asante culture, and the context of the city of Kumase. A close study of the Akan language of Twi reveals each cultural element’s spiritual and social meaning that is an integral part of the Asante life. Analytical drawings of symbolic details and reconstructive drawings of the Asante palace are used to link material culture, phenomena, and the socio-cultural identity of the Asante based on the African point of view. Expected results include the demonstration of the social and cultural expression of the Asante palace and the original embodied meaning based on the etymology of traditional structural references. Furthermore, this research will contribute to the history of African Architecture and vernacular palatial structures.
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    Sentient Spaces: Interpreting Biofeedback into Environmental Systems to Mitigate the Severity of Physiological Symptoms in Anxiety Disorders
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Richter-Lunn, Katarina
    While anxiety disorders remain the most pervasive mental illness in the United States, few therapeutic solutions have incorporated strategies for dealing with both cognitive and physical symptoms. This is particularly challenging due to the often context-driven trigger of panic and the rapid and exponential onset of such physiological symptoms. With technological advancements for real-time physiological measurements becoming increasingly precise, along with new research highlighting their relationship to cognitive state, there lies great potential for current forms of treatment to be accompanied by real-time alterations to the qualities of our built environment. Sentient space is positioned at the intersection of psychophysiology, cognitive psychology, and environmental design, to put forth a study proposal that questions how spatial systems such as light, temperature, and air quality can be informedby individuals’ physiological signals to, in turn, provide real-time relief to the physical symptoms associated with anxiety disorder.
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    Matter, Materialization, and Biomaterial Futures
    (Georgia Institute of Technology, 2023-03) Tish, Daniel
    The material landscape of architecture is shifting. Architects are increasingly engaging in material systems design, no longer relying on mere specifications to address the materialization of architectural form. All the while, the climate crisis demands that the field develop new solutions to reduce energy consumption and forces us to reckon with the carbon footprint of the materials that make up our built environment. As a result, designers are often developing materials that are bio-based, utilize waste feedstocks, or water-based formulations to keep carbon costs to a minimum. By stepping away from industrialized materials, material behaviors, such as warping, shrinking, and curling, have re-entered the fabrication process and must be contended with. Furthermore, living materials disrupt any notion of determinism or “specification” and instead must be cared for and catered to guide the organisms towards desirable outcomes. New methods for robotic fabrication suggest ways that material realities may be fed back onto the design process, enabling new material expressions, and suggesting a shared design agency through adaptive construction methods. These developments defy the hylomorphic hierarchies of form and matter that have been present in architectural production since the Renaissance. Here, we will investigate how novel biomaterial systems are challenging existing practices of materialization and the nature of matter in architectural design.