Banner Image: Latitudo Borealis pavilion model and localized shading prototype from “Experiments Toward Hyper-Local Reverse Heat Flow Assemblies” by Lars Junghans, Kathy Velikov, and Geoffrey Thün, with Daniel Tish, M.Arch ’15, and Dustin Brugmann, M.Arch ’15.
Two teams of Taubman College faculty won 2019–2020 Faculty Design Awards from the Association of Collegiate Schools of Architecture. The Faculty Design Award recognizes work that advances the reflective nature of practice and teaching by encouraging outstanding work in architecture and related environmental design fields as a critical endeavor.
McLain Clutter and Cyrus Peñarroyo, who are design partners in the firm EXTENTS, were honored for “Shaped Places of Carroll County New Hampshire,” which speculates on the complex reciprocity between who we are and the shape of where we live; between identities and the environments that support them. The project culminates in the design of three linear cities in Carroll County, New Hampshire. A notorious swing state, New Hampshire remained purple on the presidential election map until late into the night on November 8, 2016. Much like the gerrymandering practices that produced those results, “Shaped Places” seeks to geometrically organize population at a geographic scale to carefully prescribed ends. Forced to co-exist, this melange informs strategies for co-existence by urbanizing the rural while ruralizing the urban. Shape and content forge a complex reciprocity. Clutter is associate professor at Taubman College and chair of the architecture program. Peñarroyo is an assistant professor. Read more about their project.
From “Shaped Places of Carroll County New Hampshire” by McLain Clutter and Cyrus Penarroyo.
Kathy Velikov and Jonathan Rule were honored for the New Domesticities New Collectivities studio, which explored the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit. Historically, the arrangement and configuration of plans within the context of domestic space most often reveals tight allotments of square footage and compartmentalization of spaces with inherent naming conventions that imply single use, inflexible scenarios of inhabitation: living room, kitchen, bedroom, etc. But how we live, work, and play is continually changing, which questions our assumptions for what constitutes a home, how the private and the shared are partitioned, and what new kinds of spatial uses are necessary. In response to these new domesticities, the studio focused on the development of alternative forms of housing for emergent forms of living and working in Detroit’s Eastern Market area. It explored how traditional spatial labels can be reframed and recombined at the unit and building scales to develop scenarios and spatial typologies that experiment with collective forms and combinatory strategies for domestic arrangements and their architectures. Velikov is an associate professor at Taubman College and Rule is an assistant professor. Read more about their studio.
From the New Domesticities New Collectivities studio, led by Kathy Velikov and Jonathan Rule. Image credit: Hannah Cane, Jordan Laurita, and Nour Mazjoub.
In addition, Velikov, along with her co-authors, Associate Professors Lars Junghans and Geoffrey Thün and Daniel Tish, M.Arch ’15, and Dustin Brugmann, M.Arch ’15, won the inaugural TAD Research Contribution Award for their paper, “Experiments Toward Hyper-Local Reverse Heat Flow Assemblies.” The Technology | Architecture + Design Journal (TAD) is published by the ACSA.
The paper discusses the team’s research project Latitudo Borealis, which develops an innovative cold-climate wall assembly that combines new passive opaque building envelope technologies to absorb, store, and transfer solar energy into a building during winter, with exterior shading to mitigate overheating during summer. The research encompasses three domains of architectural research: the physical testing and optimization of high-performance envelope assemblies, the use of computational evolutionary algorithms in the design of highly tuned climate-informed shading configurations, and new tools and processes for precise robotic heat bending of wood. It is demonstrated that the assemblies are capable of successfully absorbing and redirecting heat into the building interior in winter to improve building performance. The application of the experimental envelope assembly is further explored through the design of an unbuilt test case pavilion. Read more about their paper.
