Today’s Los Angeles region first concentrated around its river, which now meanders through the city’s disparate social topography for over fifty miles as a largely concrete channel before it discharges into the Pacific Ocean. Since the city’s inception various actors, including engineers, planners, and Supreme Court justices, actively shaped the image of the LA River through flood control practices. This article traces these framings and their co-constitution with policy and legislation in shaping collective visions of the LA River: a source of sustenance, a force of water, a concrete landscape to be celebrated, a desolate wasteland, a dormant ecology, and critical infrastructure for a resilient LA climate future.

Women [Re]Build: Stories, Polemics, Futures          

By Franca Trubiano, Ramona Adlakha, and Ramune Bartuskaite (eds.)   

Novato CA, USA: Applied Research and Design / Oro Editions, 2019, 2018

241 mm x 165 mm

144 pages

US$ 29.95 (paperback)

ISBN: 978-1-943532-43-8

3D printing, or additive manufacturing (AM), marks the latest in a series of technological and societal revolutions that span from the printing press to the personal computer and beyond. A key asset of this technology is that it aligns the architect with the manufacturing process, integrating the design and fabrication. Additive manufacturing, particularly fused deposition modeling (FDM), can further weave construction typologies like Frank Lloyd Wright’s textile block system by controlling the deposition process to create lightweight stressed-skin blocks with the potential for multiple functions. The research and creation of an initial prototype Woven Block module using FDM printing will be discussed.

Contemporary sustainable and resilient architecture encompasses design with nature, dynamic adaptability to external disturbances, smart redundancy, and changing futures, which are essential to cope with the prerequisites of cultural influences. Contributing to the existing literature, this paper presents a series of built scaled vault prototypes which integrated material performance-based approaches in computational design and advanced fabrication, utilizing locally sourced dredged material (DM) as one of the primary building ingredients. The investigated DM is acquired from Ohio’s Lake Erie harbors and one of the coastal ports in southern Louisiana. Annual sediment removal is a required task for local port authorities and federal agencies to maintain transportation waterways for economic viability. This paper discusses DM processing procedures, and granular mixture methods integrated into a number of computational frameworks to produce a range of vaulting projects from the contemporary DM-compressed stabilized tiles (DM-CST) vault to DM 3D printed vaults, considering material workability, buildability, and extrudability, as well as element’s strength and durability. Each design has to consider these factors while responding to the force of gravity in order to achieve desired structural geometry. 

Identifying materials that can substitute rare natural resources is one of the key challenges for improving resource efficiency in the building sector. With a growing world population and rising living standards, the amount of salt (sodium chloride) produced as waste through seawater desalination and potash mining processes is increasing. Unfortunately, most of it is disposed of into nature where it causes environmental pollution. On the other hand, salt is affordable and can be used therapeutically in various respiratory treatments and to store humidity and heat. It was, therefore, necessary to determine salt materials already in use in building construction. The aim of this research was to identify those that have been used in history and analyzed in scientific studies, to investigate their physical and mechanical properties, and to identify the most promising applications in the construction field. This was accomplished via literature review, classifying the salt materials into three groups (raw salt, composite salt, and processed salt). It was found that salt has been used as a building material for centuries and has potential for future applications. 

Latest SMP (Shape Memory Polymers) materials may allow to produce future building elements that change their shape in various ways. This study focuses on (1) developing shape-changing multi-materials from SMP and (2) control the change in shape by harnessing its thermal responsiveness. We focus on the manufacturing of SMP/PLA (Polylactic acid), SMP/TPU (Thermoplastic Polyurethane) and SMP/PETG (Polyethylene terephthalate glycol) composites, with special attention to SMP/TPU and SMP/PETG composites and their material behaviors compared to single SMPs. The first step was to initially investigate shape-changing and self-transforming composites. We report on (a) a thermo-active SMP capable of recovering from a shape-change after exposure to a temperature of 55°C and (b) testing the concept of 4D printing with FFF (Fused Filament Fabrication) technique. Their printability and cohesion were tested, and consequently, a geometric connection strategy was introduced to design SMP/PLA and SMP/PETG composites. Finally, we managed to activate shape-change in an SMP/PETG with embedded heating wires controlled by a microcontroller.

 Integration of “active” materials into architectural assemblies could have a transformative effect on how we experience dynamics of the built environment. Material actuation offers a different way of generating dynamics in architectural surfaces and components. It operates without a need for multiple mechanical components. Active materials such as Shape Memory Alloy (SMA), electroactive polymers, bimetals, or even natural materials such as wood, have been explored in experimental and research projects focused on dynamic architectural assemblies. This paper focuses on SMA and considers several distinct approaches to integrating it into surfaces/elements and how its capacity to change a length or shape can be used to kinetically activate material systems. It provides an overview of a number of projects and prototypes that use SMA actuation and examines the challenges and opportunities presented by its use. The goal of this paper is to bring new insights into material-based actuation of dynamic material systems. Therefore, it offers a comparative discussion of SMA actuation and attempts to categorize their possible use in architectural assemblies.

Conventional building uses material as a fungible commodity. This debased understanding of materiality leads to environmental, social, and economic harm. The research program described here valorizes material as a common good: an asset shared by industry and community stakeholders to foster sustainable physical environments. A series of consolidated practices explore biochar as a building material feedstock. Biochar describes a range of byproducts from pyrolyzed (high-temperature, low-oxygen roasted) feedstocks like wood chips, sewage sludge, and farm waste. Biochar itself is a fine, lightweight, jet-black, and highly porous powder. Contrary to its carbon neutral use as a soil amendment, biochar holds carbon-negative promise in construction by removing airborne carbon from the carbon exchange cycle. By repurposing biomass waste biochar offers a corrective to extracting resources for building materials. Using a materially driven design approach the research program explored biochar as a fine aggregate, or sand, replacement in concrete specifically for precast concrete architectural panels. Sand mining, transportation, and scarcity have deleterious environmental impacts, and the replacement of sand with biochar results in a range of diverse thermal, hygroscopic, and mechanical properties.

This article wants to offer a brief overview of my experience as an architectural photographer and of “The Mies Project” in particular, on which I have been working on for the past few years. My approach to photography, based on the latest digital technology but also on the Leica M-System, is briefly outlined. In the past, the question was how to obtain information. Nowadays, the proper structuring of information is what really matters. Architectural Portraits, a small selection of which from “The Mies Project” are here presented, are “intimate gazes,” prioritizing the relationship of the detail of a building with its surrounding, the interaction between construction details, lighting and weather conditions. In this sense, Mies’ works not only have sparked my interest in architectural photography, but have been also the perfect poetic partner for my research.

Characterized by continuity, inventiveness, and a fervent exploration of the relationship between architecture and the environment at large, the work of Lisbeth Sachs was included in the 1979 issue of the Aktuelles Bauen magazine on women and architecture. This contribution proposes an in-depth review of Sachs’ underexplored work, suggesting a better understanding of her role as a practicing woman architect at a time when this task was not a matter of course. It places an emphasis on the dialogue Sachs established with her contemporaries, on the dense network of experiences that shaped her design approach, and on the ways it intersected with the late twentieth-century discourse on the relationship between architecture, ecology, and nature. It is not coincidental that the work of Frei Otto would have a long-lasting influence on Sachs’ design experimentation, informing her theoretical and applied design projects. Her design exploration, too, was influenced by the technological advances, the societal changes and the shifts in the cultural agency of  architecture, proposing each time a solution that addressed, rather than excluded, its surrounding context, cultural, physical, or environmental. 

 Candice Stevens has pointed out that the lack of progress on gender equality may be at the heart of the failure to advance on sustainable development. Several researchers such as Sandra Manley and Ann de Graft‐Johnson, and Rosa Sheng and Annelise Pitts have studied why women leave architecture, but no study focused on the women’s leadership in architecture education yet. This qualitative study aimed to discover insight into the leadership development journey of women focusing on sustainable architecture education. The sample was selected among 1,705 faculties of forty-one collegiate architecture programs. After email invitations, five successful women executives in sustainable architecture areas participated in the interviews. After coding analysis, three conclusions illuminated. Firstly, strong mothers influence daughters to become leaders. Secondly, the inner motivation of “working super hard” is the foundational factor that all the women leader participants claimed to sustain their leadership advancement. Thirdly, participants unveiled that there was an on-going-pattern while finishing the tasks and establishing reputations, especially in early career development. The awareness of the pattern helped to reduce the panic of the new tasks.