overview
The studio explores advanced concepts in regenerative design and construction, metabolic approaches to the conception and formation of the built environment that seek to restore equilibrium to our climate, enhance biodiversity, remediate damaged landscapes and ecosystems, while expanding socio-economic opportunity. The studio brief calls on students to develop a trans-scalar design process that considers the life cycle of building and, more broadly, a potentially synergistic relationship between cities and their bioregions through circular- and bio-economic materials, means, and methods. The specific building program that serves to catalyze this semester-long investigation is a novel kind of design laboratory, a facility for building research, experimentation, and educational outreach, sited in the forest and informed by ecosystem science, but focused on the growing global demand for dense urban settlement. Ultimately, students will confront their individual and collective role and agency in reversing the significant terrestrial disturbance created by the activities of the building sector.
background
By 2050, our species will add 2.5 billion new inhabitants to the planet’s cities. This massive global demographic trend will call for a construction boom of unprecedented scale which will in turn correspond to a doubling of existing building stock, a tripling of current urban land area, a massive spike in atmospheric carbon concentrations and a host of other less easily measured impacts to natural systems and landscapes.
What if instead of depleting our planet’s forests, peatlands, and wetlands, the making of global buildings and cities could incentivize their restoration and enhance biodiversity? As ecosystem science and techniques of sustainable silviculture evolve, concurrent innovation in bio-based construction materials and technologies and associated impact assessment methods offer the possibility for a new and powerful symbiosis between healthy forests and convivial urban growth. These bioregional synergies can be analyzed and predicted through extrapolative methodologies using broad datasets and powerful computational methods. But they must also be explored, tested, and implemented through empirical means, simultaneously, in regional forests and the urban areas that would rely on them and provide critical feedback.
approach
This studio is the first of an ongoing series of research and design collaborations between the Yale School of Architecture, Yale Regenerative Building Lab, and the Great Mountain Forest (GMF) in Norfolk, Connecticut.
As one of the nation’s oldest conversation forests, GMF encompasses over 6,000 acres of contiguous forest and woodland habitat across Norfolk and Canaan in the Litchfield Hills of Northwest Connecticut. Throughout the 19th century, the old growth forests that once dominated this landscape were intensively and indiscriminately felled to produce charcoal for regional iron ore smelt furnaces and provide tanbark for local tanneries. By the early 20th century, the landscape had been reduced to burned-over scrub with little economic or ecological value, and the land was sold or abandoned by the iron companies. Over the past century, a collaborative of conservationists and foresters purchased, restored, and established management protocols for the GMF landscape. These efforts included a series of experimental plantings to determine the viability of native and non-native species to adapt to Connecticut’s waste woodlands, a long-standing experiment that has become unexpectedly relevant in the face of climate change and species migration.
Today, GMF stands as one of the largest, intact northern hardwood forests in Southern New England. As both an institution and a landscape, GMF balances the operation of a working, sustainably managed conservation forest with the preservation of diverse ecological habitats and an expanding research and education program focused on climate change, forest health, and biodiversity. While the Great Mountain Forest landscape will serve as a primary site of inquiry and design, the studio will undertake a series of iterative and recursive design explorations at a range of scales:
Campus: as an initial research and design exercise, students will work in groups to analyze the sites that play critical roles in the operations of Great Mountain Forest: the historic center of Downtown Norfolk, the collection of repurposed agricultural and industrial structures that house the GMF Forestry Campus, and the eight-acre Yale Camp in the center of Great Mountain Forest. Each student group will undertake an analytical assessment of their respective site, followed by the design of a master plan to facilitate the creation of a Bioregional Research + Development Center embedded within the regional forest ecosystem. Just as the Great Mountain Forest operates under an ecologically-informed, sustainable management plan, students will develop metabolically and synergistically regenerative site strategies balancing the campus’ programmatic operational requirements with the protection of the region’s natural capital and ecosystem services.
Students will present their master plans to a group of international urban planning and experimental architectural design experts at the Bauhaus Earth Innovation Lab during travel week. The site strategies collectively developed at the onset of the semester will subsequently inform the following phases and scales of design exploration.
Building: following travel week, students will each identify a building within one of the three master plans to develop in more detail. Individual buildings will be programmed to support specific operational functions of the GMF R+D Center, and student groups will continue to refine and revise their initial campus master plans to incorporate the development of each building proposal. Rather than designing buildings as the mere assembly of products and materials, students will develop designs that treat their buildings as vessels for material investment: bio-regionally sourced material and product banks, with initial deposits and, ultimately, withdrawals within the framework of a cyclical, circular economy.
Detail: in parallel to and in support of the development of individual building design proposals, students— with the guidance of experts in forestry and ecological services management—will analyze anticipated yields and species distributions of the GMF forest ecosystem that have been managed and harvested for a wide range of regenerative silvicultural objectives: disease mitigation, soil restoration, biodiversity, water quality, carbon storage, etc. From that bio-material flow analysis, students will develop and fabricate proto-typologies of bio-based building components and assemblies drawn from the GMF forest. Students will develop these 1:1 details to incorporate regionally-sourced, renewable material stocks that have the latent capacity to cycle through a cascade of varying uses over repeated building life cycles until they’re finally returned to the forest’s metabolic exchange.
Given the range of research and management activities supported by the R+D center, the studio will include workshops and lectures from a range of expert partners from aligned sectors and communities: forest science, preservation, and sustainable management; environmentally progressive public outreach and professional education; and experimenters and practitioners in building design, product development, manufacturing, and construction.
travel
The studio will undertake two study trips during the Fall semester: a site visit to Great Mountain Forest in Norfolk, Connecticut, and a weeklong research trip to Germany. During travel week, the studio will visit sites, buildings, and practices throughout Berlin, Brandenburg, and Bavaria that are engaged with the development and implementation of regional bio-economies. These regions of Germany offer a number of parallels to the landscapes, urban morphologies, and socioeconomic pressures of GMF and greater New England. During the last two decades, significant advancements in mid-rise timber building and sustainable city planning projects have put Germany at the epicenter of a movement that combines techniques in high performance, regenerative building designs with low-impact urban renovation and development.
The studio will first travel from NYC to Berlin, spending five days in the remote forest landscapes, industrial centers, and academic institutions that form the Berlin-Brandenburg Bioregion. From Berlin, the studio will travel south through Bavaria, visiting innovative architectural, manufacturing, and research sites demonstrating the alignment of ecological principles with building construction.
