COURSE ABSTRACT:

“An evolutionary architecture will exhibit metabolism.  It will enjoy a thermodynamically open relationship with the enviroment in both a metabolic and a socio-economic sense.  It will maintain stability with the enviroment by negative feedback interactions and promote evolution in its employment of positive feedback.  It will conserve information while using processes of autopoiesis, autocatalysis and emergent behaviour to generate new forms and structures….Not a static picture of being, but a dynamic picture of becoming and unfolding – a direct analogy with a description of the natural world.” – John Frazer

This workshop will focus on the problem of adaptable, sustainable, and mass-customized housing units, and will seek to develop housing prototypes and enclosure systems that situate themselves within future technologies, as well as, within the streamlined manufacturing methods of product design.  The learning objectives for the workshop are: the development of hybrid representational skills that incorporate both digital and non-digital methods; learning how architects organize and present abstract information through the production of diagrams; learning about issues of ecology and sustainability pertaining to architectural design.  The generated projects for the course will include precedent housing case studies, prototype models, diagram drawing/modeling, and a class blog-wiki website.