Synecdochical Tendencies: A House in Beaver Valley

We just wrapped up our design studio at the University of Toronto Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design. Many thanks to our students for their hard work. An excerpt from the studio brief follows.

This studio will seek to extend the concept of material systems by embedding their material characteristics, geometric behavior, manufacturing constraints, and assembly logic within an integral design model that promises an understanding of form, material, structure, and behavior not as separate elements but rather as complex relations.

We will be guided by the supposition that technology is never neutrally deployed but always encompasses ideology, whether consciously declared or subconsciously assumed. Our field of operation will oscillate between practice and theory without subjugating, in the name of idealized principles, the one to the other. Working in pairs, your research will focus upon material adaptation and deployment with particular attention paid to the technical exigencies and contemporary discourse associated with sustainability.

The presumed familiarity of the small scale typology of the single family house will allow the studio to achieve an unusual degree of specificity and detail. Due to the expectation of complex fabrications and material explorations, sponsorship for this studio has been attained and each project will receive funding to fabricate large scale representations of the final proposals. Students will be encouraged to exploit the resources and technical expertise of the Daniels’ Fabrication Lab as well as the production capabilities of local fabricators.