Architecture as Catalyst: Design Systems: Identity, Information, + Environmental Graphics

Students in this workshop combined their architectural perspectives with various graphic design principles, processes, and practices employed in designing visual systems. Throughout the week, they explored aspects such as color palettes, icon design, mood boards, typography, gestalt principles, photographic mock-ups, and layout.

In teams of two or three, they applied this learning to the development of graphic components for a hypothetical farmers' market site in Minneapolis: the former train shed at The Depot (at the corner of 5th Ave S and S Washington Ave). Students were invited to realize their design solutions in any medium (or multiple media), and they were advised that a thorough conceptualization phase would entertain components both on-site (interior and exterior) and off-site (physical, virtual, or otherwise). Successful design solutions to this challenge demonstrated the following: an understanding of the multiple contexts in which a farmers' market (and, in particular, a farmers' market in this locale) operates; an understanding of the multiple systems (such as cultural, economic, and social) in which this site resides; consideration of how people might approach, view, and use this site both when the market is happening and when it is not; intentionality in the relationships between form, material, siting, and communicative function; and the potential to inform, inspire, educate, or otherwise engage the public with the site and the temporal happenings of a farmers' market.

Architecture as Catalyst: Nested Scales

This workshop proposes an approach to architecture predicated on the notion of nested scales of form, assembly, and texture. Students designed and prototyped a porous architectural surface conceived at three scales: the scale of overall building form, the scale of the building components, and the scale of the surface textures. The prototypes were fabricated from both planar frame elements and surface-milled components produced using the Digifablab's CNC router. Pattern, porosity, texture, and other attributes were tested and controlled using parametric design software. Students constructed both scale models of their proposed systems and 1:1 prototypes milled from solid hardwood. The workshop prioritized intensive use of the CNC router and developing methods of using the machine to produce unexpected material effects.

Architecture as Catalyst: Bodies In Formation

This workshop investigated the material practice of architecture through an intensive design cycle that focused on the integration of form, fabrication, and performance. Specifically, the workshop researched the design and assembly of thrust surfaces or structures in which the form of the structure is determined through a close alignment with structural vectors. During the 20th century, architects and engineers such as Guadi, Otto, and Isler have developed these types of structures through physical form-finding techniques. A number of contemporary design researchers such as Axel Kilian and Daniel Piker have continued this line of research into the digital realm through the creation of custom digital tools that simulate physical forces. Using Piker's Kangaroo Physics plugin for Grasshopper and other parametric digital tools that allow for a quick feedback loop between design and fabrication, student teams tested their designs through digital and physical prototypes and proposed a design for a larger structure to be further developed and built by the entire group. Working together, the group produced a comprehensive presentation documenting the design and fabrication of the full-scale structure.

Architecture as Catalyst: Third Nature

We have been conditioned over time to view 'nature' as something pure and immutable, distinct from and therefore somehow 'exterior' to architecture and urbanism. With industrialization, infrastructure became so ubiquitous and so seemingly 'natural' to the city that its presence was taken for granted constituting a kind of second nature that is set against the utopian construct of a 'pure' nature.

The work of the THIRD NATURE Catalyst Course challenges this position, by exploring instead the uncanny cross-overs and hybrid conditions that characterize a third nature, where computationally generated form and technology in architecture are integrated by design with ecological materials and natural processes. Here, nature is not 'pure', easy or predictable--it always retains the provocative primal aspects of wild beauty, unpredictability, and strangeness and cannot be easily domesticated.

The Workshop considers the industrialized north edges of the Upper Mississippi River, between the BNSF Railway Bridge and Lowry Bridges, one of the key focus areas of the RiverFIRST initiative where a set of pedestrian bridges and trails are designed to provide public access to--and along--the Mississippi river. This extensive area has been widely de-treed and most of the ground is covered in non-asphalt and other non-pervious materials.

As David Gissen has argued, certain environmental forces such as dust, mud, gas, smoke, debris, weeds, and insects have been historically seen as inimical to architecture. Much of today's discussion about 'sustainable ' and 'green' design revolves around efforts to clean or filter 'out' these elements, as if architecture could be bounded from impurities that surround it in the larger urban territory. It is clearly impossible to try to re-create a 'purely' natural world, free of the untidy elements that actually constitute nature.

Taking this a-biotic industrialized riverfront territory as a site, students in the Catalyst Workshop worked in teams to explore, design and construct full-scale third nature cladding systems for selected sections of the pedestrian bridges. Unlike conventional cladding, these systems are designed as 'hosts' that invite and sustain the presence of insects, volunteer vegetation (weeds) and insectivore birds species to boost the bio-diversity and future carrying capacity of this stretch of the Upper Mississippi River.