Fish. Brew. Minneapolis. An Argument for Integrated Industry

Fish. Brew. Minneapolis. is an inland salt-water fish farm, a micro-beer brewery,
and a locally sourced eatery on the edge of the Mississippi River in Northeast
Minneapolis. Through this speculative program, the project challenges the current
separation between production and consumption in industrial processes.

Seemingly unrelated, beer brewing and fish farming have potential synergies using
heat, waste and water in their respective production processes. Additionally, beer
and fish, as consumable products, can and are being paired together as
consumable products. At the scale of site and building, and at the scale of human
touch, the project is an exploration of how architecture mediates two distinct
industrial processes in a spatially integrated manner, a manner that both heightens
the experience of production for workers and engages the public from
production through consumption.

A Vertical Nature: Between Utopia and Reality

A Vertical Nature is an exploration of how to integrate vertical gardening into a
dense, urban living condition. The site is Cedar Riverside, a large, low-income
housing complex located southeast of downtown Minneapolis. Designed by
Ralph Rapson, and conceived of as a modernist utopia, Cedar Riverside now sits
as an incomplete version of the original vision, although it has remained almost
fully occupied and a viable housing option for more than 40 years.

This project proposes community gardens, and an education and training facility
for the site. The community garden spaces are grafted onto the towers as an
addition for hydroponic gardening and community gathering space. The design
echoes the scale of the site while providing a means for community gathering and
food production. The hydroponic education facility addresses Cedar Avenue,
providing education for the public as well as the inhabitants of Riverside Plaza.

Architecture as Catalyst: Material In/Formation

This Catalyst studio investigated the relationship between "big data" and material practice through the construction of a series of full-scale prototypes that merge aspects of computational design, graphic design, information aesthetics, and digital fabrication. The basis for the studio was an installation design for the School of Architecture's Centennial (October 25-26, 2013). The Centennial celebration will feature a built installation inspired by the history of the School and its alumni. This Catalyst served as a testing lab for (1) innovative and creative methods of material assembly, and (2) ways in which information can be used generatively in the design of a built structure. The studio specifically focussed on computational design tools as a way to harness large amounts of quantitative data and channel it strategically within a larger design process. Emphasis was placed on hybrid modes of working and exploring the transformative power of large amounts of information: both digitally and analog; both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Architecture as Catalyst: Materials as Probes

Architecture is a 'slow' weather probe. Our cognition of the relationship between architecture and environment--or between architecture the dynamic milieu of irradiance, sky cover, temperature, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and wind direction--requires a long feedback loop. Knowledge is acquired over time as adjustments are made here and there to actual buildings arrayed in settlement patterns, and to a building's constituent parts and materials, precisely because time affords the manifestation of invisible phenomena. One can see and comprehend a macroscopic influence of meteorological events and then make adjustments. However, the adjuster is most certainly not the architect. He or she is rarely present to collect this kind of feedback.

Yet, what if the architect were present to measure the actual rather than simulate the predicted performance of material assemblies? This Architecture as Catalyst workshop recast whole material assemblies as 'fast' weather probes. In so doing, this five day exploration with forms and sensors challenged students to align their materials and construction know-how with real-time studies of the environment. It asked the following questions:

How is knowledge of the environment acquired?

What is the potential relationship between form generation and real-time feedback?

How might design practices change when real-time feedback is incorporated into the design process?

Guest instructors Billie Faircloth and Ryan Welch brought a collection of proprietary sensor and communications technologies from KieranTimberlake, and they set up a website for students to track real-time climate data related to their work. The students were tasked with crafting a series of enclosed containers based on prescribed construction logics, and they attempted to meet a series of challenging and varied temperature targets in their iterations throughout the course of the studio.

Architecture as Catalyst: Old-School Toys, New-School Tools

The Weisman Art Museum (WAM) charged the students in this Catalyst studio to design and prototype a small, simple desktop 3D block puzzle toy of the museum to be mass-produced and sold in the WAM gift store. Students were placed into small teams to develop three different variations on the theme: a plastic injection design, a flat-pack design, and a traditional wooden design. The students followed a highly compressed version of a product design process taught in PDES 3711/5711 Toy Product Design. The project began with surveying, abstracting and sketching an existing building. The students used tools in the Digital Fabrication Lab including the laser cutters, 3D-printers, and CNC router to prototype a series of iterations. In the process, students were advised by WAM store manager, Marissa Onheiber and project manager of the WAM extension, Robert Good of HGA.

Architecture as Catalyst: Almanac of Projection

This Catalyst studio explored the topic of territories and networks through the lens of the Corn Belt. Students diagrammed the processes, methods and fluvial economies related to growing, harvesting, producing and transporting corn and corn products, recognizing Minneapolis's unique role in both the history and future of the commodity. By diagramming the historic and current methods of corn production, the studio then invented new designs that challenge the current agricultural system, infrastructures and territories, speculating on a new vision for the future of the Corn Belt. The students formatted their information designs into an "Almanac of Projection," a book that formats their research of existing systems and projects how to integrate, augment or recombine them to position new futures. Information was presented at three different scales: as a book, as maps, and as an exhibition.

Architecture as Catalyst: MAXIMUM POWER DESIGN

This Catalyst studio proposes an architectural agenda for energy.

Such an agenda is distinguished from the engineering agenda for energy that dominates architecture today. Of the many architectural and ecological shortcomings of this borrowed agenda is the thermodynamically impossible notion of energy efficiency. Energy cannot be made more or less efficient. Energy is always transferred at 100% efficiency. The reductionist and mechanistic preoccupation of energy efficiency, optimization, minimization and neutrality in architecture today thus engenders inaccurate ideas, misguided means, and perplexing products that neither serves architecture nor ecology well. If fact, these concepts run counter to the behavior of energy systems and thus occlude great ecological and architectural potential.

In contrast to this errant paradigm, architecture needs a far more exacting and ambitious agenda for energy today. It needs an agenda for energy that is at once thermodynamically accurate and ecologically exuberant. Importantly, it must achieve those ends with means that amplify the purposes and potential of architecture itself. Thus this Catalyst studio tables theories, techniques, and technologies of an architectural agenda for energy: maximum power design.