At both the urban and architectural scales, the suburban fabric of large cities like Toronto isolates people from one another and from the environment in which they live: social space is segregated by class, urban form is designed for the car and as a result actively discourages face to face interaction, while living spaces are cut off from the solar energy, air and living plants and animals that that surrounds them. This panel, lecture and charrette will interrogate the social and biophysical energies that circulate in both human and non-human ecologies, in an effort to discover ways that architecture and urbanism can encourage their freer circulation. These events support student design work in a third-year undergraduate design studio: Emergetic Urbanism: Towards a Non-Isolated Architecture.
The lecture by Salmaan Craig (McGill University) will focus on his scientific research into the potentials of breathing facades as natural ventilation in large buildings. This lecture will serve as inspiration for a student charrette on building enclosure and air circulation.
The lecture is open to the school and public
Lecture
and
Charrette:
Building
Form
and
Energy
Circulation
Monday
March
12th,
2018
9:30-11:00 – Lecture: Salmaan Craig, McGill University – Clusterduct: Notes on the evolution of building services and envelope technology (à la Gilbert Simondon) and some radical alternatives (breathing walls, buoyancy ventilation, termite mounds)
11:00 – 3:30 – Charrette on building envelope and non-mechanical ventilation systems
3:30 – 5:30pm - Review of the charrette
Salmaan Craig studies how to disinvent air-conditioning units and the lousy buildings they enable, with the aim of limiting future carbon emissions in mid-latitude and tropical regions, where most people are, most people will be, and most people will enter the middle class. I imagine an open-source toolkit for situations where standard energy efficiency measures lead to overheating, are too expensive or stifle communal life. My research involves designing heat-exchanging hybrid materials, conducting natural ventilation experiments in real buildings, making ice and water in the desert, learning about the architecture of termite mounds, and understanding the peculiarities of thermal sensation. Before joining McGill, I was a facade engineer at Buro Happold, then an associate at Foster + Partners, then a lecturer at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and I worked on projects such as the Louvre Abu Dhabi, the Masdar Institute, Apple Campus, and Bloomberg HQ.