Mapping Architecture DNA

It is important to gain a perspective on the relationship between ecology, culture and technology as it plays out in the built environment, particularly in architecture versus plain buildings. Up until about the last several decades, metrics for the performance of architecture were almost exclusively confined to the upfront capital costs and the visual experience of the building. The environmental movement introduced a new awareness of the life cycle impacts associated with buildings, and in parallel, the social sciences and psychology began collecting information from inhabitants about their living experience within the architecture and its surrounding urban fabric/form. This is causing architects to explicitly consider performative design that can be tested according to metrics and parameters that conform to more scientific and evidence-based assessment protocols.

 

The first project requires students to select an architectural precedent and to research its cultural pedigree, technological constitution and environmental behaviour, and then to conduct an “emergy” analysis of a particular material or component, and to map these attributes against what are now considered to be minimally acceptable thresholds of environmental performance. The format for this project will be an annotated "knowledge map" infographic of the comparative investigation.