FND 2011 - Sustainable Material Assemblies: Home

FND 2011 - Sustainable Material Assemblies | Spring 2025 | Linda Just 

Course Description:  Briefly, this is a transdisciplinary course meant to introduce students to sustainable practices through an investigation of material assemblies, their production, installation, and final context. Students will be challenged to think beyond the site and analyze the origins, capacities, and ends of life of different building materials, as well as their labor contexts from which they are extracted, processed, transported, and built. Organized each week as half-lecture, half-lab sessions, students are provided lectures from within each spatial design discipline and then split into graduate and undergraduate lab sections for discussion and other exercises. Student evaluation will consist in the development of a series of lab participation, case study boards, quizzes and a final exam.

... perhaps more philosophically, this course could be considered an opportunity to view architecture from perspectives beyond the purely aesthetic, purely constructed, or purely fiscal. These concepts often drive design with a sense of detachment from the impacts outside the immediate relationships of building, user, and client. Being able to think and communicate thoughtfully about the less curated loci of the design process and its impact on environments, communities, and cultures fosters a stronger sense of responsibility− and creativity− as present and future practitioners. It is tall order for a single semester, but hopefully also a compelling provocation to develop a constantly evolving personal methodology of exploring design through multiple, simultaneous lenses.

The Tuas Port Reclamation Project, Sim Chi Yin for NYT. photograph, viewed 9 Sept.
2024, <https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/20/magazine/how-singapore-is-creating-more-land-for-itself.html>