NATIVE ASSEMBLIES | ARCH402

Professor Patrick Danahy + Richard Tursky | Design Thesis Studio | Spring 2023 | TEG Architects Design Prize | Finalist |

In past historical references to how architecture can be instanced within the natural environment, a precedence is drawn from projects like Falling Water, The Farnsworth House, and The Glass House. From these specific instances, modifications have been required over time in order to continue each’s intended uses and provocations. With this, opportunities arise in today’s discourse to reconsider how artifacts with similar settings, but departing intentions, can be made through a new set of contemporary logics.

As a way to establish how designers could start to curate these artifacts that are then considered more physically enmeshed with the environment, rather than a separate figure of its own agenda, this project suggests that not only can the materiality of our designs be derived from their natural context, but also so can the formal and spatial qualities of the architecture itself. The project’s underlying notions of attempting to develop kinship between what is a building and its site can be practiced within any sort of environmental condition. However, as a way to employ specific scenarios within today’s context, the project distributed to the areas of: Siu Lam, Hong Kong; North Rim, Arizona; and Denali, Alaska. The specifics of each chosen site vary, but all still primarily involve the outlook of having a reduction of their environmental character, due to the increase in demand for residential housing. With this, the project takes the opportunity to suggest how the design and aesthetics of these residential units could be approached in future plans. As for the project’s final proposal, the design approach for each sites’ residential unit was conceived through the use of today’s contemporary surveying techniques, like photogrammetry and lidar scanning workflows. This methodology allows for designers to digitally reconstruct native geological features that are present, and then afterwards re-purpose them as a newly found design medium that can then be directly operated on and further influence the design process. Photogrammetry softwares usually involve an algorithmic set of mathematical formulas and processes used to generate 3D models from a set of 2D images. The algorithm works by identifying common features in the images, determining the position and orientation of the camera that captured each image, and then triangulating the positions of points in 3D space. Following the surveying process, and processing all mesh data, although initially unfamiliar, the object withdrawn is then able to be re-examined and manipulated, while also still retaining true U.V. material information and persistent 3D spatial data. As a way to make these objects more operable, the meshes are then built up as solid objects rather than just surfaces, so that the designer could then claim authorship towards what is then contributing to the final developed artifact.