To bridge academic exploration with real-world applications, the project culminates in the construction of a full-scale environmental test-house in Michoacán, Mexico, currently underway. This structure combines passive building technologies with contemporary methods that offer alternatives to traditional air conditioning. Post-construction, the test-house will serve as a living laboratory, utilizing thermal instrumentation, interviews, and observational studies to measure and analyze conditions such as temperature, humidity, and user experiences.
At the heart of the test-house lies a centralized "thermal mass" element that merges the utility core and central hearth into a cruciform design. This thermal mass subdivides the cubic volume into four quadrants, each capable of hosting unique thermal and environmental conditions. Additional active heating and cooling strategies are deployed throughout the house to explore hybrid approaches to interior comfort.
The project challenges traditional methodologies in building science, which often rely on "steady state" analysis to study isolated building components under fixed conditions. By constructing and operating a full-scale structure in a dynamic external environment, the test-house enables the study of time-dependent factors, including diurnal and annual cycles, as well as the synthesis of hybrid passive conditioning methods. The project highlights the complexities of hybridity, emphasizing the need for built environments that account for dynamic, heterogeneous interior conditions, and allowing for iterative modifications through demolition and addition over time.
The manufacture of dimensioned wood products to be used for building construction material continues as a source of demand for renewable building materials. Therefore, it is important to promote forest stewardship as ethically and continued sources of supply are dependent on forest health. From Wood to Tree acknowledges entropic, time-based material cycles enabling the forest environment to digest reclaimed wood, eventually increasing soil health and promoting forest growth. This process suggests the reversal of wood extraction from the forest and suggests how lumber products (and their matter) might be returned (reinserted) to tree inhabiting environments.
From Wood to Tree explores methodologies for returning reclaimed lumber to the forest exploring material circularity in a more radical stance where humans and construction are not the main, not only protagonists to benefit from material cycling.
Collective Comfort explores the potential for a new, integrated approach to community cooling. This exhibit envisions cooling centers not merely as air-conditioned spaces but as hubs of collective comfort that prioritize resilience through social engagement and collective bodily joy. In rethinking these spaces, these design prototypes examine how architecture can foster environments that don’t merely cool but actively bring people together. Drawing inspiration from ancient desert civilizations, where communal interaction and sensory pleasure were crucial, the exhibition reconsiders how design can promote both thermal comfort and community well-being.
Moving away from the homogeneity of standardized cooling, these designs allow for a range of thermal experiences, inviting visitors to explore how diverse spaces can serve distinct programs. At the heart of this approach is a challenge to the reliance on fossil-fuel-based, single-family home cooling, proposing instead a shift toward collective resilience. Through these spaces, neighborhoods can redefine comfort and deepen their understanding of climate adaptation—creating cooling centers that serve as pillars of social resilience. Through detailed design studies, spatial frameworks, and material prototypes focused on the Phoenix Metro Area, Collective Comfort offers new visions for resilience as part of the cultural and physical landscape.
Today, nightime temperatures no longer drop significantly enough to enable such intelligent and low energy, passive material strategies. A high volume of concrete and asphalt in desert cities creates an urban heat island effect where sidewalks, parking lots and streets radiate the heat they have collected during the day off at night. With little to no night time cooling available in desert cities, can the material intelligence of thermal mass, stack ventilation and energy storage still be harnessed to prevent buildings from overheating? Designers need to update how we build with thermal mass to engage with contemporary construction methods, industries, and trends of hot nightime temperatures in a changed desert climate. The exhibit displays three full-scale building portions or prototypes for incorporating these ancient and intelligent material technologies into contemporary construction methods.