Barry Wark
Founder, Barry Wark Studio
public lecture: The Architecture of Ecology
Barry Wark explores architecture as a materially dynamic, ecocentric practice, conceiving buildings as assemblies of parts designed to weather, change, and be replaced over time. His projects use computational design and circular material strategies to foreground weathering as an active design force, allowing buildings to register their connection to the environment and create ambiguity between what is made and what emerges through climate and use. This lecture introduces recent work from his practice, showing how parts-based tectonics and ecocentric aesthetics can reshape contemporary environmental architecture.
graduate workshop review: weathering artifacts
February 2, 5 p.m, Slocum Atrium
Students will design spatial objects that intelligently respond to and accelerate weathering through computational intelligence and procedural design tools.
As we move into an age of environmental consciousness and the nature-architecture dichotomy dissolves in favor of emerging ideologies of interconnectedness, it may no longer be appropriate to perpetuate the notion that our buildings are impervious and separate from the environments in which they are sited. This has given rise to an emerging field of architectural design that experiments with new ecological aesthetics and a desire for architecture that expresses buildings’ enmeshment with the environment. The workshop will explore these ideas through the design and representation of an object that speculates on conditions of permissible weathering, degradation, and inhabitation of our built environment by non-human entities. Through case studies, students will understand where and why these various effects occur in the built environment and how they might be controlled and augmented through design. The workshop will develop proposals using procedural modeling workflows in Houdini FX, allowing students to integrate computational intelligence through weather simulation and geometric analysis.
