MEBD Design Studio, 2012

MEBD Design Studio, 2012 MAXIMUM (ecological) POWER Critics: William Braham / Brian Phillips TA: Jihun Kim May 16 to June 27 DISCOVERY-PERFORMANCE-DESIGN Architecture is a process of discovery, of deciding what to work on, before it ever becomes a matter of design (disegno, drawing). For environmental building design, the process of discovery is even more profound, involving issues of resource consumption, modes of living and working, and of ecological interconnection that have be to explored before questions of performance can even be addressed. As HT Odum and others have argued, we are collectively striving to increase our power and prosperity, while reducing ecological risk, and that is the starting point for the studio. The site for the studio is the Philadelphia Navy Yard, and the period of discovery was used by each studio team to establish the sites, programs, standards, methods, and ambitions of the studio projects. Each team developed the basic framework for their project, demonstrating its role at both the scale of the Navy Yard and at the scale of an individual building or complex of buildings. The performance assessment began with a system diagram and emergy analysis of the Navy Yard fully developed according to the 2004 master plan. This expanded the design challenge to include food, transportation, waste, water, etc. and provided a more rigorous context for the design of individual buildings.