There is a real urgency in our required transition from a high carbon-fuel based economy to a low carbon form, an urgency driven by the realities of our over-heating planet. We as architects are obligated to take this transition seriously and understand the consequences of the decisions we make both globally and locally.

Material Stewardship Studio Brief 2022

Material Stewardship is an integral part of an architect’s design responsibility and is central to the approach of this 15 ECTS Vertical Studio, led by Mike Haslam, Brian Ward and Cora Carbajo with a mixed cohort of second and third year TU Dublin SABE students.

‘Material Stewardship’ equipped students with the tools to fully understand the environmental implications of design and material choices: the effect of material selection on health, on carbon, on durability, ecology, and aesthetics.

This studio was primarily concerned with trying to answer two questions:

  • What is the architecture of our low carbon future?
  • What is the architecture of a circular economy?

To answer these questions, the studio explored the narratives of low carbon building materials – the stories of where they come from, their extraction and/or manufacture, use and application in buildings – and aligned this the principles of passive design in relationship to daylighting and ventilation. Students began the semester making a Low Carbon Material Narrative drawing which summarised and visually communicated the implications and embodied carbon of one construction material from source to reuse. Through a Fieldwork Centre design project based in Greenore, Co. Louth, students measured the carbon footprint of their design proposals using the Carbon Designer Tool to achieve an A rated low-carbon building.

Working digitally with OneClicklick LCA carbon calculator software alongside physical 1:20 construction models, students worked from material selection and evaluation to develop a low carbon architecture with embedded passive environmental strategies. The design approach had three stages: spatial, detail and synthesis whereby the final design project achieved a thorough investigation of material through all its life cycle stages.