This is a vertical elective combining students in their fourth and fifth year of the BArch program with students from the architecture graduate programs. The content of the elective options varies from year to year, and covers advanced topics that invite critical thinking and innovation in the area of building technology."Biological systems arise, they self-assemble, they do their ‘job’,and at the end of their life, they die in a graceful wayand their carbon goes back into the ‘pool’. "-Dyche Mullins, PhD, Chair of Cellular and Molecular Pharmacology, UCSFSection Description:Architecture has often looked to the geometry of nature for precedents for proportions, ratios, and patterns. Recent advances in computational design and digital fabrication technology have allowed for a more fluid exploration into more complex components and assemblies. These new formal strategies suggest opportunities for more modulated building envelopes that are less rigid, orthogonal, and more adaptable. The ways in which systems in nature leverage simple operations to build, grow and re-build are being studied by biologists and mathematicians to understand these modular logics; these logics can be applied to new strategies for building embedded in material and resource efficiency. This elective will begin by looking to some of this research to rethink the architectural component and its relationship to natural systems. We will also investigate formal precedents in the natural world at multiple scales for both formal approaches and materials that are low in embodied energy. This aligns with efforts in building sciences to re-consider current building materials high in embodied carbon. As participants of the Biodesign Challenge held yearly in New York City, the process will involve material exploration into biomaterials and novel composite approaches that can be both speculative and grounded in scientific understanding. We will partner with graduate students from UCSF as science consultants, as well as become familiar with methods to calculate the embodied carbon in building materials. The focus of this semester’s work will be to research and consider biomaterials and its embodied carbon as we design components for an architectural facade. Each team will build a partial full-scale prototype of this system to be exhibited at the spring 2025 CCA (AEL/DCL)/ Autodesk Technology Center Academic Alliance | 5th Annual Biomaterials in Architecture and Design Symposium.

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