- Housing + society
- Healthy + resilient environments
- Design + construction futures
- Form, aesthetics, + practice
Contemporary housing is in crisis. Access to affordable, quality and equitable forms of housing and community are urgent challenges in many rapidly transforming cities and communities. Understanding the complex social, cultural, economic and political forces that inform and shape design and production has been fundamental to creative innovation. New expectations and forms of household, tenure and ownership, finance, design and construction drives a radical rethink of contemporary housing forms and delivery mechanisms.
SALA faculty working in the Housing + Society research theme generate new knowledge, practices and prototypes to populate an emerging palette of new forms of housing and community.
People
Rana Abughannam
John Bass
Fionn Byrne
Patrick Condon
Mari Fujita
Tania Gutiérrez-Monroy
Kees Lokman
Chris Macdonald
Bill Pechet
Inge Roecker
Matthew Soules
Sara Stevens
Leslie Van Duzer
Labs
Keywords
Urbanization; Shrinking cities; Megacities; Coastal urbanism; First Nations communities; Finance and real estate; Gentrification and social equity; Dwelling types; Consumer culture and retail architecture
Urgencies of global urbanization, climate change, public health, and civic engagement provoke a fundamental rethinking of how we imagine, design, construct and operate the built environment, at every scale. In order to address these concerns, society needs new understandings and innovations in the patterns, programs, forms and technologies that shape our landscapes, cities, and neighbourhoods. Novel computing technologies and rapidly expanding access to data are just one of several emerging techniques that are providing unprecedented opportunities to simulate, visualize and measure the complexity of spatial information and relationships necessary to inform and guide action in this arena.
SALA faculty in the Healthy + Resilient Environments research cluster generate new knowledge, practices, prototypes and technologies to improve these crucial intersections of people, natural and built environments.
People
Fionn Byrne
Joe Dahmen
Mari Fujita
Cynthia Girling
Susan Herrington
Sara Jacobs
Ron Kellett
Kees Lokman
AnnaLisa Meyboom
Daniel Roehr
Adam Rysanek
People
Keywords
Landscapes of extraction, building energy systems and technologies, urban analytics and spatial visualization, sustainability metrics of the built environment, tools and processes of public engagement, children’s landscapes and restorative environments, multifunctional landscapes, resilient systems and infrastructures, politics of urban change/shrinking cities, housing, gentrification/social equity/policy
Increasing integration of the disciplines of architecture, landscape architecture, and the physical sciences are yielding new ideas and techniques for building construction and urban design. Digital fabrication and sustainable materials processing are reformulating not only the relationship between designers and engineers, but also the positive impact that designers can have on global environmental challenges. Similarly, computational and data-driven techniques for building simulation, modelling, and construction – topics that are increasingly impacted by innovation in the computer sciences – are also making it easier and cheaper to translate the raw creative expression of designers into built form.
SALA Faculty working in the Design + Construction Futures research theme examine how these emerging technologies are allowing architects and planners to realize insightful forms and systems that better balance human, ecological, and economic conditions.
People
Joe Dahmen
Kees Lokman
AnnaLisa Meyboom
Bill Pechet
Adam Rysanek
Blair Satterfield
Matthew Soules
Labs
Building Decisions Research Group
HiLo Lab
SALA Design + Build
Keywords
Parametric design; Novel materials; Sustainable materials processing; Digital fabrication; High-performance buildings; Design-building; Digital media; Reactivating waste materials; Building performance simulation
The teaching and practice of design rests on a body of knowledge, relating to human/environment interaction, the history of human activities in the built environment, pedagogy, aesthetics and experience. Ongoing transformation in social, environmental, economic and technological conditions continuously redefine the nature of contemporary practice. This demands the development of rigorous frameworks of analysis and scholarship, both from historical and theoretical dimensions.
SALA faculty in the Form, Aesthetics + Practice research theme explore the wider societal, economic and political presuppositions embedded in both historical and contemporary forms of practice in order to change the way we practice, think and write about architectural design.
People
Fionn Byrne
Susan Herrington
Mari Fujita
Chris Macdonald
Bill Pechet
Sara Stevens
Leslie Van Duzer
Keywords
Aesthetics; Experience; History; Theory; Pedagogy; West coast architecture; Contested landscape; Urban form