Course syllabus
ARK 350 Sustainable building: Competition
Course-PM and competition brief with documents and illustrations to be found under files
ARK350 Sustainable building: Competition lp1 HT21 (15 hp)
Course is offered by the department of Architecture and Civil Engineering
Contact details
- examiner Walter Unterrainer walteru@chalmers.se
- lecturers
- Walter Unterrainer walteru@chalmers.se
- Alexander Hollberg alexander.hollberg@chalmers.se
- John Helmfridsson johnhelmfri@gmail.com
- Tina Wik
- Lasse Lind
- teachers Walter Unterrainer Alexander Hollberg, John Hemfridsson
- supervisors Walter Unterrainer, Alexander Hollberg, John Helmfridsson
Course purpose
Sustainable Building: Competition is a close to practice course, communicating and training skills and competences for participating in architectural competitions with a strong environmental and social agenda. The course invites students of architecture together with students of architectural engineering and engineering students to collaborate in a transdisciplinary design team from start, to develop a competition entry, the way how it happens in advanced practice.
Schedule
See updated and detailed Schedule under Files. Based on this document and in advance, the examiner puts the schedule for every week with detailed information about tutorials etc. under announcements on Canvas.
The course is hybrid - lectures, tutorials, seminars and critics are partly at Chalmers but primarily on Zoom. There is an on-site visit to the project site in Uddebo with a hired bus on September 1st, where supervisors take part.
You get a studio space at Chalmers.
Course literature
IPCC report: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/
Thorpe, A. (2010). ‘Design’s role in sustainable consumption’, Design Issues, 26/2: 3–16. MIT Press.
Du Plessis, C., & Brandon, P. (2015). ‘An ecological worldview as basis for a regenerative sustainability paradigm for the built environment’, Journal of Cleaner Production, 109: 53–61.
Janda, K. B. (2011). Buildings don't use energy: people do. Architectural science review, 54(1), 15-22.
Höber.L (2021) Renewable energies: why it doesn't work out (automatic translation from ´Erneuerbare Energiesn: Warum die Rechnung nicht ausgeht)- under Canvas files
MT Johansson E, (2021) Cheaper but better – an investigation of the interrelation between building costs, life cycle costs, energy use, climate footprint and architectural qualities of small rental villas in Sweden
Pereira K., (2020) Sand Stories, Surprising Truths about the Global Sand Crisis and the Quest for Sustainable Solutions
Course design
The theme of autumn 2021 will be Resilience and Transformation, with focus on the local context of Uddebo. The course supports innovation and speculative ideas on different scales, for a creative spatial program and building proposals, which are grounded on thorough investigations, simple calculations and simulations concerning energy, green-house gases and global warming potential, water, life cycle costs, investments, etc.
The course is an ideal training set for integrate design processes, when students of architecture and students with an engineering focus co-design in a collaborative process from start and learn from each other. Thus, it is supported by a teaching team, which consists of architects with strong competition and building practice, engineers and consultants.
Communication platform is Canvas, in individual cases emails to the examiner. The detailed schedule of the course, including lectures, common visit of the site, workshops, tutorials and critics is already published on Canvas as an own file. The examiner makes weekly announcements and specifications on Canvas, like order of group tutorials etc.
Midcrits, group crits and final crits (orange in schedule) as well as workshops (bright blue in schedule) are mandatory.
Learning objectives and syllabus
The course is divided in 3 phases:
- Investigating and analyzing Väveriet in context to the village. This investigation will be supported by local stakeholders and the result will be programmatic ideas for an incremental development process of Väveriet. A two days workshop, applying an evaluation tool to set the project intentions in context to the 17 UN-development goals promotes a discussion and sharpens your ideas for a sustainable competition strategy.
- Learning and exercising simple tools for preliminary energy calculations and Life Cycle assessment, daylight as well as basics in building economy, incremental processes, self-building etc.
- Designing an architectural project based on investigation and with support of these tools. To win a competition, a clear and comprehensible communication to a jury is necessary, so there will be inputs and support to optimize graphic and verbal communication.
The final delivery is an architectural project on competition scale, connected to a technical report, which documents environmental calculations and data.
Like last year and after the final presentations, a qualified external jury discusses your projects and all groups can watch this close to real jury session.
Examination form
Examinations are group examinations (project presentation and discussion/critics) with contribution of each group member.
In case the project or parts of it are below minimal expectations, there will be a defined complimentary assignment.
Course summary:
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