This project is driven by a motivation rooted in global contexts and the urgent issues that demand our attention in this century. In “Upheaval,” Jared Diamond identifies key risks our world faces today: the proliferation of large nuclear weapons, escalating global inequality, the consequences of climate change, and the depletion of essential renewable resources like forests, fisheries, soil, and freshwater. This unit’s exploration revolves around this overarching curiosity, initially focusing on the specific realm of timber industry in the UK context. As we delve into the project site in Leith, our exploration dynamically shifts between the risks associated with inequality and the depletion of renewable resources.
Throughout the project, the concept of ‘dust’ serves as a central pivot, which allowed me to delve into the thematic aspects of ‘deprivation,’ ‘surplus,’ and ‘prolongation.’ By embodying ‘dust’ through the physical form of sawdust, we give substance to both scarcity and abundance. These three themes encapsulate the project’s origins and trajectory, transitioning from the identification of elements marked by ‘deprivation’ and ‘surplus’ to the pursuit of ‘prolonging’ both aspects. Hence, the project bears the title “Search for Prolonged.”
When it comes to decision-making in architectural projects, there are no right or wrong answers. The specificity of our choices can range from a comprehensive understanding of their implications across various dimensions and contexts to adherence to architectural conventions without fully grasping their underlying context and their implications. It is vital to acknowledge that the construction industry often generates outcomes that neglect significant environmental, economic, and social implications on a large scale. This project aims to move away from the notion of a building as a singular entity, which oversimplifies diverse materials and their traces into a conceptual object. Instead, it attempts to comprehend architecture as a broader process and cycle, encompassing the interconnectedness of various factors.
In the literature on the carbon implications of timber buildings, the transition to using more timber in our built environment will make positive changes. However, this should not be understood as a simple mechanism of simply replacing concrete and steel with timber without understanding the complex relationships between timber and forests, forests and timber architecture, and forests and society. The reason why this project prioritizes timber is not that timber is messianic, and the unit is about timber, but to try and understand the implications of specifying timber on the building tectonics and the environmental and social ecology.
