Designing The Forest And Other Mass Timber Futures
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Designing the Forest and other Mass Timber Futures
If we want to continue existing on this earth, an era of renewable energy and materials is urgently needed. What role could mass timber, with its potential to replace concrete and steel, have in ensuring the planet’s survival? This book retraces wood’s passage from stewarded seed in the soil of forests, to harvested biomass, to laminated walls in a living room, through to its disassembly, pausing at each step in the supply chain of mass timber to consider the labor and economies involved, looking closely at the way wood is grown, sourced, and transported, and its impacts on the biodiversity of the forest and the health of our ecosystems. It explores why historically entrenched contexts of extractivism make such sensitive approaches difficult to cultivate across landscapes and industrial frameworks. Along the way, common assumptions about mass timber are debunked, including its fire performance, its strength, and its role in carbon sequestration. Having identified contemporary technical, cultural, and spiritual gaps preventing the transition towards a fully timber built environment, it outlines how we might move forward. A more sensitive species-based methodology is essential, with designers as choreographers of carbon, transferring and trading between forest, factory, site, and beyond. This will be an important read for anyone interested in our built environment and how to design it to be non-extractive, especially those with an interest in architecture, urbanism, forests, ecology, and timber, as well as students of architecture and design interested in the generative nature of materials and design processes.
Compositional Intelligence
*With a foreword by Mario Carpo* Given the extensive data sources represented by urban environments, this book investigates the potential of architecting for cities using large-scale models – the technological underpinning of Generative AI. Koehler examines Large Language Models (LLMs) in relation to architectural questions of typology – those critical junctures where architecture engages with the city itself. Typology becomes the interface between an AI model and its modeled audiences, represented languages, and scales of operation. The investigation reveals how LLMs represent a fundamental shift from comprehending discrete elements to understanding entire languages – introducing a stochastic perspective that transforms how we read and shape urban reality. At the heart of this framework lies the concept of “inductive types” – threshold interfaces that superpose multiple value regimes and actively reconfigure themselves in response to changing urban conditions. By treating architecture as a form of representational materialism rather than a fixed language, designers can engage with complex urban systems while maintaining critical agency. This approach envisions architecture as an embedding of languages, where buildings become processors of information that compute through their spatial arrangements. The synthetic knowledge produced by LLMs enables access to plural values and stakeholder perspectives, allowing architects to participate in broader material ecologies through computational superposition rather than traditional dialectical methods. Providing a robust theoretical framework as well as practical insights into how architects can adapt their notational tools and design processes to embrace AI, this will be an essential read for any practicing or researching architect or urban designer interested in the implications of AI on the built environment.
Ecosocialism
Author: Salvatore Engel-Di Mauro
language: en
Publisher: Springer Nature
Release Date: 2024-11-30
This book offers an extensive critical overview of eco-socialism, one of the most generative and significant aspects of contemporary debates within socialism. Marxism has played a foundational role in the development of ecosocialism since its inception and has also led to critical reflections on the 20th century Marxism and ecological interpretation of Marxist writings. Despite the relevance of ecosocialism to the pressing debates on the ecological crisis and the growing literature on ecosocialism, there has not been a comprehensive account on ecosocialism and its variations. This volume seeks to fill this important gap and to pave the way for a more systematic development of this emerging paradigm. The book not only engages with a critique of other non-socialist ecological schools of thought in defence of ecosocialism, but also provides a critical overview of debates within ecosocialism and of ecosocialism itself. The latter includes an appraisal of ecosocialism in Bolivarian Venezuela and the implications of current efforts in the People's Republic of China to build an ecological civilisation. Furthermore, the book contains a crucial discussion about the relation between eco-socialism and indigenous studies and movements.