Contextual resource driven architecture

Abstract

Designing responsibly in the current environment of ecological doubt requires fundamental changes. By constructing architecture of site resources alone, you eliminate the embodied energy and inorganic materials that run rampant in the modern day construction industry. Bio-polymer-based material systems need to be investigated to combat the current detrimental synthetic petroleum-based materials that currently compose our markets.

By creating architecture that is truly of the site, it begins to blur the line between the natural environment and the built environment. The use of bio-polymer based material systems lends to a greater ability to respond to the local environment's needs by creating materials that are sensitive to the ever-changing context the system is in contact with.

The morphology created from these bio-polymer based material systems will begin to break accepted architectural paradigms of form by changing our influence on the design. The designer or architect is no longer the primary giver of form, but rather the catalyst of form. The influence we have now is the construction of scaffolding and form work that the material system is applied to. The material system will dictate the final form by its own intrinsic properties such as setting time, viscosity and flexibility. The end result of the form is a combination of the designer's input and the material's natural response to the ambient environment and typographic scaffolding.