A house without weight,
an ultralightweight Odyssey
KU Leuven: Faculty of Architecture, Master of Architecture
Engagement: Craftsmanship, 2024 – 2025 Semester 3, Campus Ghent
Teacher: Ruben Castro
Language: English
Review moments: week 3, week 5, week 13
This studio is seen as a research trajectory to reflect, formulate and think of possible dreams, technologies and crafts for an architecture that can offer us a house without weight.
In 2020 the world surpassed the point of the amount of artificial material we produced as humans, which weighs more than all living organisms on this planet. At the start of the 20th century, the mass of human-created stuff weighed roughly 3 percent of global biomass. Since then, anthropogenic mass has grown exponentially to approximately 1.1 trillion tons today. It’s now accumulating at a rate of 30 billion tons a year, which corresponds to each person on Earth generating more than his or her own weight in manufactured stuff every week. Most of that material is concrete—humanity’s favourite building material—followed by gravel, bricks, asphalt, and metals. If current trends continue, these manufactured materials will weigh more than twice as much as all life on Earth by 2040. Can we produce an autonomous house with the minimum necessary materials from renewable resources that offers us most generous space for life? A space that offers us still the experience of shadows, light, intimacy, sight, spaciousness, and a feeling of home without the conventional impact on earth’s resources. Using Hi or Low-tech technologies, (im)materials with artificial or non intelligence to ingenious usage of materials crafted on site. We invent and propose techniques that are unconventional to contain everyday life. Redefining the idea of a house and its usage. Questioning the untouched understanding of how we lived since modernism. Pushing the final frontier of domestic life.
cover image: graphene aerogel
Full Studio Description to be found here (pdf).