The ODDS & MODS pedagogy platform offers a multi-year curriculum centered on material circularity. Each year a selected material for reuse will be explored from a variety of perspectives. This enables MIT students to enrich their explorations of material reuse by making connections across conceptually adjacent courses in design, research, computation, and fabrication.
WHAT WOOD WOULD
Instructors: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, T.A. Charlie Janson, with support from Prof. Caitlin Mueller and Rachel Blowes
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 15
The WHAT WOULD WOOD studio and workshop explore experimental wood construction with two unconventional and seemingly opposite typologies of wood. Messy Mass Timber (MMT) is our term for irregular pieces of dimensional lumber and CLT offs cuts harvested from factory waste streams. Extracted as commercial crop in industrially cultivated soft wood forests, mainstream CLT production is based on a modern era system of standardization and wood waste. The abundant by-product supply of ‘waste’ wood cut-offs can be stacked and assembled, inspired by design imagination to create new forms of un-wholly wood – thick beams and floor slabs that can resist large forces in compression.
At the other end of the industrial-forest spectrum, Wild Wood is our term for minimally processed, small diameter logs with varying branch geometries that retain wood’s unique mechanical properties as an orthotropic material. Wild Wood encompasses small-diameter hard wood tree species and tree forks of varying branch geometries that can be harvested to support forest regeneration. In natural varying forms, the junction of forking branches conserves much more strength in tension than if it were cut and sliced. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood can be utilized independently or together to create regenerative wood building systems that respond to forces in tension and compression. Through this workshop, students travel to local forest land and develop prototypes of wood constructive assemblies. Messy Mass Timber and Wild Wood are undervalued, provocative and increasingly combustible parts of a fragile, and fast disappearing ecological commons. WHAT WOULD WOOD asks a fundamental question: how could building with wood – and the architectural discourse around design with wood— be redefined and reimagined to enable wood circular materiality and envision possible futures for wood in architecture.
WHAT WOOD WOULD
Instructors: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, Prof. Caitlin Mueller, T.A. Mara Diavolova
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 15
The WHAT WOULD WOOD option studio and adjacent fabrication workshop explore experimental and innovative approaches to the use of wood in the design of collective worker housing for US Forest Service firefighters and community service providers. Our partners in this venture are representatives of the US Forest Service and Washoe first nation sawmill start-ups and stewards of the Palisades Tahoe Forest region of what is now called California. Our departure point is the design of a bird blind—a small, stealthy structure that can disappear into the landscape of woods. Working with digital design toolkits, students draw inspiration from a design inventory of specific wood pieces. With intelligent design visualization and assembly protocols, the studio explores a fundamentally new relationship of part to whole in architecture. Our approach moves away from the traditional value accorded to physically continuous, uniform wood in favor of a transformative ‘alchemy’ where diverse sets of small wood pieces, considered in the mainstream as ‘waste’, can be aggregated and designed to take on high value spatial properties and structural capacities.
The studio involves Spring Break travel to Washoe first nation forest lands to visit and document collective housing sites and sawmills, and to converse and share design ideas with artisanal wood knowledge keepers, forest fire fighters, community leaders and industrial wood manufacturers. At MIT and at the legendary UC Berkeley Wood Lab, students fabricate models and large-scale wood components of their design proposals for collective worker housing. Against the visible context of ongoing forest fires and climate crisis, students study the different histories and ways of thinking about the forest to stake out a range of design positions on the utilization of wood in architecture.
CASTAWAYS: Experiments in the reuse of brick
Instructor: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, Karl-Johan Soerensen, with support from Prof. Caitlin Mueller
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 15
In this semester-long workshop, students conducted hands-on experiments with CASTAWAYS, a brick industry manufacturing term used to describe discarded, broken and/or undervalued brick stock. In the US alone, excess and waste brick stock of differing sizes and forms, is piled in a vast mass of embodied energy waiting for reuse. Students in the workshop researched brick manufacturing processes, explored aesthetic, environmental and spatial potentials for reused brick, learned from brick masons and explored how machine vision and neural network logics (AI) can enable the design and assembly of non-standardized, geometrically irregular, heterogeneous materials. Students developed critical perspectives and designed and tested physical prototypes that demonstrate new approaches to material reuse in brick.
CASTAWAYS: Experiments in the reuse of brick
Instructors: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, Prof. Caitlin Mueller, Celia Chaussabel
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 12
The CASTAWAYS MA/MX studio and workshop focused on brick material circularity, exploring the design, sourcing, and prototyping of existing, heterogeneous brick ‘waste’ stocks and their reuse in specific economic and cultural contexts. Students engaged in "high" and "low" technologies, projective architectural design, hands-on fabrication, and field trips to brick yards. Together, the studio and workshop provided the technical and critical design thinking tools to enable students to position brick re-use as a disciplinary project for architecture, located within the specific environmental, economic, and cultural contexts of Massachusetts (MA) and Mexico City (MX).
DIGITAL CIRCULARITY: Tooling Up for Reuse
Instructors: Prof. Sheila Kennedy, Prof. Caitlin Mueller, Alexander Htet Kyaw, Rachel Blowes, Celia Chaussabel, Keith Lee, Karl-Johan Soerensen
Level: Graduate
Programs: MArch1 and SMArchs Students
Enrollment limit: 12
The ODDS & MODS elective courses began in January 2024 with a skill building IAP workshop. This two week course enabled students to explore 3D scanning and algorithmic matching frameworks for the characterization, design and assembly of geometrically irregular forms.
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