Round Table - Open House 2023

In April 2023, to channel the collective spirit of Open House at MIT, a cross disciplinary group of faculty and students gathered in a Round Table conversation, to collectively discuss and imagine material circularity in architecture. Each participant shared a project or provocation that spoke to technical and conceptual questions and possible futures of a curriculum on material circularity at MIT. To host the conversation, and bring people together in this public discussion, student researchers designed and built a Round Table made of 19 discarded wood pallets harvested from MIT loading docks. Using analytical visualization and computation, a single grain spanning structure was designed. This allowed the many small and irregular pieces of different dimensions and wood species to work together in an upcycled structure.