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The National Park Service represents the nation's largest initiative in landscape conservation and preservation. As both a material and cultural construct, national parks are living memorials to a ...

Disrupt/Displace was both a Venice Architectural Biennale Session and a “Report from the Front” on the Dakota Access Pipeline: simultaneously a critique, a performance, and a proposal presented in ...

“The Bauhaus believes the machine to be our modern medium of design and seeks to come to terms with it.”—Walter Gropius, The Theory and Organization of the Bauhaus German architect Walter Gropius founded the Bauhaus in 1919 and after fourteen prolific years, it closed. Despite its short tenure, the ramifications of the Bauhaus are still present in architectural education and practice. Its core objective was a radical, and still unrealized, concept: the unity of art and technology. The introduction of contemporary digital tools, techniques, and materials make this unity possible in new and profound ways thereby extending the Bauhaus project into the present day as a meaningful model for architectural education and digital craft.

“The problem with a tent is that when you use it you throw it away, so it’s money that melts.”—Alejandro Aravena The social project of architecture has long been fascinated with emergency and refugee housing as a primary unit of architectural and urban development. For decades, architects have proposed alternatives to the United Nations’ blue tent cities that are the principal image associated with humanitarian aid and its resulting urbanism. During the 2016 Venice Biennale Reporting from the Front, curator Alejandro Aravena challenges architects to reconsider the discipline’s relationship to society’s most urgent challenges. The ongoing European refugee crisis is one such ‘Front’and this research examines the viability of an alternative to the polyvinylchloride (PVC) tarp as the default condition of emergency and refugee housing. The authors propose that waterproof paper surfaces and members, treated with a proprietary nano-coating can perform as well as traditional materials, but with reduced environmental impact and improved user comfort. A collaboration between researchers in Material Science and Architecture combines ongoing scientific research with digital design tools and methods. Following is a brief history of building with paper, an introduction to hydrophobic nano-coatings, and several fabricated prototypes. This project expands upon initial applications from the Tokyo Institute of Technology (2012) where researchers successfully prepared paper surfaces with a nano-particle coating, repelling water and maintaining structural integrity.