Material Logics: From Stereotomy and Tectonics to Wood Craft

2019

Faculty:

Ignacio Cardona, Instructor

Students:

15 Architecture Students

Institutions:

Wentworth Institute of Technology

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This sophomore architecture studio explored how material systems and modes of construction can generate architectural form through two projects situated in contrasting urban and rural contexts. The first, a faculty residence and atelier for the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, investigated the dialectic between stereotomic and tectonic construction—mass and lightness, continuity and articulation. Color-coded conceptual models became analytical tools for making these relationships spatially explicit.

The second project proposed an expansion of a wooden boat-building school in Brooklin, Maine. Working with wood as the primary material, students connected architectural design with local craft, boat-building traditions, contemporary fabrication, and environmental responsiveness. Together, the projects positioned materiality and making not as outcomes of design, but as generative processes through which architectural space, structure, and expression are conceived.