One House Many Nations: Hacking Colonial Systems of Dominance Through Community-based Collaboration One House Many Nations (OHMN) started as an Idle No More campaign to raise awareness about, and provide solutions to, the housing crisis for Indigenous peoples in Canada. In its first few months, OHMN launched an educational campaign to pressure all levels of government and challenge Canadians to take action. OHMN brought together builders, architects, and community members to fund and construct one house. Over the past three years, the ideas embodied in the OHMN movement have been branching and evolving at the Opaskwayak Cree Nation. What started out as one house in Big River, Saskatchewan, is transforming into a community village design project that is leveraging the need to address the housing crisis to develop systems to hack the same colonial systems that make and keep Indigenous people homeless. This work is focused on using housing to build and share community knowledge, generate local economies, and develop architectures that enhance the health of the land. Partners
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Black Locust has long been a part of northeastern US forestry, but its status as an invasive species precludes it from complete integration into the built environment. Uncommon among trees, it bears the characteristics of both fast growth and high density. Its fast growth makes it somewhat of a forest bully: it outgrows neighboring trees and then slows down to block their access to the sun. But its density and rot resistance make it ideal for landscape and exterior applications. That fact, coupled with a need to aggressively harvest it, still has not increased the presence of Black Locust in our built environment. Among its robust, often contradictory, properties, one rests quietly in plain site: a fluorescent brilliance under UV exposure. The cellular and chemical structures responsible for this phenomenon are unknown, and there is no clear evolutionary advantage attributed to it. Lime Light is an objet d’art and architectural experience. It is a space for pondering, where the Black Locust is providing answers to questions that have not yet been asked. Lime Light is both an architectural experience and an educational tool. It is an immersive, nocturnal analogy to the New England Autumn tradition of observing leaves changing […]
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Lamella systems contain a particular logic; a construction system, that through geometrical arrangement, has a spanning potential far greater than any of its individual members. Our interest in this system was to use units of materials that were otherwise relegated to the waste yard. We reduced the lamella to its basic primitive form in search of geometries that inherent to its logic. Our project pulled what is typically a 2-dimentional system in a 3rd dimension and explored it as a thickened wall and ceiling assembly made exclusively out of 2”x 2”x 24” members with only wooden dowel connections. The resulting structure acts as a host for a window. The window is part test, part commission, part media project, and part conceptual portal that transforms the structure from day to night. This small bit of research is part of a larger wood agenda our group is currently pursuing at the GSD.
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