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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The exploration documents and dissects wood at three primary scales: forestry primarily as it’s situated in New England, mass timber construction, and wood’s heat transfer behavior. At each scale we try to identify and leverage critical forms of feedback that link architecture to the tran-scalar complexity of wood. These feedback loops shape three iterative wooden trial huts that test our assumptions and begin to question normative indicators of performance in solid wood buildings. One set of inquiries unpacks transient heat transfer properties of multiple hard and softwood species across a range of thermal experiments. Another is focused on the physical procurement of materials and the construction of different types solid wood assemblies. The third is focused on how large scale thermodynamic variables produced at the forest-scale can influence small-scale thermal performance at the building-scale. Over the course of the investigation the focus shifts from making and monitoring toward reflecting on what was made. The physical experiment transitions into a dwelling that yields a different form of data acquisition. Partners
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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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