Bioregional Tectonics
Cornell AAP
Spring 2025
This seminar introduces students to the environmental, territorial, and material impacts embedded in architectural production. Framed within Internalities, the research project led by Manuel Bouzas and Roi Salgueiro for the Spanish Pavilion at the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale, the course examines architecture’s external consequences—materials extracted, energy consumed, labor displaced, residues wasted, and emissions released—and explores strategies to reverse them. Students are challenged to rethink carbon-intensive models and envision architecture grounded in regenerative territorial ecosystems. The seminar investigates bioregional tectonics through a palette of wood, stone, earth, cork, clay, hemp, straw, and other low-carbon, pre-industrial resources, tracing how materials emerge from forests, soils, quarries, and croplands and shape specific constructive cultures. Combining lectures, guest talks, readings, and hands-on research, the course spans diverse geographies, including China, India, Turkey, the Caribbean, and Northern Europe.
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Assignment 1 maps resource territories, traces material life cycles, and redesigns a basic dwelling with the selected tectonic palette.
- Assignment 2 produces a 1:20 detailed constructive model synthesizing material, territorial, and tectonic research.
Program:
B.Arch / M.Arch Seminar
Instructor:
Manuel Bouzas
Students:
Helen Bennett, Issa Bozdogan, Lara Carolan, Jamie Chen, Idil Derman, Eavan Flanagan, Varun Gandhi, Jacob Gibbons, Shijia Jin, Jihoon Kim, Amina Lahham, Victoria Lee, Omar Leon-Mora, Brandon Yiu Leung, Ana Samaniego, Boseul Seo, Tarjanee Manan Soni.
Seminar lecture series
