A Draft Resolution Supporting The Municipal Authority to Rearrange: A Non-Optimized Methodology for Doing Less

Abstract

Buildings are outdoor objects. They are enclosures that are detached and extended outward from the body in order to warm, cool, or otherwise insulate persons, animals, or objects deemed worthy of protection. Containers of space and air, building enclosures create barriers to temperature, moisture, and to strangers. Single-family homes are one such type of enclosure. As a building typology, they are institutions of outsized stature in both the American imaginary and the physical presence on the landscape. Clad with layered accumulations of extracted material, single-family homes are designed to extend to the brims of their structures and often their plots. This thesis proposes the partial deconstruction and reenclosure of unused and oversized housing stock by local governments, in order to mine post-extraction material for reuse as well as reduce the volume of temperature-controlled air in homes over 2,687 square feet.

The three case studies presented in this thesis are set in Rutland, Vermont. A setting chosen for its wet and warm summers and freezing and snowy winters, as well as its above-average home sizes that stand in contrast to a history of declining population. Opposed to research into engineered solutions for sealed envelopes or design-for-disassembly approaches, which focus on ground-up construction, this thesis proposes pathways to less, that are outside of the typical cost or material-driven calculus of architecture and construction. Instead, this research centers on the reduction of the volume of temperature-controlled air as a driver of adaptive reuse schemes. The aim here is to provide a set of equally valid architectural possibilities for the reduction of the impact of the built world on the environment.