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Anywhere Specific: The Power of Collaboration
Rick Sommerfeld, AIA, Director of the ColoradoBuildingWorkshop, presented “Anywhere Specific: The Power of Collaboration” at the AIA Colorado Practice + Design Conference, showcasing the program’s ethos, achievements, and innovative approach to architectural education. The Colorado Building Workshop, a Masters of Architecture program at the University of Colorado Denver, has completed 22 community-based projects, constructing 54 structures with 61 community partners over 17 years. Faculty members Will Koning and Andy Paddock, alongside collaborators like Scott Lawrence (University of Idaho) and JD Signum (Sawhorse 7), have been instrumental in its success.
Sommerfeld emphasized the program’s focus on societal issues, including food deserts, human waste, forest fires, and overfishing. Notable projects include the Longs Peak privies, addressing waste management in high-altitude backcountry locations, and a research station in Antarctica, supporting scientists studying pinnipeds, seabirds, and krill. The program’s ethos is encapsulated by Renzo Piano’s quote on the unity of science and art, inspiring students to integrate context, material, and structure into their designs.
Operating near the Continental Divide, the program has tackled diverse climates, from the high deserts of Bluff, Utah, to the extreme elevations of Leadville, Colorado. It has pioneered innovative solutions, such as Engelmann spruce CLT panels for wildfire mitigation and rodent-resistant cabins for Cottonwood Gulch Expeditions. The program’s 19-week timeline includes intensive spring semester work and a three-week summer build, fostering collaboration among engineers, contractors, and material representatives.
Sommerfeld shared the program’s evolution, from humble beginnings with $25,000 budgets to complex endeavors like business incubators in Denver. Balancing budgets through project funding, tuition, and donations, the program operates as a self-sustaining entity within the university. Its commitment to addressing societal issues while fostering creativity and innovation has made it a hallmark of architectural education, preparing students for real-world challenges in diverse contexts.
Takeaways
We really focus in many ways on these mundane typologies, project types that architects wouldn’t do, as a way to bridge between what is an educational model and then ultimately the profession that they’re going to be entering into. So a lot of these projects are really underfunded or would be things that maybe architecture firms wouldn’t be taking on, but they aren’t really mundane problems in many ways.
I am in fact, running a kind of design firm and construction firm within the university. It is a business. It needs to be profitable in some ways. It doesn’t need to take from the university, it needs to give back to the university. And I’m doing that through charging the clients money for the projects themselves.
So that’s always heartwarming that our students did a good enough job, that we have clients that are kind of calling us back… they want us to come back and do the same thing that those cabins that they have now… And apparently, they’ve been really successful.
I thought it was sort of important to bring in this quote from Renzo Piano, which succinctly puts it that he can’t see any sort of separation between those two functions. And in many ways, they speak the same language and they require the same energy. And we push our students many ways to take that on as well.
Unfortunately, because of the way that the school year worked, they still had a year left in their education. But I did get an opportunity to reach out to the alumni of the program and give them an opportunity to apply to be some of the construction crew that went down… So these are some of the lucky individuals that applied to be part of that program and got to spend four weeks each time in Antarctica, building in this, incredible place.
In this particular case, we had a snip panel construction, structurally non insulated panels… And it was a failure, like epic, epic failure. But it failed at the mock up level. It failed in the university. And we were able to pivot to prefabricated wall framing.
We’ve engaged numerous engineers and contractors, material reps, to basically come and educate students. Almost like a village comes together to sort of educate or raise a child.
The projects that we started with were very humble. And I think it’s really important to kind of understand that this didn’t happen over overnight. This is over a 17 year period… some of our first projects were as simple as working on the Boulder Museum of Contemporary Art for just about four or five thousand dollars.
We would prefabricate everything with the students in Denver, every last nut, bolt, screw, piece of flashing, and then we would ship it all the way to Livingston Island… It all had to fit on a 16 foot Zodiac because we needed to figure out a way to break these pieces down and get it to the site and then rebuild it in as little as four weeks.
Our engineer got really excited about the idea that these steel plates, while architectural in our minds as architects holding the rock, could actually be part of the structural system and that we could move beyond the sort of gravity system… and start to think about how in folding architecture… we could begin to understand how those lateral loads could transfer from one wall to the other wall and essentially stiffen the entire box.