- RESEARCH
- BUILDING ECOLOGY | CONSTRUCTION | BUILT ENVIRONMENT
- Yashiro Lab | Department of Architecture | The University of Tokyo
The life process of a building is metabolic, while the architecture of a built system, that is, the assembly of objects and the configuration of relationships among them, continuously shifts over time. Existing methods for describing this process and assessing its sustainability still allow further sophistication to fully capture its metabolic aspect.
This work identifies critical issues facing the development of a method capable of graphically depicting building metabolism, resulting in the design of a prototype description method—material flow configuration description (MFCD) method. In this method, the life processes of a building are illustrated as a system of material flows—a combination of flow channels with geometric configurations, and a surrounding environment with flow resistance.
For a quantitative assessment of the sustainability of flow configurations, the efficiency of the system must be formulated by formally describing the resistance of the flow environment and the forces causing the flows.
Related Publications
- Igarashi, T., Yashiro, T., Ozawa, K. and Morishita, Y. (Jun 2019) “The transfiguration in the ‘architecture’ of buildings: How could we design a ‘metabolic’ process model of building life processes for environmental adaptation?” CIB World Building Congress 2019, Hong Kong.
- Igarashi, T. (Mar 2019) “Construction of built environments in extreme environments (An introductory study on the dynamics of environments) [Japanese] (極限環境におけるbuilt environment の構築に関する研究：環境の動態に関する研究序説),” Master’s thesis, Department of Architecture, the University of Tokyo.
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